 The moderator of this panel is Lucinda Harrison Cox, the Associate Law Librarian at RWU. A member of the RWU Law Library Founding Library staff, Lucinda has served as Associate Law Librarian since 2007. In addition to her administrative and reference responsibilities, she teaches in the library's Prepare for Practice certification program and teaches other research-related classes in the library and school of law. She has served as an officer and or committee chair for the various professional organizations, including LLNE, V-A-L-L, A-A-L-L, and I-L-U-G. Steve Albro is a Lexis-Nexis Academic Account Representative, where he currently supports the students and faculty in the law schools at Roger Williams, University of Maine, University of New Hampshire, and Western New England University. Steve is a Massachusetts attorney that has worked for Lexis-Nexis for 16 years with 12 of those working in various law schools throughout the New England area. Robert Brink is the Executive Director of the Social Library in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been the Executive Director since 1998. Robert served as Director of Special Projects for the Social Law Library between 1975 and 1984. In the interim, he served as the Executive Director of the Flaschner Judicial Institute, a not-for-profit judges organization dedicated to the professional development and continuing education of the Massachusetts judiciary. The Institute became affiliated with the library in 1999, and Mr. Brink has continued as its Executive Vice President. He is also a trustee and the Executive Director of the Supreme Judicial Court Historical Society. And now the introduction I have been dreading all day because it uses a name that I cannot pronounce. Ted Howell is the founder of Howell Legal. After graduating law school in 1999, Ted took a position with Testa Hurwitz and Toboe where he focused his practice on dot-com companies. After T-H-N-T, Ted took a position with a small Providence, Rhode Island-based firm where he focused his practice on shareholder agreements, contract negotiation, debt financing, asset protection, business succession planning, and mergers and acquisitions. In 2005, Ted began practice at Partridge Snow and Han where he practiced until May 2014. At Partridge Snow and Han, Ted became partner and chair of the corporate group. During his tenure, Ted also got more involved in the startup community, which eventually led to the formation of Howell Legal. Today, his clients run the gamut from large companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues to the earliest stage pre-revenue startup. His passion is getting to know the client and the client's business and integrating himself in a team approach to the provision of legal services. I can tell I'm shorter than she is. Okay, for our panel discussion, we are discussing what law librarians can do to support innovation, entrepreneurs, legal incubators, and law schools, their firms, bar incubators, any incubators, innovation, generally. Our three panelists all represent different aspects of what can be done. And I'm going to direct questions. Fortunately, I get to have the questions written for me. I did not write these questions, at least not all of them. So I'm gonna start with Robert from Social Law Library. Social Law Library is currently providing some entrepreneurial support services to attorneys. Would you care to tell us a little about these services and how they develop, what type of expertise is needed to staff and what resources are needed? Sure. Well, first of all, for those of us, the insecure panelist always brings handouts. So here's a hand out of our newest website and Social Law, we're helping lawyers put down their roots in the legal industry. For those of you that don't know where the oldest law library in the country, we have 14,000 members. We service the three branches of Massachusetts government, the largest firms in the city, three or 4,000 solo practitioners around Massachusetts, 278, 80 towns, every single legal service agency in Massachusetts. So we try to provide services to every one of our constituents. I just wanna sort of just make an observation about innovation. I'm not a big person for innovation. I mean, I don't think the innovation is the goal. I think innovation might be the means, but as our prior speaker talked, I'm more interested in marketing and listening. Learn to listen and listen to learn and sometimes you come up with solutions that are innovative. And that's what I'm interested in. I think Social Law has been very innovative and in terms of developing our past, we listened to our members. We went through maybe a year or two years ago, three years ago, a big strategic plan and a marketing thing. And I said, oh, this is what they need, this is what they need, this is what they need. And when you actually went out and did focus groups, nobody thought that what I thought they needed is what they needed. They had their own ideas and our goal is to develop products and services to meet the needs of our members. The last speaker was very innovative, but you know, the CAT scan, the guy that he listened to the child, what is the need of the child and then they developed a service around that. She had the board with all the stick-ups after she listened. Learn to listen, listen to learn. So I'm not sure, I don't put a huge premium on innovation for innovation's sake. I'm interested in solving people's problems and using the best tools available and the shortest distance between two points. And so in terms of just sort of to break up our membership, we have innovative services for every branch. We, for our solo practitioners, you know, we not only provide all the databases that are remotely available when we can't provide the large vendors remote access. We have fast case and we have high non-line and we have all of those kinds of things that we're licensed to provide remotely. But lawyers in Massachusetts, most