Reading Time: 6 minutes
Is working with lawyers more likely than other fields to result with colleagues being impacted by scandals? I wouldn’t have thought so but now I’m not sure. The CEO of a former workplace—who hired me to go to Canada and who I had huge respect for—has just been let go (“is no longer employed by”) amid …
Continue Reading A Problem in the Legal Profession

Reading Time: 7 minutes
One long-term challenge for law library decision-makers is the position legal publishers take on their pricing. They incorporate confidentiality clauses in their contracts to prohibit sharing of pricing information. So, when I wrote about my decision about cancelling Bloomberg Law, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when their representative called to tell me to…
Continue Reading Fear of Information Access

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I was delighted to see the ABA Journal name Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt two of their 2025 Legal Rebels. I’ve already mentioned Prof. Howarth’s book—Shaping the Bar—and will recommend that you read it if you haven’t already. The bar exam, and the obstacle it creates while simultaneously demanding far more of…
Continue Reading The Bar as an Obstacle

Reading Time: 7 minutes
My first discussion about equitable access at my current role happened during my interview. I was talking with some students, one of whom had hustled for the interview from work and frequently used the law library after their full-time job. Evenings are a time at which the law library is lightly or unstaffed. We had a…
Continue Reading Small Changes for the Same Access

Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was downloading a government form the other day and it told me that I would need the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Umm, I don’t think so. Adobe is a corporation whose tools I avoid like the plague. Also, a PDF should not need a proprietary reader in order to be accessed. Despite the marketing, portable document …
Continue Reading The Plague of Document Formats

Reading Time: 4 minutes
One of the interesting things about my current role is that it is two part-time roles. When I was hired, the role required a library director 49% of the time and a faculty member for the remaining 51%. It has resulted in a lot of unusual outcomes. For example, when I take a full day of…
Continue Reading Split the Difference

Reading Time: 6 minutes
The semester started last week and I have been building out my course materials in our online learning management system (LMS). Our university uses Blackboard but I expect that users of Thomson Reuter’s TWEN or Blackboard’s competitor, Canvas, have been going through a similar experience. I’ve been surprised how much duplication is involved even when there…
Continue Reading First Steps in Learning Management

Reading Time: 13 minutes
I cancelled Bloomberg Law. It was an agonizing decision-making process. The decision itself was not hard. If anything, it was obvious and overdue. That tension, of having an obvious decision that still needs to be teased out to its full extent, was a professional challenge. It has been a long time since I had found myself…
Continue Reading Decision Dilemmas

Reading Time: 5 minutes
My immersion in law school life continues. All faculty are asked to proctor a final exam so I had that experience. The room slowly filled with laptops and piles of books and notes and outlines, sometimes supplemented with scratch paper. The laptops are a requirement for the exam. But I was still struck by the place…
Continue Reading The Place for Print

Reading Time: 7 minutes
My wife and I are house hunting. We are hoping it will be our last move, as we have moved a few times already, always because my desire for challenging work took us to new places. It has meant identifying and engaging a number of specialists—a realtor, a lawyer, a painter, an electrician—to help us. Our…
Continue Reading The Humility of Expertise

Reading Time: 2 minutes
This is the first Christmas in 6 years that all of my family will be in North America. The first Christmas my parents have bothered to get a tree to decorate, since it didn’t feel like much of a celebration with my brother held hostage in Russia. I’ve been reflecting on the many well-wishers I heard…
Continue Reading Thwarted Prayers

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have departed X as a social space like so many others. You will still find my handle on there but it’s not somewhere I linger. My brother’s ordeal in Russia meant I used that account for a lot of public advocacy and I’m worried that, if I yield it, it will be taken up by…
Continue Reading Re-Publish Your Twitter Archive

Reading Time: 11 minutes
Let us take a walk into the unknown. I have spent most of the last year thinking about how legal scholarship is promoted and connected. Not so much from the perspective of the librarian assisting faculty, but from the perspective of the librarian or lecturer who is promoting their own scholarship. One of our law school…
Continue Reading The Found Legal Scholar