PC World, John P. Mello Jr.: "Dell described a bleak outlook for the PC industry on Good Friday in a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The document, one of several filed by the company in connection with its move to go private, includes a laundry list of ills that pretty much defines life for computer makers in the post PC era. That list identifies factors contributing not only to Dell's present and future performance, but paints a picture of the uncertain world ahead for all PC makers."

PC World, John P. Mello Jr.: "Dell described a bleak outlook for the PC industry on Good Friday in a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The document, one of several filed by the company in connection with its move to go private, includes a laundry list of ills that pretty much defines life for computer makers in the post PC era. That list identifies factors contributing not only to Dell's present and future performance, but paints a picture of the uncertain world ahead for all PC makers."

PC World, John P. Mello Jr.: "Dell described a bleak outlook for the PC industry on Good Friday in a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The document, one of several filed by the company in connection with its move to go private, includes a laundry list of ills that pretty much defines life for computer makers in the post PC era. That list identifies factors contributing not only to Dell's present and future performance, but paints a picture of the uncertain world ahead for all PC makers."

"Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization dedicated to improving consumer information and to reforming the traditional law school mode...The Transparency Index reflects Law School Transparency’s review of law school websites, through which we analyze the employment information that law schools use to market their programs. We measure not only whether law schools meet voluntary transparency standards, but also whether they meet the requirements from ABA Standard 509."

Women Partner Watch 2013: Gaining Ground: The interactive chart ...represents The American Lawyer's latest attempt at answering a simple question: How many women make partner at the nation's largest law firms these days? We took our initial stab at answering the question last year. First, Aric Press, editor in chief of American Lawyer parent ALM, analyzed some 5,000 partner promotions at Am Law 100 and Second Hundred firms over a four-year period beginning in January 2008. What Press determined, as he reported in his January 2012 Dicta column, was that 30 percent of the lawyers making partner at those firms during that period were women. With that as a benchmark, we examined the 1,926 partner promotions made by 183 firms in 2012 and found that the ratio of women had edged up to 32 percent. Some firms, of course, fared better in terms of the male/female breakdown."

Storm Warning - In a new book, futurist Richard Susskind finds most firms unprepared for the challenges ahead.

Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries - A Report from Ithaka S+R and the Association of Research Libraries. Nancy L. Maron, Ithaka S+R, Sarah Pickle, Ithaka S+R. February 2013

Frederic Filloux, guardian.co.uk: "Its official blog merely mentions "6 billion visits per month" sent to news sites and Google News claims to connect "1 billion unique users a week to news content" [see The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale]...But how exactly does Google News work? What kind of media does its algorithm favour most? Last week, the search giant updated its patent filing with a new document detailing the 13 metrics it uses to retrieve and rank articles and sources for its news service. (Computerworld unearthed the filing, it's here)."

How White & Case tamed its information overload, By Oz Benamram. See also Communicating Professionally Using Outlook, by Oz Benamram, last updated: October 2012.

American Banker/Bank Technology: "Social networking has become so common and broad-based in its use — there are now more than 500 million Twitter users and more than 1 billion Facebook users — that banks have no choice but to incorporate social networking into their marketing efforts."

"The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor are pleased to present this 2013 Report on the State of the Legal Market highlighting the trends that we perceived in the legal market in 2012, as well as the factors that we believe will impact the market in 2013 and beyond."

News release: "PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey, now in its sixteenth year, aims to inform and stimulate the debate on how businesses are facing today’s challenges. Over the years, thousands of CEOs around the world have taken the time to share their views with us. In total, we conducted 1,330 interviews with CEOs in 68 countries between 5 September and 4 December 2012. By region, 449 interviews were conducted in Asia Pacific, 312 in Western Europe, 227 in North America, 165 in Latin America, 95 in Central and Eastern Europe, 50 in Africa and 32 in the Middle East. The interviews were spread across a range of industries, with further details by region and industry, available on request. To better appreciate CEOs’ perspectives for 2013, we also conducted in-depth interviews with 33 CEOs from five continents over the fourth quarter of 2012, and more extensive extracts can be found in this website where you can explore responses by sector and location."

2013 Client Advisory: "For the legal industry, the results in 2012, another turbulent year, were largely a repeat of trends that emerged over the prior three years. In fact, we think it is time to let go of any lingering notion that the industry will revert to the boom years before the Great Recession anytime soon. With profit growth and other financial indices reaching lower setpoints in the past four years, we anticipate that the current state of the industry will remain the norm for the foreseeable future. With this view in mind, we are taking a step away from our typical year-on-year analysis. Part I of this Client Advisory contrasts the four years prior to the Great Recession and the four years after, to discern the hard lessons learned by law firm leaders. Part II discusses how to apply those lessons going forward, using today’s logic."

Can Lawyers Stay in the Driver's Seat? - Daniel G. Currell, Corporate Executive Board; M. Todd Henderson, University of Chicago - Law School. University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper No. 629. January 16, 2013

Highlights from the 2012 Am Law Tech Survey - Topics covered include: Money, Cloud, Social Networking, Smartphones, Tablets, Win8 Purchasing. [99% of survey respondents use iPhone iOS]

News release: "On November 15, 2012, the National Association of Women Lawyers Foundation released a report, entitled National Survey of Women's Initiatives: The Strategy, Structure And Scope Of Women's Initiatives In Law Firms, which details the results of its first ever survey of women's initiatives in law firms. This groundbreaking study was conducted in an attempt to find solutions to the troubling results of NAWL's Annual National Survey of Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, which has been published every year since 2006. One of the most startling statistics from that survey that illustrates the stark difference in advancement between men and women is the fact that only about 15% of equity partners are women in the typical large law firm. In this most recent report, NAWL notes that "women's initiatives" have been a way that law firms address the issues of retaining and advancing women attorneys at the firm."

Rachel M. Zahorsky, ABA Journal: "More and more billing partners are knocking research costs off invoices before they’re even submitted to clients, legal consultant Rob Mattern of Mattern & Associates recently told me...This trend is apparent at firms that negotiate deals with research providers but historically haven’t passed along discounts they received to their clients, sometimes as a means to collect on other, nonbillable items, Mattern added. Mattern's firm’s 2012 Cost Recovery survey reported an influx of firms with clients who either balked at or outright refused to pay for legal research. While some firms have adopted policies to charge clients only the hard costs billed to them, others are adding legal research charges to the cost of doing business. In fact, 43 percent of law firm respondents said they absorb more of their legal research costs today than in 2010, according to a recent Bloomberg Law survey of 97 law firms, ranging from 50 to more than 400 attorneys. And transactional matters are less likely to recover legal research costs than litigation."

Thinking Like Your Client: Strategic Planning in Law Firms - A report from ALM Legal Intelligence, October 2012. "LexisNexis has spent the past few years highlighting the difference between the practice of law and the business of law; and the lackluster economic conditions over that same time span have only served to reinforce how important those differences are. Without a doubt, law firms have a thorough and detailed understanding of the practice part; that’s their forte. It’s the business of law part where shortfalls occur.

• Revenue is the top priority in most strategic plans. Yet, almost half of the respondents are remiss in building, tracking and measuring client loyalty and satisfaction. Are firms overlooking the direct link between revenue and satisfied customers?
  
• Profitability is the second strategic plan priority. But, fewer than half are actively focused on a non-billable hour strategy, and more than half can’t yet tell if AFAs are more profitable than hourly rates. AFAs and various pricing models have been around for a few years; they are not going away. Isn’t it time to honestly reexamine the elements that make your firm profitable?
  
• Talent acquisition/retention holds the third top spot for strategic priorities, although laterals dominate the discussions and, apparently, everyone’s plans. How sustainable are growth models tied to an on-going “musical chairs” game of lateral talent shifting from firm to firm? Is anyone focused on a plan for organic growth?"

National Association of Women Lawyers and the NAWL Foundation: "Also, continuing a trend we have noted in previous Survey Reports, the structure of law firms has grown more complex. The typical AmLaw 200 firm is now a two-tier partnership with many different categories of lawyer in a leveraged structure: 151 equity partners (barely 15% women), 91 non-equity partners (26% women), 54 counsel (35% women), 188 associates (46% women), and 11 staff attorneys (70% women). As the preceding numbers clearly show, women constitute a smaller percentage of each category as you move up the career ladder. In other words, over the course of time women exit law firms disproportionately more than their male peers. Moreover, it is troubling to note that the percentages of women equity partners and women associates in the typical firm have declined slightly during the past two years."

Federal Computer Week: "Twitter has quickly evolved from social media novelty to critical communications channel. This list shows which federal agencies have built the biggest audiences, and where the growth has been fastest over the past year. The data [in this article] was compiled by OhMyGov, a media and technology firm that specializes in providing advanced media intelligence for government agencies, congressional offices, lobbyists, and businesses working with government. Please note that for many agencies, follower totals for multiple Twitter accounts were combined to provide a better sense of total reach. All counts are as of Aug. 31, 2012."

The Future is Yesterday: Public Relations in the Networked Era by Lee Rainie, Sep 20, 2012, at Public Relations Society

Via LLRX.com - The New Digital Public Library of America Board of Directors - David H. Rothman's current commentary highlights the composition of the new board of directors of the nonprofit DPLA, an organization that continues to grow and change, along with clarifying its goals and objectives.

General Sentiment - Q2 2012 Global Brands Report - "Apple, Google and Microsoft have long vied for the top spot in our quarterly Global Brands series. Who pulled ahead this quarter? A new arrival in this quarter's Impact Media Value top ten also placed among the top Perception Media Value winners thanks to further European expansion. The Q2 2012 Global Brands report analyzes the brands that had the most significant impact online in the second quarter of this year."

"The Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) released an independently conducted analysis showing that the savings to consumers and the U.S. health care system from the use of generic prescription drugs has risen to a current rate of $1 billion every other day — totaling $193 billion in 2011 and more than $1 trillion over the last 10 years (2002-2011). The Generic Drug Savings study was conducted for GPhA by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a division of IMS Health that has been a leading provider of market intelligence to the health care industry for more than 55 years."

From the July 23, 2012 issue of Fortune: "Royal Dutch Shell tops the Fortune Global 500, ending Wal-Mart's two-year winning streak. See the full list of the world's largest corporations, including detailed company profiles and contact information."

LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell - The Selection and Retention of International Law Firms, June 2012: "Understanding how in-house counsel identify and retain external law firms is uppermost in the minds of law firms throughout the the world, especially for firms active in international markets. In-house teams need to be sure that they select the right law firm that can stand up to scrutiny by other stakeholders in the business and meet their needs and expectations. A new study commissioned by LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® in association with The International In-house Counsel Journal examines how companies based in Canada, the U.S. and Latin America select and retain law firms in international (foreign) jurisdictions."

News release: "According to Selected Findings from the Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2011 released today by NALP, the overall employment rate for new law school graduates is, at 85.6%, the lowest it has been since 1994, when the rate stood at 84.7%. In addition to an overall employment rate that fell two percentage points from that for the previous class, and that has dropped each year since 2008, the Class of 2011 employment figures reveal a job market with many underlying structural weaknesses. The employment profile for this class also marks a continued interruption of employment patterns for new law school graduates that had, prior to 2010, been undisturbed for decades. The NALP Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2011 measures the employment rate of graduates as of February 15, 2012, or nine months after a typical May graduation. Analyses of these data reveal an employment rate that has fallen more than six percentage points since reaching a 23-year high of 91.9% in 2007 and marks the lowest employment rate since the aftermath of the last significant recession to affect the U.S. legal economy. The Class of 1994 was the last class with an employment rate lower than that for the Class of 2011, and since 1985 there have only been three classes with an overall employment rate below 85.6%. All of those occurred in the aftermath of the 1990-1991 recession: 83.5% for 1992, 83.4% for 1993, and 84.7% for 1994. (For information on trends in graduate employment going back to 1985, see here.)

The Plaintiffs’ Bar Goes Digital - An Analysis of the Digital Marketing Efforts of Plaintiffs’ Attorneys & Litigation Firms, January 2012

Restoring Contemplation: How Disconnecting Bolsters the Knowledge Economy, by Jessie L. Mannisto

Some students are graduating with more than $150,000 in debt, by Ryan Lytle

Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value, Paul André - Carnegie Mellon; Michael Bernstein - MIT, and Kurt Luther - Georgia Tech, February 2012

Goal III Report - An Annual Report on Women’s Advancement into Leadership Positions in the American Bar Association, February 2012

The Lateral Report 2012: "If 2010 was a year for staying put, 2011 was the year that partners jumped back into the lateral market with full force. In the 12 months ending September 30, 2011, 2,454 partners left or joined Am Law 200 firms. That was a 22 percent increase from 2010, when only 2,014 changed jobs—the lowest number of partner moves since 2000. This year's figure was consistent with the annual average of 2,458 partner moves from 2005 to 2009 and was higher than the number of lateral moves in 2007, when 2,423 partners moved. Even without the 208 partners that the March dissolution of Howrey added to the 2011 total, there was still a 16 percent increase in partner moves over the previous 12-month period. This year's uptick in lateral churn does not mean the boom years are back. Both transactions and litigation lagged in 2011, consultants note. So what accounts for the increase in lateral hiring? In many cases, it's cherry picking, as firms try to counter a stagnant economy by poaching top performers from rivals."

Winter 2012 Transparency Index Report, January 2012

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital - December 28, 2011 - "As 2011 comes to a close, Nielsen reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices. Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs. Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS."

"Vizibility and LexisNexis recently conducted a survey to help shed light on the use of social media in legal services marketing. To illustrate the findings, the results have been released as an infographic, available below. View the announcement here. The research suggests a high degree of reliance on broadly defined social media marketing programs, with 81% of survey participants reporting they already use social media marketing tools and another 10.1% saying they plan to deploy social media marketing elements within six months. Furthermore, reliance on social media tools and how they’re measured differ significantly by firm size. The survey found that a clear majority of participants consider social media an important part of their overall marketing strategy, with nearly half (48.5%) reporting that social media is “somewhat important” while another 31% believe the tools are “extremely important” to their total marketing efforts. Click a preview below to view the infographic at full size. The infographic is available in both black and white versions."

Top Ten Trends for Legal Outsourcing in 2012 - An insider’s guide to the changing dynamics set to impact the legal outsourcing field in the coming year. Fronterion LLC. December 2011.

"What is LST? - Law School Transparency is a Tennessee non-profit dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the transparent flow of consumer information. It was founded by two Vanderbilt University Law School students in 2009 on the belief that other law schools could be as transparent as Vanderbilt. LST operates independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market...This website aims to provide a clearer, more meaningful window into the employment opportunities at ABA-approved law schools by explaining (and repackaging) the currently available data and information. This website also contains updates about LST's policy initiatives, including our efforts to reform the ABA Section of Legal Education's consumer information standard, our efforts with U.S. News, and our efforts to prompt schools to voluntarily share better information outside of the accreditation framework."

The National Association of Women Lawyers® and The NAWL Foundation Report of Sixth Annual Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, October 11

About Think with Google: "In this world gone digital, the marketing industry is moving faster than ever before. At Think with Google, we bring together like-minded marketers to keep up with what’s new and what’s next in digital media and marketing. Here you will find a selection of the research, insights and ideas — from both inside and outside of Google — that informs our strategies, decisions, and products. There are videos, articles, interviews, and studies designed to bring you everything from high-level inspiration to deck-ready data points. Consider this your digital cheat sheet."

Judicial Ethics and Social Networking Sites: "Michael Crowell
UNC School of Government, September 2011 (Revised)

"Altman Weil MergerLine™ tracking law firm mergers and acquisitions as they are reported by the press. MergerLine compiles news of mergers and acquisitions of all sizes. Our focus is U.S. firms, but we will report on significant combinations wherever they occur. Lawyer headcounts are derived from published league tables, directories and law firm websites."

Networks, Hiring, and Inter-Organizational Mobility: Evidence from Law Firm Dissolutions, Christopher I. Rider, Emory University - Goizueta Business School. Posted July 8, 2011

News release: "Representatives Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Co-Chairmen of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate so-called “supercookies”, files that can be installed on computers without a user's knowledge. Supercookies allow websites to collect detailed personal data about users, including websites previously visited. Even when consumers choose to delete regular cookies from their computers, supercookies persist. According to a report last month in The Wall Street Journal (“Latest in Web Tracking: Stealthy ‘Supercookies’, August 18, 2011), it was discovered that companies have been installing supercookies on users’ computers without their knowledge. Even technical experts at the websites in the report stated they had no knowledge that the secret files were being installed."

Radical change is certainly producing some alarming symptoms: "According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years...For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing."

News release: "LexisNexis® Risk Solutions today unveiled the HPCC Systems Alliance Program, which is a collaboration of partners to stimulate innovation and accelerate market adoption of the newly open sourced HPCC Systems, an enterprise-proven, open source solution to help large organizations process “Big Data”. Built on a high performing computer cluster technology, HPCC Systems is an alternative to Hadoop. Interest in processing and managing Big Data is growing rapidly among enterprise and service provider customers. LexisNexis collaboration with innovative leaders will help customers navigate options for addressing large data sets, reduce overall infrastructure costs, and improve business agility and data insight. Products and solutions from these partners will help deliver fully integrated, turnkey solutions."

"Midlevel associates put their noses to the grindstone in 2010, and they didn’t like it. While demand for legal services rose, staffing at the biggest firms still lagged behind prerecession levels. As a result, third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates had their most demanding year since the downturn began, averaging 2,037 billable hours in 2010, compared to 1,957 in 2009. Adding the equivalent of two extra weeks of work may not sound like much, but it marked the highest number of associate billable hours since 2007. That probably helps explain why our survey of 5,361 midlevel associates from 149 law firms showed the average firm composite score declining for the second straight year to the lowest associate satisfaction score since 2004. As one DLA Piper associate told us: "Firms got too lean [after the recession] and consequently realized that associates will work more and more if asked. Quality of life has therefore decreased."

Google Doubleclick Ad Planner - "You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains. For each site on the list, you'll be able to see: The site category; Unique Visitors (users); Page Views; Whether the site has ads."

News release: "The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver today launches a unique, national initiative to change the way law schools educate students. Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers provides a platform to encourage law schools in the U.S. to showcase innovative teaching to produce more practice-ready lawyers who can better meet the needs of an evolving profession."

Update, November 30, 2011: Seeking Synchronicity Webinar Recording Now Available
OCLC - "A new membership report from OCLC Research, in partnership with Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Seeking Synchronicity distills more than five years of virtual reference (VR) research into a readable summary that features memorable quotes that vividly illustrate very specific and actionable suggestions. Taken from a multi-phase research project that included focus group interviews, surveys, transcript analysis, and phone interviews, with VR librarians, users, and non-users, these findings are meant to help practitioners develop and sustain VR services and systems. The report asserts that the "R" in "VR" needs to emphasize virtual "Relationships" as well as "Reference". Among the topics addressed are:

• The exaggerated death of ready reference
  
• The importance of query clarification in VR
  
• Ways to boost accuracy and build better interpersonal relationships in VR
  
• What can be learned from VR transcripts
  
• How convenience is the "hook" that draws users into VR services
  
• Generational differences in how people perceive reference interactions and determine success
  
• The need for more and better marketing"

"Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use."

Jamie S. Gorelick and Michael Traynor, Co-Chairs - ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 - Re: For Comment: Initial Draft Proposals on Lawyers' Use of Technology and Client Development. Date: June 29, 2011

EMSI: "Just how bad is the job outlook for lawyers? According to our quick analysis, every state but Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., and Nebraska produced more — in some cases, far more — bar exam passers in 2009 than the estimated yearly openings for lawyers in those states. The same glut holds true when comparing law school grads, via IPEDS from the National Center for Education Statistics, to the same opening estimates. And when you take into account nuances with the D.C. bar and how Wisconsin operates, there might not be any states with a shortage."

The American Companies With The Most Valuable Brands: "24/7 Wall St. has done an analysis of the largest companies in the United States based on the size of their portfolios of major consumer brands. Many of these brands are worth billions of dollars if brand valuation firms are correct. All certainly generate tremendous sales. The Procter & Gamble brand portfolio creates more than $40 billion in revenue each year. P&G has a market value of $186 billion. Coca-Cola, another company on the list, has a market value of $155 billion. The success of these corporations is based almost entirely on their brands. Most of the corporations on this list have flagship products that are decades old and some were first introduced before 1900. None of the companies on the list is a one-trick pony. Brand diversification has been one of the most successful American business strategies over the last several decades. Mars has a large array of chocolate and pet food products. Kellogg has dozens of cereals. Each company used manufacturing, marketing, and distribution expertise as leverage for commodities purchases and product placements in retail outlets."

"Local businesses are growing. We’re helping. Google's not just a search engine. We've also helped hundreds of businesses in every U.S. state to grow. Across the U.S., Google's search and advertising tools provided $64 billion of economic activity in 2010. Click the map to see Google’s economic impact in your state. The state-by-state advertiser, publisher, and non-profit totals listed in the map are rounded to the nearest thousand."

• Our Search & Advertising Tools
  
• Where We Get the Numbers
  
• FAQ

Google Announces First Quarter 2011 Results: "In May 2011, in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the United States Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers, we accrued $500 million for the three month period ended March 31, 2011. Although we cannot predict the ultimate outcome of this matter, we believe it will not have a material adverse effect on our business, consolidated financial position, results of operations, or cash flows. As a result, we have updated the affected financial data in this release, as noted, as well as the accompanying financial tables."

The Am Law 100 2011 - American Lawyer.com: "After watching profits per partner sink 4.3 percent in 2008 and revive only 0.3 percent in 2009, Am Law 100 firms finally posted a healthy increase--8.4 percent--in 2010. But much of that gain is attributable to firms’ aggressive cost-control measures, especially in the area of headcount, which dropped 2.7 percent over 2009. As a result, growth in revenue per lawyer--the most reliable measure of the overall financial health of law firms--was more tepid, 4.4 percent. Gross revenue rose 4 percent in 2010, in effect making up for the 3.4 percent loss The Am Law 100 posted in 2009, as firms benefited from the nascent recovery in capital markets and M&A. However, much of that growth came from two giants--DLA Piper and Hogan Lovells, a pair of vereins whose worldwide revenues were included in this year’s report for the first time, due to a change in our methodology. Leaving out those two anomalies, The AmLaw 100’s average gross revenue increased a meager 1.4 percent in 2010."

U.S. Public Libraries and the Use of Web Technologies, 2010 - April 2011, Zeth Lietzau, Jamie Helgren. This study was funded through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) by the Colorado State Library, Colorado Department of Education.

Managing Brands in a Topsy-Turvy Marketing Environment

Government Technology: "A new study ranking government, nonprofit and industry trade groups for their use of social media and online strategies revealed that more than 50 percent of the organizations polled are not using these digital avenues as effectively as they could be. The first L2 Digital IQ Index: Public Sector was co-authored by digital think tank L2 and the George Washington University School of Business, and ranked 100 digitally active public-sector groups on how well they are using different technologies to their greatest ability, or how high their digital IQ is. NASA, the White House and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are respectively ranked as having the highest digital IQs. The International Civil Aviation Organization, the Universal Postal Union, and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America (IIABA) came in last."

LLRX.com - Open Source Tools for Tutorials: Nicole C. Engard continues her series on best practices for libraries to leverage open source tools with a guide on publishing tutorials for using library resources. Rather than creating a printed pathfinder, she suggests creating a video tutorial instead, as the learning experience is often more engaging and has deeper impact when users see something done versus reading about it.

News release: "The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google Inc. has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules (Article 102 TFEU). The opening of formal proceedings follows complaints by search service providers about unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services. This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of any infringements. It only signifies that the Commission will conduct an in-depth investigation of the case as a matter of priority. Google's internet search engine provides for two types of results when people are searching for information. These are unpaid search results, which are sometimes also referred to as "natural", "organic" or "algorithmic" search results, and third party advertisements shown at the top and at the right hand side of Google's search results page (so-called paid search results or sponsored links). The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialised in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services. The Commission will also look into allegations that Google lowered the 'Quality Score' for sponsored links of competing vertical search services. The Quality Score is one of the factors that determine the price paid to Google by advertisers."

Using the Kindle in Library Settings - A Survey, Updated: Recently Montrese Hamilton wrote a summary of responses to her survey of three Special Libraries Association discussion lists about using the Kindle in library settings. The questions were well-received and more replies arrived after her wrap-up was published so she returns with the new comments plus insights gathered from her own Kindle-lending experiment.

Angel, Marina, Whang, Eun-Young, Banker, Rajiv D. and Lopez, Joseph, Statistical Evidence on the Gender Gap in Law Firm Partner Compensation (September 9, 2010). Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-24. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1674630

News release and findings "The latest NALP [National Association for Law Placement] findings on law firm demographics reveal that the overall representation of women and minority lawyers in law firms declined between 2009 and 2010, likely a casualty of massive lawyer layoffs during the 2008-2009 recession. In 2010, the percentage of women and minority partners in law firms across the nation was actually slightly higher than in 2009. Among associates, however, representation of women and minorities declined slightly, for the first time since NALP started compiling this information in the 1990s. The net effect was that, for lawyers as a whole, representation of both women and minorities declined slightly. Minorities now make up just 12.40% of lawyers at these law firms, compared with 12.59% in 2009. Just under one-third of lawyers at these same firms are women — 32.69% in 2010 compared with 32.97% in 2009. Minority women now account for just over 6% of lawyers at these firms — 6.20% in 2010 compared with 6.33% in 2009."

LLRX.com: Using the Kindle in Library Settings - A Survey - Special Librarian Montrese Hamilton shares effective ways an electronic document reader may be used to provide customers on-demand access to new content. Beyond instant access to material, e-readers can: reduce the need for Interlibrary loans, help grow the collection without adding shelf space, and eliminate processing required for physical matter.

Fulbright's 7th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report

CNNMoney: "Google has made its famous search algorithm into a $20 billion business, but for years, investors have asked, "What's next?" Google finally has an answer: Android...By 2013, Android [mobile operating system] will be a $4 billion-a-year business for the company and "a blockbuster success," Caris & Co. analyst Sandeep Aggarwal forecasts. That's a nice revenue bump for a company that had sales of $24 billion last year. But Google is dreaming even bigger: At last month's Zeitgeist conference in Arizona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters that he sees Android as a $10 billion business."

News release: "Last year began with the economy in a trough; many major U.S. corporations were either bailed out or taken over by the federal government, and the housing market was in the midst of one of the most brutal slumps in American history. Although recovery is now well under way, improvement has been slow and halting, with unemployment inching up toward 10% and housing starts still lagging. Consumer spending finally edged up over the course of 2009, but many people remained too concerned about their jobs and mortgages to open their wallets enough to jump-start the sort of roaring economic comeback that Americans seemingly have come to expect as a natural part of the business cycle."

• MCCA® List of Women General Counsel at Fortune 500 Companies (Page 1)
  
• MCCA® List of Women General Counsel at Fortune 500 Companies (Page 2)
  
• MCCA® List of Women General Counsel at Fortune 501-1000 Companies

News release: "In the 2010 Kids and Family Reading Report - Turning the Page in the Digital Age - a national survey released today, children age 6 – 17 and their parents share their views on a wide range of topics regarding reading in the 21st Century. The study, conducted by Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, and Harrison Group, a leading marketing and strategic research consulting firm, found that from age 6 - 17, the time kids spend reading books for fun declines while the time kids spend going online for fun and using a cell phone to text or talk increases. Parents express concern that the use of electronic and digital devices negatively affects the time kids spend reading books (41%), doing physical activities (40%), and engaging with family (33%). The study also found indications that technology could be a positive motivator to get kids reading -- 57 percent of kids (age 9-17) say they are interested in reading an eBook, and a third of children age 9-17 say they would read more books for fun if they had access to eBooks on an electronic device. This includes kids who read 5-7 days per week (34%), 1 to 4 days per week (36%) and even those who read less than one day per week (27%). The findings from the Kids and Family Reading Report indicate that the ebook market will continue to grow. While only 6% of parents surveyed currently own an electronic device used for reading eBooks and other digital publications, 16% plan to purchase one in the next year. And parents are not hesitant to share those devices with their children – approximately 8 in 10 (83%) of these parents say they do or will allow/encourage their child to use their eReading device."

"The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it will require The Coca-Cola Company to restrict its access to confidential competitive business information of rival Dr Pepper Snapple Group as a condition for completing Coca-Cola’s proposed $12.3 billion acquisition of its largest North American bottler, which also distributes Dr Pepper Snapple carbonated soft drinks. Under a settlement with the FTC, Coca-Cola will set up a “firewall” to ensure that its ownership of the bottling company does not give certain Coca-Cola employees access to commercially sensitive confidential Dr Pepper Snapple marketing information and brand plans. In a complaint filed with the settlement, the FTC charged that access to this information likely would have harmed competition in the U.S. markets for carbonated soft drinks. On February 26, 2010, the FTC approved a proposed settlement order in which PepsiCo agreed to set up a similar information firewall after acquiring its two largest bottlers and distributors (see press release)."

The Continued Rise of Blogging: "Social networks and microblogs have in recent years nudged blogging off the social media pedestal. For some consumers, who have more communication tools at their fingertips than they did a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter have supplanted blogging as life-streaming outlets. But blogs continue to be important. eMarketer estimates that this year more than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly. By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or 60% of the internet population in the US. One reason for the rise in readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online media landscape. “Trends in blog reading are expected to maintain an upward course as blogs continue to gain influence in the mainstream media,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report The Blogosphere: Colliding with Social and Mainstream Media (fee). “But there is a caveat to this forecast: Over time, blogs will continue to become indistinguishable from other media channels."

"U.S. News and Best Lawyers, the leading survey of lawyers worldwide, have joined to rank nearly 9,000 firms in 81 practice areas in 171 metropolitan areas and 7 states.

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Statistical Evidence on the Gender Gap in Law Firm Partner Compensation, Marina Angel, Eun-Young Whang, Rajiv D. Banker, Joseph Lopez, September 9, 2010

Development of a SharePoint Site - Lorette S.J. Weldon continues her series with a discussion on how to interpret and document the requirements of an organization or a specific department in order to develop a successful SharePoint site.

Law Libraries Transformed: Not long ago, the law library was "a place". It housed printed materials and staff and provided work space for research. Lawyers went there to use books and consult librarians to locate and complete assignments. Today, Eleanor Windsor and Ron Friedmann report that the notion of a modern law library is very different, shaped by the skills of specialized researchers and information managers rather than by bookshelves and bound volumes.

Problems with Creating a Course to Help Colleagues - How many times have you wondered how to do a task or work with software? You feel wonderful once you have found a colleague who could share their "know-how" about how to complete that task more efficiently or how to implement an applications that does not have a manual that makes sense to you. Lorette S.J. Weldon focuses on four factors to consider when you want to share your knowledge on your own: cost; timing; equipment and global presentation.

"The newly released Altman Weil Flash Survey, Law Firms in Transition 2010 found a clear consensus emerging among US law firms on changes in the profession. Over 75% of firms surveyed indicate that they believe that more price competition, more non-hourly billing and the use of project management to improve efficiency of service delivery will be permanent changes in the legal landscape."

The Decade's Most Influential Lawyers - These are the lawyers who've defined a decade.

From the Law Firm Library Trenches: A Conversation Between Two Veterans: Elaine Billingslea Dockens and Karen Krupka, each of whom has over 20 years of law librarian experience, discuss the field of law librarianship, and key issues and factors that new law librarians are likely to encounter as they enter this unique, and still vital profession.

World Privacy Forum: "New forms of sophisticated digital signage networks are being deployed widely by retailers and others in both public and private spaces. From simple people-counting sensors mounted on doorways to sophisticated facial recognition cameras mounted in flat video screens and end-cap displays, digital signage technologies are gathering increasing amounts of detailed information about consumers, their behaviors, and their characteristics, like age, gender, and ethnicity. These technologies are quickly becoming ubiquitous in the offline world, and there is little if any disclosure to consumers that information about behavioral and personal characteristics is being collected and analyzed to create highly targeted advertisements, among other things. Few if any consumers expect that the video screen they are watching, the kiosk they are typing on, or the game billboard they are interacting with is watching them back while gathering images of them and behavioral information. This is creating a one-way-mirror society with no notice or opportunity for consumers to consent to being monitored in retail, public, and other spaces or to consent to having their behavior analyzed for marketing and profit. The privacy problems inherent in digital networks are profound, and to date these issues have not been adequately addressed by anyone. This report by the World Privacy Forum seeks to shed light in a dark area and to start a more robust public debate. In addition to the report, the WPF has released with a group of the nation's leading consumer groups a set of privacy principles to be used in digital signage networks."

Getting Educated at LegalTech New York 2010: Conrad J. Jacoby provides an overview of the New York LegalTech show and conference, long one of the preeminent opportunities to catch a glimpse of the future of legal technology. Conrad highlights how the conference provides a surprisingly accurate snapshot of litigation support, electronic discovery, and even the health of the legal industry as a whole.

News release: "Social Sentry provides corporations the ability to monitor the social networking communications of their employees. Delivered as an easy to deploy SaaS offering, Social Sentry enables businesses to monitor employee activity on all major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It provides granular and real-time tracking to eliminate significant corporate risks related to: Compliance issues; Leakage of sensitive information; HR issues; Legal exposure; Brand damage; Financial impact."

Merkle View from the Social Inbox 2010 - Actionable Information for Marketers From the Annual Consumer Email & Digital Media

LLRX.com: Law Firms Now Outsourcers? - With the recent announcement that UK law firm Eversheds will launch its own outsourcing business, Ron Friedmann addresses the question of what exactly is law firm outsourcing, and how does it differ from where lawyers are located.

LLRX.com - Ethics of Legal Outsourcing White Paper: The practical reality for US and UK attorneys engaging in or contemplating Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is that the outsourcing of both core legal and support services across the legal profession is nothing new. What is different today with the emergence of the LPO industry is that both core legal and legal support related services are being outsourced to lawyers, law firms and corporations located offshore in countries such as India, South Africa and the Philippines. Mark Ross analyzes how the outsourcing of legal work by a law firm or legal department to a legal outsourcing company or an entity located offshore raises specific issues pertaining to the outsourcing lawyer's ethical obligations to his or her client.

LLRX.com - Effective Project Management: the Art of Creating Scope Statements - Carol A. Watson's discussion of how well-defined scope statements are the key to successful project management continues with this article focused on how all written documentation should be clearly and concisely written, avoiding ambiguities at all costs.

UK TimesOnline: "Nestled amid the bustle of north Mumbai, the headquarters of Pangea3, one of India’s biggest legal outsourcing companies, is enough to give a British corporate lawyer used to the slick environs of the City or Canary Wharf the heebie-jeebies...an army of young Indian graduates, most of them from the country’s top law and engineering schools, sits before a barrage of computer terminals. Many are working on legal documents digitally accessed from the servers of blue-chip Western clients via transcontinental fibreoptic cables. Others are engaged in research for upcoming litigation to be fought out in American courtrooms, or are analysing patent filings registered by British companies...Much of the work that Pangea3 and similar firms deal with, such as drafting derivatives contracts or conducting due diligence for mergers and acquisitions, was once the preserve of trainees and associates at big City law firms. Some of those firms racked up annual revenues of more than £1 billion during the boom years, in part by billing out teams of junior lawyers for up to £300 an hour for even the most routine tasks."

Project Management - A Law Librarian Survival Skill: Carol A. Watson discusses how effective project management requires considerable thought and preparation before actually initiating the work of the project. Although many of us are eager to jump into the tasks related to a project, it is important to remember that careful planning will provide the groundwork for a successful project outcome. Carol reminds us, "Remember, it takes time to save time," and she will be writing on this overall topic in forthcoming issues of LLRX.com

The Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation? William E. Nelson, Harvey Rishikof, I. Scott Messinger, Michael Jo | 62 Vand. L. Rev. 1749 (2009)

News release: "Marketers of violent music, movies, and video games can do more to restrict the promotion of these products to children, according to the seventh in a series of Federal Trade Commission reports on marketing violent entertainment to children. The FTC’s report states that the music industry still has not adopted objective marketing standards limiting ad placement for explicit-content music. As a result, the industry still advertises music labeled with a Parental Advisory Label (PAL) on television shows viewed by a substantial number of children. Music retailers routinely sell labeled music to unaccompanied teens. The report also finds that movie studios intentionally market PG-13 movies to children under 13, and the movie industry does not have explicit standards in place to restrict this practice. The growing practice of releasing unrated DVDs undermines the rating system, and confuses parents."

"In September The American Lawyer and the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) jointly surveyed 587 ACC members who have the title "chief legal officer" or "general counsel." In that group, 149 head departments at companies with annual revenues of $1 billion or more. Here are the survey results (Note: Click on the images at the end of the posting for a larger view)."

Access to Social Websites in The Legal Environment - Fall 2009 - Part 1: Survey of Law Librarians in Selected Firms, County/State Law Libraries and Law Schools.

Support for the Research Process - An Academic Library Manifesto: This document by Chris Bourg, Ross Coleman, and Ricky Erway can serve as a pathfinder for those professionals seeking to focuses on roles that academic, law and special librarians could undertake in order to better support the research process.

Free Tools and Applications For More Efficient Online Interaction: Many lawyers understand the importance of networking, but running a law practice takes time and no one ever seems to have enough of it. This factor is one of the main reasons lawyers offer as an excuse to avoid online networking, but Nicole Black proposes how choosing even a few efficient applications from the range of free tools available can streamline and accelerate this marketing process.

Lisa Smith: "Over the past two decades law firms have advanced significantly in measuring performance both internally and externally. But are some of the very metrics firms have come to rely on now impeding progress in a world that requires innovation? The economic downturn has accelerated both client and firm interest in developing new approaches to providing services and in offering new pricing arrangements. Firms are starting to rethink the traditional staffing structures. Other changes are on the horizon. Yet progress has been somewhat slower than some would like to see (and maybe faster than others would like to see it)."

Leigh Jones, The National Law Journal: "The United States' largest law firms this year suffered the deepest cuts in their attorney numbers since The National Law Journal began tracking their census figures more than 30 years ago. The total number of attorneys working at the top 250 law firms plunged by 5,259 lawyers."

The Application Usage and Risk Report - An Analysis of End User Application Trends in the Enterprise, Fall Edition 2009, Palo Alto Networks: "Social networking, blogging/microblogging, cloud-based productivity and collaborative applications are just a few of the applications that are making the cross over from personal to corporate use as a means of improving productivity. This report shows that the use of these applications is commonplace across a worldwide sample of
more than 200 organizations in a wide range of industries.
Some specific findings from the research include:

• Twitter session use grew more than 250 percent from the Spring 2009 edition of the Application Usage and Risk Report, published in April.
  
• Facebook use increased 192 percent while Facebook Chat (released in April 2008) was the fourth most commonly detected chat application, ahead of Yahoo! IM and AIM.
  
• SharePoint collaboration is ubiquitous – bandwidth consumed by SharePoint, specifically the documents component, increased 17-fold from the previous report in April.
  
• Blogging and wiki editing increased by a factor of 39, while total bandwidth consumed increased by a factor of 48."

2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study "was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on 2,948 valid responses to our online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during August and early September, 2009, the results provide a very useful benchmark for where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media across different activities and sites. The study was focused on social media utilization – how people and companies are using social media in a work context today – and not on adoption. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or worked for a company currently managing, developing or planning social media initiatives."

"Fully one-third of the 110 Am Law 200 firms participating in our fourteenth annual survey of technology directors reported that their capital budgets were down more than 10 percent this year. Staffing levels and salaries have taken hits, and equipment purchases and software upgrades have been put off. None of it is happy news. Access all the charts (free registration req'd) in our survey from the links at the bottom of this page."

News release: "Over the past eight years, more in-house counsel have required specific terms of retention that govern what they expect from their outside counsel, according to the results of the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, a collaboration between the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) and Serengeti Law, released at ACC’s Annual Meeting, October 20 in Seattle, WA. Gone are the days when in-house counsel send out major projects to outside counsel, pay vague bills “for services rendered,” and remain uninvolved while outside counsel do whatever they think is necessary. Seeking to find out how in-house counsel were managing the work being done by outside counsel, and to gather metrics regarding the management techniques being used, the annual survey collected objective data from in-house counsel to assess the methods undertaken to better manage their work with outside counsel."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Updated and Revised October 2009: Sabrina I. Pacifici's completely revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web, database and email alert products, services and tools, as well as links to content specific sources produced by government, academic, NGOs, the media and various publishers.

Legal Implications of Cloud Computing - Part Two (Privacy and the Cloud): As a follow-up to last month's article that provided an overview of cloud computing in the context of significant legal issues, this article by Tanya Forsheit reviews the issues of privacy and cross-border data transfers.

Using Technology To Estimate, Control And Manage Litigation Document Review Budgets: Conrad J. Jacoby details approaches and exercises that contribute to a successful process for calculating - and staying within - a realistic budget for a litigation or regulatory document review.

News release: "Hildebrandt announced the release of its 2009 Law Department Survey (fee only). The 2009 Survey achieved an all-time high in participation, reflecting the strong interest of General Counsel and law department managers in benchmarking with peer organizations. This year, the Hildebrandt Survey included 231 participants representing 21 industries and 22% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. Over 30% of the companies have revenues at or above the Fortune 500 level. This includes companies that are privately held or based outside the United States. The 2009 Survey reports 2007 and 2008 data and is most reflective of the period leading into the economic downturn which began in mid-September 2008."

News release: "Companies are seeing a litigation wave that corporate counsel expect to swell in the coming year, according to respondents of Fulbright’s 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report. Corporate counsel say they are steeling themselves for a big year of litigation with 42% of U.S. respondents anticipating an increase in legal disputes their companies will face in the next 12 months. That is up from 34% of last year’s respondents. The expectation comes during a year when 83% of U.S. respondents reported that new litigation has been commenced against their companies in the past year, up from 79% last year...More than one-third of companies say the economic downturn has resulted not only in an increase in their litigation caseloads, but also their use of alternative fees. Tighter cost control, more than anything else, is the most important way in which the economic crisis has affected litigation management, respondents say."

The Art of Written Persuasion: Part V - Improve Your Vocabulary, Improve Your Success: Troy Simpson returns with this fifth article in the series, and investigates the link between having a good vocabulary [lawyers have a speaking acquaintance with around 23,000 words] and being a persuasive lawyer.

2009 Networks for Counsel Study - A Global Study of the Legal Industry’s Adoption of Online Professional Networking, Preferences, Usage and Future Predictions - Sample Composition: "The survey was administered to 1,474 counsel – 764 private practice lawyers and 710 corporate counsel –in May and June of 2009; 33 countries were represented. Financial Services, Manufacturing and Healthcare were the top three industries represented."

Working Mother: "These are turbulent times for law firms. The economy is still reeling, several prestigious firms have collapsed, and layoffs have been rampant. No doubt about it, this sector is feeling the recession. But for working-mom lawyers, who’ve long sought more flexibility, this may be just the moment they’ve been waiting for. Our 50 Working Mother & Flex-Time Lawyers Best Law Firms for Women are leading the charge for change, using the power of flex both to cut costs and retain lawyers. Already, our winning firms have more lawyers working reduced hours (8 percent versus 5 percent nationwide) and also employ more female equity partners, who share in their firm’s profits (20 percent versus 16 percent nationwide)—and that’s just for starters. We salute these firms for recognizing that making the legal profession work for women is good business for everyone."

Are Law Firms Ready for Transparency? Attorney and KM expert V. Mary Abraham provides details on how one law firm has found a way to create real transparency in its dealings with clients via an extranet, and whether this process may start a trend.

Re-Hashing the Hash Tag - Crowd Competition and Community Standards at the #AALL2009 Conference: Roger V. Skalbeck and Meg Kribble describe how the majority of social media activity during the 2009 AALL conference took place on Twitter, and how this technology impacts the profession and the free exchange of information, moving forward.

AmLaw Litigation Daily: "Corporate Counsel magazine's annual Who Represents America's Biggest Companies survey is out this week, and it tells a familiar story: For the most part, the same giant corporations have been hiring the same giant firms, and making the same demands for alternative billing to reduce their giant fees."

News release: "High potential employees aren’t afraid to strike out for greater opportunities despite the continuing recession, according to a study of how the best and brightest of high potential talent have weathered the global recession over the past 18 months. The report released by Catalyst, Opportunity or Setback? High Potential Women and Men During Economic Crisis, offers a surprising overview of the current workplace and recommends that even during international economic instability, employee retention must remain a foremost concern for businesses."

News release: "Are law firms putting their bottom lines at risk? According to Catalyst’s Women of Color in U.S. Law Firms, women of color face complex barriers compared to other groups that may significantly decrease job satisfaction and increase the intent to leave their current firm—factors that affect a firm’s bottom line. The study is the fourth and final in Catalyst’s Women of Color in Professional Services Series examining how the “intersectionality,” or combined identities of gender and race/ethnicity, puts women of color at a unique disadvantage in the workplace. Despite widespread existence of systems created to develop and advance women of color, research has shown that more than 75 percent of these women will leave their employer within five years, costing an amount potentially greater than each person’s total salary and benefits."

Law Practice Technology Information Sources and Tools - Ken Strutin identifies core sources to learn about new technologies that apply to legal research and law practice. In addition, he has identified specific tools that will contribute to managing research, communication and information-based tasks.

Associates Survey 2009: "In our annual midlevel associates survey, third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates rate their firms as workplaces. We examined 12 areas that contribute to job satisfaction." To find out how third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates rate their firms as workplaces, our annual midlevel survey examined 12 areas that contribute to job satisfaction. They include relations with partners and other associates, the interest and satisfaction level of the work, training and guidance, policy on billable hours, management's openness about firm strategies and partnership chances, the firm's attitude toward pro bono work, compensation and benefits, and the respondents' inclination to stay at their firm for at least two more years. Respondents graded their firms on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest score. On this chart, firms with ten or more responses are ranked by their averages on those questions."
THE CHARTS

Associates Survey 2009: National Rankings

• Associates Survey 2009: Results by City
  
• Associates Survey 2009: Results by Size - Am Law 100 and Global 100 Firms
  
• Associates Survey 2009: Results by Size - The Am Law Second Hundred
  
• Associates Survey 2009: Results by Size - Non-Am Law 100 Firms
  
• Associates Survey 2009: Firms from A to K; from L to Z

Twitter 101 for Business: "Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter."

Five Things Lawyers Should Know About Social Media: Lawyer, writer and blogger Nicole Black advises fellow professionals about important core techniques and goals to consider before jumping on the “social media” bandwagon.

Optimizing Web Traffic via the Media Scheduling Problem. Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinbergy, Ravi Kumar, 15th ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009: "Website traffic varies through time in consistent and predictable ways, with highest traffic in the middle of the day. When providing media content to visitors, it is important to present repeat visitors with new content so that they keep coming back. In this paper we present an algorithm to balance the need to keep a website fresh with new content with the desire to present the best content to the most visitors at times of peak traffic. We formulate this as the media scheduling problem, where we attempt to maximize total clicks, given the overall traffic pattern and the time varying clickthrough rates of available media content. We present an efficient algorithm to perform this scheduling under certain conditions and apply this algorithm to real data obtained from server logs, showing evidence of significant improvements in traffic from our algorithmic schedules. Finally, we analyze the click data, presenting models for why and how the clickthrough rate for new content declines as it ages."

UberCEO: Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media - "...top CEOs in the country appear to be mostly absent from the social media community. That's the result from research we conducted over the past several weeks. We looked at Fortune's 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog. The results show a miserable level of engagement."

Marketing Yourself with Webinars - Attorney Wells H. Anderson recommends presenting periodic webinars as an effective, direct and efficient technique to attract new clients and professionals who refer business to you.

The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service: An Enhanced Role For Libraries - Stuart Basefsky advocates broadening the concept of institutional repositories (IRs) to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and documents how they can then serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent - By Bruce Etling, John Kelly, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey - Internet & Democracy Case Study Series, June 2009. Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2009-06

Dear Sisters, Dear Daughters: Strategies for Success from Multicultural Women Attorneys - "This is a unique, inspirational collection of letters from 44 experienced women attorneys of color to the next generation outlining various roadmaps for success in the legal profession as a minority woman attorney. The book is organized by practice settings: (a) large and midsize firms; (b) solo and small firm practices; (c) public service, including government, nonprofits, executive roles in government and nonprofits, the judiciary, and elected officials; (d) in-house practices; and (e) academia. Following the essays in each chapter are tips for success from the authors featured in that chapter; these tips serve as a quick reference for you to refer to for inspiration. The essays end with a response from a sister/daughter from the next generation."

From Law Shucks, the Layoff Tracker: "Major law firms are turning out to be just as susceptible to general economic conditions as every other industry. Historically, layoffs by top-tier firms were kept quiet and were done on a one-off basis. We’re trying to shed a little light on the situation...As of May 9, 2009, over 11,584 people have been laid off by major law firms (4,671 lawyers / 6,913 staff) since January 1, 2008."

Law Firms Embrace Business School 101: "At a growing number of law firms, top attorneys are being trained like business people, using executive education courses designed to strengthen management and business skills. Some firms have been actively teaching lawyers business skills for the past half-decade. But this year's shrinking client lists -- and profits -- have encouraged more law firms to invest in management education."

A Current Glance at Women in the Law 2008 - Women in the Legal Profession, American Bar Association Market Research Department.

Lessons of The Am Law 100 - Last year was The Am Law 100's worst in 17 years--and the falloff in premium work is only partly to blame. The American Lawyer, By Aric Press and John O'Connor, May 01, 2009.

Proactive Leadership & The Role of Information: Identifying Strategic Networks of Information - Networking is supposed to be essential to successful leaders. But what is the importance of networking conceptually? People are only one form of this vital leadership resource. Stuart Basefksy explains how would one go about developing expanded networks of information and sources.

"According to Hildebrandt ... law firm merger activity significantly increased during the first quarter of 2009, with a total of 33 completed law firm mergers and acquisitions involving US law firms. This compares with 22 completed US mergers in the first quarter of 2008, and 23 in the first quarter of 2007. Six additional mergers announced during the first quarter are to be completed during the second quarter of 2009, for a total of 39 thus far in 2009. Lisa Smith, head of Hildebrandt's Law Firm Strategy and Merger Practice, said “As we predicted at the beginning of the year the pace of consolidation in the legal industry has accelerated. We continue to see high interest in mergers and acquisitions, particularly as firms complete their internal restructuring processes and turn to strategic positioning.”

News release: "In this difficult economy, lawyers can get help with their careers, their practices and their well-being with just a mouse click. The American Bar Association’s new Economic Recovery Resources Web Portal offers a wide range of assistance for coping with tough times including information on job searching, personal development and career transition, law practice management tips, handling stress, and more. The resources Web site at http://new.abanet.org/economicrecovery consists of six topic areas: job search and networking, career transition, practice management, professional development, stress management and savings."

Burney's Legal Tech Reviews: Verizon Wireless USB760 Modem and the Cradlepoint CTR500 Mobile Broadband Travel Router - For consistent, resilient mobile internet connectivity, Brett Burney recommends these three small, versatile products that are cost effective and reliable.

Post-Conference Workshop on Competitive Intelligence, April 2, 2009 - 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, & Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and beSpacific.com

The Layoff List - Employment shifts at The Am Law 200, Global 100, and Other Firms of Note - scroll down the page to see the regularly updated postings about layoffs [coverage is currently 2008-2009] of staff and attorneys.

"Here are preliminary, partial 2008 financial results for The Am Law 100, the highest-grossing firms in the United States. Gross revenue numbers are for legal work only and exclude disbursements. They are rounded to the nearest $500,000. Head counts are full-time equivalents, as of August 31, 2008. To be eligible for The Am Law 100, a firm must maintain a plurality of its lawyers in the U.S. Results will be updated here on a daily basis. Final rankings and full results for The Am Law 100 will be published in The American Lawyer's May issue and on AmericanLawyer.com. The Am Law Second Hundred will be published in June."

E-Discovery Update: Revisiting ESI Agreements and Court Orders - Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on the new requirement that litigants must meet early in a dispute to discuss the scope of discovery work to reach agreement on how best to proceed with the discovery of potentially relevant electronically stored information (“ESI”). What happens, though, when fundamental assumptions used to reach agreement at that early stage in the case turn out to be incorrect?

Six Questions and a Strategy for Campus-wide Information Competence. At Cornell University Library (CUL) a committee was established in 2005 to address the issue of information literacy at the university. The committee did extensive research on this topic and developed an approach for seeking solutions. Stuart Basefsky presents three exhibits to accomplish this objective.

"Hildebrandt and Citi Private Bank...present this 2009 Client Advisory highlighting the trends that we perceived in the legal market in 2008, as well as the trends that we believe will impact the market in 2009."

Ahead of the Curve: In 2009, Your Lawyers Are Your Best Knowledge Management Resource - Gretta Rusanow outlines her recommendations on why this year presents an excellent opportunity to work on those long-desired collections of models, best practice documents, sample clauses and know how files.

The Upside of the Downturn – Time to Work on Your Know How: Knowhow expert Gretta Rusanow highlights content as the focus for law firm knowledge management plans this year.

E-Discovery Update: Pushing Back Against Hardcopy ESI Productions - Conrad J. Jacoby addresses how critical technology issues related to document authenticity and document-associated metadata have left fewer lawyers willing to accept e-mail messages and other electronic documents in print format. He argues that litigants choosing to produce electronically stored information in hardcopy format should be prepared to provide more complete electronic copies of their production, even when it isn’t initially requested by opposing counsel.

Fulbright & Jaworski LLP 2008 Litigation Trends Survey, 253 pages, PDF, prepared by Greenwood Surveys, July 2008. [Note: there were 358 participants in this study: 251 in the U.S. and 100 in the UK]

Catalyst Group - Beyond Red and Blue: Insights into the Design of Presidential Candidate Websites, August 6, 2008 - "The results of our research indicated that aesthetics play an important role in users’ evaluation of a candidate’s site, but that ease-of-use may ultimately carry the day as the quality that people value most."

AmLaw Daily: "In the last two years or so, though, Web development and marketing professionals say law firms have gotten increasingly serious about the Web. Slowly, the gap in quality between Am Law 200 Web sites and those of Fortune 500 companies has narrowed, as more and more firms put in the investment and manpower to make their Web sites more than just regurgitations of what can be found in print."

Why and What Lawyers Should Consider Outsourcing: This article by Ron Friedmann reviews the history of and logic behind legal outsourcing. It then outlines some of the current legal outsourcing options. A detailed discussion of each option is not possible in one article. Instead, the final section takes a close look at one, outsourcing secretarial and word processing tasks.

Pew Internet and American Life Project - Podcast Downloading 2008, 8/28/2008, Mary Madden Sydney Jones

News release: "U.S. lawyers are free to outsource legal work, including to lawyers or nonlawyers outside the country, if they adhere to ethics rules requiring competence, supervision, protection of confidential information, reasonable fees and not assisting unauthorized practice of law.

Those are the conclusions of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, which describes outsourcing as a salutary trend in a global economy. Many lawyers do outsource work, using lawyers or nonlawyers as independent contractors, hiring them directly or through intermediaries and on temporary or ongoing bases, says the committee.

Outsourcing can reduce client costs and enable small firms to provide labor intensive services such as large, discovery intense litigation, even though the firms might not maintain sufficient ongoing staff to handle the work, according to a new ethics opinion issued today. Ethics Opinion 08-451 details ethics obligations of lawyers and firms that do elect to outsource legal work.

"The National Cancer Institute presents this 19th monograph in the Tobacco Control Monograph Series, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use. Monograph 19 provides a critical, scientific review and synthesis of the current evidence regarding the power of the media, both to encourage and to discourage tobacco use. It is the most current and comprehensive summary of the scientific literature on media communication in tobacco promotion and tobacco control. Research included in the review comes from the disciplines of marketing, psychology, communication, statistics, epidemiology, and public health. All are vital to understanding how exposure to the media influences tobacco use."

Technology Tools for Information Management - Roger V. Skalbeck and Barbara Fullerton's share a fast paced presentation of 19 practical, low cost and innovative tech tools they respectively use on a regular basis. So if you are looking for ideas to improve your use of Outlook, RSS, Adobe, and enhance your presentations and collaborative goals, this article is a must read.

Justia: Find Attorneys, Legal Aid and Legal Services - Arranged by practice areas, states and metro areas.

Law.com - Who Represents America's Biggest Companies 2008: Labor Pains

2008 Best Law Firms for Women Announced by Working Mother and Flex-Time Lawyers - FindLaw: "The legal profession is in a work/life crisis, with 78% of associates leaving law firms by their fifth year and nearly 50% of women lawyers leaving the profession at some point in their careers. The question is whether law firms will ever abandon their traditional practices to meet today's rising female workforce demands? They might have to, according to a special report in the August/September issue of Working Mother magazine. Produced in partnership with Flex-Time Lawyers, the report names the Best Law Firms for Women and examines the challenges and opportunities afforded to female lawyers."

Reference from Coast to Coast: Summer Musings - Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen provide a timely and valuable refresher on a range of well-sourced, reliable, topical websites, guides, print and program materials useful for summer associate legal research training.

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced the results of a study on food marketing to children and adolescents. The report, Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities, and Self-Regulation [see also Appendices A-F], finds that 44 major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion to promote their products to children under 12 and adolescents ages 12 to 17 in the United States in 2006. The report finds that the landscape of food advertising to youth is dominated by integrated advertising campaigns that combine traditional media, such as television, with previously unmeasured forms of marketing, such as packaging, in-store advertising, sweepstakes, and Internet. These campaigns often involve cross-promotion with a new movie or popular television program. Analyzing this data, the report calls for all food companies “to adopt and adhere to meaningful, nutrition-based standards for marketing their products to children under 12.”

76% See Business Benefits – May Influence Job Choice for 46% of Users: "Australian employers' approach to on-line social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may be influencing their efforts to recruit young workers, according to new research by law firm Deacons. In the Deacons’ Social Networking Survey 2008, almost half of those who used social networking sites at work said that if given a choice between two jobs equal in all other respects, they would choose an employer which allowed access to these sites over one which did not. The research found almost a third of 16-24 year olds and a quarter of 25-34 year olds who access the Internet from work use it at some time for on-line social networking activity. The results highlight the challenges organisations face when it comes to managing the impact of so-called Web 2.0 technologies, says Nick Abrahams, head of Deacons' Technology, Media and telecommunications law practice."

Workshop 8 – Monitoring & Current Awareness: Mining Blogs & RSS for Research, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM, Sunday April 6, 2008 - Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and Author, beSpacific.com.

"The new AIDS.gov home page provides easier access to site information and offers new features." Prominently displayed at the top right side of the page are links to: a well designed and organized Blog, Podcasts to which users may listen and for which transcripts are provided, RSS Feeds to the podcasts, resource announcements and alerts. Also included are AIDS/HIV related feeds from other e-gov sites. All around, this is a tremendous step forward in e-gov design, with improved site navigation, useful and accessible content and thoughtful implementation of current applications.

Brits vs. Americans: Who's Better Prepared to Weather a Recession? Richard Lloyd, The American Lawyer, March 24, 2008: "Traditionally, U.S. firms have benefited from the sheer size of the domestic U.S. economy, the American penchant for pursuing litigation at all costs and large bankruptcy proceedings that provided a seemingly endless gravy train for law firms. The U.K. firms, in contrast, do not see the same upside from countercyclical litigation work. There is simply not the same litigation climate in the United Kingdom, and litigators make up a far smaller proportion of most English firms. At New York's Cravath Swaine & Moore, around 50 percent of the firm's lawyers are in litigation, while at Herbert Smith -- arguably, London's premier brand in litigation -- around 35 percent of attorneys are litigators."

Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to launch Google For Non-Profits, a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization's mission in a smart, cost-efficient way. This site features ideas and tutorials for how you can use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more efficiently. And to get inspired, you'll also find examples of innovative ways other non-profits are using our products to further their causes."

Press release, December 10, 2007 - "The way communicators dispense information is out of sync with the way consumers use media, according to Media, Myths & Realities, a comprehensive survey of media usage among consumers and communications professionals conducted by global public relations firm Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions – ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation – and advice from an expert rates highest when making medical decisions and purchases based on a product’s environmental impact. Despite the strong evidence that friends, family and experts play a key role in influencing decisions, only 24 percent of communicators report having a word-of-mouth program in place."

Google Docs Blog: "It's been two months since we launched Google Presentations and already we've got new toys [Link to the presentation detailing the new features]...Embeddable Presentations, Importing slides from other presentations, Drag and drop image insertion, Rearranging slides, Changing the background, Prettier toolbar."

Am Law 200 Managing Partners Issue Fog Advisory for 2008, David Bario, The American Lawyer, 12-03-2007 [note: free registration required to read the links that follow): "Each fall, when this magazine surveys the leaders of The Am Law 200 about the state of their firms, the responses are awash in sunny optimism -- at least, they have been until now. This year, for the first time since we began polling them in 2003, a substantial number of firm leaders admit to being uneasy about the future. More than a quarter reported that they were uncertain about their firm's prospects next year, and a few said they felt downright pessimistic."

Press release: "The Commission has approved the issuance of a Federal Register notice announcing the start of its decennial review of the FTC’s Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, 16 CFR Part 435 (Mail Order Rule). As detailed in the notice, the Commission is seeking comment on whether to retain the Rule. To guide discussion of this issue, the Commission is seeking information on the Rule’s costs and benefits. Assuming, based on the public response to the notice, the Commission decides to retain the Rule, it also seeks to determine whether it should make three changes to the Rule in response to changes in technology and marketing practices that have occurred since the Rule was last updated in 1993."

Press release: "Working Mother magazine, the authoritative source for career mothers, and Flex-Time Lawyers LLC, a national consulting firm advising attorneys and legal employers on work-life balance and the retention and advancement of women, today announced the list of the 2007 Working Mother & Flex-Time Lawyers Best Law Firms for Women. The winning firms are notable for their work/life and women-friendly policies—including flex-time, child care and women-focused mentoring, leadership and networking programs—as they set new standards to retain and promote top female legal talent."

Electronic 2007 Law Librarian Survey from ALM Research - Survey Says Librarians Like Their Jobs but Are Displeased With Vendors - "Electronic research was supposed to replace books and lower costs, but it's done neither -- and librarians aren't happy about it."

THE CHARTS

Happy 4th. From Computerworld, this completely non-holiday related article - Law firm boosts cellular signal in new offices - New system enables employees to use cell phones in offices three floors underground - may be of interest, especially to colleagues here in Washington, D.C.

Brand Awareness and the Evaluation of Search Results, by Bernard J. Jansen (Pennsylvania State University), Mimi Zhang (Pennsylvania State University), Ying Zhang (Pennsylvania State University)

"In a custom report created for ClickZ News, Hitwise measured traffic market share of the candidate sites. The measurement firm found traffic to Democratic candidate sites was top heavy, favoring Clinton's, Obama's and Edwards's sites. HillaryClinton.com garnered nearly a third of visits among Democratic candidate sites in May. BarackObama.com attracted almost 28 percent, and JohnEdwards.com drew 23 percent of visitors to Dem campaign sites last month."

The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0, David C. Wyld, Associate Professor Southeastern Louisiana University (99 pages, PDF)

According to the National Law Journal, The 50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America.

Am Law 200: The Gap Widens - They compete in the same markets, but the Second Hundred and its bigger sibling, The Am Law 100, are growing apart, Jim Schroeder, The American Lawyer, June 1, 2007

American Library Association: "As part of its effort to support libraries and librarians seeking to improve their protection of library users’ privacy, ALA is making available new tools to help libraries conduct audits of its privacy policies and procedures. Developed by ALA during its own 2003 privacy audit, each tool is a document template that can be adopted and changed to serve the needs of the individual institution."

ALM: "How do companies select counsel in foreign countries? What tools and resources do companies use to select overseas counsel? What are the "must-have" qualities for overseas outside counsel? See ALM's new study, How U.S. Companies Select International Outside Counsel."

Harmony Helps: A Progress Report on State Government Internet Presence - March 2007 - "This brief explores how state web portals have matured and examines the impact of the 2003 expansion of the dot-gov domain to state and local governments; trends in state portal domain naming conventions; trends in Internet portal branding and marketing; the alignment of agency websites and state email addressing with the state portal; areas of cross-boundary collaboration for online services; and areas for future progress in cross-boundary collaboration for online services."

Table of Contents for LLRX.com - January 15, 2007 issue:

"Today OJR welcomes Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota and Laura Ruel of the University of North Carolina as contributing writers on the site. Each month, Nora and Laura will examine current research on news website user interfaces and storytelling techniques. Their articles will help news site producers and editors pick the best ways to package their information to increase their site's traffic and influence."

The December 2006 issue of ABA's Law Practice Magazine features a profile of Sabrina I. Pacifici, founder, editor, publisher of LLRX.com and author of beSpacific. After a decade of publishing the free webzine on law and technology resources, and with more than four years and 11,000 postings on beSpacific.com, I am delighted to continue my active participation in such a expert profession, both here and abroad, which values innovation, creativity, contribution and community. Thank you for all your support, and I look forward to publishing your articles in 2007.

The following articles are available in the December 2006 issue of LLRX.com:

Federal Trade Commission Public Hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade, November 6 - 8, 2006.

'NLJ 250' Shows Strong Law Firm Growth Continuing - "The top 250 law firms gained 4 percent more lawyers; partnership numbers grew by 5 percent," by Leigh Jones, The National Law Journal, November 13, 2006.

Chicago Tribune: Lawyers face right to blog - "Online journals that contain legal discussions and background information are challenging traditional practices on attorney advertising."

AmLaw Tech Survey: Law Firms Play Variations on Old Themes - "The 11th annual survey finds firms expanding IT while adopting new versions of old standards."

"The Chief Legal Officer Survey ...conducted by Altman Weil, Inc. and LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® reports a dramatic decrease in Chief Legal Officer (CLO) dissatisfaction with their outside counsel."

Press release, October 4, 2006: "As information security concerns among consumers and other customer constituencies rise, just 29 percent of marketers say that their firm has a crisis containment plan in case of a security breach, according to findings of a major research initiative by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. Without such a plan and other security strategies in place, companies are at risk of losing hundreds of million of dollars in market value and loss of reputation and brand trust, according to the study's findings."

From Primary Research Group (via Lawsites): "This study is based on a survey of 40 law firms with a mean size of 211 lawyers; data is broken out by size of law firm (by number of total lawyers) and by number of practice groups...In each firm a major marketing official answered questions regarding editorial staff, website development and marketing, use of blogs, listservs, eNewsletters and other cyberspace promotion and information vehicles. The report presents hard data on the use of search engine placement consultants, click through rates on eNewsletters, number of unique visitors to the firm website, and presents data on law firm spending plans for a broad range of Emarketing vehicles." [available in PDF and print, $$, Link to purchase info]

Press release: "According to "Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms," a report by The ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, women of color experience unique disadvantages based on race in addition to gender. White women experience such events based on gender alone, men of color experience such events based on race alone, and white men have virtually no first-hand or personal experience with discrimination."

Blawg: Marketing Your Practice with a Weblog, by Jim Calloway and Tom Mighell.

Press release: "JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, reveals that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006. According to a new report, Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement, currently 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs."

Virtual Reference in the Age of Pop-Up Blockers, Firewalls, and Service Pack 2, by Pascal Lupien.

From the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section of AALL, this Revised Marketing Toolkit (June 27, 2006), includes content in the following categories: Mission Statement, Competencies for Head Law Librarian, Commonly Asked Questions and Answers, Bibliography, and Statistics Handbook.

Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly, by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, June 15, 2006.

"The Competitive Intelligence Foundation's State of the Art: Competitive Intelligence Research Report ($) helps chart the progress of the competitive intelligence (CI) field. This report provides CI practitioners significant information on how competitive intelligence can support their organizational environment – information that can be used by all practitioners to improve their effectiveness."

The LA Times reported (reg. req'd) today that the controvery over the government propaganda campaign is also an issue for 77 news stations throughout the country, who have aired content that is now under investigation by the FCC.

AALL Speakers Directory and AALL Speakers Directory FAQ

Podcasting Legal Guide - Rules for the Revolution (38 pages, PDF), by Colette Vogel and Mia Garlick. Published under a Creative Commons license, with an accompanying wiki.

The Three Factors for a Successful Online Banking Site

"HealthNewsReview.org is a website dedicated to: improving the accuracy of news stories about medical treatments, tests and procedures ; helping consumers evaluate the evidence for and against new ideas in health care. We support and encourage the ABCs of health journalism: Accuracy, Balance, Completeness...HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about: specific treatments, procedures, investigational drugs or devices, vitamins or nutritional suppliments, diagnostic and screening tests."

New York Times, March 18, 2006: Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?

From Marcus P. Zillman, news of his latest Accessibility Resources White Paper Link Compilation.

Business Intelligence: Not Just for Bosses Anymore: "Business intelligence has long been about spitting out data—often irrelevant and outdated—to a few big bosses. But today's BI is both more meaningful and more egalitarian. And it requires ever tighter alignment between IT and the business."

The January 15, 2006 issue of LLRX.com includes the following articles:

I am delighted to announce the addition of three new columns on LLRX.com, authored by leading professionals from different spheres of our community.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki: "This is a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have business blogs, defined as: active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products." Currently there are 19 listings that include links to the respective blogs.

The Law Page is a new, centralized webpage from which readers may link to a range of information and commentary on law and business related issues that the Journal is aggregating from current content as well as additional sources. This includes news links from Mealey's.com, and a new column, The FLaw, on law firm management (note: most of this content is available by subscription only, but there are also links to WSJ free features). The cornerstone of the content is the new Law Blog.

In 2005, there was alot written about RSS, from the standpoint of marketing, enterprise-wide communications, current awareness monitoring, and as an app that perhaps could significantly diminish the use of email. Interesting, therefore, to note this article, It's time to bury RSS. Will 2006 be the year of aggregated feeds?

The Blogosphere Beckons: Should Your Company Jump In? Harvard Management Communication Letter, Vol. 2, No. 4, November 2005.

'NLJ 250' Shows Lawyer Ranks Growing Again - "Most firms are getting bigger, but it's harder to make equity partner." Lindsay Fortado, The National Law Journal.

Burson-Marsteller press release: "The results of the fifth annual 2005 PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey reveal that while blogs are increasingly making headlines, only seven percent of CEOs are actually blogging and many are skeptical about starting a blog themselves. Despite the low numbers, 59 percent of CEOs said blogs are useful for internal communications, and 47 percent said blogs are effective for external audiences."

IBM press release: "IBM today introduced a new software solution that enables businesses to make sense of the explosion of information from emerging social networks on the Web to deliver new insight into brand reputation and customer, competitor and public opinion about their company. The proliferation of blogs, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups and articles published daily on the Web has created a phenomenon where public opinion about an organization spreads worldwide, faster than ever before. These sources are filled with insight from consumers, experts and competitors that can be analyzed and used by businesses to make better decisions on products, services and business strategies. This creates a tremendous opportunity for organizations to carefully monitor their image and more quickly address business opportunities, threats, quality concerns or changing public perception."

'Blawg' use in law firms is on the rise

The newest additions to the Google product blogs, now numbering ten, are:

Forbes targets what is calls "attack bloggers" with a very broad brush, in a trio of articles as follows:

Wall Street Journal free feature - Jobs Blog: Sites That Post
Openings for Katrina Evacuees, include job opportunites in specific states and localities, in the food and hospitality sectors, and in real estate.

How to let customers know there's been a breach of their data and help them keep their faith in you, by Dr. Larry Ponemon.

From Inc.com, The Top 10 Things You Should Know Before You Blog offers practical and sound tips to assist small businesses in the effective and successful creation and maintenance of blogs to communicate with consumers.

Law Library Marketing Resources, by Cindy Carlson.

What is RSS and Why Should I Care?, presented by Marianne Lenox, Staff Training and Development Coordinator, Huntsville Madison County Public Library, July 2005. [Peter Scott]

Justia Offers Free Migration Solution for FindLaw's Law Firm Web Site Clients

Delivering Actionable Information To Front-Line Lawyers, by John Alber

WSJ Free Content today, Marketers Scan Blogs For Brand Insights

Recent suggested reading on enterprise blogs, and corporate blogs for public consumption:

Two postings, via Hot Links, that offer useful comments on best practices for PowerPoint presentations, as well as how and when to dispense with them in favor of simply talking directly to your audience:

"Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly." [Link]

Law Library Blogs and Blogs by Law Librarians or Law Library Associations - Compiled by Bonnie Shucha - Updated 6/2/05.

From Wall Street Journal free features, Blogging Becomes A Corporate Job provides a general overview of how several companies, including Microsoft and Stonefield Stonyfield Farm Inc., are diversifying their marketing and corporate communications with the addition of talented bloggers to their workforce.

Advertising Panel Lays Down Rules for Law Firm Ads on Web, by Charles Toutant, New Jersey Law Journal.

Computerworld reports on how a North Carolina hospital system has launched blogs authored by patients that communicate their experiences with specific medical procedures and treatment regimes.

The Wise Use of 'Intelligence', Leigh Jones, The National Law Journal, 04-12-2005.

"This page features links to World Wide Web sites, PowerPoint slideshows, and other electronic resources used in support of presentations at Computers in Libraries 2005. Links are provided at the discretion of presenters. Additional links will be provided as they become available."

Press release: "A newly published white paper on blogs from Edelman, the world's largest independent public relations firm, and Intelliseek, a marketing intelligence firm and provider of one of the Internet's leading blog portals, explores the importance of the blogging phenomenon for public relations and marketers and provides a first-of-its-kind directory of influential bloggers, segmented by industry."

Look Who's Blogging - How five executives got blog religion and are using it to their professional and personal advantage.

From NeOn, An open conversation with Michael Wiley, Director New Media, GM Communications about: "GM FastLane Blog, GM's experiments with podcasting and GM's plans for further developments with communication channels like blogs, podcasting and RSS."

Press release: U.S. Corporations Misuse or Underuse Competitive Intelligence, Outward Insights Survey Shows: "A majority of U.S. based companies that claim to use competitive intelligence (CI) to guide their decision-making processes either don't use intelligence enough or use it the wrong way. This excludes nearly 30% of companies that don't even have, or don't feel the need for, a CI system, despite today's ultra-competitive environment." [thanks Claudia]

Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations: New Chapter from Beautiful Evidence. Below is an excerpt from the forthcoming book by Edward Tufte.

Delivering the News with Blogs: The Georgia State University Library Experience (31 pages, PDF)

Fortune.com has an extensive article on the slippery slope effect of relying on the "viral" linking aspect of blogs to promote products, as well as highlighting recent examples of the enormous impact of bloggers' responses to instances of what they perceive as corporate misdeeds and the marketing of faulty products.

Tim Stanley, the co-founder of FindLaw and its former CTO after the site's purchase by Thomson West, has launched the beta version of an incredible new service to the legal community, Justia: Law Firm Web Site Design. With a range of features and price points (from free to a choice of very competitve pricing options) not currently available in the market, Tim and his expert team have set a new standard of website design in combination with search engine optimization targeted to serve the entire community, from solos to large firms.

"Build a FREE Law Firm Web site In a Few Easy Steps! All Web sites include:
Template Web Design, Search engine optimized pages, Firm Home Page, Firm Profile Page, Firm Location Page, Practice Area Profiles, Attorney Profiles, Web Resources Page, Legal Articles Section W3C Web standards design & layout U.S. 508 and W3C's Web Accessibility Guidelines."

Global Concerns: An In-Depth Examination of Travel Web Sites Selling International Airline Tickets

In his September 27 posting on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Scott Gatz from the My Yahoo! Team details the new RSS features incorporated in the redesigned My Yahoo! beta release.

The ABCs of Intranet Learning

Blogs: The Marketing Killer. This article reviews how major corporates are leveraging blogs and RSS feeds for marketing, collaboration and current awareness monitoring.

The President and COO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathon Schwartz, launched a blog on June 28. Other Sun bloggers comment on his effort: What's missing from Sun blogs (or, is Executive Blogging enough)? and Sun has gone Cluetrain.

Company Plugs RSS as Alternate to E-Mail Marketing

In the July 2004 issue of the ABA Journal (pages 34-35, text not currently available free online), see the article, The New Librarian, focusing on the topic of hourly rates for billable time, which according to a recent informal survey on the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section Listserv, range from $80 to $200 for "in-depth research."

The 2004 Online Customer Respect Study of the Top 100 U. S. Companies ($$) evaluates "corporate performance from an online customer's perspective," according to the aggregate ratings for the following criteria: ease of navigation, quick and thorough responses to inquiries, respecting customer privacy, open and honest policies, values and respecting customer data. The top five companies are: Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Bank of America, and Medco Health Solutions.

From the LA Times (reg. req'd), PeopleSoft Lawyer's Weblog Is Fresh Twist in Spin Wars.

New on LLRX.com for June 21, 2004:

PR bloggers push forth the medium

The June 2004 issue of The American Lawyer includes an AmLaw Tech Library Survey: Books, Bytes and Budgets. Subtitled, "Caught between paper and PCs, librarians struggle to speed services and corral costs."

From Micah U. Buchdahl, Internet Marketing Attorney (IMA), the following links:

Via Law.com, news that Hildebrandt International announced a joint venture to provide outsourced "professional support services" to American law firms.

2004 TechnoLawyer @ Awards: The Legal Profession's Version of the Oscars.

10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis, by Nick Wreden. This article offers concise insights that can easily be implemented in leveraging blogs for marketing. In addition, there is a link to an excellent presentation (pdf, 52 pages), Making sense of weblogs in the intranet, which provides numerous screen shots of KM applications at Lucent.

Online Presence: Considering Blogs Instead of Web Sites

From The Legal Intelligencer, Going the Way of the Market:

Newer Versions of Firm Web Sites Boldly Go Where Few Lawyers Have Gone Before.

The Third Annual Report on The Home Pages of the UK's Top 100 Companies' Corporate Web Sites ($$) [Link]:

The National Law Journal's 26th annual survey of the nation's largest law firms, covering the period Oct. 1, 2002, to Sept. 30, 2003.

From BusinessWeek.com: The Web Smart 50: Areas evaluated include collaboration, customer service, customization, streamlining, management and cutting edge applications.

From Denise Howell's blog, What Has Your Blawg Done For You, Your Clients, Your Profession, Lately? Issues addressed include:

Why and How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Library's Services, by Darlene Fichter:

New on LLRX.com this week:

From Law.com:

The following new articles were published this week on LLRX.com:

From the American Lawyer today, the 2003 Associates Survey.

Law Office Computing magazine announced the winners of the competition for the best websites, large and small firms. Thanks to Amy Campbell, I Want My BlogTV, for posting the information, which is as follows:

Vault Survey of Top 100 Law Firms, compiled from surveys returned by 11,908 associates from more than 100 top firms. See also the survey Rankings Methodology. "An extended PDF excerpt and table of contents" is available for download here.

The American Lawyer has published a new survey, the A-List, which ranks the top 200 law firms according to the following methodology: revenue, pro bono, associate satisfaction, and diversity of the lawyers.

The winners of the FindLaw Web Site Awards for 2003 were announced August 14. In the large firm category, the winner is Allens Arthur Robinson; in the mid-size firm category, Swaab Attorneys is the winner; and Immigration Solutions is the winner in the small firm category.

From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center:

The Corporate Blog Is Catching On: "Alan M. Meckler, the head of Jupitermedia, keeps a Weblog, an online journal of his thoughts. He says he didn't notify the company's lawyers."

Intro to Weblogs for Law Firm Marketing - This important new web publishing tool can help legal services marketers reach niche audiences: by Amy Campbell, whose review includes mentions of SCOTUSBlog, HIPAA Blog, and this blog, about which she states:

In response to the SEC's June 4 indictment on securities fraud, Martha Stewart purchased full-page ads in today's major newspapers declaring her innocence, and launched a new website, which currently includes a letter/appeal from her, and a statement from her attorneys. Apparently, more information about what promises to be a high-profile case will be added to site in the future. Update on Martha's page: According to the June 6 USA Today, Martha's website "received 1.7 million hits in the first 17 hours." On June 10, the following information was added to the site: Setting the Record Straight.
See also:

Andrew Zangrilli's new article in Modern Practice predicts the following trends for 2003 in law firm technology development: "1) more features and functionality added to existing technology; 2) unifying and consolidating disparate systems; and 3) more legal self-service applications."

Firms Take Hard Line on Law Directories spotlights the growing competition among global legal publishers for a share of the lucrative legal directory marketplace, as well as highlights other online marketing and branding strategies available to high-profile firms.

From the ABA's Market Research Department, news that the 2003 ABA National Lawyer Population Survey is available here. In addition to this data, the site provides access to other ABA research and statistics about the profession (demographics, women in law, salaries, quality of life, law firm rankings, corporate counsel, etc.) as well as links to related information from other professional associations, legal publishers and consultants.

Business lawyer Bruce MacEwen's article, Planning a Web Site With Some Punch, reviews the best practices that now comprise standard content areas on most law firm websites.

Lawyers Use Metatags to Help Their Web Sites Pop Up on Internet Searches.

American Lawyer Media, Inc. (ALM) announced the launch, in April, of a new quarterly magazine, Law Firm Inc.(TM), "designed to provide law firms with information and practical advice on a wide variety of business, operations and management issues."

There has been an increased focus on e-lawyering lately, although the provision of free and fee-based services online has been underway for years. Two recent resources from the ABA on how lawyers are using email and the Web to market and deliver services to clients are: Some Call It eLawyering: Is It a Brave New World or an Ethical Quagmire? and the eLawyering Site, a web-based discussion group.

Micah U. Buchdahl of HTMLawyers, Inc. has published his IMA (Internet Marketing Attorney) web site reviews and awards. Well worth a read, Micah has spent considerable time evaluating the sites of the 250 largest law firms in the United States, and ranking them according to his determination of their merits in the following categories: design, content, usability, interactivity, intangibles. He uses an easy to read chart format, with a rating system (1-10, with 10 being the best) that results in a total score listed at the far right hand side of each entry.

American Lawyer Media, Inc. launched a new service, Legal Market Information Source, providing "clients, law firms and companies marketing to the legal industry with trend data, reports, rankings and custom research on major U.S. and global law firms...Initial LMIS product offerings will cover four areas: law firm reports; legal industry briefs; industry ranking tables and custom research reports."

The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against the Educational Research Center of America, Inc. stating the company had "collected personal information from high school and middle and junior high school students through surveys," and used this data "to create lists of students that it sells to commercial entities for use in marketing." A copy of the settlement agreement reached in this matter is here, and a newly released FTC consumer alert for teachers and school administrators, titled "Student Surveys - Ask Yourself Some Questions," is available here.

The big-six music retailers, organized under the name Echo, have launched a new consortium to license and distribute digital music services.

A series of three articles on leveraging web sites and related applications such as e-mail newsletters for law firm marketing is available via law.com: Web Sites Can Net Attorneys More Clients, Firm Sites Must Click, and More Marketing Tools: It Ain't Just the Web Site.