PAYPAL Issues have been resolved. My apologies to those who were unable to place orders yesterday. Thank you for your patience.

Dear Colleagues and readers you must be asking yourselves:

What is a Blog-o-zine? It is word I made up to describe a print publication which includes  “best of” selection of  Dewey B Strategic  blog in 2017.

Why a print blog-o-zine?“  I, who have been an unrelenting advocate for digital information consumption have now pivoted to embrace a print representation of my 2017 blog posts?  The bottom line is that  I want to make my content accessible to more readers and to put it into a format which more easily “browse–able“ for lawyers, researchers and legal information innovators who want to review a recent snapshot of the legal information landscape.

What inspired this? I had two epiphanies on the print versus digital issue in 2017. After 7 years of blogging it has become more difficult for me to locate my prior blogs. After I moved from the Blogger platform to Lexblog which uses WordPress, my earlier posts became much more difficult to find using Google searches. As I often say “with  Google can always give you something— but it does not always give you the exact thing  that you are looking for.” 

Perhaps more importantly, in 2017 I read the book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter  by David Sax which posits that since we are material beings we have a special connection to tangible things. Sax documents the reappearance of all sorts of artifacts of our pre-digital age:  Phonograph players, vinyl records, 35 mm film, moleskin notebooks and yes – specialist magazines!  I was only half way through the book when my daughter asked to go into an Urban Outfitters at 5th Avenue and 42nd St in Manhattan – and what was in the front of the store? Displays of phonograph players, vinyl records and 35 mm Fuji film.

The Revenge of Analog made me question one of my most basic assumptions about information delivery. It made me notice that for at least some content, I prefer to hold something in my hands and browse. The Dewey B Strategic Blog-o-zine is my celebration of our tangible selves who still enjoy turning a page and browsing.

Why should  someone pay for it? The 2017 Dewey B Strategic  Blog-o-zine is intended to be an easy access, reference handbook on the major legal research/technology trends,  product releases and enhancements of 2017. The book includes 34 product reviews for cutting edge legal products incorporating AI, analytics, workflow tools and plain old expert analysis. What have the big players Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law and Wolters Kluwer been up to? Did you catch the release of new features on Fastcase, CARA,  Ravel, Lex Machina? Have you heard about the innovative new tools from Judicata,  Gavelytcs and Voxgov? The blog-o-zine can be seen as a good investment in a tool that will make it easier for you to focus your time and your budgets on best products for your firm’s research needs.

What the legal information industry thought leaders are saying…. Dewey B Strategic has been recognized as an important source of legal publishing and technology insights by industry executives, knowledge management and library thought leaders. Read their testimonials here.

 Exclusive content in the Blog-a-zine – A  wrap-up blogpost on the state of the legal information industry at the end of 2017. ” 2017:KM Rises, “Robot Lawyer” Fatigue Sets in. Analytics and Workflow Surge.”
The book will retail for $99 but will be available at the pre-publication price of $79.00 (plus shipping) through April 30th. The publication will ship on or about April 30th.

You can use Paypal to reserve your pre-publication price  here: Buy Now Button

If you should experience any difficulties with Paypal please email me at jogdc1@gmail.com.

Last week Bloomberg Law launched a new analytics tool, Health Care Fraud Analytics. A first of its kind tools offering insights into a very specific niche– health care fraud enforcement. The tool enables subscribers to search and filter health care fraud settlement agreements by court, entity, allegation, date which can be used to display trends in health care enforcement and settlements. The product also provides insights into whistle-blower suits and violation trends. Settlement analytics can be searched by law firm or Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Launches Health Care Fraud Enforcement Analytics Tool

I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew Perlman, The Dean of Suffolk Law School and Professor Gabrielle Teninbaum, Director of the Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation at  Suffolk Law School. Suffolk is on of the U.S, law schools which has been in the forefront of transforming the law future lawyers are educated. In particular they have focused on preparing students for the emerging technology roles described by legal futurist, Richard Susskind. The interview was published in the  March issue of Thomson Reuters Practice Innovations.

The article provides insights into upcoming changes  law school curriculum, the role of the ABA and law firms in the transformation of legal education and preparing students for practice chances arising from AI and analytics in the practice of law.

Read the full interview here.

 

 

The March issue of  Thomson Reuters Practice Innovations has been released. This issue focuses on AI’s impact on the business and practice of law, transformation of legal education and the ongoing challenges of value pricing and client collaboration.

The Full issue is available here.

Subscribe to Practice Innovations at this link.

Skill Fade: The Ethics of Lawyer Dependence on Algorithms and Technology Brian Sheppard, Seton Hall University Law School

Using Expected Value Calculations and Big Data to Guide Decision-Making  by Mark Thorogood , Perkins Coie

 Fending Off Incursions by the Big Four into the Legal Industry  by V. Mary Abraham

The Opportunity for “Back Office AI” in Law Firms     by Sally Gonzalez, Fireman & Co

Suffolk Law School: Leading Transformation of Legal Education  Jean O’Grady, DLA Piper Interviews  Andrew Perlman Dean of Suffolk Law School and Gabrielle Teninbaum  Director of the Institute on Legal Innovation, Suffolk Law,

The Future of Change is Client/Law Firm Collaboration By Toby Brown, Perkins Coie

 Today Lex Machina  announced the release its first annual Products Liability Litigation report which analyses more than 400,000 product liability cases filed in U.S. District Courts from January 1, 2009 to Dec 31, 2017.

