Time to learn about...cloud computing

So as our technology practice grows, we find that we are being forced to brush up (or in my case, just acquire some!) knowledge on the concept of  'cloud computing'. Now if you're anything like me, i.e. not a technophobe but not exactly on the cutting edge of every new technological development, then the term 'cloud computing' might be a bit hazy for you. One of my colleagues who is very 'techy' - although I doubt he would appreciate that tag! - explained the concept in very simple terms for me.

Basically he said to imagine 'the cloud' as a virtual filing cabinet - so basically, you can store music/documents etc in the cloud, instead of having, say, a physical hard drive to back them up on. There are some free cloud providers or you can pay for them.The main benefit is, though that it means your files are accessible anywhere - it means you don't have to be on your home PC, for example, to access that Word document you were working on last night. And so on and so forth.

Not surprisingly, however, with this major new concept comes a whole host of legal issues, everything from data protection and data security, to environmental concerns - indeed only this weekend Greenpeace have spoken out about concerns that big companies who provide cloud services, are using too much coal as opposed to 'cleaner' sources.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2168543/greenpeace-cautions-apple-cloud

One of the issues of most interest to me in terms of the intellectual property research I often do, is the implications for copyright infringement - who is responsible for illegal material stored within the cloud - is it the provider? Indeed this is something that is still under debate in terms of who is responsible for preventing illegal material being downloaded - is it the internet service provider? There's also issues surrounding the processing of personal data. With all of these rapidly changing technologies comes new and unexplored legal issues.

I don't think this is an area that I will ever become a specialist in, but it certainly looks like there is no getting away from the increasing number of questions we are receiving in the law library with respect of this topic - therefore I think it may be  a case of, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em....

Appraisals and the art of delegation....

So suddenly a couple of weeks have flown by since my last post - I still can't quite believe we're hitting March this week! It's been a hectic time in the law library - enquiries flying in left right and centre, and coupled with my extra responsibilities I have taken on since we had our appraisals, to say I have been a bit stressed is a serious understatement!

One of the main responsibilities I have taken on is a lot more delegation. This is not something that comes easy to me either. In all honesty I often find it easier to just do something myself than ask someone to do it for me. But one of my managers explained to me that part of learning how to be a good manager, is developing your ability to pass on and manage tasks, as opposed to just getting them done yourself. Teaching someone else how to go about a particular piece of work, and then ensuring that they do it within the alotted time frame and to a sufficiently high standard is a skill in itself.

When my managers are out of the office at the same time (one is part time so this does happen from time to time every month), and it is only the team Director, me and our 2 junior staff members, responsibility to allocate enquiries and act as the first point of assistance has moved from the Director to me. I would be lying if I said I don't find this daunting; I hope it's something I shall just become accustomed to and therfore more comfortable with, but at present, it's been a nerve racking couple of weeks as I have had to step in 3 times already! I think the most difficult part of delegation is knowing when and what to allocate to particular individuals! I am always wary of overloading the others in my team, or giving them something that perhaps is above or below their skillset. However, the only thing that will really help me to get over this is practice, so that's what I am doing. Let's call it a work in progress...

The appraisal process has always been fundamentally the same in every law firm I have worked in, and it's certainly useful from a Chartership point of view to have a chance to reflect on what I have achieved in the last year, and illustrate how I have gone about meeting the objectives we set last year. It's also helpful to get feedback from fee-earners and team members - it definitely makes you feel more appreciated!!

One thing that I did speak about during the appraisal once again was to what extent I can specialise in a particular practice area (mine being IP) - and again it's a tricky one. One of my goals this year is to help the other junior team members become more au fait with this practice area. One of them is going to be working with me on my Bulletin, for example. This will involve me coaching him in the various topics that are covered in the Bulletin, showing him how to pick out stories of interest from the various news sources I follow, and how to summarise and edit them for our Bulletin. The idea is that while I maintain editorial control, so to speak, I am sharing the knowledge that I have acquired with at least one other team member. It definitely makes sense, although again, I find it difficult at times to let things like this go, as I Really enjoy working on them! However, it's a good opportunity for me to work with one of the others on a one-to-one basis - it's good practice for me also in terms of taking control of tasks and delegation.