of them are solo practitioners and there's a lot more to practicing law than legal research. And our goal is to help lawyers in all of their activities. So we have something that we sort of generally call, you know, social law office in a box. We design websites, we help them brand, we do their stationary, we do their business cards, we have technology so that they can do webinars for their clients using our technology. We're an ISP provider, they're internet. We have a whole host of services that are not strictly library services. They're services to help lawyers, young lawyers practice law. And we have a number of young lawyers that actually use the social law library as their office. Two people come to mind. There's a guy named Adam Russell. He didn't have any office. He came to the social law library for two or three years and he practiced drunk driving cases in the Boston Municipal Court. And they come to the library, use our services, use the email, do all of that. Now he finally learned how to be a trial lawyer. He has his own office. We have another young guy named Sean. I forgot his last name. A firm of two people, they use our office and they have what they call a virtual law firm. And they go out, they go to their clients. Their clients don't go to them. So we're very interested in providing the tools to every possible tool necessary or that we can provide to help our members practice law. So those are solo practitioners. You know, large firms and mediums firms, especially we started something called Point-to-Point Managed Services. You know, you go to the grocery store. You know, it's a pepperage farm that is putting the bread on the shelf. It is no longer. And there's a huge amount of outsourcing going on. We are not at all interested in displacing law librarians. But we found that there were a lot of small, mid-sized firms that, you know, need help. And they want to outsource types of research too. You know, I mean, we now do have a lot of alert services. You know, Jessica, one of our research librarians, we now do legislative bill tracking. You know, we've got two or three customers. I think she's tracking 10 or 12 bills in the Massachusetts legislature. That's a service that we provide. I don't think it goes over the divide between reference and research. So we have a lot of alert services now. And we have maybe five or six or seven clients where we're providing, we're going to them. Filing, cataloging, all of those kinds of things for our smaller, we have one large firm. But we're not at all interested in displacing any librarians. So for government, for Massachusetts government, talk about, you know, dysfunctional. If you are in your local town, it probably has branch libraries. You're looking for a book. North of Boston is a great book I would recommend it. My wife wrote it. You know, you want to go there and you want North of Boston, you go on the catalog and it says it's not in our branch, it's in the other branch. Well, Massachusetts, we have 228 executive and legislative branch members, offices, 3,000 some-law lawyers. And there's no catalog that brings them all together. So we're using an old tool like Sierra Triple I and we now have working on pilot projects to get our catalog into those offices. I don't know whether that's innovative or not. For Massachusetts government, it is innovative. But it might not be innovative elsewhere. So what we try to do is listen to our clients and provide them what they need. And sometimes, you know, the old way is the best way. Here's one example and I'll stop talking. So two examples, you know, the Massachusetts legislature, all of these committees, you know, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Judiciary Committee, they have Westlaw but they only have it for Massachusetts. So, you know, how about a 50 state survey? That's an innovative way to help them. So we can still help them with materials. The Massachusetts Judiciary, they have Westlaw or Lexus, I'm not sure which, but there's a meter. They're only allowed to use it for, you know, the meter goes off. So they can use, through us Fastcase, we publish 35 databases ourselves. So there are other ways to do it. I don't know whether those are innovative technologies but I think that they solve the problem. So what we're interested in is listening to our clients solving problems and hopefully if it's innovative, great. But the goal is not necessarily to be innovative. The goal is to provide services to our members. This morning, one of the panelists point out that innovative could be, innovative for your location. That's right. Ted, your firm is structured to provide non-traditional services or at least to provide them in a non-traditional way and is focused very much on entrepreneurship. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your philosophy and the unique aspects of your approach? Sure. I should start by saying, give you a little more background in myself. I was a mechanical engineer before I was a lawyer which a lot of people probably think is odd but believe it or not, there are a lot of people in my field of law actually that were engineers. So I'm gonna apologize if I start getting too brief but feel free to ask more questions. A little background as to how I ended up where I am in the firm. I practiced early on in the 90s with dot-con companies. I did a lot of private placement work and IPOs. It's all corporate transactional work. I also did some licensing and some limited intellectual property work. And that was during a time when the, what I would call the traditional firm was still booming for a large majority of the firms and I'll explain that more in a second. And that model was really the pyramid model where you had partners at the top going down to senior level associates, going down to lower level associates. The firm that I was at was 425 attorneys with 70 partners and they were constantly just leveraging and people didn't ask questions about how