Thomson Reuters announced today it has launched a dynamic interactive online tool offering comprehensive coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011-12 term. Case by Case: The U.S. Supreme Court, accessed at www.reuters.com/supreme-court/2011-2012, combines original reporting from Thomson Reuters News & Insights (www.newsandinsight.com) with links to an extensive collection of analysis and legal materials, including motions, briefs and opinions, all sourced from Westlaw, the leader in legal research.
Additional features include:
- Multiple ways to dig into the Court’s full calendar, including an interactive timeline, sortable lists and case name searches
- A color-coded index that organizes the cases by practice area, making it easier to search and sort
- Brief profiles of lead attorneys are included with each case summary, along with helpful background information on the lead attorney’s firm or agency
- An at-a-glance display of when cases are being argued and if they’ve been decided
- A “How They Decided” button that highlights how the justices voted
Posted by Jeff McCoy in:
Education | In the News |
No Comments |
The National Federation of Paralegal Associations (NFPA) announced the 2011 Thomson Reuters Scholarship winners at their annual convention, held recently in Minneapolis.
Mary K. Hanson from Sacramento, CA, who is a paralegal student at Heald College, received highest honors and the $3000 scholarship. Her scholarship described her path to the paralegal program from the foreclosure of her house due to a mortgage scam and her determination to legally fight.
Austin Brian Preendergast from Middletown, RI, who is attending Roger Williams University, received the second place $2000 scholarship. His essay described his exit from the banking industry in the downturn, leading him to follow his dream of working in the legal profession and pursuing his paralegal education.
The applicants were judged by representatives of NFPA Advisory Board based on their academic records, extra-curricular activities and recommendations from professors and/or work supervisors, and their personal essay in which they revealed how their paralegal education will provide them with an advantage in securing employment in the legal profession.
Scott Freedman of Thomson Reuters (center) presented Mary and Austin with their scholarships.
Congratulations to Mary and Austin!
Posted by Jessica Leibrock in:
Education |
No Comments |
Saving time and saving money are two things that most IP professionals would readily agree are important.
To that end, Thomson CompuMark and Thomson IP Management Services are teaming up to offer a webinar to help you develop strategies for successfully integrating the management of trademarks and patents into your workflow.
In the webinar, leading experts will share information about customizable trademark solutions that work the way you need them to, fast and efficiently.
The webinar will cover techniques that streamline every phase of the watch process from how you order watches, to how you can update your portfolio and analyze results. We’ll also discuss how you use online solutions to manage your watches, and several methods and services that will help make sure you’re always compliant and that you have the flexibility to best manage your budget.
Learn more and register for the webinar here.
Posted by Erin Capellman in:
In Practice | Intellectual Property |
No Comments |
The constantly changing and evolving nature of the Internet and social media presents unique challenges to those managing trademarks and brands online. There isn’t always a clear answer when it comes to things like how best to protect your brand’s reputation online, how to interpret new policies and procedures of ICANN, and how to decide which social networks to monitor for trademark infringement, just to name a few of the issues.
Thomson CompuMark has created a new LinkedIn Group to provide a forum for trademark professionals, brand owners, and others from around the globe to exchange ideas and opinions, and share news and information, to gain a better understanding of the issues and challenges faced, and ultimately to help you successfully manage your brand online.
Visit the Thomson CompuMark LinkedIn group to join the conversation today.
Posted by Erin Capellman in:
In Practice | Intellectual Property |
No Comments |
An excellent resource for large law firm practitioners, the Practice Innovations Newsletter has just published the October edition.
The feature article highlights a case study on the role of the Alternative Fee Manager, discussing existing and emerging roles for the AFA Manager and how AFAs aid in fee conversations with clients.
Also in this issue is information on how women today are influencing leadership values, and an article on how to improve associate morale through career coaching.
This great resource is available four times a year. Subscribe to the Practice Innovations Newsletter to receive an email when each new edition is posted.
Posted by Anne Ellis in:
In Practice | Practice tips | Technology and innovation |
No Comments |
One of our most distinguished authors passed away recently. Harold S. “Hal” Bloomenthal, scholar, practitioner, and author, was considered a dean of West’s Securities Law Library.
Having practiced in the areas of corporate and securities law since 1955, Hal’s titles included: Securities Law Handbook, Emerging Trends in Securities Law, Securities and Federal Corporate Law 2d, International Capital Markets and Securities Regulation, Going Public Handbook, Sarbanes-Oxley Act in Perspective, and Securities and Federal Corporate Law Report.
Hal Bloomenthal
Hal’s accomplishments as an author span more than 40 years and include law review articles and treatises on securities law, administrative law, and natural resources law. At a time well past when most people would have been happy to retire to a life of quiet enjoyment, Hal still possessed a strong desire to remain active in the field, continuing to learn and to share his knowledge and experience into his 90th year. That desire, and the insightful analysis he brought to his writing, will continue on through the efforts of Sam Wolff, Hal’s co-author, friend, and colleague of over 20 years. Mr. Wolff will carry on Hal’s legacy in the Securities Law library titles.