I am not sure if delegation comes naturally to some more than others - I suspect it does, to an extent, but I wonder if it really is just something you can become more comfortable with over time, or if it is either something you like or you don't like. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else on this kind of thing....

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Training team members - what works, what doesn't?

One thing that I am always trying to learn more about is the best ways of training a fellow colleague. This is a part of my job that has become pretty significant and looks set to only continue in this way, as one of the aims of 2012 is for me to take on a bit more of this side of things in order to free up my managers a bit.

In the last couple of years, I have attended more than one seminar and training course focusing on the best ways to train, training methods, how to be engaging....and so on. One thing that always concerns me is: can you really be taught how to train? Or is a big part of being able to 'train' successfully down to an inherent skill that you either have or you haven't?

I would say that while you can definitely improve your training methods and techniques, there is a certain something that you've either got or not got...that quality that makes you engage with the person or people you're training and that makes you explain things in a logical and easy to follow fashion, and that makes you approachable and easy to ask questions of. 

I'm still trying to discover if I have that certain something, but in the meantime, let's have a look at what's important when, say, you are training a fellow team member on something.

Having been party to many training sessions over the years, I am certainly well enough equipped to know what makes a one-to-one training session a successful one from the point of the 'trainee'. At times like this I always use my 'unofficial' mentor as my role model (regular readers will remember me waxing lyrical about this lady from a post in 2011) - now if anyone could make a training session engaging, it is this lady. I had many one-to-one sessions with her over the years we worked together, and the things I remember being most helpful were a) she never patronised me or made me feel stupid. b) she was patient to a fault and made herself available for endless questions during and after the session and c) no matter what the topic was, she always managed to make me laugh, even when I was very stressed out or upset because I didn't understand something. 

Believe me, having now been in the shoes of the trainer, as opposed to the trainee, to be able to do all of the above is no mean feat! Let's look at each point in turn:

1) Don't patronise

Unless you've made a real error in the recruitment process, chances are that you are not dealing with an idiot - you're just dealing with someone who is new to a role, or a particular procedure. So while you want to make every step abundantly clear, don't talk down to them as if they are a child. I have had that done to me and believe me, it's inufriating, even if well-meant!

 2) Don't tell - show

This is one of the key pointers given by The Harvard Business Review Management blog

and it's definitely one of the most important. It is much easier to teach people something with a real life example, rather than just explaining in the abstract. Find an example of how what you're showing can be applied to their daily job. Talk them through each step and explain why you are doing something.

3) Allow your colleague to ask questions

Asking questions is often how we learn the most, because only after we have been shown something, and we have tried to replicate the task ourselves, do we realise what makes sense and what didn't. It is impossible to know if you will be able to carry out a task you have just been shown, on your own, until you physically sit down and try. It is only then that you sometimes realise your three pages of scrawled notes are not quite as helpful as you thought! So make sure as a trainer you make yourself available for questions, not just in the hour following the session, but days and weeks after it too. It may be that they don't need to carry out the task until some time in the future, by which time the notes they took will be virtually meaningless. It's important to ensure that you foster an environment in which they feel they can approach you at any time, even if it means you need to go through the same thing all over again. 

4) Don't be too serious

As I mentioned earlier, some of the best training sessions I have had are ones in which the trainer has been laid back and displayed a sense of humour! There is nothing more off-putting or guaranteed to make you make mistakes out of sheer nervousness, than being in the company of a po-faced trainer. If you are relaxed, your colleague will relax too and consequently take in more as a result. You don't have to be a stand-up comedian - just try and put them at ease, and then if they are doing something while you watch, they're less likely to make silly mistakes out of nervousness.

