Patrick J. McKenna is an internationally recognized author, lecturer, strategist and seasoned advisor to the leaders of premier law firms. McKenna’s deep dive into law firm strategic planning delivers a detailed guide on the major errors to circumvent to establish a winning competitive position going forward.
Nicole L. Black’s actionable checklist begins with an end of year review of your law firm’s achievements and challenges to determine issues and new requirements moving forward. The review will include conducting an audit of your workflow and technology to identify process gaps and ensure efficiency and profitability in the new year. When the audit is completed, identify and implement technologies and service providers that will bridge the gaps identified and establish the foundation for success.
Data mining and knowledge discovery is a quickly evolving field that is part of the portfolio of CI, BI and KM professionals, law librarians, research analysts, infopros, data scientists, data journalists and students in college and graduate programs. This expansive bibliography by Marcus P. Zillman comprises a wealth of information, resources, tools, techniques and applications, as well as links to many open datasets. The subject matter includes data mining, data scrapping, data aggregation, big data and big analytics. The resources include: ebooks and glossaries, research papers, video tutorials and online training, APIs, open source web data extraction tools, datasets, bibliographies, case studies, scientific and academic papers and substantive articles, as well as training and certifications on data mining, and open source code.
Librarian and tech expert Karen Coyle provides insight into the evolving conflict that caused OCLC to file suit against the company Clarivate which owns Proquest and ExLibris. The suit focuses on a metadata service proposed by Ex Libris called “MetaDoor.” MetaDoor isn’t a bibliographic database à la WorldCat, it is a peer-to-peer service that allows its users to find quality records in the catalog systems of other libraries.
Ed Summers, librarian, metadata expert, teacher, and computational expert, delivers an insighful lesson on the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. PURLs were developed to make URLs more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL it pointed to needed to change you changed the redirect on the PURL server, and all the places that pointed to the PURL didn’t need to change. It was a beautifully simple idea, and has influenced other approaches like DOI and Handle. But this simplicity depends on a commitment to keeping the PURL up to date.
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: An introduction to U.S. data compliance laws; Companies ditching VPNs for zero trust architectures to secure hybrid workplaces; Research finds US adults have context-specific views on biometric technology use; Apple iOS privacy settings to change now; and Mozilla has released a new platform for privacy-focused email communications.
Lisa M. (Bradford) Mayo, Director of Data and Analytics at Ballard Spahr LLP identifies how and why data and analytics are on the forefront of much of the firm’s modern technology offerings. Unlike many firms, Ballard’s data and analytics function sits inside their Client Value and Innovation department, where they have some latitude with a research and development budget and the directive to “fail fast” if they determine a proof-of-concept did not meet our needs. The firm’s data management mission statement says in part that we “contribute to the firm’s strategic goals by using innovative technologies, a variety of flexible and adaptive data sources, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and ongoing data literacy education to help redefine the Firm’s internal performance objectives and accountability drivers and transform how the Firm delivers legal services to its clients.” Just 48 words but loaded with meaning and purpose, both for now and in the foreseeable future.
The software that lawyers relied on to run their firms used to be premise-based, but as reported by Nicole L. Black, in 2021 cloud computing software is the most prevalent. In fact, even before the pandemic, lawyers were adopting cloud-based legal software at higher rates than ever before. According to the 2020 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, 59% of lawyers surveyed were already already using cloud-based software pre-COVID. Notably, the results of another survey conducted by MyCase in mid-2020, showed the social distancing requirements of the pandemic have only served to accelerate this trend.
Knowledge sharing, social media and knowledge management expert V. Mary Abraham shares her readout and impressions of this timely and impactful keynote presented by Marco Iansiti, Harvard Business School Professor of Business Administration, and Coauthor of Competing in the Age of AI. Abraham’s insights encompass how the pandemic is accelerating enormous changes. Within 5-10 years, every organization will be run differently. Those who invest in digital transformation will do just fine. Those who do implement tangible change not will be left behind.
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: The evolving threat of ransomware: Beware of cyber extortion in 2021; What if opting out of data collection were easy?; How 5G and AI Are Creating an Architectural Revolution; and Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis.