Reading Time: 4 minutes
We are over a quarter of the way through the initial semester of my law practice technology class. Talk about building an airplane while flying it. My book has provided the skeleton and now I’m figuring out what can be accomplished within a 26-hour semester. In order to keep it practical—because
Explorations with Information and Technology
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Zero Sum Legal Publishing
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Another year, another change in legal information. The AALL Committee on Relations with Information Vendors (CRIV) did a nice write up of American Lawyer Media’s strategic changes. It is not the first legal publisher to (a) center its content exclusively on its own platform nor (b) to create all-or-nothing content…
The Chimera of the Self-Hosted Digital Library
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Someone posted a long thread to a micro blogging site I am on about the self-hosted library. I am not going to link to it because it’s well-meaning and also not a one-off. These posts appear periodically when people with technology acumen experience the epiphany of financial extraction in the information…
The Changing Times
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
It is a new year according to people who follow the Gregorian tradition. Increasingly, I have neglected or ignored the change from December 31 to January 1. It may be age as much as anything—I am like the 40% of Americans who will go to bed before the clock strikes…
Æ is for Effort
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 9 minutes
The semester is over. All going well, my grading will be done by the time this post appears. I am looking forward to the student evaluations, which I made a very pointed pitch to have them complete. It is the second skills-oriented class I have taught and reinforced for me how…
The Inbox and the Desk Chair
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 9 minutes
I was sick recently and had to miss some days of work. This meant that my email inbox was filling up. Even as we move into the holiday-end-of-semester-holiday period, I can see more than 50 emails a day. A handful of those messages matter—colleagues on a shared project, staff with specific…
Blog Post Rescue Mission
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I posted recently about how, despite there being a great opportunity, blogs seem to remain a niche information source. I mentioned the LawProfs network, which hosted a couple of blogs I followed (Academic Success, and so on), as coming to the end of its life. I had reached out to…
Dog Fooding the LMS
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 9 minutes
The University is moving from Anthology’s Blackboard learning management system to Instructure’s Canvas. It looks like it’s just in the nick of time. Our full cut over isn’t until fall 2026 but, both because I’m the person responsible for our instructional tech team and because I’m teaching in the spring,…
Scholarship Clout Chasing
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I had a sales pitch from a program inside Elsevier’s SSRN unit. The idea was to create a Research Paper Series that showcases the law school’s scholarship. The Dean pitched the cold call over to me and so I followed up. I was interested to see that part of the pitch…
Artificial Intelligence is a Gift
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 10 minutes
I had to laugh to myself when a journal editor said that it was all they could do to avoid an AI-only volume. We were on a panel discussing artificial intelligence in law school and I felt their pain. Who wants to read anything about AI any more? Haven’t we all…
High-Profile Presentation Logistics
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been at the law school for over a year now and we have monthly faculty assemblies outside of the summer months. It has been interesting to see people’s presentation styles in what is the largest regular meeting I attend. It’s an audience of 50 odd people—faculty and staff—and that’s a…
No, Your OTHER Self
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been noticing my guard dropping in my interactions at work. I first noticed it after a class, when the students had brought up a topic and I had ended up reaching back into my own personal history for a story. I’ve felt it a bit with interactions with some…
Reflections on Paper
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I will be taking my research and writing students on a tour of the law library soon. It’ll include a walk through our collection floors and past my office, as well as other nooks and crannies. I don’t keep any diplomas on the wall which, while I’m not defensive about it,…
Wrangling the Money
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve been in my current role just over a year and it is the second one where we had a bit of process change around money. In my previous role, the CFO died about 5 months after I started and we found that knowledge of some of the library’s processes died…
The Bump and the Grind
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I’m in a liminal space on my writing. It was a very busy summer, one way and another, and I was in a bit of a forced march to get projects done before it was over. The book manuscript is the longest piece I’ve ever written. I got it and a…
Law Through A Kaleidoscope
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
It all started with a inflammatory headline on an article shared on Mastodon. It was from a politically aligned media site that was suggesting that a new Congressional Bill would deprive Americans of rights. I read the article and then I read the bill. By the time I returned to Mastodon,…