 | |
Member News
|
Kudos to Deborah L. Rusin, Director of Library and Research Services, Katten Muchin Rosenman, who was recently inducted into the VIP Professional Woman of the Year Circle for the National Association of Professional Women (NAPW). Click here for the official announcement.
Congratulations to Cheryl Niemeier, Director of Knowledge & Research Services, Bose McKinney Evans, Indianapolis and Holly Riccio, Nossaman, LLP, San Francisco, CA on their appointment to the AALL Nominations Committee for a two-year term beginning July 2016.
Kudos to the following members nominated to the slate of candidates for the 2017-2018 AALL Executive Board:
Scott D. Bailey, Global Director of Research Services, Squire Patton Boggs LLP, Washington, DC nominated for Secretary;
Catherine M. Monte, Chief Knowledge Officer, Fox Rothschild LLP, Philadelphia, PA nominated for Board Member; and
Jean P. O'Grady, Director of Research & Knowledge Services, DLA Piper, Washington, DC nominated for board member.
Way to go! Cameron Gowan, Library Services Manager at Jones Day in Washington DC is the April AALL Diversity Committee Librarian of the Month. Click here to read the profile.
|
|
Please send us your news and ideas!
Thank you!
Kurt R. Mattson, JD, LLM
Private Law Librarians & Information Professionals
|
 Welcome New Members! Viorela Bryant, Corporate Librarian, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Meg Chicco, Reference Librarian, Pepper Hamilton
Roberta Fox, Competitive Intelligence Librarian, Katten Muchin Rosenman
Laura Fox, Director Research & Custom Solutions, Bloomberg BNA
Deborah Grimm, Director of Research & Library Services, Husch Blackwell
Mary Koshollek, Director of Information and Records Services, Godfrey & Kahn
JeffreyNelson, Research Services Manager, Squire Patton Boggs
Robyn Rebollo, Vice President, LAC Group
Deborah Schwarz, President, LAC Group
Robin Linkowski, Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone, PLC
|
 Quick Links
|
2016 PLLIP Summit Agenda Available!
The full agenda for the 2016 PLLIP Summit: Strategic Impact is now available on the PLLIP Summit website. The day is intentionally designed to empower participants to have strategic impact within their organizations.
From the morning keynote to the final wrap-up session, each program builds upon and complements the rest of the day's lineup.
To see the full agenda and read more about it, please visit the 2016 PLLIP Summit: Strategic Impact website here.
2016 PLLIP Summit Opening Reception
The PLLIP Summit Committee is pleased to announce that Bloomberg Law will be sponsoring the Opening Reception for the PLLIP Summit: Strategic Impact on Friday, July 15th from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. The event will be held at the Crown at Tribune Tower, a short walk from the conference location.
Details on how to RSVP for the Opening Reception will be available shortly.
|
|
|
Private Law Librarians & Information Professionals Newsletter
|
|
|
From the Chair
 |
| |
Scott Bailey
|
Spring (which feels like Summer) is here in Washington, and we are in the midst of evaluations and staff appreciation week! This is not just a week for wearing jeans and eating free hot dogs (as delicious and appreciated as these perks may be), but it is a time to contemplate and appreciate! the people that work with us every day in our firms to achieve awesome results. Maybe we achieved more awesome results with a bit of free espresso and caffeinated motivation on Monday, but the main message was gratitude.
This isn't just a study and consideration of law librarians and their operations but the firm as a whole. Time to think about who contributes to your success across the firm and even in the larger legal community. Where would we be without those in administration (even finance and marketing!) and the practice (even grumpy lawyers who drive and test our service!) and other firms who enrich our lives and help us learn every day? Benchmarking, evaluation and annual reporting includes taking stock and giving thanks for what makes us successful.
Evaluating and appreciating ourselves and our colleagues is one thing, but evaluating our firms and our peer firms and community is also worthwhile. While we are required to be a part of our firm's evaluation process that HR sets out, the values of collaboration and more importantly appreciation and gratitude that this time brings forth is worth some contemplation and energy.
I'm headed to the LLSDC Town Hall meeting in a few minutes where members get to appreciate each other and the organization that they have built over decades and make changes to reflect our values in the DC community and to further our professional lives. A necessary byproduct of this amazing organization is the personal relationships that develop as a result of a like-minded community, and I am grateful to call it home.
