BLS Library Blog

If you need to conduct remote research during the BLS Winter Recess (Dec. 23–Jan. 3), these are our suggestions:

• NOW is the time to email askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or to text (718) 734-2432 and state: “My [professor/journal editor] encouraged me to find additional articles and treatises to support [assertion X].  Can you help me?”  A reference librarian can recommend searches in our SARA library catalog to find e/books and “advanced searches” in our OneSearch discovery platform to find articles.
• NOW is the time to implement the BLS proxy server instructions for off-campus access to many ebooks, ejournals and databases.  Prior to Winter Recess, you can still troubleshoot implementation problems with our library tech staff, accessible through: library.lab@brooklaw.edu  Librarians recommend either the Firefox (Mac) Proxy Instructions or the Firefox (Windows) Proxy Instructions. 
  • After implementing the BLS proxy instructions for one web browser, close/reopen the browser, enter your BLS username [format: firstname.lastname] & password, then click: Sign in. 
    • Examples of sources available off campus through the BLS proxy server by clicking the ACCESS ONLINE VERSION link in the SARA catalog record: Elgar Encyclopedia of Human Rights, IBFD Tax Research Platform, Law360 (legal news/analysis), Oxford Scholarly Authorities on International Law (ebook collection), Oxford Scholarship Online: Law (ebook collection), and WashingtonPost.com.
• Check out needed print sources in BLS Library by Dec. 22.
• If you find cites to articles or books unavailable through BLS Library, as of Dec. 15, 2022, you still have time to place requests for scans of articles and book chapters through the BLS interlibrary loan process. 
  • To place an ILL request, access SARA library catalog and click tab: ILL, enter your BLS username [format: firstname.lastname] & password, then click: Create Request. 
    • Fill out the appropriate template: Article, Book or Other (choose Other to request a scan of a single book chapter).
  • Feel free to email askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu or to text (718) 734-2432 to learn more about making an ILL request. 
  • If you place an ILL request, please monitor both your BLS “In” box and “Clutter” folder for replies from lenders. 
  • Note: ILL requests will not be processed from Dec. 23-Jan. 3. 
• For further information, BLS patrons can access the Canvas page: Librarians’ Research Presentations > under heading: Materials from Librarians’ “Alcove Academy” Presentations, click: PowerPoint: “Effective Remote Research.”

We hope our tips will improve your research during Winter Break.  Remember: Right now, we are here to help! 

You asked, we listened! 

A few months ago, the SBA told library representatives that students often encountered issues with the older copiers on the ground floor. Good news: the library now has a new copier that replaces the older equipment in the alcove near the reference desk. 

The new copier copies, scans, prints, and you can readily email your scanned documents or save them to your USB device. Unlike its departed brethren, large stacks of paper will not derail it so copy and scan away! Thank you to the SBA for bringing this issue to our attention. Thanks also to Yves and Sunil, the library computer staff, who worked hard over the weekend to ensure everything is working properly.

By the way, we were thinking of naming the new copier. Any suggestions? For now, we’re calling it the anti-Bob Marley, since it’s not jamming.

The anti-Bob Marley 

Brooklyn Law School, during the Summer 2017 semester, has taken a first step with its Externship Seminar – Tech Tools For Law Practice, in teaching technology to law students. As more and more states take note of ABA Standard RPC 1.1 Comment [8] and add state level rules which require that lawyers have basic technology competency, more law schools are responding and adding technology courses to their course offerings.

A session at CALI Con 2017, Teaching Law Practice Tech to Law Students – State of the Art, discussed three major themes aimed at teaching a new technology course. Michael Robak offered a walkthrough of the approval process for proposing a new technology course and provided tips for getting faculty and administrative officials onboard. A recent comment, Winning the Battle to Teach Legal Technology and Innovation at Law Schools by Christy Burke, states that many law schools are not yet convinced that this kind of practical non-theoretical education is their responsibility. However, she notes several examples, such as Stanford Law School’s Legal Design Lab, Vanderbilt Law School’s Technology in Legal Practice and Oklahoma University Law’s Digital Initiative, that offer a counterweight to that resistance.