services were provided. The bill went out, the bill got paid. I happened to be practicing during a time where I feel I've seen some changes in terms of client expectations. And after I left that firm, it imploded after the dot-con bust, I worked with a small firm as you mentioned as well with Partridge Snow and Hahn. At Partridge Snow and Hahn, I used my engineering background and my interest in working with tech related companies to build myself a practice where I really work a lot with startups and early stage companies. And these are fast moving lots of ideas. Oftentimes they're students and a lot of young people. And during that time, I really began to see that the demands of a client changed pretty dramatically. They certainly weren't going to just take one of the bills that we had prepared that put the hours down and pay it. They'd question what's the value that was provided here and shouldn't I be able to pay for the value? Shouldn't you take some of the risk because you understand what it's gonna take to get this done as opposed to giving me all the risk? And even perhaps even more importantly, I want you, meaning me, to work on it rather than your associates, which obviously prevents me from leveraging under the traditional model. And this was part of the impetus of starting my own firm. I couldn't do that effectively. I felt in the old model, my partners constantly questioned me, why aren't you billing your clients more? You have lots of clients, but why can't you bill them more? And why do you want to write time off? Why are you trying to distinguish what time is good and what time is bad? And so starting my own firm, I really felt that I was seeing where clients were going in terms of their demands because I was working with younger clients that are going to be the next 20 years from now, they are going to be the client base for most firms. I felt that there was still a very strong position for very large firms in small areas that are very focused like public securities, things along those lines. But when it came to some of the more general practice areas that you have a lot of online tools that are supplanting, I would say, even some of the services that we provide, and you really need to find other ways to distinguish yourself. So my firm now to answer your question, I still have not found a way to completely divest myself on the billable hour. I have to keep track of hours because I have to understand where I'm spending my time and what value I'm providing. But nonetheless, I do offer services to clients in a way where I try to make sure that I'm providing them the value they expect, whether that's through providing fixed fee arrangements or other types of arrangements, which sometimes work out and sometimes don't. Certainly done that, I've done services that are more akin to the model where you have a retainer where people are just paying me to be on staff for a period of time. A lot of times, I'll look at a transaction and I'll try to look at it from a business perspective and say the value that I'm adding to this given the size of the transaction is X and it's not gonna be more and I'll just bill X and I'll come to that agreement with the client. Again, those are things that I couldn't do in the traditional firm. And the other part that's probably may or may not be interesting to you is that in order to implement that model, I've moved while not completely to a virtual model as you suggested. It's partially virtual. I feel that in order to provide the quality service that the clients are demanding and the way they're demanding, the current firm model excludes a lot of highly qualified attorneys from the mix. And a great example is the primary caregiver of the home or something, back at home with the children or something like that. My model doesn't preclude them from doing well in terms of financially and I hope to attract those types of people to be able to provide the services and actually be able to have a career in a law field whereas in a larger firm, I can think of some of my star associates left for paternity or maternity leave and it precluded them from even getting a bonus at the end of the year under the old model. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the story. It tells us a lot about the differences in the approach that you're taking and the more traditional approach. D, we didn't forget you. Again? Libraries today are, many of us have incubators with our attached to our schools and we are working to balance providing services to those incubators while also trying to stay in touch with the contracts that we have with our vendors. Would you care to talk to us about how Lexis views those contracts and the relationships with our incubators and also perhaps how Lexis perceives the benefits of extending services both to the law schools and to the firms and incubators? Sure. Good afternoon. To answer the first question, I think we heard in the first panel, certainly resources are a big concern, especially for public entities. So the first thing I would take off your plate is there is no charge. It does not affect your contracts at the schools whatsoever. This is something that is completely separate. In the folders that I handed out, there's an outliner of what the agreement is. And Fred Rooney, formerly of Tarot, he kind of runs the clearing house for these. But as far as the actual, the ID or access, all you have to do or whoever is the program director is to contact Fred, indicate what your needs are. And then within seven days, those folks who are participating as part of that incubator will get a Lexis ID. They have access to Lexis for a year, free of charge. So there are no costs associated with that. And those are set up separate from the law schools. So there's nothing we have to do, even administratively, that the schools have to manage. Currently, nothing that I have to do, but we'll see how that evolves. But certainly, from my perspective, if this is