Sure, we enjoy the free coffee and the treats, but the main thing to focus on in this time of professional change and growth are the people who serve the community that help us all thrive. As I mentioned, LLSDC is not standing still but is changing their bylaws and involving the whole DC community to do so. This is happening all across the country and even the world in our field. AALL has had a major push for rebranding and will continue that effort to bring us forward as innovators and leaders in new ways. PLLIP has added more grants and evolved its strategy and revised its procedures to be current and forward looking. All of this took a village, all of it took members who were willing to make changes for the better and work out their differences to achieve a common good. Our work as a service to each other and the general community was highlighted by Greg Lambert's blog post earlier in the week entitled Espresso Machines are a Lousy Substitute for Law Library Leadership. We are more than lounge providers with fancy coffee machines. We are friends and colleagues and we collaborate to build a powerful network of information professionals that is much more capable than the sum of its parts.
Thank you all for what you do every day... We can always focus on what we can do better in the future, but it's time to stop and appreciate the good that we do right now.
|
Important Reminders
Have you voted for your PLLIP 2016-2017 Officers?
If so thank-you very much! If not, it's not too late!! Voting remains open until 11:59 p.m. on Friday April 29. If you no longer have the election email, please email PLLIP Secretary Nancy Rine at nancy.rine@friedfrank.com and request that it be resent to you.
PLLIP-SIS Executive Board Meeting
This will be at the AALL Annual Meeting in Chicago and is open to all members. Please feel free to attend on July 17th in the Hyatt Skyway Room 282 and will begin at 6:15pm.
Want to get involved with PLLIP-SIS?
Plan to attend one of several PLLIP committee meetings in Chicago:
Membership Committee Meeting, Monday, July 18, 7:30-8:30am, Hyatt- Skyway Room 281
Communications Committee Meeting , Monday, July 18, 5-6pm, Hyatt Skyway Room 284
Education Committee Meeting, Monday, July 18, 5-6pm, Hyatt Skyway Room 283
|
 Around the Blogosphere
What does the future hold for librarians? This month's curation of blog posts and articles explores the recent landscape of what people are saying and writing about our future as legal information professionals.
While focused mainly on the view of public library directors, several of the 11 skills listed in Top Skills for Tomorrow's Librarians are general enough to be applied to information professionals in any type of library setting. Namely, these skills are collaboration, communication/people skills, data analysis, leadership and certainly technological expertise.
In How young librarians are figuring out the field's futuretoday's young information professionals say that Google has not made them obsolete, rather the digital age has freed them up to assist their clients with more sophisticated information needs - heady stuff such as dealing with big data, digital archiving, and becoming human rights archivists by building digital collections of social media information. Success is often fleeting but Introducing a New Success Framework for Information Professionals provides context around a variety of qualities that information professionals embody and asks us to consider where what we do, fits into this framework and how we can take advantage of it and be successful in this transitional time in our profession.
How libraries can save the Internet of Things from the Web's centralized fate discusses the idea of libraries supporting access to an Internet that is open, free, and unowned. The author suggests that a move to de-centralization of information in the form of greater anonymity via the use of platforms such as TOR, Betterment, and Bitcoin, should be supported by libraries because the overarching purpose of libraries is to provide "universal access to knowledge". In doing so, perhaps, libraries could rout out the bad elements of these "dark" Websites that are often rampant with criminal activities.
|
Member Spotlight
|
|
Interview with Colleen Cable
Director of Information Services, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP, New York City
|
What was your path to law librarianship? In law school, I was a teaching assistant for the first year legal research class, and I loved it. That experience really solidified for me what my career was meant to be. After that, I decided to get my library degree and got a job at the county law library, and the rest is history.
Did you have a mentor or librarian who helped you and/or influenced your work style/ethic? The former Director of the University of Tulsa, Richard Ducey, gave me that first opportunity and I will forever be grateful.
How has your job evolved from the time you first began your career? I think the core and purpose of the work is basically the same, assisting patrons with finding information to solve problems or answer questions, but how we go about it is different. I bought the very first computers at the county law library, and now I can't even remember what work looked like without a computer!
What is your biggest challenge at work? Finding time to be strategic, while keeping up with all the work is challenging. It is very important to continue moving forward and affecting change, but it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and before you know it an entire week has gone by.
