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Information Professional Update
Issue 9, September 2007

• Spotlight On ...
  1) Make the Transformation! Morph From Human Routing Machine into Current-Awareness Wizard
  2) LexisNexis® Current-Awareness Options: Size Up Your Organization and Choose What Works Best
• Special Guest ...
  1) A Few Words about LexisNexis® Publisher from … Holly Pinto, Director of Library Services, Holland & Hart LLP
  2) Major Law Firm Info Pro Builds Update Solution With LexisNexis® Total Alerts Powered by Ozmosys®
• Take A Tour...
  1) Deal Lawyers can Select M&A Task and Move Directly to Content with New Practice Center
• FYI Flash ...
  1) Library of Congress Director Speaks, Offers Tips for Cultivating Leadership
  2) Full-Text Elsevier Journal Total Soars Above 350!
  

Make the Transformation! Morph From Human Routing Machine into Current-Awareness Wizard

by Cindy Spohr, Senior Director,
LexisNexis Librarian Relations Group

Providing the right information, at the right time, in the right format is such a challenge today. As I talk with law-librarian colleagues around the country, I have learned that this is one of the tallest hurdles you face day after day. The practice of law continues to require more news, and firm clients demand that their attorneys are always up-to-date on the latest developments on everything.

And in addition to being current, attorneys expect this information to be customized to their practice area, their clients—their interests—as well as to be delivered in their preferred format. It’s the combination of these requirements that often creates and magnifies the challenge for you.

But, as with many things, a challenge can often be viewed as an opportunity: Providing current-awareness solutions on a firm-wide basis can be an excellent opportunity for you to demonstrate the skills and knowledge that put you in charge of your organization’s information needs.

LexisNexis® can help. We can give you the tools and content to assist you with developing just the right current-awareness program for your organization. The majority of this issue of LexisNexis Information Professional Update is dedicated to providing you with information on the flexible range of LexisNexis Current Awareness Solutions. Your LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant also has many good ideas to share.

But, don’t take our word for it alone. Several of our Information Professional customers have agreed to share their insights on LexisNexis Current-Awareness Solutions:

• Gwendolyn Wilcox, Electronic Resources Librarian at Winston & Strawn, LLP, gives you an honest appraisal of her firm’s program to manage “e-mail update overload” with LexisNexis® Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys®. Don’t miss it.

• Holly Pinto, Director of Library Services, Holland & Hart LLP, and her team use LexisNexis® Publisher to push vital content throughout the 350-lawyer firm. Inside she shares a few of her Publisher applications and insights. It’s well worth your reading time.

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LexisNexis® Current-Awareness Options:
Size Up Your Organization and Choose What Works Best

What are your current awareness challenges today? Chances are you have a lengthy list.

LexisNexis offers a variety of current-awareness products—each different yet flexible and compatible enough to work together for you as you create solutions as unique as the information needs of your organization.

Take a look at the chart below as you plan your organization’s current-awareness program.

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A Few Words about LexisNexis® Publisher from …Holly Pinto, Director of Library Services, Holland & Hart LLP

The Holland & Hart LLP Web site characterizes the firm as the “largest in the Rocky Mountain West” with 350 attorneys in 13 offices across seven western states as well as in Washington, D.C. Its broad range of practice areas includes civil litigation, oil and gas, tax, estate planning, environmental, bioscience and many others.

The firm’s expansive reach also gives Holly Pinto and her library staff of seven—five librarians and two support staffers all in the main Denver office—significant information challenges as they manage Holland & Hart’s library collections and electronic research tools and offer business- and legal-research support and training.

For example, they constantly measure the appropriate means for firm attorneys to fulfill their research needs, i.e., electronic v. print; monitor copyright compliance for their electronic distribution; and determine which library services should be added or discontinued.
When it comes to current awareness, Pinto includes LexisNexis Publisher in her library’s portfolio. Here’s why:

Q: How has LexisNexis Publisher helped you and your firm deliver targeted information? 
A: “LexisNexis Publisher allows us to set up topics specific to our attorney/practice group/marketing department needs. We can formulate a search across a large number of publications relevant to our needs. For example, right now we are running searches on all of our office locations in the local newspapers in each region.”
       “Publisher is very efficient, effective—quite a time saver. We can quickly set up a topic, test the search, make changes if needed and publish it to a variety of formats. I especially like the XML option and have used it on a number of practice and department pages on our Portal. The XML option makes it easy to ‘grab’ the results and publish them anywhere internally. We get maximum distribution, and I don’t have to worry about copyright issues.”

Q: What do you monitor with LexisNexis Publisher?
A: “We track some clients and legal topics such as e-discovery and climate changes. The managing partner brings me articles from The Wall Street Journal® and has me search for them in (LexisNexis) Publisher. Then we post the link on the Partner portal page. There is a nice collection of investment and retirement planning articles ready for viewing.”
       “Our future plans include using (LexisNexis) Publisher more for competitive intelligence. And I would love to move most of our (LexisNexis) Alerts to Publisher and set them up as a distribution list.”

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Major Law Firm Info Pro Builds Update Solution With LexisNexis® Total Alerts Powered by Ozmosys®

by Gwendolyn Wilcox, Electronic Resources Librarian,
Winston & Strawn, LLP

Today’s news is blogged, podcasted, tickered, tagged and fed here, there and everywhere in a matter of minutes. Sometimes even e-mail seems slow in comparison. Yet the convenience of having the news come to you by way of the one application you probably know best—e-mail—is undeniable. One way or another, we’re accessing our inbox throughout the day. E-mail, no matter what the device, keeps us connected. It keeps us “in the know.”

What’s in It for Them?
So, too, for the attorneys we serve, which is in part why LexisNexis® Total Alerts is an appealing solution to the “news problem.” LexisNexis Total Alerts also have the potential to help attorneys manage information overload. In a single e-mail, attorneys can receive any combination of BNA® newsletter content; LexisNexis news on clients and hot topics; press releases from companies of interest; Federal Register notices; numerous alerts from government agencies, respected Web sites, and blogs; and more. Each attorney determines the order in which this information is displayed in their customized e-mail—a tremendous benefit for busy professionals who must prioritize the day’s reading.

Getting Started with LexisNexis Total Alerts
At Winston & Strawn, LLP, the implementation of LexisNexis Total Alerts was an opportunity for Library Services to partner with Business Development and the IT Department to create a valuable news delivery product. The time initially spent setting up content groupings and establishing procedures to properly administer the service proved to be important to its ongoing manageability.
Upon going “live” with My Daily News in 2005, Library Services promoted the service through e-mail notices and news postings on the firm’s intranet, and through a special internal Web site providing additional information. Attorneys new to the firm receive a welcome e-mail describing the service, and of course, as new content is incorporated, Library Services reaches out to those who may have an interest.

Encountering Bumps in the Road
Since its debut, we have met a few challenges. When we implemented delivery of a monthly publication through LexisNexis Total Alerts, feedback from attorneys made us realize that the service is best suited to delivering content published frequently—weekly at least. Content costs, though more controllable with LexisNexis Total Alerts, still boggle the mind, and then there’s the frustration of finding a great content resource, only to discover that it’s not in a format that works well with the service.
One hurdle we’ve yet to overcome entirely is lack of awareness. I would venture to guess that there are My Daily News recipients who still don’t know that the newsletter is customizable or that, care of Library Services, they are daily consumers of RSS feeds.

So What’s Up Next
Clearly we still have work to do on the promotion side. Beyond that, there are always searches to be set up in LexisNexis® Publisher and an ongoing need to identify, test and make new content available. Projects on the horizon include a My Daily News “facelift” in accordance with the firm’s branding.

Care of LexisNexis Total Alerts, we also have a hosted blog, a tool which we have used to create a summer associate pathfinder for our electronic resources. Because updates to the blog are fed through My Daily News, Library Services is looking into ways to utilize the blog to promote greater awareness of available resources and of the library more generally. If all goes well, we may introduce the blog to other administrative departments and invite them to utilize it to reach out
to attorneys in a new way.

The Million-Dollar Question
With LexisNexis Total Alerts, your library can provide reliable content, manage content costs and distribution, and help increase attorney productivity, albeit perhaps with a few stumbling blocks along the way. But, surely by now, the Big Question is going through your mind: Are your attorneys using the service?  In short, yes. We receive weekly requests from attorneys to add alerts to their newsletters and occasional requests to investigate the possibility of offering new alerts. Since we implemented My Daily News in 2005, just a handful of recipients have asked us to discontinue their e-mails, and when something isn’t working quite right, we hear about it.

We aren’t fooling ourselves, however; after all, subscriber count may not equal reader count and direct feedback has been relatively sparse, though generally positive when received. Recognizing that e-mail delivery alone may be insufficient, we continue to monitor the marketplace for supplementary services. However, for the foreseeable future, we are committed to providing an e-mail delivery option, and LexisNexis Total Alerts is a straightforward, manageable and personalized way to do just that.

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Deal Lawyers can Select M&A Task and Move Directly to Content with New Practice Center

The new LexisNexis® M&A Practice Center offers single-point access to a complete portfolio of M&A information and services, including practice guidance, precedent, primary law, treatises and due diligence.

But the M&A Practice Center has so much more than resources. It identifies the key stages of complex corporate transactions—i.e., due diligence, drafting agreements—and provides a simple, yet thorough method for managing each stage of the deal in one central location.

Select a stage from the M&A Practice Center menu, choose your task and go. Information can often be obtained without having to enter search terms, though the FOCUS feature is available to refine the results. (And as new M&A content and tools become available on lexis.com, they will be integrated into the M&A Practice Center, truly making it an online platform for M&A information.)

There is no additional charge to gain access to the LexisNexis M&A Practice Center. Just click the RESEARCH TASKS tab on the main lexis.com menu. Click the All Research Tasks link (Note: Look for the link, not the red button.)

Select M&A Practice Center. You can make this practice center your starting point after you log on to lexis.com. Just click the Set as my default Research Task Page link. (Or edit your current default.)
Once the Center displays, you can click on a deal stage in the left column or in the center of the main page. (The category menu in the left column displays on all screens so you can move easily between steps. And a breadcrumb trail at the top of the screen provides easy navigation from search results to other deal steps.)

Deal stages in the LexisNexis M&A Practice Center include:

Latest M&A News
Stay up-to-date on the latest developments in your practice. Get information from the sources you trust on the deals and deal makers moving the markets. For example:

• Stay up-to-date on current M&A news from sources like The Wall Street Journal®, The New York Times®, Financial Times and FactSet Flashwire™. (Get more details on FactSet® products available through lexis.com in next month’s LexisNexis Information Professional Update.)
• View the most recent stories on M&A topics from the vast repository of LexisNexis M&A news sources.
• Set up ongoing news alerts that you can review online or receive via e-mail.

Structure the Deal
Structure deals effectively by consulting examples of recent deals and overviews of major transactions. Plus, gain access to timely and relevant on-point precedent, deal documents, guidance and much more including information from EDGAR Online® and FactSet® MergerStat®, MergerMetrics™, Shark Repellent™ and Deal Advisors.

Perform Due Diligence
Perform in-depth due diligence on acquisition candidates, targets and your own clients.
Gather information and intelligence about people and millions of private and public companies, including news, financial analysis, third-party overviews, public records, litigation and more. You can:

• Get a profile, financials, or compile background information on millions of global private and public companies with reports from LexisNexis® Company Dossier, Dun & Bradstreet®, Experian®, Reuters®, EDGAR Online Real-Time SEC Filings, Historical Quotes and more.
• Compile an in-depth report on a company or person using the warehouse of LexisNexis sources.
• Review public records on a company, person or location via LexisNexis SmartLinx®.
• Review cases, litigation dockets and liens/judgments in which your subject has been involved.
• Get news and business information on a company or person. Get support and guidance for conducting due diligence.
• Consult expert guidance for performing due diligence and evaluating and investigating companies. Use sample checklists to get started.

