CRIV CONNECTION

The second CRIV/Bloomberg liaison call of 2023 took place (way belatedly) in February 2024. AALL/CRIV representatives Jeanne Frazier Price (CRIV chair and Bloomberg liaison); Michelle Hook Dewey (AALL Executive Board member); and Vani Ungapen (AALL Executive Director) met with Madeline Cohen (Bloomberg’s Library Relations Director).  Cohen shared product updates and enhancements and answered questions triggered by AALL member input. 

Bloomberg’s focus in 2023 was on improvements to dockets content and functionality, many of which responded directly to customer feedback.  State court content has significantly increased, with docket information for 323 new state courts added to the resource; those courts represent a variety of levels and types of state judiciaries. Forty-three jurisdictions are now represented in the state court dockets content. Filtering options have been added (e.g., damages amounts, industry, and party role), as well as a new tool that predicts outcomes of particular cases included in the Bloomberg database. Users can more quickly identify documents available for download and can more easily track particular documents within the full docket information.

The Bloomberg homepage has seen improvements as well, most notably it has been simplified and is less cluttered and can easily be customized by individual subscribers using drag-and-drop functionality. Results from searches undertaken on the homepage have also been enhanced, with more references to recommendations, charts, and other secondary sources. 

The new Law Librarian Resources Collection (which can be added to any user’s homepage) brings together primary authorities and secondary sources that are especially useful in the law school context. Another resource that’s of particular interest to academic users is the Law School Innovation Program page. That Program recognizes efforts among law schools to incorporate technology into instruction and outreach.  Descriptions of law school programming and other innovations are included on the Program webpage. 

Questions focused on BNA’s plans for its print materials, the possibility of subscribing to less than the full Bloomberg platform, the availability of secondary source archival materials, the integration of generative AI functionality into the Bloomberg product, and the availability of usage statistics. 

Apart from the ABA/Bloomberg Manual on Professional Conduct and titles it continues to publish in print (the Bloomberg/BNA Tax Management Portfolios), Bloomberg has no plans to disaggregate content on the Bloomberg platform or to provide alternatives in terms of content slices to the current subscription model. Bloomberg recognizes the need for archival versions of secondary sources and is continuing the process of adding archival versions of print secondary sources to the platform and determining how best to preserve and make available superseded born-digital secondary sources. The readability of archived print materials on the platform has improved. 

Many of Bloomberg’s enhancements to the platform (e.g., the predictive outcome tool) rely on AI, and Bloomberg expects to continue to integrate AI functionality into its product, with more announcements on that topic expected before the AALL Annual Meeting in July 2024. Those AI-supported improvements are likely to center on legal research functionality, contract drafting and analytics, litigation drafting, and document summarization.

Finally, subscribers’ needs for reliable and consistent usage statistics were discussed. 

A more thorough report on the Bloomberg liaison call will appear in the upcoming issue of The CRIV Sheet.