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Sarah Rhodes describes and documents the work of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group’s fourth annual investigation of link rot among the original URLs for online law and policy-related materials archived though the group’s efforts. Link rot” is used to describe a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL. The Chesapeake Group focuses primarily on the preservation of Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. In the four years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 7,400 digital items and 3,200 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web.

Workers Compensation was the first social reform in America dating back to 1911. On this edition of Workers Comp Matters, host Attorney Alan S. Pierce, joins Andrew J. Reinhardt from the firm Reinhardt & Harper, PLC, at the Workers Compensation Centennial in Boston, Massachusetts, to discuss the latest in workers compensation and celebrate 100 years. Andy talks about his work with Workers Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG), legislative matters and upcoming congressional hearings in Washington DC pertaining to workers compensation.

In the summer 2011 issue of Marquette Lawyer, there is an informative two-page article about legal-research instruction at Marquette University Law School. Like most law schools, Marquette has a mandatory first-year research course, but it also has a required advanced course in legal research, “one of the few requiring that second course.” The focus at Marquette is on training students to be good legal researchers, but also on teaching students “to become discriminating and careful users of the results they get.” Because of the amount of information that is freely available, the latter focus is especially important. According to library director and Professor Patricia Cervenka, “[m]ore emphasis is being placed on critical thinking about what legal research finds … You need to know how to blend sources, how to weigh different sources, and especially what sources to regard as reliable and authoritative.”

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The Boston Globe has been covering a crisis at the Boston College archives. They had collected a series of interviews from IRA members, assuring them of complete anonymity. And now the Northern Ireland Police Services have appealed to federal prosecutors to subpoena parts of the archive collected under that agreement. I presume that this crisis has been triggered by the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland. Nevertheless, the archivists are facing a difficult decision. In order to keep faith with the people who trusted the journalist who collected the information in the archive, they may have to destroy the archive. Read the rest of this entry »

A champion of rights for the disabled, Tony Coelho, Board Chair of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), who authored, in part, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, carries on the fight for the rights of the disabled in todays issues. On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen and co-host Randy Dyer, talk to Tony about his lifelong advocacy, his personal story with epilepsy and how a structured settlement can assist those living with disabilities.

It is always gratifying to see the librarians highlighted in a law school alumni publication. Over the weekend, I read a laudatory article in the Spring 2011 Law Quadrangle: Notes from Michigan Law. The article, entitled “Whither the Law Librarian,” will not be news to any law librarian. It portrays four dual-degree librarians who work at the University of Michigan Law Library as “helping to advance digital research rather than hinder it.” The librarians interviewed point out that being a librarian has always been about managing information–finding it and using it–and for this reason, format is simply not that important. The article concludes with the often-repeated statement that “technology has flooded researchers with so much information that, now more than ever, they need a guide to help them navigate the chaos.” This is probably true, but I wonder if students today actually believe it.

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Sony Corporation suffered a huge security breach in its video game online network with names, addresses, and credit card numbers of 100 million PlayStation and PC game network users stolen by hackers. Attorney and co-host Bob Ambrogi welcomes Justin Brookman, the Director for the Center for Democracy & Technologys Project on Consumer Privacy and Attorney John H. Lacey from the McCormack Firm, LLC and author of “Massachusetts Data Privacy Law Blog, to take a look at one of the largest online security breaches. Justin and John talk about litigation, potential legislation and how this breach could impact Sony.

How can legal professionals get better at getting things done in their practice? On The Un-Billable Hour, host Attorney Rodney Dowell, Director of the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program, welcomes Dr. David D. Nowell, a Clinical Neuropsychologist, to discuss his work with legal professionals and how he helps them reach their practice management goals. Rodney and Dr. Nowell touch upon working with professionals with ADHD, the perks to hiring help and how attorneys can persist and complete tasks in a busy practice.

Lately, I have talked with a number of students who are planning to set up solo law practices after they graduate and pass the bar exam–not surprising given the job market for new lawyers. Most of them plan on doing something else part time to pay the bills while trying to establish their practices, and they have very little money to devote to start-up costs. One big fear revolves around the loss of “free” access to Lexis and Westlaw once they graduate. New graduates know they have gotten dependent on these databases, and they wonder how they will cope without them. I have suggested a number of free, reliable websites for primary sources, and the Pace Law Library has a good online research guide that gathers together free and low-cost sources. I have recommended that graduates start with the free sources, and then go to Lexis when they need fee-based content such as Shepard’s or Matthew Bender publications. Lexis had a good, pay-as-you-go option that allowed researchers to access only the materials they needed using a credit card. That option has been ended, according to an announcement Lexis posted recently. Lexis’s reason for cutting off this option doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: “This decision is part of our effort to create and support products that better meet those needs identified through collaboration with our customers …” So exactly how does cutting off access by credit card affect that effort? The only thing that Lexis is trying to support is its own bottom line. Credit card access to pieces of the Lexis database meant that some users cancelled their subscriptions because it was more cost effective to do so. Lexis’s decision really hurts the solo practitioner and the small law firm at a time of deep economic distress. Shame on you, Lexis! Read the rest of this entry »

As the number of legal technology options and platforms have increased, management of legal technology has become more complicated than ever before. Routine recommendations are changing because of smartphones, use of Macs, Web 2.0 and other changes. In important ways, our view of technology and even the Internet has become more personalized and less universal. In this episode, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell discuss how our technology is becoming more complex and varied, the resulting changes to questions you must ask and traditional recommendations, and ways to start to address the implications of this trend. After you listen, be sure to check out Tom & Dennis co-blog and book by the same name, The Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies.