Law Library Management, Incorporated

LLM @ ALA

Ray and Marge will be exhibiting at the ALA Region I & II conference in Savannah next week.  If you are attending, make sure to stop by and say hello .

Marge Jassin Quoted in LIBN

Take a look at this article from the Long Island Business News entitled, “Out-of-work lawyers try to be paralegals, secretaries.”

Marge is quoted as saying:

“It is totally inappropriate to have an attorney in a library,” because most attorneys do not have the necessary library science skills and degree to work in a law library, said Marjorie Jassin, vice president of Law Library Management, in Huntington, which helps firms manage their own law libraries. “But they are applying for anything law-related. They are looking for work. They have student loans to pay.”

Way to go Marge!

Your Pipe To Legal News

As law librarians, it is no secret that we have to market ourselves all of the time.  It is my opinion that we have to prove, everyday, that our jobs are worth keeping (especially in this economic climate). 

One of the easiest ways to do this, especially for legal researchers, is to follow up with attorneys after the initial work is completed.  Not a day goes by that I don’t e-mail an attorney with a news item referring to an issue that I had previously worked on.  Attorneys appreciate this follow up and, in turn, provide me with more work, which, in turn, continues to justify my existence at the firm. 

One of the methods that I use to keep up is via my RSS Reader (I use Google Reader - which makes it very easy to e-mail articles, blog posts, etc).  I read many legal blogs, especially those that are pertinant to the practices of the firms that I service.  What I found is that these blogs usually link to court cases or news about court cases and new filings, and they were usually from the major national papers.  So, I had an idea.  Why not create one place for all of the legal news coming out of the legal world as well as court decisions?

Enter Rockin’ The Courts

Made using Yahoo Pipes, this tool is a “mashup” of  many feeds into one.  The major pieces include a Google news search from the major newspapers.  For those that are curious, here is the search string I used:

site:latimes.com intitle:court OR intitle:judge OR intitle:jury OR intitle:attorney OR intitle:lawyer OR “Supreme Court” OR “Federal Court” OR “State Court” OR “appeals Court” OR “Court of Appeals” OR “superior Court”

Of course, the domain in the first line changes, depending on the newspaper.  In addition to newspapers, I have also included one blog (for now) which covers the Supreme Court better than any outlet (The SCOTUS Blog).

I have also started to include opinions from the Supreme Court and various United States Court of Appeals.  Some have RSS feeds, which makes it easy.  For those that don’t, I used Page2RSS to create a feed.  There are also some state court opinions, but not nearly as much as I would like and intend to add more.

You will sometimes see duplicate stories.  This happens because many of the major newspapers carry AP stories and I have yet to figure out how to “unduplicate” them.

So, feel free to bookmark the Rockin’ The Courts link, make it your homepage, or grab the feed. 

And, of course, please let me know via e-mail (steven @ lawlib.com) or place a comment below if you have any questions.  I will be adding resources as this project develops.

Steven M. Cohen