CRIV / Bloomberg Law Semiannual Call

Jeanne Frazier Price
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Director of the Wiener-Rogers Law Library
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Date: Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Participants: Jeanne Frazier Price (CRIV Liaison to Bloomberg Law), Lauren Kaplan (Head of Strategy, Bloomberg Law), Michelle Hook Dewey (AALL Executive Board Liaison to CRIV) & Ross Pendley (Customer Experience Manager, Bloomberg Law)

Updates from Bloomberg Law

Mike Bernier, former Director of Library Relations at Bloomberg Law, had long served as Bloomberg’s liaison to CRIV. Mike retired at the end of November 2022. While we very much miss Mike’s helpfulness, good nature, and kindness, we look forward to working with Lauren and Ross.

The update on Bloomberg Law products centered on (1) improvements in findability and accessibility of materials on Bloomberg; (2) enhancements to docket information and the discoverability of information about dockets and the documents in them; (3) additions to practical guidance resources; and (iv) an increased presence on the part of Bloomberg Law in trending issues important to the legal community. Highlights from Bloomberg Law follow.

Improvements in Findability/Accessibility

• Users can now search by phrase within a document, rather than having to sift through appearances of the individual words that make up the phrase
• Sorting options have improved
• Recommendations based on past use are suggested

Docket and Litigation Enhancements

• New courts added (additional state and local courts; Puerto Rico Court of First Instance) and some progress on lifting access restrictions in other courts
• New filtering options for search results (e.g., resolution, settlement noted, class action, county court)
• Patent Trial and Appeal Board cases can now be filtered by inter partes review, covered business method, post-grant review
• Improved docket search functionality from the initial search option
• New fields for filtering within docket search results: case outcome, case settlement, potential class action, case status, case length in days
• Causes of Action field and complaint summaries added to Docket Alerts for federal district court cases

Practical Guidance Improvements

• Labor & Employment
  • New customized chart-builder functionality for local paid leave and local minimum wage information
  • Enhanced practical guidance on pay equity
  • Updated 8th edition of ABA-jointly published The Developing Labor Law: The Board, the Courts, and the National Labor Relations Act
  • Additions to resources on employee immigration issues, including docket tracking and updated practical guidance on employee hiring
• Transactional Drafting Tools
  • Additions of different types of agreements to the Draft Analyzer
  • Additions to sample contract clauses to cover trending issues related to, among other things, supply-chain challenges
• Environmental, Social, and Governance Issues
  • New toolkit for the health industry, including specific information focused on drug retailers, health care delivery and manager care
  • New toolkit for the manufacturing industry, including specialized guidance for companies engaging in mining, oil and gas activities, electronics-related activities, and technology
• Privacy and Data Security
  • Updated home page and enhanced alert features
  • Enhancements to functionality for building state bill proposal searches for biometric and consumer privacy initiatives
  • Enhanced access to information on Edgar filings and transactional precedents, dockets and court opinions, state privacy resources, international materials, and federal statutes, regulations, and agency materials
  • Enhanced client alerts related to the General Data Protection Regulation, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
• Banking and Finance
  • New practice pages on fintech compliance and the UCC
  • Updated practice center features including new state banking and finance regulation and federal banking and finance regulation trackers, each with alerting and filtering functionality
  • Improvements to state and federal securities coverage and enhancements to the functionality of the Rule 506 Form D Filings Chart Builder
• Emerging Issues
  • Three new In Focus features
    • One that enables discovery of A.I.-related information and documents across practice areas, including an interactive state map linking to a comparison table of A.I.-related legislation and regulations
    • A second focusing on federal and state developments in abortion law arising out of the Dobbs decision
    • And another on pay transparency at state and local levels

Engagement in Current Issues

Bloomberg continues its support of both:

• The Law School Innovation Program which identifies and honors law schools and faculty that implement programming designed to advance new methodologies in teaching
• The DEI Framework which recognizes law firms that meet standardized and transparent criteria in measuring diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Requests for Assistance

Since the last liaison call, CRIV had received only one request for assistance involving Bloomberg products. That request related to the sometimes unavailability of downloads from particular dockets; users would receive an error message to the effect that the particular document required courier retrieval (which was inaccurate – the document was available for download on PACER). Bloomberg had acknowledged the problem but had shared no timetable for resolution. Similar concerns had been voiced on the law library directors listserv. Mike Bernier was contacted, investigated the problem, and quickly got back in touch with both the CRIV liaison and the librarian who had submitted the request. The problem, which had to do with multi-part pleadings in particular courts, was identified and largely fixed. The requestor described Mike’s responsiveness and help as “fantastic.”

Questions from CRIV

The call concluded with questions raised by the CRIV liaison. First, with respect to print materials, Bloomberg continues to publish only tax materials in print. There are no current plans to change that approach. As to the availability of stand-alone access to the ABA/Bloomberg Law Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, Bloomberg representatives believed that such access is available and intend to follow up with additional information. Some concerns were raised about the difficulty of accessing Bloomberg News / Bloomberg Terminal articles in the Bloomberg Law platform. Lauren and Ross acknowledged that this was a known issue, that improvements were underway, and that, in the meantime, there were work-arounds. Finally, the Bloomberg representatives were asked about the reception to the changes in access and pricing for Pacer materials for academic customers that were instituted some time ago in order to curb some unexpectedly high use. Lauren and Ross suggested that those changes seem to now be fairly well-accepted among the academic user community.