Image courtesy of: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

 

Trainee training 2011 - so how did we do???

Well, who would have thought it - it's nearly Christmas and this blog is still going strong! It is very amusing to look back to my first post - I was exceptionally nervous, apprehensive, unsure - you name it - of how I would use the blog, what I would write etc. It is good to know that I have managed to overcome those feelings (well most of the time!) and so to everyone who has been following me - thank you!!!

You may recall earlier in the year that I talked quite a bit about our trainee training programme that kicks off every September when the new trainee lawyers start. Just to recap - we run our sessions over a period of about 8-10 weeks, in contrast to some firms I have worked at whereby the library sessions with the trainees are all finished within their first couple of weeks.

The sessions are run by myself and one of my Managers. This year, we ran the following sessions:

1) Introduction to the library: how we work, what we can supply, charges, plus an overview of copyright restrictions (very important to try and develop an awareness of that early on!)
2) Caselaw: an overview
3) Legislation: an overview
4) Forms and Precedents
5) European caselaw and legislation: an overview

Each session involves a lecture-style presentation from myself and my manager, a chance to ask questions, and ends with the trainees answering questions relating to that session. We then go through the questions with them and explain anything they had difficulties with. For this part of the session we take them to the IT training room, where they have access to our online resources and so can work through real-life examples.

The reason we go back to basics and explain the fundamentals of caselaw and legislation is simply because our trainees come from a variety of backgrounds - some may have studied law at university before sitting their LPC, while others will simply have done another degree, followed by a conversion course and LPC. The LPC is the last stage of law school. However, this means they have all different levels of experience, therefore we have come to the conclusion that all of them will benefit from a recap of the basics, and it ensures that they are all starting from a similar point once they have reminded themselves of this base knowledge.

The one thing that we felt this year should be revised going forward, however, is the length of the sessions. Traditionally we have taken a comfort break halfway through our presentation; this year, however, we got the impression that the trainees found this a little frustrating, and would rather just press on and finish early! We tried this out in our last session and it worked really well, therefore I think it's something we will always offer in our sessions going forward - that way if they want a break, they can have one, but if they want to just keep going, we will do so.

We got very good feedback in terms of the content of the sessions, with some of the trainees saying in particular that the European caselaw/legislation material was particularly helpful, because they had no idea that so much pre-legislative material is freely available online. For the record this kind of material can be of particular interest to the trainees if they are asked to carry out research on a particular piece of EU legislation - there can be some excellent background material in there. We also produce some handouts each year - not for every session, but a handbook in the first session and an excellent guide to European legal research written by one of our PSLs. We got great feedback on this as well. I think the handbook in the first session is very useful to them, because that first session comes very early on in their time with us, and judging from the stunned/exhausted faces we always see before us, I don't think they are physically able to take in everything we tell them! So it's definitely useful for them take that book away to their desks. We include information not only on library services, but tips on Boolean searching, what resources are best for certain kinds of research and so on.

From our point of view, this year's training sessions on the whole went smoothly (I say on the whole - there were the inevitable IT blips/online examples that worked fine at my desk, but failed at the first hurdle in front of the trainees....!) - but I think one thing that both myself and my manager notice more and more with every year, is that many of the trainees give the impression - at least for the first couple of sessions at least - that they do not need to be there. I think the perception of the 'library' is one that they associate with their academic libraries. They have no concept of just how important we are to the fee-earners - although many learn very quickly once in their seats and being asked to carry out research! But in all seriousness, I find it rather sad that yet again, we face these ongoing preconceptions of what people think a library is like - they assume that all we do is manage the book collection and that's as far as it goes. For the most part, I can laugh it off, as one way or another, they come to realise that a corporate library is very different to the one they had at uni/law school....but at the same time, it's also frustrating that simply because of our job title, we are regularly having to justify our presence. When any of the fee-earners find out that we are actually all qualified to MA/MSc level, they are utterly dumbfounded. It is a sad fact that librarianism as a profession is sorely undervalued across the board.