What part of your job do you enjoy the most? What part drives you crazy? I most enjoy collaborating with the Orrick team to develop new services and solve issues. It drives me crazy that there isn't more than 24 hours in a day! There's so much to do and so little time to do it.  How do you keep up with news and trends in law libraries? I think it is very important to network with colleagues. I do this via conferences and just reaching out when I have questions. I also think it is important to keep up with news and trends in the legal field generally. This information should help focus and drive the strategy for the library.
What job would you have if you had not become a law librarian? Teacher or working in a bookstore.
How do you reach out to your attorneys to let them know how the library can help them? I'm not afraid to be a squeaky wheel or insert myself into conversations/meetings. If I see something that I think we should be involved in, I reach out. We post on our internal blog and on the firm-wide calendar. We are also always looking for new services that meet needs of the end-users.
Any advice for new librarians who are just starting out? Don't be afraid to try something new. I've had several career changes in my life and each one opened doors that I never even knew existed. I would not be where I am today if I hadn't taken some risks. Like my mother always said, what is the worst that can happen?
|
|
Congratulations to our 2016 PLLIP-SIS Award Recipients!
Distinguished Librarian: Elaine Knecht, Director of Information Services, Barclay Damon, LLP, Buffalo, NY
Hall of Fame: Janet Accordo (Ret.) and Bess Reynolds (Ret.)
Rookie of the Year: Corrine Vogel, Research Librarian, Baker Botts
Service to PLLIP: Lucy Curci-Gonzalez, Executive Director, New York Law Institute, New York, NY
Vendor/Outside Champion: Ed Walters, CEO, Fastcase
|
|
Seeking reviewers for 2016 AALL Annual Meeting Programs
Do you like to write? Want to be published?
If so, consider writing a review of a 2016 annual meeting program. The PLLIP e-Newsletter editors are seeking writers to review the below 2016 AALL Annual Meeting programs. The reviews will be published in a PLLIP e-Newsletter issue or as blog posts for On Firmer Ground following the July annual meeting in Chicago.
Please email Cheryl Niemeier cniemeier@boselaw.com indicating which program for which you'd like to write a review. Once she's compiled the list of reviewers, she'll follow-up with each individual to confirm the programs(s) to be reviewed.
In order for the program to be fresh in the reviewers mind the deadline to submit all reviews will be close of business Friday, August 19, 2015. Please note: a few have already been claimed as noted in red.
Feel free to select more than one program to review. Here's the list:
- PLLIP-SIS Summit: Strategic Impact - Saturday, July 16, 8:30am - 5pm - claimed
- Crowdsourcing a Skill Set to Manage the Legal Information of the Future - Sunday July 17, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
- The Power of Legal Analytics - Delivering Advantages in Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, and Successful Client Pitches - Sunday July 17, 11:30 am-12:30 pm - claimed
- Legal Workspaces of the Future - Sunday, July 17 2:30pm - 3:30 pm
- Promoting the Value of Technical Services at Budget Time: Practical Advice for Directors and Managers - Sunday, July 17th, 2016 2:30pm - 3:30pm
- Hooking the CI White Whale: Advanced Analytics in a CI Report Sunday, July 17th from 2:30-5:00
- Enterprise Search Initiatives: New Opportunities for Your Organization - Sunday, July 17th, 2016 4:00pm - 5:00pm
- CRM/DMS/EDD/KM - What Are They and Why Should I Care? - Monday, July 18th, 2016 9:45am - 10:45am
- Virtual Footprints: Vetting People in the Digital Age - Monday, July 18th, 2016 9:45am - 10:45am - claimed
- Attorney Research Skills: Continuing the Conversation Between Law Firm and Academic Law Librarians - Monday, July 18th, 2016 2:00pm - 3:00pm
- Disruption in the Legal Industry: What's Arrived, and What's Coming - Monday, July 18th, 2016 2:00pm - 3:00pm
- Understanding the Creation and Use of the Law Firm's Internal Data - Monday, July 18th, 2016 2:00pm - 3:00pm
- Can Robots Be Lawyers? Meet ROSS, and Glimpse the Future of AI in Law - Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 8:30am - 9:30am
- Taking the Lead on Teaching Legal Technology: Opportunities and Challenges - Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 8:30am - 9:30am
- "Disruptunity": The Legal Research Revolution Is Now! - Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 11:00am - 12:00pm
|
|
|
|
|
