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CMLawLibraryBlog

The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law community about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests.

Aggressive Tactics for Landing a Big Firm Job

Sue Altmeyer, Electronic Services Librarian, sue.altmeyer@law.csuohio.edu | November 12, 2007 - 14:33

Cameron Stracher, Commentary: Guerrilla Tactics Can Help You Survive the Recruiting Jungle, The American Lawyer, Nov. 9, 2007 (on Lawjobs.com), tells you how you can get a big firm job even if you did not get an on-campus interview. The article highlights tactics such as calling the recruiting coordinator directly, using your contacts and even crashing law firm parties. Law firm partners want someone with the enthusiasm and chutzpah to employ these guerrilla tactics, says Stracher.


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Do Court Opinions have Friends? Using Social Networking Theory to Organize Case Law Databases

Jan Novak, Associate Director jan.novak@law.csuohio.edu | November 12, 2007 - 11:20

In Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research , Syracuse University College of Law Professor Ian Gallacher focuses on how the increasingly digital legal publishing environment limits the ability of all users to access the law. Saying good-bye to print research techniques doesn’t burden the legal researcher with full and unfettered access to Westlaw and Lexis: both systems offer the self-indexing approaches of Boolean and natural language searching, as well as numerous pre-indexing editorial enhancements common to print tools. Gallacher, however, is concerned that open access alternatives to the major legal information vendors do not provide sufficient indexing retrieval mechanisms.

Gallacher uses social networking theory to describe how the pre-indexing inherent in judicial opinion writing can be used to map the relationships between authorities and the evolution of legal issues. The idea is to map case "A" by showing cases that relied upon case "A"(which cases would appear in a Shepards or Keycite) and cases which case "A" relied upon (which cases that would appear in a Lexis Table of Authorities). A database could employ a graphical representation to "allow the researcher to see the cases the court believed were most important to its decision on a particular issue and would permit the researcher to understand the relationships that exist between cases as they contribute to the development of a piece of legal doctrine."

Gallacher, Ian, "Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research" (October 24, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1024176


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Avoiding Dysfunctional Study Groups

Amy Burchfield, Access & Faculty Services Librarian amy.burchfield@law.csuohio.edu | November 12, 2007 - 08:53

As exam period approaches, the last thing you want as an extra stressor in your life is a dysfunctional study group. After all, study groups are supposed to facilitate learning, right? Not become immense wasters of your ever-more-elusive time.

A brief article by Amy L. Jarmon in the November issue of Student Lawyer offers some good "rules of the road" for successful study groups. Some of the tips are just plain etiquette - like having a rotating or permanent group moderator who is responsible for conveying information to others. Other tips are about optimal size of groups (3 - 4 members) or how to benefit from different individual learning styles.

If you want to read the article, you can ask for the current of issue of Student Lawyer at the Information Services desk. Student Lawyer also regularly runs short articles on interviewing, legal writing, professionalism, hot practice areas and other topics. It's the kind of publication you can easily flip through on a quick study break.

And of course, the Library offers study rooms for group study -- but they tend to fill up quickly the closer we get to exams, so reserve one in advance for your group at the Information Services desk.


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