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.

Bloomberg Law CRIV Liaison Meeting

June 15, 2022

Attendees:

            Michelle Hook Dewey, CRIV, Board Liaison (Mercer University Law Library)

            Tom Hemstock, CRIV, Vendor Liaison (Albany Law School, Schaffer Law Library)

            Mike Bernier, Bloomberg Law

            Kristyn Hyland, Bloomberg Law

            Vani Ungapen, ALL Executive Director

Prior Business

            None

Current CRIV Member Issues with Bloomberg Law

            None

Mike Bernier and Kristyn Hyland reported on updates and recent changes to Bloomberg Law.

PRACTITIONER TOOLS

  • Bloomberg Law Continues to Enhance its Collection of Practitioner Tools. New content development in this category includes 325+ new Practical Guidance documents so far in 2022.
  • New Tort Defenses Practical Guidance – a companion to our Tort Actions and Tort Damages and Relief coverage – including state-specific content for defenses to claims such as negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, defamation, and fraud.
  • State Allocation of Liability Chart Practical Guidance, providing insight into a client’s level of risk in a negligence case. This chart quickly identifies the theories of liability applied by each state and DC.

TRANSACTIONAL TOOLS

Enhancements available in the Transactional Intelligence Center continue and now include:

  • How to Use Transactional Tools & Features Practical Guidance designed to help lawyers unlock the value of our transactional tools and resources, including descriptions of how the tools work, common use cases, pro-tips, and more
  • Marketing & Digital Rights Practical Guidance that provide sample language, drafting tips, and precedent searches to assist Bloomberg Law customers with drafting and negotiating common forms of marketing and engagement agreements that involve digital rights.

LITIGATION TOOLS

  • Market-leading Bloomberg Law Dockets is a mainstay of Bloomberg Law’s litigation offering and has had several recent enhancements.
  • Enhanced dockets search with new filtering options (Resolutions, Class Action, County Courts, and new CSV fields when downloading search results, e.g., nature of suit, cause of action)
  • Enhancing dockets is a key priority for 2022 with more to come.

BOOKS & TREATISES

  • Bloomberg Law will add 40+ new Books & Treatises in July from leading publishers including ABA and James, strengthening the litigation reference library.  A MARC record update in July will cover the changes.  Contact Matthew Newton (mnewton@bloombergindustry.com or Mike Bernier (mbernier@bloombergindustry.com) to be added to our MARC record update distribution list.

PRACTICE AREA COVERAGE

Bloomberg Law continues to strengthen practice area coverage with important enhancements.

Labor & Employment.  More state coverage as a result of user feedback:

Environmental, Social, Governance

Banking & Finance

Tax

  • Redesigned practice group landing coming June 21.
  • Ready-made OnPoints presentations on key tax developments are new, allowing practitioners to use and edit presentations on key tax developments.

LAW SCHOOL INNOVATION PROGRAM

Bloomberg Law has launched a law school innovation program to highlight innovative efforts to teach future lawyers.

Law School Innovation Program identifies and promotes law school programs that are helping students transition successfully to legal practice.  Applications are now open and will close on 9/6/2022.  Bloomberg Law’s law school representatives can answer any questions, and the organizers of the program will be at AALL.

AALL

Bloomberg Law will be present at AALL to highlight what’s new with Bloomberg Law and to answer any questions.  Librarians wishing to sign up for time to meet with a representative of Bloomberg Law before the conference should reach out to Mike Bernier

Summer Associate & Intern Guidance from Vendors

The three leading legal research vendors – Bloomberg, LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) – each offer free online guidance and resources to help law students and new graduates use their products in the legal workplace.

These resources are current for summer 2022 and may be helpful as a complement to on-the-job training or as a refresher on platform-specific research tools and tactics. Consider sending the links below to your students, associates, or interns for their preparation and reference this summer.

Keeping Up with the Vendors – In Their Own Words

Tracking developments in legal information vendors’ products and policies is an important part of many law librarians’ jobs, and it’s a valuable pursuit for keeping current in the profession.

While the major legal database and content providers all offer a variety of access points and formats for news about changes to their platforms and offerings, being aware of them all, let alone connecting with them regularly, can be a challenge.

To help, the list below brings together resources for staying abreast of announcements and product-related communications from Bloomberg, Fastcase, HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Wolters Kluwer. Be sure to bookmark, subscribe, follow, etc. whichever are useful to you, and/or save this blog post for future reference. Please email me at christensena@wlu.edu if you know of anything missing; I’ll plan to keep it updated.

Bloomberg Law

Fastcase

HeinOnline

LexisNexis

Thomson Reuters Legal / Westlaw

Wolters Kluwer

CRIV/Bloomberg Law Bi-Annual Call

The bi-annual CRIV/Bloomberg Law call took place on July 29, 2021, at 11:00 a.m., via Zoom. In attendance were:

  • Mike Bernier, Director of Library Relations, Bloomberg Law
  • Joe Breda, President, Bloomberg Law
  • Michelle Hook Dewey, AALL Board Liaison to CRIV, Mercer School of Law  
  • Tom Hemstock, CRIV Liaison to Bloomberg Law, Albany Law School

Outstanding Issues:

None

New Items:

Expanding News Channels

14 new news channels added in 2020 and that number is increasing. Bloomberg Law is adding timely channels such as Social Justice & Diversity, Cannabis, and more.

Improved Email Alerts

In response to customer feedback and to increase engagement, Bloomberg modified email subject lines in alerts to be more descriptive. For example, the sender for the Banking Report will be a variation on “Banking” instead of the umbrella “Bloomberg Law” line that is unclear.

ALM News Content

Although introduced in 2020, and mentioned in the previous vendor call, Bloomberg Law emphasizes that they have ALM content (such as National Law Journal) added shortly after the content is published on ALM’s site.

In-Focus Content

Bloomberg Law continues to add new in-focus pages that brings resources together in one place. Resources on these pages are crafted by experts in the field. Recent In-Focus pages include Contract Drafting, Biometrics and a Core Litigation Skills Toolkit.

Draft Analyzer Improvements

Significant new features are now included such as improved comments, the ability to create a table of contents of clauses, hyperlinks to defined terms within the uploaded draft, and details/comments on the clauses used in the document.

Case Law Enhancements

Opinions can be now filtered by published and unpublished opinions.

Law Librarian Update

A newsletter for librarians launched and is available at https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/law-librarian-newsletter/.  Emails are sent to librarians when new editions are posted.  Contact Mike Bernier at mbernier@bloombergindustry.com to be added to the distribution list.