The Ginger (Law) Librarian

The ABA's new Law Technology Today series kicked off with a series of questions about artificial intelligence in the legal profession. In the inaugural roundtable of a Law Technology Today series, we asked the LTRC Board, and other lawyers and legal professionals, five questions about AI and lawyers. Their answers range from skeptical to optimistic. What does artificial intelligence mean to you? To me, as a full-time practicing lawyer, artificial intelligence is sophisticated computer programming that allows your smart devices to provide more relevant responses to your inquiries. This could include narrowly tailored legal research results or more accurate search capabilities in document management programs. Artificial intelligence also means smart devices that learn more as you use them more. What area of your practice, or of the law, has benefited the most (or could benefit) from artificial intelligence? In my experience, legal research has benefited the most from artif...

States have been reporting their (generally lower) bar pass rates from the July examination, and the debate about what is the cause and what should be done is intensifying. In that vein, the NYTimes Room for Debate asks, Is the Bar Too Law to Get Into Law School? Bar exam scores have declined over the past few years, and last summer, graduates had some of the lowest scores in a decade. This years scores could be even worse. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which creates and scores the multistate, multiple-choice portion of the exam, maintains that the quality of incoming law students has declined, while many law professors blame the bar exam itself. Why are so many law students failing the bar exam? A variety of debaters weighed in on the matter with advice to the ABA to create a more meaningful exam and law schools to better prepare their students. One debater noted that the incoming students have weaker credentials, and another opined that the bar exam should be dro...

We now know that Ross is in development for legal research, but we we are still a long way  from being replaced by machines. This was confirmed by an recent  NYTimes  article about the current state of artificial intelligence: An artificial intelligence software program capable of seeing and reading has for the first time answered geometry questions from the SAT at the level of an average 11th grader.  The achievement, in which the program answered math questions it had not previously seen, was reported in a paper presented by computer scientists from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington at a scientific conference in Lisbon on Sunday.  The software had to combine machine vision to understand diagrams with the ability to read and understand complete sentences; its success represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Despite the advance, however, the researchers acknowledge that the program’s abiliti...

A new Pew survey called Libraries at the Crossroads finds that while people report feeling strongly about the importance of public libraries in their communities, those people are actually using libraries less and less. Atlantic's take is that overall, perhaps people aren’t visiting libraries as much because their relationship to the printed word, still a library’s core offering, is dramatically changing. Nearly one-third of [Pew survey] respondents who were 16 and older said libraries should “definitely” remove public access to some of their print books and stacks in order to free up space for technology hubs and other more customizable workspaces like reading spaces and meeting rooms. Many more were open to the idea: 40 percent of those surveyed said libraries should “maybe” reconfigure space to include fewer printed books. On top of that, almost half of those surveyed said libraries should “definitely” make 3-D printing technologies available to patrons who want to use the...

Robert Ambrogi over at LawSites just reported that Fastcase has acquired Loislaw . LoisLaw subscribers began receiving notices over the weekend informing them of the news. The letter stated that WK will sunset the Loislaw product effective Nov. 30, and that “we are collaborating with Fastcase so they can offer comparable subscription plans on the Fastcase platform, including Loislaw treatise libraries, at the same or lower prices as your current Loislaw subscription.” Reached by phone, Fastcase CEO Ed Walters confirmed the acquisition. He said that it was an assets-only purchase that includes the Loislaw brand and domain name and that will move Loislaw’s subscribers to Fastcase. He declined to disclose the purchase price. Wolters Kluwer ... is increasingly focusing its products on the larger-firm market and on highly regulated and specialized areas of law such as corporate finance, securities, tax, banking and health. Given that focus, it no longer makes much sense for the comp...

As the 5th week of law school classes comes to a close, I can say that teaching legal research and writing to international LL.M. students is a great joy (and a challenge). For a law school population that is fairly homogenous, it is wonderful to be among 13 students from 10 different countries, and this also poses the types of challenges one could expect from such a diverse class.  While looking for additional resources on point, I recently came across this list from the Legal Writing Institute: The Global Legal Writing Skills Committee has created a video library and webinar series on teaching international students, which was awarded the 2015 Global Legal Skills Conference award for Outstanding Programming in Global Legal Skills Education.  The presentation slides and webinars are available at http://www.law.msu.edu/glws/ .   Contact the committee co-chairs, Sammy Mansour ( mansou25@law.msu.edu ) or Cara Cunningham Warren (cunnincl@udmercy.edu), for more detai...

The NYTimes recently ran a piece asking " What is the Point of College? " The author put college in two categories: utility university and utopia university. One vision focuses on how college can be useful — to its graduates, to employers and to a globally competitive America. When presidential candidates talk about making college more affordable, they often mention those benefits, and they measure them largely in dollars and cents. How is it helping postgraduate earnings, or increasing G.D.P.? As college grows more expensive, plenty of people want to know whether they’re getting a good return on their investment. They believe in Utility U. Another vision of college centers on what John Stuart Mill called ‘‘experiments in living,’’ aimed at getting students ready for life as free men and women. Here, college is about building your soul as much as your skills. Students want to think critically about the values that guide them, and they will inevitably want to test out thei...