Nichelle “Nikki” Perry discussed methods and options for choosing course content. Knowing where and how your students will practice can make a difference in class coverage. Stacey Rowland gave an overview of a recently taught course at the University of North Carolina discussing technology for new lawyers. This course covered topics such as Advanced Legal Research through Ravel and Bloomberg Law Litigation Analytics, using Word Styles as a foundation for document automation, asking students to construct a mock law firm website, litigation support services as well as hands on experience with CLIO and kCura’s Relativity.

In Brooklyn Law School’s Tech Tools for Law Practice seminar, the first assignment was to have the students complete a Legal Technology Assessment to determine how fluent they were with the basic technology tools of their trade: Word, Excel, and PDF. The website Procertas helped us to answer the question of what are the tech skills we should be teaching law students to better prepare them for working in the “real world?” See Tech Comes Naturally to ‘Digital Native’ Millennials? That’s A Myth by Darth Vaughn and Casey Flaherty which relates that testing of hundreds of law school students resulted in scores as low as 33 percent when asked to complete some simple Word tasks such as:

• Accept/Turn-off track changes
• Cut & Paste
• Replace text
• Format font and paragraph
• Fix footers
• Insert hyperlink
• Apply/Modify style
• Insert/Update cross-references
• Insert page break
• Insert non-breaking space
• Clean document properties
• Create comparison document (i.e., a redline)

Hopefully, as more law schools incorporate teaching law technology into the curriculum, those scores will improve.

An intriguing new title in the Brooklyn Law School Library collection is Robot Law by Law Professors Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin, and Ian Kerr (K564.C6 R63 2016). The 402 page book brings together research on robotics law and policy written by scholars from law, engineering, computer science and philosophy on topics such as liability, warfare, domestic law enforcement, personhood, and other cutting-edge issues in robotics and artificial intelligence. The book is an in-depth look at an area of law that is growing in importance. Like the Internet before it, robotics is a technology that will transform the social and economic landscape of legal research and practice. Robot Law looks at the increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread use in hospitals, public spaces, and battlefields requiring rethinking philosophical and public policy issues, including how AI interacts with existing legal regimes and changes in policy and in law.

Whether artificial intelligence will one day displace human lawyers has become so important that, this past April, Vanderbilt Law School hosted the first legal conference on the topic, “Watson, Esq.: Will Your Next Lawyer Be a Machine”. Speakers included Richard Susskind, author of “Tomorrow’s Lawyers” and “The Future of the Professions,” and Andrew Arruda, whose firm ROSS Intelligence helped build ROSS (which does not stand for anything), the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney, on top of IBM Watson.  Designed by students at the  University of Toronto, ROSS is meant for use by lawyers. Asking it a legal question will yeild an “instant answer with citations and suggested readings from a variety of content sources.” ROSS reads and understands language, postulates hypotheses when asked questions, researches, and then generates responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. It learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more users interact with it.

A recent Washington Post news piece reports that the law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that it is employing ROSS to handle its bankruptcy practice of nearly 50 lawyers. CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, says that other firms have also signed licenses with ROSS and expects more announcements soon. Although still in the prototype stage, ROSS shows great promise as an innovative legal research tool. Tasks that ROSS can do include:

1. Giving relevant answers – not a list of results – to natural language questions;
2. Learning from user’s questions – it learns and improves the more it is used;
3. Providing a consistent, easy-to-use experience on any devices used to access it.

At this week’s CALIcon 16 being held at the Georgia State University College of Law, BLS Reference Librarian Harold O’Grady and Technology Educator Lloyd Carew-Reid will present a session, The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Education, Research and Practice. Also participating will be:

• Professor Heidi Brown (Director of Legal Writing at Brooklyn Law School);
• Mikhail Jacob (a Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology); and
• Dr. Mark Riedl (an Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and Director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab).