Anyway, on the plus side, this year's trainee training is all done and dusted, the trainees have settled into their seats very well, and my Manager and I have given a collective sigh of relief that that is it out of the way for another year! I really do think we both have learned a lot from this year and have been able to critically evaluate how we did, both in our own opinions as well as taking into account the feedback given to us by the trainees themselves - thereby giving us some food for thought for next year....

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Jack of all trades, master of none? Should a law librarian specialise in one area of law?

Jack of all trades...?

It seems to me that law firms tend to take very different views of a law librarian becoming a practice area-specific information specialist. Some of the very large law firms seem to have this as a matter of course, along with one central information/resources department, while the smaller ones tend to only have the occasional practice area specialist.

Part of my original remit in my current role was to work closely with the intellectual property (IP) group, and seek to provide them with a very tailored current awareness and research service. This was without a doubt a daunting task - the firms I had worked at previously had only very small IP groups, and they were all pretty self sufficient, therefore I had almost no prior knowledge of this practice area at all! The only thing I knew was the key textbooks, simply because I had been in charge of acquisitions in London in my last role, so I was pretty clued up on the core texts for most of the common practice areas in a corporate law firm.

The first thing I did was speak to a close friend who works as an insurance litigation specialist in one of my previous firms, in a bid to try and understand how she had developed her expertise in this area. One of the most helpful tips she gave me was to try and get a handle on as quickly as possible of who their key clients are and what sort of work they're doing most frequently. This in turn would enable me to get a feel for what current awareness information would be most relevant to them.

My first few months in the role were quite literally a baptism of fire. There was a huge amount to take in - I had no technical knowledge of trade marks, copyright or any other facet of IP, so I took it upon myself to do a lot of background reading in my spare time. Fellow law librarians will agree that the best to place for this kind of easy to understand overview is PLC (Practical Law Company - subscription database). I felt that by acquiring an understanding of what, for example, a trade mark actually is, why you register them etc etc, would mean that I would at least know the terminology when all the enquiries started coming through.

There was quite a strong expectation that I should also be taking an active part in the IP team's weekly meeting; for example providing them with solutions to projects/research questions, and in doing so, basically promoting the work of the Information Centre (the law library) to the team. Yet again, this was in all honesty pretty horrendous for me to begin with! I had never had to attend another team's meetings, so to do so on my own was nerve racking. What also made it worse was that this team had traditionally been pretty self sufficient and were, shall we say, slightly sceptical that there could be anything I could assist them with. (You can imagine the sheer satisfaction I feel now, 18 months down the line, when I go on holiday and all hell breaks loose because they are actually now quite dependent on me!) However in the first instance, my efforts to try and develop a relationship with the team were met with a lot of resistance, and looking back, I think it was only through sheer dint of pretty much forcing myself upon them at every opportunity and promoting our services as much as possible, that got me to the stage where I am now.

In the time I have been doing my current job, I have actually developed a genuine passion for the work I do relating to the IP team. It seems to me that you can't have it both ways, and this is where I think the biggest law firms have the right idea when they have specific practice area information specialists - and that is what they are; their role is clear and they can put all their efforts into one practice area, and in providing those fee-earners with a high level service.

On the other hand, many law librarians are traditionally a 'jack of all trades, master of none' - and I don't mean that in a derogratory way, because there's still a big part of my role that necessitates that! But I am just trying to show the differences between the 2 types of law librarian. Working in the general Information Centre as I do, until I joined there wasn't really an official assigned analyst (what we call ourselves in the firm) to any practice area. It was well known that 2 of my managers are insurance and litigation supremos (and i am not kidding. there is NOTHING they don't know!), but they weren't officially in charge of any of the associated practice areas. As a rule, law libraries like the one I am in now require the law librarians to be flexible, and able to pick up any enquiry from any practice area and turn their hand to it. Very often this involves doing a bit of quick reading first, just to try and actually understand what they're asking about at a very basic level!