something that definitely takes off, and I think we've seen it in the last year or two, the number of incubators that have been created. I think even since March of this year, when we had 38 around the country, we're up to 54 just in that short period of time. And so what Lexis may do to help support them, even beyond the law school walls, that may change. And if it's me personally, I'm happy to help out anybody. As far as our benefit to it, I think the first thing is it plays into our rule of law initiative. This is something that's been in place for a number of years now. And it's both here in the United States, but also internationally, excuse me, internationally. And so some of the things that we've done over the last couple of years to help out the law students, and especially recent graduates, recognizing that the economy is bad. And so one of the first things that we created was the Aspire program. And that allows your graduates who, we saw many of our graduates who were deferred initially, and they were just told to go work for a nonprofit. And so what we did to help them out was give them access to Lexis for a year. Again, that program's in place now. So for any of our recent graduates that choose to go to work for a 501C3, they can have access from now until next September, free of charge. The content is very similar to what they have here in law schools, with the exception of public records. And that also goes to this incubator ID access that they would have. So certainly, that's something that's kind of a continuation of what we've been doing already. The other thing too is just that with part of the rule of law is it's that access. There are millions of people that do not have access to the judicial system. These folks are underrepresented. And so by giving low cost or free legal services to these folks, we give more access to those people that are underrepresented or don't have access to the judiciary. And so when we see with these incubators, one of the things that is required or that traditionally happens is that they are filling that need. What this also allows us to do is to support those attorneys that want to support that community. But perhaps because of loans, just the cost of living, that they can't afford to support those folks. And so this gives them that opportunity. So that helps support that community. Again, it supports our initiative with the rule of law. But then I think also selfishly as a company, it's a way for us to strengthen relationships with these newer attorneys. And hopefully that they're perhaps future customers. So I don't want to say that we're totally, there is a business aspect of it too. But I think that's where we're coming from. It's just a continuation of what we've already been doing with our recent graduates. Allowing on that incubator concept. And this will give you an idea of how much, of course, that it's changed. In 2013, there was a survey. And at that time, 11 library directors were surveyed, whose schools had an incubator program. You've heard the numbers Steve just used so that gives you an idea of how many more could have been surveyed recently. But at that time, there were 11 that were surveyed, seven of them responded. And basically the response was that most of them did not have a formal role in the development or continued support of the incubator programs as far as the library participating. For our panelists, why do you think that would be? And do you have suggestions on what might be done differently? How could the law libraries come to the table? What could they do to assist? Anyone want to go first? You're up. Yeah, I'll add to that. One of the things I didn't mention about how I'm beginning to practice was sort of leveraging resources that are out there in ways that weren't available before. And a great example would be, I call this open source, but it's not open source, right? I do a lot of transactional work, so it's not as much on the research side of things so much as understanding how deals are put together in what the various terms of deals are as well as looking for forms of documentation to help document those deals. And there's, with the last 10 years, there's been an explosion in firms that are putting different forms of documents online. There's been an explosion that you've all heard of LegalZoom and others. And one thing that I'm doing in the practice is it used to be that I hear LegalZoom, I don't know, run away. The documents are gonna be terrible. Oh, this is actually gonna, I'm gonna actually make more money off of this because the documents are so bad that I'm gonna have to rewrite everything. And that was the thought process. And it's really changing. A lot of the online services are getting better. A lot of the resources are getting better. And the challenge for a practitioner is being able to figure out which resources are good because with the change of the practice, there's a realization that we have to use those tools. The clients are demanding it. That's one way we're reducing our costs. We're providing a small amount of high value in terms of helping them to use those resources or using them ourselves and spending a third of the time on it. I think as a practitioner, I think I would get a lot of value in terms of finding, not just my own, but finding a place where the expertise had already vetted a lot of these things and where I could easily access those types of things without doing Google searches and trying to figure it all out on my own. I'm not sure if that's something that a role of the libraries could play or not, but I think that that's certainly one area where it would be helpful for my practice. Thank you. Social, I can't answer from the perspective of the respondents to this survey because we're not a law school library. But we do work with a Massachusetts School of Law incubator program called Justice Bridge, right? UMass, excuse me. And we provide their two offices, IP authenticated access