Message from the President, March 13, 2009

Reaping the Benefits

I have recently discovered gardening. Not that I was unaware of it in years past, but I have recently become a participant. Some recent sunny days have afforded me the opportunity to start getting the gardens ready. I’m going to have three garden spots this year: one for herbs and two for vegetables. I have visions of beautiful basil and tomatoes; fresh beet green salads; and cucumber sandwiches. That said, what I have at the moment is one plot full of weeds and roots; one plot ready for tilling; one plot of clean, loose, healthy dirt; and two very tired arms and shoulders. In short, it doesn’t look like much right now. There is nothing instant about a garden.

We are sowing some pretty exciting seeds at VALL too! We have started a blog. We are developing a wiki. We have grant funds to support your professional development. I have visions of a vibrant and lively blog with VALL member news from every corner of the state. We are well on our way. I have visions of a wiki full of pages for collaborative program development; pages for conversations about issues facing law libraries; pages for members to build and contribute to resource guides. Amy Wharton has graciously agreed to break ground on this exciting project. Please let her know if you are willing to help with the early labor. I have visions of VALL members returning energized from all types of professional development meetings and programs. I look forward to hearing what you’ve learned, perhaps in a blog posting.

All of these projects need your avid participation. Our blog can only be lively if we hear from you. The terrific thing about a blog is that you don’t have to write a whole article. Do you have a few thoughts on a topic that might interest other VALL members? Submit it to Evelyn Campbell to post on the blog. Do you know of a VALL member who has received an award or deserves to be recognized? Let us know! Our wiki can only be collaborative if you participate. Are you developing a program? Would you like to collaborate with someone or solicit feedback from your colleagues? The wiki is the place for you. We will unveil the wiki at the May meeting, complete with instructions about how to build or contribute to a page. Our grants program only works if you apply. Donna Bausch and her committee are excited to support your professional development!

So it’s back to the garden for me today. If I expect to have beautiful plants this summer I need to start the seeds now and try to keep ahead of the weeds. Our VALL projects may be tiny sprouts right now, but with a little work from everyone we’ll be reaping the benefits in no time!

Leanne

Free workshop: Library of Virginia & the State Capitol

DISCOVER THE WORKINGS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

Do you want to learn more about the General Assembly and the
online Legislative Information System (LIS)? ... get an "inside" tour
of the State Capitol? .... participate in a mock session in the State
Senate?

Come to a FREE workshop to be held at the Library of Virginia & the
State Capitol.

Register at: http://host5.evanced.info/lva/evanced/eventsignup.asp?ID=684

Monday, April 13, 2009

9:30 AM : REGISTRATION & LIGHT REFRESHMENTS (Library of Virginia
lobby)

10:00 AM : THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY & THE LIS: learn how to navigate the
GA website and receive hands-on instruction on the Legislative
Information System (LIS) (Library of Virginia IT Lab, 1st floor)

12:15 PM : LUNCH & ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION, State Capitol, Senate Room 3
(A legislator seated at each table or panel discussion, depending upon
the number of attendees)

1:15 PM : STATE CAPITOL BUILDING TOUR: New discoveries are unveiled in
the renovated building

2:15 PM : MOCK SESSION, Senate Chamber: Learn the rules and
legislative language; participate in floor debates and cast votes

3:00 PM : ELECTIONS 2009 (meet and discuss issues with a political
analyst), Senate Chamber

3:30 PM : ADJOURN

For more information, contact Suzy Szasz Palmer at 804-692-3620 or
suzy.palmer@lva.virginia.gov

VALL Winter Meeting Feb 27 at George Mason Law Library (Photos by Heather Buchanan)

Ten General Counsel Resources

Rarely a day goes by without our reference staff receiving at least one request for general counsel information. The likelihood and ease of success of locating this information depends on the company type, size and location. For publicly-traded U.S. (and many Canadian or U.K.) companies, a visit to the Corporate Governance section of the company’s web site is usually all that is required. However, private and non-U.S. companies are another matter altogether.