 I still do enough non-IP enquiries to ensure that I keep my hand in at other practice areas, but I think further down the line, I may need to decide how I want to move forward in my career, and if I would like to focus on IP more than anything else. As I said earlier - and sad as it may sound - I genuinely find this area of law interesting and I never thought that would happen! So it would seem a shame to have come so far with it, to just drop it in my next role (whatever that may be). However, there is the downside that perhaps I am limiting myself quite severely to IP-information specialist roles only - and I do wonder if that is the wisest thing to do, given the ongoing poor economic climate...

Nonetheless, I think the question of law librarians specialising in one field of law is a very interesting one, and I would definitely be keen to hear others' views on this...

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'The Magical Law Library Staff' - is it true that law librarians are often underrated?

Abracadabra, your research is done...

So I came across this Linex Systems blog post titled The Magical Law Library Staff on another favourite blog of mine, The Running Librarian. It looks like it has struck a chord with a lot of us law librarians out there, which is why I felt I had to mention it myself!

In every law library I have worked in, it has been a long standing joke (although sometimes uttered with more bitterness than at other times, depending on what we have just been asked!) that the fee-earners have no concept of the amount of behind-the-scenes work undertaken by us on their behalf, to make their working lives easier. Journals that appear like clockwork every week on the lawyer's desk can often be the result of a several week-long battle with a particular supplier, trying in vain to understand why, if they have our correspondence details correct on their system as they claim, the journal has been sent to our old address 2 miles up the road for the last 3 months. That beautifully formatted, clear and concise current awareness bulletin is the result of onerous trawls through reams of news bulletins and other online/paper publications. And that neatly laid out and fully referenced answer to a horrible legal research question involved at the very least, a crash course in a very obscure point of law!

Now while some of you might say, well, what do you expect - that's what you're employed to do; that's your job to ensure all of the above and more happens as it should happen. And yes, that is true, of course it's our job - if we weren't actually making a difference to the fee-earners' lives then our existence wouldn't exactly be justified. So it's not so much that I need to be profusely thanked every single time I do something at work - far from it. No, what my own personal bugbear is that without exception, in every law firm I have worked in, there is still a core of people who simply have no clue that we are the ones managing the online databases on which they are so dependent; or that we are the ones constantly keeping abreast of the fee-earning work being done across the firm, and providing a tailored current awareness service as a result. Sadly it seems like there will always be some people who think that 'all' we do is tidy a few shelves every day.

In some ways though, the law firm library is its own worst enemy, as it often seems to me that librarians/information specialists or whatever job title we use, are not by nature the kind of people who blow their own trumpets. We tend to remain very much in the background, not seeking glory for what we do at all. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't want to be part of a team that did project an image of superiority, because I don't think that makes for great working relations with other departments! No, I just think that sometimes, the law firm library is highly underrated, which is a great shame. And even those general administrative tasks are still important - who wants to come into a library where there is a huge big messy pile of books and journals waiting to be shelved? If we didn't attend to tasks like that, as well as all the other things we do, then people would certainly notice us - and not in a good way. But when these things are all being done without fuss or faddle, you do sometimes wonder if people even stop to think about how much time we spend, making sure the library is a pleasant place to visit, and moreover, a useful stop for research.


I think another part of the problem is that the information profession in general is underrated. In fact, to some people, even calling it a profession is something they would question, because an astonishing number of people have no idea at all that, for example, in order to move up the ladder in law firm libraries, 9 times out of 10 you need to have attained at the very least, a post graduate diploma in information science/library studies etc, although the majority of my colleagues actually have the Masters qualification, or they studied the subject at undergraduate level. But on the rare occasion I have had cause to mention this fact to one of my fee-earners, without fail they react with genuine surprise. Sadly even in this day and age, librarianship is not like, say, accountancy, where it's  pretty well-known fact that you have to sit many exams before you fully qualify. People tend to know about teachers, doctors, nurses - but not many people know how we qualify!