to all of our databases that license permit, that is Fastcase, Heinonline, all of those databases that will allow us to provide remote access to our members. So at those two offices, all of those attorneys get the full range of social law library products. And we also provide the lawyers themselves, username, passwords. So they're at a very, very small price. We think people should pay something, but UMass actually pays us for their lawyers because those lawyers are at the offices sometimes, but they're also trying to develop their own practices. It's a combined kind of low bono, you know, when they're getting cases. I think there are 15 of them between the two offices. They're getting cases that don't qualify for legal services, but the people can't afford. So we, and if there are any other, you know, incubator programs, you know, give us a call. We'd be happy to do the same thing, quite frankly. I think we're incubators. I don't, I think the framing of this thing is how can we support other incubators? I think we're incubators. I think you're incubators. We have other kinds of programs, not the client development kind of program, but again, those resources that lawyers that are hanging their shingles, they're in district court. They're doing family law cases. They're doing fender vendors. They need basic resources and they don't just need legal research resources. They need the business resources. So in Massachusetts, lawyers get in trouble for two things. Substance abuse and poor office management. That's about what it is. They don't return their phone calls. They don't have the systems. They don't have the bill tracking systems. So we have negotiated, I think it's on one of these things with, you know, a lot of these Clio, a lot of these practice management organizations to give our members discounts. So that I think is we're helping, we're incubating in those instances not through law school organizations, but people that are out there that are trying to hang their shingle and trying to make a life for themselves. So I think that we're incubators and I think that you're incubators. And it's part of it is how do you help those law school incubators, but what services do you provide your students so that when they leave, they can practice law. We have our own incubator program. We're developing an affinity program with law schools. So to introduce social law to your graduates, you know, and we'll give you free membership for six months a year so that people can get access to the kinds of services that we have. And again, their services for solo practitioners, mid-sized, large firms, businesses, the government. So we want to be helpful to solo practitioners and I think we're incubators and I think you're incubators as well. Do you have anything to add? Sure. I think that, you know, from my perspective, especially working in law schools, I think some of the same thoughts we share is that they don't know what they don't know. And I think that goes for both our students but also our faculty members and perhaps our alums. And I know that when I'm out in the schools, how much I learn from each of you because you're aware of different products and programs that are out there. And I think that you knowing of programs like social law or like this incubator program and being able to relay that to faculty member whereas perhaps they may not think to come to talk to one of us, but kind of even taking it back this morning, you know, that there may be alums or professors out there that have that seat, they have that idea, but they are afraid to go for it because maybe resources aren't there or they don't know what resources are there. And so I think that with each of you having that knowledge, getting that word out to them, I think that's one way to help support them but also that as these incubators evolve to show these recent grads, these students that you're still there for them. And I think that often we have these alumni events, I see it here in the library, you know, how many students often will come back in and you still stay in touch with these folks. And so who knows, maybe it's not a recent grad but maybe somebody who's been out there practicing for a few years or is, you know, after they leave large, they want to do something different and coming back to each of you and maybe they're just sharing their ideas and then you can kind of give them the information that, hey, look, things have changed. And so I think those are ways that I see that each of you can help be supportive of these incubators is just doing what you do now, get that information out there because I think that many of them don't know until a few weeks ago, I didn't know. And so it's been education for me too to see how much is out there and how quickly this has taken off nationally. Do you think that from supporting an incubator, a public law library, whether it's academic or not academic would have better success than a private law library from the sense of a private academic? Is it a more natural fit? I don't know. I think it's where the young lawyers come into contact. And if the academic library is 60 miles away and there's a local branch of a state county library there, well then let the state county library do it there. So I don't know that there's a more natural or an ideal way. I think there's an opportunity for everyone everywhere to do their part. I don't think there's like a hardened fast. You should do it, we should do it. There is something about practice-oriented libraries that are doing it. But Boston Public Library could do a lot. We give them all of our proprietary databases the ones that we publish. And so we help each other. And I think that's the deal, we help each other. You just didn't, as a rule anyway. I mean we can't collect everything. We rely on Suffolk, we rely on New England. We're always borrowing back and forth northeastern. So let's join forces, help collaborate rather than say we're more natural than