Here is a list of resources that I typically consult in the course of my research for general counsel information:

1. Corporate web sites, generally on the “Investor Relations” web page under “Corporate Governance.”

2. Hoovers - http://www.hoovers.com - The “Key People” portion of company reports.

3. The Leadership Directory’s Corporate Yellowbook - General Counsel information is often included in the Officers and Management portion of a company profile.

4. Directory of Corporate Counsel - currently available on Lexis.

5. West Legal Directory - Corporate Counsel (WLD-CORPCO).

6. Corporate Representation (“Who Counsels Who”), available through Incisive Legal Intelligence (formerly American Lawyer Media). A few of the firms are designated as “Company Counsel” in the “Type of Representation” field.

7. SEC Filings via http://www.sec.gov - On occasion, a full text search through company filings for the term “counsel” or “general counsel” will bear fruit. However, this is a very hit-or-miss method.

8. Westlaw Business http://business.westlaw.com - A more sophisticated platform for searching SEC filings for the term “counsel” or “general counsel.”

9. State business registrations/filings - a growing number of states are offering electronic access to images of business entity filings. You may encounter filings by or mentioning in-house counsel.

10. News - press releases and articles that mention hirings, promotions or statements made by general counsel.

What resources do you use to find general counsel information?

Contributed by Michele Gernhardt.

Principles of Legal Research (West 2009)

Kent C. Olson from the University of Virginia Law Library has authored Principles of Legal Research which is due out this summer. It may not be out yet but Kent is giving us a preview of a portion of the book which should prove invaluable to all law libraries.

As an appendix to the book, Kent recently made a topical list of selected treatises and services. For each of 46 subjects it indicates the LC call number range and then lists (1) multi-volume treatises, (2) one-volume treatises and hornbooks, and (3) services. It also indicates which titles are available in Lexis or Westlaw, with WL database IDs.

The UVA Law Library has adapted this list to limit it to items available to its patrons. They have included the library's locations and call numbers, and listed the online-only items separately at the end of each section.

Kent says that anyone else interested in adapting the list for their own library holdings is welcome to do so. Please include a credit to the book, as UVA Law Library has done, if you create a handout or website adaptation.

The full list is available here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfgckfzv_4gxwzcfg4 and the version for UVA Law Library is here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/main/Treatises+by+Subject

Note from Kent:
I'd be happy to send these files as Word documents to anyone who'd like to use them. I'd also appreciate hearing about errors, oversights or updates, especially before the final printed version goes to press. Kent Olson at kolson@virginia.edu

Competitive Intelligence Sleuthing

Competitive Intelligence (CI) does not involve covert operations or espionage but it is sleuthing ... nearly almost always in electronic form. Law librarians have been doing CI sleuthing for a while and have seen an increase in the number of fee and free tools available nowadays. I could spend days just listing them, but that would defeat the purpose of this blog posting.


When you get a request for information on a company, the first thing you will have to determine is if it is a private or public company, and where it is incorporated. Use a large tool like http://www.hoovers.com/ to determine location and whether it is private or public. There is enough free content on Hoovers to give you this information. The premium databases will give you all kinds of valuable information including financials and key eople, etc.

Once you have identified location, you can either do a Google search for the state's corporations website or you can use BRB Publications' website to find the appropriate state and then do a name search for your entity : http://www.brbpub.com/freeresources/pubrecsitesStates.aspx The kind of information that is available varies from state to state and the searching capability of each site varies too, with Virginia's being one of the least user friendly.

If the company is not large enough to be listed on Hoovers and Googling the company name doesn't provide any useful information and you do not know where the company is incorporated, you will need to use a fee-based tool like http://www.accurint.com/ which is a "pay as you use" kind of subscription but you do need to register and be approved before you are given access. But if you do have access, a nationwide search of corporate filings should give you the state of incorporation. If you have access to Westlaw or Lexis, both have corporate databases that will yield the same information.

