The ILTA Track at AALL 2014 San Antonio Patricia E. Barbone Director of Library Services Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP

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1 The ILTA Track at AALL 2014 San Antonio By Patricia E. Barbone Director of Library Services Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP If you were one of those that ducked out early on the last day of the AALL 2014 conference, then you made a big mistake. The Tuesday ILTA track offered three programs filled with inspiration and useful take-aways. A recurrent objective in all the programs was to showcase information management trends that identified new career opportunities and offered solutions for staying relevant. All three programs were produced in collaboration with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA.) Here is brief summary of the three programs. I started the day with Discussing big data Opportunities with Firm Partners, from No-Brainers to Game Changers. The program began with an overview of the big data phenomena. The program offered a good understanding of what big data was and how it was being used both in the business world at large and within the legal industry. Jobst Elster, Head of Content and Legal Market Strategy at InsideLegal.com, moderated the program. He described big data as data sets that are so large that common software tools are not able to capture, process, and curate the data. The size of the data sets vary; but no matter what the size, it s not the size of the data that matters, it is the value you can derive from analysis of the data. The panelists were all individuals who were utilizing big data for information solutions. Each panelist was asked, What does big data mean to you? Gina Lynch, National Director of Knowledge Services at Bingham McCutcheon, described it as a weapon to accomplish your goals. John Bower, Assistant Director for Business Development at Fox Rothschild described big data as a massive career opportunity for those within the legal industry. Jobst Elster called big data a game changer for those working with information management. Clearly the panelists believed that big data held many opportunities for law librarians. How will big data affect information professionals? Bowers told the audience that Harvard Business Review in a 2012 article described data scientists as the sexiest job in the 21st century. He believes there is a growing role for professionals who are distilling actionable information from disparate data sets. Masters degrees are popping up everywhere in data science. Big data in law firms is in its infant state but growing. According to Elster, this is evident in the increase in financial investment from venture capitalists into legal start-ups dedicated to big data solutions. According to the 2013 ILTA technology purchasing survey, when asked what impact big data would have in the next five years, the responses were fairly evenly distributed: Most CIOs weren t sure, didn t think it would have much impact, or saw it more as a storage challenge. However, 16 percent thought

2 big data would lead to more strategic use of data in areas like predictive data modeling, data mining, and more accessible data analytics. How is big data evident in the legal industry? John Bowers brought his perspective as a business development professional. First, collection isn't the problem. Analysis is the problem. Law firms are pretty good at collecting all sorts of data, libraries included. Here are just a few examples: Human resources demographics including diversity numbers, contact relationship data; various client billing practices; time sheet data; conflicts (risk management) data; matter budgets; forms; and RFPs. All of these data sets are rich in detail about the firm and its capabilities. In many cases there are overlapping departments collecting the same data. Law firms tend to store data in individual silos, so it is not easy to tap when a question is posed. Is there anyone is tasked with analyzing firm data? Are there stakeholders at the firm who don t want this data to be surfaced or analyzed? In many cases internal politics can influence this process both positively and negatively. Law firms are not the only ones who need big data solutions. Corporate law departments put out RFPs for work, and then don t know how to analyze the proposals they receive. They pay legal spend analytics companies to help them find benchmarks to determine what a legal service should cost. Law firms don t have the ability to compile this from their own internal sources and price services accordingly to clients. Attorneys really just want to practice the law and don t want to get involved with all this analysis. Bowers suggestion to the audience be part of the solution. In implementing big data analysis at Bingham McCutchen, the process starts with a problem that needs to get solved. Lynch starts with the question, who is using the library and how can we direct more users to the library? Digging deeper, she wondered, Can we tie library use to a more productive or profitable lawyer? She sought to uncover the answer by compiling data on her lawyers along with other bits of data and perform some analysis. She filled in a spreadsheet with Bingham s attorneys and added Lexis use, Westlaw use, reference requests, CI requests, and current awareness alerts. She used conditional formatting and colors to bring out correlations. This enabled her to see usage patterns around practice areas, class year, and attorney status. Another product she used and recommends is Tableau which is available for free on the Internet. By inputting a spreadsheet into Tableau, you can create a graphical representation of the data. From this tool, Lynch was able learn that the strongest users in each practice group were partners. The program finished up with a summary of external resources used to pull data for analysis or that were already analyzing some type of external data. These were services most useful for business development, competitive intelligence, and case outcomes. Leveraging SharePoint for Library Services was the second ILTA program. The speakers for this program were Stacy Pangilinan, a librarian at DLA, and Peter Zimmer, a SharePoint consultant with lots of experience building internal portals and intranets for law firms.