you are, or vice versa. I think it's a false, I think it's a false dichotomy. I think if you look, ABA on their site maintains a page for the incubators that are around the country. And there's actually even two links for the two that are international. And taking a look at those 52 that are here in the United States, you see a mix. I think there's about eight or nine public institutions, public schools, another 15 or 16 that are actually private. I would say I'd probably back up what Robert was saying. I think it's probably more locale than anything. If they are there in that community and they have those connections, then they're fine. So based on that makeup and then in addition to those probably half the number of those schools that are incubators, they are other private entities. A lot of like bar associations, there's some other consortiums out there of we know of one up in Boston, several law schools and there's one out in Los Angeles as well. But there are a number of bar associations across the country that are starting up these incubators. So I don't think whether private or public, I really don't think it matters. I would tend to agree with that. I mean, from a practitioner standpoint, I don't see myself distinguishing between the two. It's more about where are the people that I generally work with, that trust, what's in my locality. I think that's where I'll go. I can't really point to one or the other necessarily being the better locale for it. Thank you. Just one other idea. Another kind of nexus point might be associations. NELCO deals with a whole lot of libraries and if NELCO takes on as a project to foster incubators and communication between and among its libraries, that might be a way to get things started rather than have everyone doing it themselves. There's able, I think everybody can play some sort of a role. That's a good point. And by the way, for anyone who's interested for the link to the ABA page with the incubator information, that link is on the conference website page with the information for more information on our topic. There are libraries that do not consider themselves incubators per se, they're not affiliated with institutions that have incubators, that provide classes to their members, Jenkins in Philadelphia as one that is not necessarily an ELNI institution. And has offered many classes for years. Would we consider this innovative? Simply rebranding a traditional function? We consider it a cost effective way to support alums, new alums, new practitioners. Certainly we can all offer classes as part of what we do as libraries. Do we think of this as creating a tension perhaps with CLE providers? Is it something we should worry about? He was that part of the question. Sorry, I had the microphone covered. Should we worry about a potential tension between our offering classes and potential CLE to traditional CLE providers? No, don't worry about it, absolutely no. I mean if you look at the history of continuing legal education, libraries miss the boat. Libraries are the natural, would have been the natural CLE providers. If you look at the history of CLE in the United States, CLE used to be in the office and in the motion session. And then after World War II, they wanted to educate the soldiers coming back. And in the late 1960s and 1970s, there was this huge thing called the Ardenhouse Conference in between the ABA and ALI and some of these other things and says, we have a professional responsibility to provide continuing education. And the Bar Association swooped right in and got sort of a monopoly on it. It became a profit center. Well, social law, you people are educational organizations. Why not train people? Like you come in here, people come in to study, they come in to get educated, but are concerned about tension? No, I'm being competitive here, but I love Phil Rosenfall, I mean we go way back, we were their number one client. But he's selling databases to Bar Associations. If one we're gonna get into this is our role, this is your role, that's a legal research function. We provide 70, 80 CLE courses a year. Look at our calendar right here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven this month. And we generate revenue. Our classes are 50 bucks when MCLE and the Bar Associations are 150. This is an incubator. A lot of our programs are directed, and again, I look at them as incubators. The programs we're doing this month and next week, emigration law, that's a solo small firm type practice. Family law, this is what people that are hanging their shingles go to. We have two programs, one on civil practice in the Massachusetts District Court, the great community court, and criminal practice. That's where people that are hanging their shingles. So I think we have an obligation as an incubator to provide those things. It provides revenue. I was asked by AALL about 10 years ago to write an article on it. It's amazing, there's this thing called, I forgot the name of the national organization that does continuing education. There were no librarians on it. It's Bar Associations, Bar Associations, Law Schools. Somehow, we as an industry that is dedicated to education as librarians completely miss the boat, got elbowed aside. So I'm personally not worried about the tension. We have a niche. And a lot of the programs, let's just say, again, they're sort of incubator. There are a lot of lawyers out there, let's say. In Massachusetts, we have a criminal defense for the impoverished, and CPCS, which is the Legal Service, Criminal Legal Service Agency, they have higher bar advocates, private practitioners that get assignments that need CLE credits. And we provide a lot of criminal law subject programs for them, 50 bucks. And they're trying to build caseloads by getting assignments from CPCS. CPCS is an incubator program for bar advocates. So we provide a lot of education, and I think that's very consistent with what our mission is as a library, to educate in every which way possible. I'm not personally concerned about MCLE. I'm not concerned about the bar associations. We have a good relationship. It's not, we don't have an adversarial relationship. It's a free country. American Enterprise, offer your programs. Well, raw. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. From my standpoint, I think CLE could use more competition. So I'm actually agreeing with you. When I look at CLE, there are generally two reasons why I'm gonna take a CLE course. One is because Rhode Island and New York required me to get X number of credits. And the other is because I actually need to learn something. And too often, I find myself getting two or three credits in a year taking a program that I think I'm going to learn something, and it's a poor program. I don't actually learn anything. And then the other seven I'm spending trying to figure out, okay, can I find anything that's even applicable to my practice here that's worthwhile, and I have to take them in because I need my 10 for the year, right? And as you mentioned, a lot of them are expensive. Some of the ones that are really applicable to my practice end up being two or three day seminars where in Miami Beach, it's gonna cost me $5,000 so I don't do it, right? So personally, I'd love it if you provided more CLEs because that means there's more opportunity for me to find a program that matches my practice and likely some better pricing. It's an interesting sort of the history in Massachusetts. When CLE started after this Ardenhouse conference, the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Boston Bar Association said we have to do this as a professional responsibility and we don't want to be competitive with one another so they created this organization called MCLE and then there was an anti-competitive agreement and then MCLE started to make oodles and oodles of money. They had a monopoly. The prices went up and there was a war, really a war for about 10 years so that the Bar Associations could begin to offer brown bag lunches. It's a profit center and the more competition the prices go down and the quality goes up. So yeah, go. There's a killin' me here, you're takin' everything. So I think the cost was the first thing I thought of. In the way I feel, much like we were talking about the unrepresented clients that are out there that don't have access to judicial system, these are clients that aren't being represented, not being served and I would say that probably this segment of the legal market isn't being served because they can't afford it. This is the whole thing with the incubators that, okay, they're entering, they may not be able to afford to go to them if they're in a jurisdiction that they're not required but again, they don't learn everything that they need to go out there. I think the other thing that the librarians could offer and Ted, you hit on this on the topics. Sometimes you need to learn something, maybe they don't offer them but by working with the incubators you know the people that are there. You can tailor your training to what their needs are. What skillset do they have? What are they struggling with? Stuff that perhaps wasn't taught in the classroom or forgotten about because they didn't think it was important at the time. So that's where I see the librarians kind of fill in that niche that isn't being filled and so I'm all on board for competition. I think it's absolutely. If that helps drive down the price even better but I just think that these are probably the folks that can't afford to go or take advantage of the CLEs anyways and so I think it's all good. Yeah, query whether librarians might even, as you pointed out, might be in a better position to figure out which programs are better suited to their local community going back to the earlier question as well. All right, when we're talking about innovation, what occurs to you that the people in this room or their organization can put into practice next week, this year, that would be more innovative and hopefully helpful to the practice, to their firm school institution, what would you suggest? Is that for us or for them? That's for you all. What advice would you give us to take back? Well, I know what we're trying to do. I have one suggestion that you might already be doing because you can tell, I have a practice oriented. I mean, thinking about our clients, our practitioners, our solos and the like and the people that are getting out of law school and cannot afford anything. They're really having a difficult time. Ken Svengales' book, the 2015 edition, said that the average practitioner should be spending $4,000 a year on legal research materials. And he has a chart there that talks about the increased prices of all of the publishers. I mean, it's all of them, you know, Westlaw, Lexis, all of them. I mean, shoots through the roof. And you've got graduates that many of home are not going to big firms to the test of herwits and to others and are really struggling. They're not going to district attorney's offices. They're out there struggling. So, and they don't have a chance to buy and subscribe to the premier databases. So I don't know what you do this. I think you should give in your legal research classes. I think you should give research tasks in which you say, don't use any of those premier. Use fast case. Use case maker. Use hind online. Use those things that you get through the bar associations have databases and learn to improvise, innovate, not with the things that you get here that you're not going to afford out there. I think that's an incubator type of assignment. You might already be doing it. And I don't mean to be too aggressive. It's go time after. Yeah. I mean, I think that's from my perspective. I think that's something that the law schools can do. We've run conferences with the judiciary that run this judicial education organization. And the quality of legal research or practitioners, there's been a lot