The report highlights  claims related to pharmaceuticals and medical devices and provides detailed insights on case findings, resolutions timing, damages awarded in verdicts, and approved class action settlements.

Owen Byrd, General Counsel and Chief Evangelist is quoted in the press release announcing the report. “Every year, the number of product liability cases filed in District Court consistently outpaces the combined case filings for patent, commercial, employment, trademark, copyright, antitrust, securities, and bankruptcy appeals. Of those product liability cases, medical device and pharmaceutical litigation accounts for the lion’s share of all filings, which is why we’ve chosen to feature this sector in our first annual report.”

Key Findings Include:

Continue Reading Lex Machina 2018 Products Liability Litigation Report Includes Trends and an Analytics “Primer”- Expert Witness App Launched

Tax and Trust & Estate lawyers have always been a breed apart. They take their research tools and processes VERY seriously. And Wolters Kluwer CCH resources have defined the process of tax research. CCH launched its first publication in 1913 the year the US enacted its first tax law The Revenue Act of 1913. Anyone who has studied tax law understands the multiple threads of primary sources ( laws, regulation, revenue rulings etc. which are necessary for the interpretation of the law. A code section is only the first step in a complex analysis. And all of these primary law pieces are in a continuous state of change. Wolters Kluwer is leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to generate new tools and insights.

This week Wolters Kluwer launched an  important  new tool Estate and Gift Tax Plus  to help trust and estates practitioners instantly track changes in laws and regulations with an innovative new tools for “redlining” and point in time navigation. Since the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Job Act was the most sweeping tax law in decades, trust and estates practitioners will need to track ongoing changes to regulations as well as interpretive and advisory materials impacting the practitioners understanding of the law. Wolters Kluwer expects their  Tax Plus and Estate Tax and Gift  Tax Plus products to help lawyers master these ongoing changes efficiently.

New Features Include: Point in time allows lawyers to see a law or regulation as it was in a particular year and redlining which allows a lawyer to track changes in laws and regulations over time.  Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Launches Estate & Gift Tax Plus With Redlining and “Point in Time” Research Features

Today Fastcase is announcing the addition of the Littler Mendelson employment law practice materials to their growing portfolio of secondary sources and practice materials. Littler, is the largest global employment and labor law firm, and as far as I know they also have the largest collection of law firm authored treatises. The firm has a bookstore on their website. As of today, Fastcase will offer, 79 titles from the Littler Employer Law Library within the Fastcase legal research platform.. Fastcase subscribers will now see little materials in their search results. National titles include: Littler on Bankruptcy and Employment Law Issues, Littler on Disability in the Workplace, Littler on Classifying Workers: Employees v. Independent Contractors, Joint Employees, & Other Contingent Continue Reading Fastcase Expands Treatises: Adds Littler Employment Library Including 79 Titles

My apologies for the delay. February was a “lost month” due to flu season. Please vote here. 

They Survey will close Friday March 16th.

This blog has covered a wide variety of new products including Judicata’s Clerk, Gavelytics, Voxgov, CARA’s Brief Finder and CARA Push Notifications. Lex Machina launched new modules including bankruptcy appeals, commercial, employment and products liability. Ravel launched law firm analytics before being acquired by Lexis.

Wolters Kluwer appeared to have been in innovative overdrive building new tools and features on its own and in alliance with other technology companies. Wolters Kluwer launched M&A Clause Analytics,  Smart Tasks, predictive legislation in their Federal Knowledge Center, Clarivate, Standard Federal Tax Plus, SEC RegReview, a new Cybersecurity Product, Enhanced Arbitration Platform and a KTmine IP Alliance.Lexis unveiled an AI tool: Lexis Answers and began to deliver some “mashups” between their various products. They enhanced Practice Continue Reading Last Call To Share Your Wisdom with Your Colleagues Respond to 2017-18 Start Stop Poll

Several months ago a colleague asked a group of legal information professionals if they had come up with a way to eliminate “bad” sources from news alerts. I have seen RT News – a notorious source for Russian propaganda show up in  alerts on artificial intelligence. Many law firm competitive intelligence operations rely on news aggregation platforms to curate alerts on companies, industries and issues. Platforms such as Vable, Ozmosys, Manzama and LexisNexis Newsdesk scan an ocean of daily news stories, social media and press releases in order to curate and surface stories relevant to a specific issue. To date, no aggregation platform has offered a tool for flagging or eliminating stories from “unreliable” sources. Human curation may flag bad sources but automated alerts may deliver news from a questionable source unless an alert is limited to a few reliable sources. Help may be on the way in the form of a product called NewsGuard.

NewsGuard will not rate individual stories but will evaluate the overall reliability of the news source. According to the company’s press release, NewsGuard will begin offering “reliability ratings” and news “nutrition labels”. The reliability Continue Reading Legal News Pioneer Steven Brill Takes on Fake News with NewsGuard. How Will News Aggregation Platforms Respond?

It was only eight weeks ago that Fastcase announced the axquisition of Docket Alarm. Today they are announcing the expansion of Docket Alarm to include court dockets from California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. They will also be adding docket integration with Fastcase and addition visualization tools to provide insights on litigation trends for client development and litigation strategy.

 In addition, Docket Alarm users can now move from court dockets, briefs, and pleadings into cited cases from Fastcase without a separate login. Docket Alarm is making an archive of over 200 million litigation briefs, motions, pleadings, and Continue Reading Fastcase Fastracks Launch of State Docket Analytics & New Features Following Docket Alarm Acqusition