One thing that also makes me laugh (or want to cry!) is the fact that a lot of fee-earners really do seem to think we are in fact magicians. No really, they do. You see,here's an example: fee-earners in my experience tend not to like spending money, and so when they come across an abstract of an article that is apparently exactly what they're looking for, they often find it very difficult to accept that, in some cases, the only way to access it will be for us to pay for it. I think they believe we have access to a magical, cost-free repository of data, which contains everything from that 2003 copy of the Journal of Fracking (yes that is a made up title, although believe it or not I was looking to 'fracking' last week!) to unreported cases from the 19th century! While it is certainly very flattering - perhaps we are just so good at our jobs that the fee-earners simply cannot believe there are things we can't obtain for them without incurring a cost - at the same time it can be frustrating after you have explained for the 3500th time to a new trainee that no, just because when you're at uni you have free access to every journal under the sun, doesn't mean it's the same here - particularly when we're in the cost-cutting climate that we are right now...

The Linex Systems blog post states that:

"The librarians are the ones who take the vague query they’re given, work out the core of it, learn the legal issues around it, collate relevant materials, and pass back a useful and relevant answer…even if sometimes the answer is “there’s no answer”, because nobody’s covered that point before (which happens a LOT more often than is fun for us – it’s not our fault no material exists on certain points!). We know our users, and which ones will expect not only the requested material, but also for you to have read it, and be able to have discussions about the content of that material."

I definitely empathise with this one as well! Sadly, we very often find in our job that what we are trying to prove as much as we can is that there is no answer to a query - and again, that's not something any lawyer likes to hear. While it is a lovely feeling when you discover a passage in a textbook or in a case or journal article that appears to all intents and purposes to be the very answer you're trying to ascertain, sadly this doesn't always happen, and so you end up simply trying to show that nothing appears to have been written about that particular issue yet, and/or that there is just no caselaw debating it.

The blog writer also mentions that:

"...And maintaining a master list of their passwords, because they NEVER do as they’re told, and keep the email with the information on it in a safe place."

Ah, the delightful forgotten password scenario. If I had £1 for every time a fee-earner forgets their login details...well, put it this way, I wouldn't be sat here writing about it! At our firm we are quite fortunate in that the most frequently used resources are now all IP-authenticated, meaning that login is automatic because the database recognises IP address from our office, and I can't tell you the amount of time that is saved in terms of forgotten password queries. That having been said, there are still several specialist databases that require passwords, and so when I set up access to these, I specifically ask if the details can be sent to me first, and then I can send them onto the new user myself, meaning that I can make a note of them on our passwords list and that way it doesn't matter if that new user loses their details down the line. Obviously it is a problem if they change the password they are given and don't tell us, but to be honest, I have only come across a handful of lawyers who ever actually have the time to do that! The other problem is that there are sometimes data protection issues that prevent some database administrators from sending a user's login to someone else, which means that I have to contact that fee-earner, pre-warn them that they will be receiving an email directly and so NOT to delete it assuming it's junk, AND kindly request that they forward it onto me so that I can maintain the password record. And if you're wondering how many people actually do as I ask, then you've probably guessed correctly - not many! AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!

So I guess the big question is: are law librarians really underrated? In my opinion, I think unfortunately there are some fee-earners who will never see us (if they see us at all) as anything more than book shelf stackers, but before this post puts you off ever contemplating a career in a law firm library, let me reassure you by saying that for every non-appreciative fee-earner, in every firm I have worked in I have had just as many very grateful fee-earners, who truly do seem to appreciate the hours we spend on ensuring that they have access to the most relevant and up-to-date information and resources, and having their research requests answered efficiently and promptly.

Ah, the sweet life of the City law librarian....

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