3 Although I ve attended SharePoint programs at AALL before, this one was a cut above. Stacy Pangilinan provided some examples of how she is using custom lists at DLA to manage resources and track projects while Peter Zimmer augmented her examples with lots of information about how SharePoint 2013 works. Pangilinan couldn t attend the program in person, but she attended virtually and the program didn t miss a beat. As promised by the program description, those new to SharePoint got some basics, while there were plenty of advanced tips for those already versed in SharePoint. The features discussed were from SharePoint At the core of how librarians can use SharePoint is the list. Zimmer described a SharePoint list like an excel spreadsheet with the added advantage of creating a work flow to an item (an item is analogous to the cell in Excel.) A form is the way new data can be input into a list. SharePoint provides solutions for creating lists out-of-the-box but also allows for customization. One of the ways users have modified forms for custom lists is with a product called Infopath. An advanced tip for users is that this product is going away in a few years. Zimmer told the audience that the ability to customize forms will be built right into SharePoint. The benefits of team sites were also discussed. Team sites are great for collaborating on a department or project level. Useful web parts like the recurring calendar and issue tracking were showcased. DLA has a team site for their Library Digital Services group that has a projects custom list and a recurring tasks calendar; this allows team members to track their projects and tasks. You can also prioritize tasks and switch status from to-do to done. Data can be displayed multiple ways by add groupings by issue status and creating different views. SharePoint can be used to create a research portal. Pangilinan shared DLA s research portal with the audience. Their portal has practice group pages with subgroup tabs, an A-Z list of electronic resources, personalized passwords lists, and a place to request research. According to Pangilinan, the goal in building and maintaining the research portal was to update information in as few places as possible and have automatic updates from their ILS. They used local and unmarked MARC fields to code content in the ILS, and then extract that content to a site as a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is stored in an internal site, and then converted to a custom list on their SharePoint site. This process is heavily supported by the DLA IT department; but Pangilinan says if you can extract a spreadsheet from your ILS, you can add it to SharePoint and convert it to a custom list, even without IT support. One of the great capabilities about SharePoint, is that information can be stored and updated in one location, and displayed and consumed by multiple sites and users on the portal. In this way one group can manage the information that many users will use, and the content will stay fresh and up to date. Sounds like a role tailor made for the librarian. Zimmer suggests that if you get a chance to provide input for designing a SharePoint site with either a consultant or IT staff member, make sure you let them know

4 you understand this feature. It shows your professional reach and will allow for a more functional site. The ILTA day concluded with Strategic Technology Imperatives for Law Librarians. The idea for this program came out of the results of an ILTA study that explored how advances in information technology could impact the legal industry over the next decade. The findings of the report, the Legal Technology Future Horizons [ identified a number of key technology developments that will likely affect librarians and library services in law firms and law departments. The speakers were Sally Gonzalez, June Hsiao Liebert, and Elizabeth Prike. Liebert and Prike are currently law librarians working in law firms, and Gonzalez is an IT professional with a long history of working in law firms and as a consultant to firms and corporate law departments. Gonzalez spoke first and framed the discussion. Based on the findings of the study, there were three key drivers for change in the legal industry: Business Forces, Technology Evolution; and Generational Forces. Gonzalez discussed how emerging changes might play out. Key changes were in the areas of mobility, knowledge management, data mining, and analysis of big data. All the impending changes would have big implications for librarians. Trends that we can see developing right now are the internet of things, the idea that all devices will be connected to the internet and can be controlled via your mobile device. The other is the emergence of the digital native, those who have always grown up with a computer and interact seamlessly with technology, in particular the internet and social media. Digital natives are a contrast to the digital immigrants, those who use computers but can still remember how we used to do it. The shift in workplace behavior will be more apparent when digital natives begin to make more decisions regarding technology deployment. I doubt few would argue with Gonzalez s belief that the technology evolution will have a big impact on how law librarians will manage content in the future. The question is just how will it all play out? She proposed various scenarios for the audience to consider. There will be ever increasing digitization of content. Digital rights management will be a key skill as we transition more of our collection to digital content and digital lending will be a key component. Applying the concept of the internet of things, all our content will be connected to technology and in the library, perhaps nothing will be missing again. The library of 2020 will see more services delivered virtually. That was easy to grasp given that we have already seen a shift in how requests come to the library with being most frequent. However, in the future, we may be delivering services through avatars and research bots. One of the cooler predictions for the library of 2020 was a 3-D

5 projection of a library. Stroll down a virtual shelf, touch a book, it appears on your workstation, and after you re done, it goes away. Some more pie in the sky types of emerging technologies, which are cost prohibitive now but may not always be so in the next 5 to 10 years, are: robotics, personalized interactive displays, and expert level decisions systems. It was exciting to ponder the future and explore the possible ways that technology will affect library services in the future. More than that, it will be important for long range planning. As Gonzalez suggests, we should be ready when our firms ask us to lead the future directions of our library services; and make 5, 10, and 15 year decisions in keeping with the long range strategy of our firms. In summary, staying to the last day of the AALL conference to attend the ILTA programming was definitely time well spent. The programs offered insight into the current and future technological trends that will affect information management. This type of programming is essential for librarians and information professionals who need guidance and knowledge meet the challenges of the future. Plan accordingly for 2015, and don t plan to leave early if ILTA shows up on Tuesday in Philadelphia.