of criticism. So, given the practical skills, and you're probably doing that. And if we can be quick with these so that we still have time for a couple questions. I'll be quick. Actually, it's a hard one for me to answer, I should say, because I don't do as much research as a traditional litigator or someone like that because I'm more of a transactional attorney. But to bolster your comment, and I'm sorry to say this, I don't have Lexus Nexus. I don't use case maker. And I go online and look at other resources. And I've learned to do that. And I feel comfortable with it. And I think if you can train people that way, it may be very helpful. And so I don't have any bosses there, so good record. I encourage students to use different services. The way I look at it, they're just different tools in the toolbox. And so, do I want them to use my service, of course. But honestly, I mean, we're in an education environment. So as much as I can, I try to let them know about that stuff while it may sound like I'm pandering. I think it's a good idea. What you've done here at Roger Williams, the happy hours. And maybe you or Raquel could talk some about that. But I think what was good about that, and these are classes offering students on products that aren't necessarily legal related. But how do they use them in practice? And I thought, that's something that's different. I think using those types of training sessions are good for students beyond the legal research. Because it is, those are the types of programs they're going to be using. So I think each of you probably had a better position to describe what that is. And maybe that's something that they could take back to their libraries. But that's what I would suggest. Thank you. And at this point, I'm going to throw the floor open for questions. If anybody has any questions for our panelists, we have just a couple minutes. But does anyone have a question? Yes. We have a microphone, or I will repeat the question. There's going to be more and more authoritative primary source law that we don't need baskets for, I think. But that's not my question. My question is related to, like you said, you're using legal Zoom judiciously. And when you see the role of the courts in providing forms and with good instructions, and wouldn't that be more authoritative than something like legal Zoom? Well, I should correct that. I don't actually use legal Zoom judiciously, but some of my clients do. And then I sort of overlook the forms. And I provide a much smaller, I spend a lot less time reviewing the materials because they've already been prepared rather than preparing them myself. The courts, I'm sure, play a role in a litigation practice. But they don't play much of a role at all in my practice. I've stepped in a courtroom and actually litigated once. And it was only because I was co-counsel. And I didn't think the litigator got a point across, so I stood up and made my point. That's just to give you an idea. I don't spend time in the courtroom. I don't think that courtrooms would have the expertise to actually advise my clients on the type of documents that I'm creating, which are a lot of contracts and formation type of documents. So I, as you probably gathered from some of my responses earlier, I'm also a firm believer in the free marketplace. And I think that these online services will filter themselves out there that will get better or they'll disappear. And I'm not sure that, at least in my practice, the court actually would play a role. I just think we get online questions from people who are probably like clients. And I think I would really be hesitant to, say, send them something like saying, here's this form. Yeah, and I think you should be. I think it's probably more incumbent on practitioners like myself to maybe be giving more to the community. I try to, I always give at least an hour of free service. And I was saying this to someone earlier, earlier panelists. A lot of those hours, I know, I'm never going to see a client out of it. But I see that as sort of providing back to the community. And it's really the practitioners, at least in my practice, that will be able to give the guidance that's needed on that. And, you know, I think we should be doing that. Any other questions? Yes. I have a question concerning the incubator program at Lexus. Well, not seriously, but one thing I was thinking of was if we are incubators already, can I send that form and get it for free? That's a good question. How formalized does the incubator program that's set up after the floor and the institution have to be to then get the in and motion? Very minimal. I think that, talking to you again, Fred Rooney, I think the fact that if it comes down as long as it's that social aspect of it, that you're serving that underserved community, that there are reduced costs, that's about it. And asking about any restrictions, my concern was the fact that we actually had these incubators posted on the ABA site. Were there some sort of ABA requirements for this? Not at all. He pretty much said, look, if you send the form in, you're probably getting it. That was pretty much what he said to me. That would be true. Any other questions? I have one thought. I wanted to go back to your question. Just very quickly, one thing I've done in the past is I've done office hours for things like the Rhode Island Center for Innovation for Entrepreneurship. Maybe as a law library, you get alumni and others. And you get them to give back by providing office hours through your library. And maybe that's an innovative idea where it can help people to use sort of the online services and gives them an opportunity to give back. Just a thought. Well, there is a lawyer in the library. Do you guys do that, the lawyer in the library? Right. And that's been kind of their natural way. Any other questions? No more questions? Then I think we may be ready for our dessert break. And may I thank our panelists for all their questions?