Author: Stosh Jonjak

  • Tracking Legislation: GovTrack.us & LegiScan

    Tracking Legislation: GovTrack.us & LegiScan

    As legal information professionals, I am sure you have received requests to track proposed legislation. Changes in statutory law are obviously fundamentally important to the practice of law. The potential for legislative change creates an information need requiring a method of monitoring the status of proposed legislation as it bounces around the legislature. Thankfully, monitoring proposed laws/bills can be done…

  • Quickly Check the Availability of State Court Electronic Docket and Document Access With CourtReference.com

    Quickly Check the Availability of State Court Electronic Docket and Document Access With CourtReference.com

    Though I have detailed its flaws, PACER’s existence as the centralized interface containing electronic access to Federal court dockets and documents makes our jobs as law librarians much easier. State courts, on the other hand, are the wild west of electronic docket and document access.

  • Ravel Law: Visualizing Legal Research

    Ravel Law: Visualizing Legal Research

    Ravel Law incorporates the age-old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” into legal research. Visualization is fundamentally incorporated into Ravel Law’s software design. When users conduct a search on a legal topic, or a prior case, Ravel delivers an interactive graphic displaying cases associated with this topic or prior case; the cases that…

  • Inforuptcy: Enhanced & Cost Effective Bankruptcy Docket & Document Retrieval

    Inforuptcy: Enhanced & Cost Effective Bankruptcy Docket & Document Retrieval

    Interfacing with PACER is just a fact of life, especially for those of you working in Bankruptcy practice groups. Our country’s Bankruptcy courts, of course, are electronically accessible via PACER, and feature cases with massive dockets comprised of thousands of filed documents; many trees are destroyed during bankruptcy proceedings. So, the ability to locally store dockets…

  • PacerPro Unveils DocketShare

    PacerPro Unveils DocketShare

    I have been lucky enough to give a few presentations that usually require a brief explanation of cloud computing. I am intrigued by the concept, of course, but am always terrified I am going to lose the interest of my audience as I ramble on about private clouds, software as a service, security concerns, and…

  • Searching Social Media | Part 2: Twitter

    This series focuses on methods of improving the relevancy of your results of social media searches, while not being logged into the services themselves. Again, social media searching is clearly trending upward in the law librarianship profession, as attorneys are increasingly making these requests while conducting informal discovery. In Part 1 of “Searching Social Media” we…

  • Searching Social Media | Part 1: Googling Facebook

    Searching Social Media | Part 1: Googling Facebook

    Have you experienced an increase in social media search requests? As attorneys become more likely to turn to social media during their informal discovery processes, I have found an uptick in questions like: “could you please do a social media background check on this person?” This is a growing information need I believe law librarians are excellently suited to fill,…

  • Thursday’s Musing: Troubleshooting Software and Troubleshooting Attorneys

    Thursday’s Musing: Troubleshooting Software and Troubleshooting Attorneys

    (photo (c) 2009 Kordite, available here)   In the last few years, have you found yourself answering more software troubleshooting-oriented questions? “How do I restrict my search results in this interface?” “Why does this program make my system crash?” “Why doesn’t this software do this?” “Where can I find this specific information using this software?” “What…

  • Thursday’s Musing: The Value of Perception, the Librarian and the Library Space

    (photo (c) 2009 Dorli Photography, available here)   As collections are becoming more electronic, the value of the library space is becoming increasingly questioned. A trend among articles written by non-librarians is to link the edifice with the profession: the librarian works in a library, technology is making libraries obsolete, therefore librarians will also become…

  • The Empirical Value of Special Librarians: An Australia ROI Study

    The Empirical Value of Special Librarians: An Australia ROI Study

    One of the biggest difficulties with the law librarian profession—and really, this is true of any profession with a strong customer service and/or pedagogical component—is gauging the empirical value of what law librarians do. There is not a one-step, direct, easily definable correlation between a law librarian task, and how much revenue that task generates…