The Brooklyn Law School Library has long provided access to Bloomberg Law to the law school community. BLS users now have access to a new legal intelligence platform: the Privacy & Data Security through the Practice Centers tab where users can click on Intellectual Property. At the top left corner of the page is a purple banner that reads “Looking for Bloomberg Law: Privacy & Data Security >> Access Now.” There, users will find analysis and news in an increasingly critical area for legal professionals.

Announced late last month, this newest Bloomberg Law tool was launched to address the need many legal practitioners have to quickly educate themselves on privacy and data security trends shaping legal practice, compliance and business operations. Data security runs the gamut from maintaining the integrity of simple personal information such as names, social security numbers and other private information to more complex business issues like those last month in the European Court of Justices’ invalidation of the long standing U.S. “safe harbor” agreement in the case of Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner. Privacy and data security laws can change overnight and the Privacy & Security Data Resource Center helps explain them.

In addition to aggregating news and information in this area of law, the platform features tools to help users develop perspective on the items most likely to impact specific industries or business units. For example, the platform’s “chart builder” allows practitioners to compare laws on breach notification, privacy and data security laws across regional jurisdictions. It also has “heat maps” that highlight areas of developing case law and legislation, and provide direction to applicable documentation for easy review.

Bloomberg Law: Privacy & Data Security has a collection of portfolios offering insight and guidance from leading privacy and data security authorities. Written by expert practitioners, titles include Cybersecurity and Privacy in Business Transactions: Managing Data Risk in Deals and Cross-Border Data Transfers. There are also treatises with expert practitioner insights and guidance to help make sound decisions and plan with confidence. Titles include Practical Guide to the Red Flag Rules: Identifying and Addressing Identity Theft Risks and Cyber Liability in the Age of the New Data Security Laws.

The BLS Library has many titles in its collection on the subject of data security. One of the latest is Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier (Call # HM846 .S362 2015). The publisher of the 383 page NY Times bestseller says “Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you’re unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.

“The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.

“Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You’ll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.”

On Thursday, June 18 at CALIcon 2015 held at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, one of the opening sessions was called Incorporating Technology, Business Development and Marketing in the Law School Curriculum. The session by Brooklyn Law School Reference Librarian Harold O’Grady and Brooklyn Law School Technology Educator Lloyd Carew-Reid examined how law schools are now incorporating technology, business development and marketing in the law school curriculum. Using Google Hangouts, Harold and Lloyd were joined by Brooklyn Law School Professor Jonathan Askin and MIT’s Danza Greenwood to discuss their ABA-MIT Online Legal Appathon which took place at the ABA Tech Show 2015 in April.

Three BLS students participated remotely in the session: Alex Goldman, Class of 2014, Patrick Mock, Class of 2017 and Paula Collins, Class of 2017. Alex discussed his project on Technical Standards for Warrant Canaries. Patrick and Paula talked about their awards at the second annual Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) Innovators Competition held in April 2015. Patrick won 1st Prize for his proposal, Buoy, which addresses the problem of student loan debt by incorporating a crowdfunding model into a student loan service. Paula won 3rd prize for her FLIC (Film Legal Information Center) app, which would deliver a virtual law practice, direct client services, and business/entrepreneurial services to a community of Indie film artists in Brooklyn and surrounding areas.

A video of the hour-long session is available on YouTube at this link.

The Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world,  recently released the report, The Web at 25 in the U.S. 

What were the report’s findings?   “The internet has been a plus for society and an especially good thing for individual users” proclaims its subtitle. But we all knew that.

Here are some highlights from the report:

• 87% of American adults use the internet
• 90% of internet users say the internet has been a good thing for them personally
• 6% say it has been a bad thing, while 3% volunteer that it has been some of both
• 76% say the internet has been a good thing for society
• 15% say it has been a bad thing and 8% say it has been equally good and bad
• 53%  say the internet would be, at minimum, “very hard” to give up
• 49% of cell phone owners say the same thing about their cell phone
• 35% of all adults say their television would be very hard to give up (44% in 2006)
• 28% of landline telephone owners say their phone would be very hard to give up (48% in 2006)
• 70% report positive treatment by others online
• 24% report negative treatment

Social media did not command as great an appreciation.   Only 10% reported that they would find it very hard to give up social media.