Create Documents
Draft documents for deals after referencing on-point precedent agreements and clauses, organizational documents, sample language and forms—all through point-and-click features and easy-to-use search templates. Analyze everything from joint venture and merger agreements to by-laws and articles of incorporation. And find related forms from Warren’s Forms of Agreements® and Rabkin & Johnson Current Legal Forms with Tax Analysis. Even get federal drafting and filing requirements and regulations.

Negotiate and Review
Review research and other materials dealing directly with negotiations, including law reviews like the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, legal news and journals. And find guidance and information for negotiating a deal.

Close, Execute and File
Understand execution and filing requirements, regulations and guidelines at the federal and state level. Get checklists and filing instructions, exchange and SRO manuals, and more. For example, you can:

• View corporate filing requirements for all 50 states.
• Get federal or self-regulatory filing requirements and regulations.
• Find answers to questions that arise on a day-to-day basis through analytical sources, guides and check lists.

Research
Locate on-point statutes and regulations, review case decisions, access legislative information, read through relevant analytical materials and treatises, complete a compliance review, or review the state of a law in a particular jurisdiction.

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Library of Congress Director Speaks, Offers Tips for Cultivating Leadership

Government librarians got an inspiring talk on leadership from Donna Scheeder, Director, Law Library Services at the Law Library of the Library of Congress, during the LexisNexis Government Customer Appreciation Lunch at the AALL Annual Meeting July 17.

Now you can enjoy the same motivation! Scheeder’s talk, entitled Leadership Through Influence: The Path for 21st Century Government Librarians, is available via a Special Episode of the LexisNexis® Federal Info Pro Podcast. Listen to Scheeder’s insights and practical tips right from the player. Or download from the MP3 link and listen at your convenience. You can also grab the podcast right off iTunes®. Go to the podcast at LexisNexis Federal Info Pro here.

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Full-Text Elsevier Journal Total Soars Above 350!

Determine standards of care. Monitor a vast spectrum of medical, health, environmental, pharmaceutical, genetics, etc. companies—their intellectual properties and their research pipelines. Find preeminent experts and tune into their examinations and critiques of the scientific theories important to your clients.

Do all of this—and more—with Elsevier full-text publications* available through lexis.com. Now there are more than 350 full-text publications available.

For details on the new resources, go to the latest Elsevier Full-Text Journals via lexis.com Quick Reference publication, now posted on the LexisNexis InfoPro Web site. Click here to review.

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LexisNexis™ Information Professional Update

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LexisNexis Information Professional Update is a monthly newsletter (November/December issues combined) for law-firm, law-school, corporate, and government information professionals published by LexisNexis, P.O. Box 933, Dayton, OH 45401-0933.

Managing Editor
Barbara M. Byrd
barbara.byrd@lexisnexis.com

Contributors
Peter Adams, Beverly Burns, Kara Cox,
Jayne Nash, Carol Sandy

Legal Liaison
Shari Townsend

For comments or questions regarding legal
products, contact:

Cindy Spohr, MLS
Senior Director, Librarian Relations Group
cindy.spohr@lexisnexis.com

LexisNexis, lexis.com, Martindale-Hubbell and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks, and FOCUS is a trademark of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. SmartLinx is a registered trademark and Mealey’s is a trademark of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. CourtLink is a registered trademark of LexisNexis CourtLink, Inc. Warren’s Forms of Agreement is a registered trademark of Matthew Bender & Company, Inc. BNA is a registered trademark of The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
© 2007 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier. All Rights Reserved. LB2007-9 0807

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