Obviously if a company is public you are going to be able to get a whole lot more information than if it were private. If you are looking for information on key management figures and boards of directors, check annual reports and SEC filings. Hoovers also has a section it calls Key People and this is where you can locate CEO information, resumes and salary information if available. If you have a Bloomberg subscription, don't forget to look here as well because it has a management section. Westlaw and Lexis are also good traditional tools to try.

Also, don't forget to look on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/ and ZoomInfo http://www.zoominfo.com/ both require free registration to get to more information. And as much as it pains me to say this, do not overlook social networking sites such as Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ I once found someone from a publishing house on Facebook whom I could not locate anywhere else, so do not rule this out as a business resource. Facebook requires registration to set up an account, but it is free.

And while we are on the topic of people hunting, online telephone directories are now more than just a listing of a name, address and telephone number. They have a value added feature listing all previous addresses, so if you are people tracking, this is another means of verifying address information about a person. 411.com is one that I use frequently http://www.411.com/

Once you have located your company and want to figure out its litigation history -- what lawsuits have been filed against it, in which jurisdictions is it being sued the most, what kind of matters is it being sued for? And most importantly, who is getting this client's business if you are not? Resources like West Monitor Suite, Courtlink, AdVantage and Bloomberg have profiles that will show the litigation history beautifully in the form of charts and graphs in eye-catching color. Each resource does it a little differently ... it really is a personal choice which one you pick, depending on what is required. The profiles are really very useful ... you are able to tell at a glance what is going on instead of having to weed through volumes of information, and they work very well to fitting into a report.

Don't overlook Pacer https://pacer.login.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl?court_id=00idx as a resource. It's harder to do and you don't get the pretty charts but it's still possible to know what is happening with a company's litigation. The US Party/Case Index provides a means of searching by company name and will provide a listing of the case name, the court, the date filed and the nature of suit.

If tracking a company's litigation is also part of your sleuthing expedition, you will become familiar with the alert services of Courtlink and CourtExpress, as well as of those of Westlaw and Lexis. If you have a Bloomberg Law account, you are in luck because it has a very speedy alert service. Do not forget about state litigation tracking. There is no way to do this comprehensively but there are some services that will do some part of it. There is Courthouse News Service http://www.courthousenews.com/ -- you can set up "Dingers" for companies, clients and people that you are watching. Virginia Lawyers Weekly
http://www.valawyersweekly.com/ has a daily alert that is very useful. VLW also has a blog to which you can subscribe. http://www.valawyersweekly.com/vlwblog/

And of course, one cannot say enough about keeping up with what is happening to a company/client through news alerts or RSS feeds. There are lots of very useful free tools out there. One really powerful one is Google News -- you can choose what you want Google to monitor and how often you want to receive the news alerts. Almost all the major newspapers also have free alerts -- make use of those. And if these newspapers provide access to their articles through a free registration on their site, take advantage of that. Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg law also have substantial news databases that provide news alerts. Cost will vary depending on your contract.

Getting CI on a company or client is a multi-tiered strategy -- there is not one resource or tool that will do it all. There are hundreds of tools out there, this posting is just a small compilation of a few that I use most frequently. I hope they will help you in your CI quests.

Contribute by Evelyn M. Campbell

Welcome to Leslie, Amy & Kristin

Leslie Ashbrook

Leslie is a reference librarian at the University of Virginia School of Law Library. She received her JD from the University of Missouri, her MSIS from the University of Texas and her BA from the College of William & Mary. Leslie who is originally from Chillicothe, Missouri, enjoys the outdoors and pursues hiking, biking and walking whenever she can.

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Amy Wharton

Amy is Research and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the University of Virginia School of Law Library. She received her JD from George Mason School of Law and her MLIS from the University of Oklahoma. Prior to joining the UVA law library, Amy held reference and electronic positions at several law firm libraries in Washington, DC. Her most recent position was with Winston & Strawn, LLP. When Amy is not working in the library she takes care of two kids -- Joey and Wendy and three frogs -- Cocoa, Eddie and Wilt.

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Kristin Glover is a research librarian at the University of Virginia School of Law Library. She graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2005. Kristin worked for three years as an attorney in the City of New York's Corporation Counsel's Office before joining the UVA law library.