Hal had a long, varied and distinguished career in law. After graduating with a B.S. degree from Marshall University, Hal served in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II. Following his military service, Hal received a J.D. degree from Duke Law School and a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School. He commenced his law career as an enforcement attorney in the Denver Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hal most recently served as counsel to the Denver firm of Holme Roberts & Owen, L.L.P. and as Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Denver College of Law. He also taught securities law as a member of the faculty at the Wyoming College of Law and Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College, and as a visiting professor at Duke Law School, Colorado University, the University of Arizona, and The Hastings College of the Law.
Hal will be remembered fondly by his family and countless students, colleagues, and friends. Many lives touched, and a life well lived.
Posted by Jessica Leibrock in:
Education |
No Comments |
The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference continues to amaze and inspire me. Last week’s meeting in Nashville proved to be the best of the five ILTA conferences that I’ve attended.
ILTA is a peer networking organization for legal technology professionals. Members include IT managers and directors, database administrators, practice automation specialists, training professionals, network administrators, CIOs, CTOs, and a wide range of other legal technology experts. These individuals assemble annually to share their experiences, insights and innovations through roughly 200 top-quality educational sessions over four days each August.
ILTA coordinates member connections among both functional and regional groupings. Functional groups are called “peer groups,” offering networking and information sharing among individuals interested in Knowledge Management, Desktop and Application Services, Risk and Records Management, User Support Services, and eight other practical member alignments. Regional groupings organize around geographic centers – promoting professional networking across peer groups within most major cities in the United States, and expanding aggressively around the globe. The annual conference supports the peer and regional group connections, encouraging members to network and share both within and beyond these circles of interest.
Serving as the “Practice of Law” liaison with ILTA for Thomson Reuters, I had the privilege and pleasure to participate, on a relatively limited scale, in the preparation and programming for this conference. Working closely with one of the many outstanding ILTA volunteers, Julia Forbes (manager of Training and Application Services for Boston-based Brown Rudnick, LLP) and I defined and proposed ten session concepts. These proposals were reviewed by an ILTA committee, and three of our ten sessions were selected for this year’s annual conference.
I was struck by the thorough and purposeful process of shaping these sessions. ILTA is extremely selective as it evaluates session proposals. They scrutinize the form and substance of each session, considering the needs and benefits for their members, ultimately distinguishing the most appropriate topics, and then positioning them for relevant ILTA peer groups.
Throughout the process of preparation and presentation of these sessions, I was amazed by the commitment, focus and efficiency that Julia Forbes and the other ILTA volunteers demonstrated. Their determination and devotion produce the quality programming that is essential to this conference. I applaud their efforts, along with the stellar leadership that drives this remarkable organization and this outstanding conference.
Posted by Lance Odegard in:
In Practice | Practice trends |
No Comments |
The ILTA 2011 Conference finished with the annual ILTA Awards Dinner at the Gaylord Opryland. While we were sorry to see the conference come to an end, the evening and conference were capped off with Hubbard One receiving the “Vendor Implementation of the Year” award.
The award, which recognizes outstanding achievement by a vendor organization that has celebrated a highly successful technology implementation for a client in 2010, went to Hubbard One in recognition of the implementation of InGeer, an innovative SharePoint project for Australian law firm, Herbert Geer.
Herbert Geer – with offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane – wanted to find a better way to access, manage, and leverage the firm’s arsenal of information to drive better business decisions and shape the client experience. The firm engaged Hubbard One to build InGeer, an intranet that brings together information from across the firm into a single portal to facilitate more efficient and effective decision making, and also shape the client experience.
Hubbard One successfully implemented a comprehensive financial reporting and matter planning portal built on XMLAW SharePoint technology that serves the entire legal community of Herbert Geer. The portal provides the firm’s lawyers with the ability to access detailed client and matter information and provides a holistic view of client activity in real-time.
We’re delighted that InGeer has been recognized at the ILTA awards – this was a fantastic project to get involved in and we enjoyed working with the team at Herbert Geer on every stage of the process.
Our thanks to ILTA for the award, and for hosting another outstanding annual conference. We’re already looking forward to ILTA 2012!
Mark Schiff is president, Hubbard One
Posted by Mark Schiff in:
Technology and innovation |
No Comments |
Three firm representatives discussed coaching programs and their experiences implementing these programs: Sharon Ford of Sidley Austin LLP, Jan Huber of Baker & Daniels, and Julia Montgomery of Arent Fox LLP.
The speakers differentiated coaching from training. Training was described as a traditional classroom or virtual classroom environment with one teacher and more than one student. Coaching is a one- on-one experience that is customized for the pupil. While many firms have training programs in their firms, fewer have coaching programs.
The three offer tips on setting up successful technology coaching programs. Handouts are available on the ILTA website.
One example cited involved the rollout of Office 2007. Initial traditional training was well attended but the attorneys did not retain the content of that single session. Since training for attorneys is not mandated in most cases as it is for staff, they do not have to attend the group trainings. Attorneys may be embarrassed about their lack of technology expertise, leading to their reluctance to attend group training. The panelists felt – both from their own observations and requests from some attorneys –that attorneys often need additional customized one-on-one training. Attorneys felt they were the weak links in creating Office documents, causing additional work for others in their team to fix mistakes. Current trends in firm hiring include less administrative staff, requiring attorneys to create more of their documents themselves. And alternative fee arrangements increase the attorneys’ desire to increase their efficiency. One-on-one coaching allows the attorney to learn these skills without feeling pressure from others observing them.
Panelists shared several tips that helped turn their coaching experiments into permanent programs. Pre-coaching meetings with attorneys allowed trainers to see what products the attorneys used and how they used them. Follow up meetings with the attorneys’ secretaries gave additional insight and gained the secretaries’ acceptance in the process. It is important to coordinate with the attorney’s secretary and the help desk to ensure all parties have a consistent strategy and message. The coaches had the goal of providing customized training but had to balance that with specific core competencies that needed to be emphasized to every attorney. The Help Desk call logs were analyzed to discover which of the attorneys’ skills were commonly underdeveloped, and these were the focus of the core curriculum. Proper preparation of a core curriculum, and customizing it for each attorney allowed both goals to be achieved. Training documentation was posted privately to attorneys, so they did not feel put on display. Coaches always asked attorneys for permission when they wanted to publicize attorney success stories.
Another key to success that all speakers agreed upon was word of mouth promotion by the initial group of attorneys trained. It was emphasized to them that they were getting special coaching that was specifically designed for them.
It looks as if personal coaching of attorneys has a place in the overall training plans of law firms. We will have to wait and see whether this trend continues and becomes more popular in other firms.
Josh Wolf is a technology manager with Thomson Reuters
Posted by Josh Wolf in:
Technology and innovation |
No Comments |
I was pleased to see a mixture of Elite Enterprise IT and Finance staff attending my session at ILTA 2011: Maintaining a Healthy Elite System. Almost everyone takes away a nugget of information to explore further, either gained directly from the presentation or from group discussion. IT staff, whether new to managing Enterprise systems or veteran administrators, often find it useful to review tips for troubleshooting and keeping their systems running smoothly. Finance staff usually leave the session with increased comfort that their systems largely take care of themselves with scheduled maintenance jobs that run automatically, and also with an appreciation for the manual technical tasks that they may not have known their IT staff performed. I believe the nuggets discovered this year included PAL, SQL Nexus, and check_schema.ksh.
PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) and SQL Nexus, both free downloads from codelplex.com, are two open source utilities that help system administrators run quick performance bottleneck analyses. Tuned for specific server roles and hardware configurations, both utilities quickly process large volumes of historic performance data and show the results in easily readable reports—a nice alternative to importing the raw data into Excel and defining formulas and graphs to search for problem trends. Further, these tools provide a straightforward way to identify a qualitative performance baseline against which to compare future performance.
Soon after the conference, Elite will post check_schema.ksh on its knowledge base. Producing a report that can be used to identify missing standard objects, like indexes and columns, this Korn shell script compares the schema of your actual Enterprise database against the standard schema that the source code for your Enterprise version defines. Reestablishing missing indexes or columns will help avoid performance problems or application errors that may result from the missing objects.
For the most part, maintaining a healthy Elite Enterprise system is a hands-off activity. However when problems do arise, having knowledge of the system infrastructure and a few powerful but uncomplicated tools in your arsenal will reduce the stress and time needed to resolve them.
Bruce Rosen is a team lead technical consultant with Elite
Posted by Bruce Rosen in:
Technology and innovation |
No Comments |
The U.S. Constitution is one of the most powerful and impactful documents in existence. It literally touches every American’s life, and has since its creation in 1787. Recently, I had the opportunity to view the document first-hand as part of a new exhibit, “We the People: The First Official Printing of the U.S. Constitution,” sponsored [...]
Earlier this week, we released our 2011 Annual Report in an interactive format available online at thomsonreuters.com. Along with information on the company’s financial performance as well as business unit overviews, this year’s annual report contains a variety of dynamic content including interviews with our new business leaders as well as stories of how we [...]
We’ve got a great episode for you this month, kicking off with our “Chaos in the Courts” segment that, believe it or not, is yet another story about the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas. Since our March podcast, another person has fallen victim to the establishment’s trademark bypass burger.
Then in our “On the Blawgs” [...]
