Winners Of The Techshow Startup Alley Competition

Above The Law reports on the winners of a new competition to select 12 legal technology startups to participate in the first-ever Startup Alley at the American Bar Association’s TECHSHOW conference in March.  These startups will participate in a March Madness-style bracketed face-off on TECHSHOW’s opening night. Startups will face off against each other in pairs, over three rounds, with audience votes determining who moves to the next round. The startups are:
ClariLegal, a cloud-based litigation management platform that is simplifying the way litigation services are bought, sold and managed.
Ping is automated timekeeping for lawyers that will automatically track, categorize and describe all of a lawyer’s billable actions.
Court Buddy is a wholly automated platform that matches solo and small firm attorneys with small businesses based on pre-selected, a-la-carte flat rates.
LawTap Like ZocDoc for doctors and dentists, LawTap is a booking engine for attorneys.
Doxly is a cloud-based platform that transforms the chaotic process of managing legal transactions into a singular tool.
Paladin helps law firms, companies and law schools manage their pro bono with streamlined sourcing, tracking and outcome reporting on a modern, tech-forward platform.
UniCourt is a nationwide case research, tracking, management, and analytics platform that integrates court data from federal and state courts into a cloud-based application.
LegalClick is a platform for lawyers to sell their legal services direct to clients with a document assembly shopping cart in an app or online.
TrustBooks takes a scary thing like trust accounting and makes it drop-dead simple.
LawBooth connects people and attorneys online, making it easy for consumers to find the right attorney and schedule a free initial consultation.
 Alt Legal’s software helps companies and law firms create, track, and analyze intellectual property filings.
 Aggregate Law quickly and efficiently connects skilled project attorneys to legal work.

New ABA Innovation Fellowship

The American Bar Assn. Center for Innovation has announced that applications are now being accepted for the first Innovation Fellows Program. The ABA Center for Innovation encourages and accelerates innovations that improve the affordability, effectiveness, efficiency, and accessibility of legal services. Recent – within the last 5 years – law school graduates will spend one year in-residence at ABA headquarters in Chicago. Fellows will receive a stipend of $45,000, along with benefits, during their time in the program. The first cohort of fellows will begin August 1, 2017 and complete their work by July 31, 2018. Bar admission is not necessary.

Are gadgets done?

The New York Times recently had an interesting article called "The Gadget Apocalypse is Upon Us." The Gadget Age, claims the author, is over, and "and even if that’s a kind of progress, because software now fills many of our needs, the great gadgetapocalypse is bound to make the tech world, and your life, a little less fun."

Lexis.com for law schools ending Dec. 31

LexisNexis has sent us a reminder:
"Dear Law School Librarians, A friendly reminder that Lexis.com® will retire on December 31, 2016 for law school customers. The current link to lexis.com in the drop down menu in Lexis Advance® will be removed. We've been communicating directly via email to the small number of faculty nationwide still using lexis.com to ensure a smooth transition to Lexis Advance, consistently over the past year. LexisNexis Account Executives have also been contacting these individuals to offer training on Lexis Advance. Faculty using lexis.com should be aware of the retirement date, but we want to make sure no one is caught off guard. If you're aware of faculty at your school still using lexis.com, please remind them of the impending date. "

FDLP "End of Term Presidential Harvest"

The Federal Depository Library Program has announced that The Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, George Washington University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries, and the U.S. Government Publishing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. Using a two pronged approach, the project seeks to capture a comprehensive snapshot of the Federal government on the Web at the close of the current administration. The first is a "comprehensive crawl" of the dot gov domain; the second is a "prioritized crawl" that seeks to capture sites in greater depth and to identify those at greater risk of rapid change or disappearance. The project team will assemble a list of related URL’s and social media feeds. As a result, the project team is calling upon government information specialists, including librarians, political and social science researchers, and academics – to assist in the selection and prioritization of the selected web sites to be included in the collection, as well as identifying the frequency and depth of the act of collecting. You can use their "End of Term Presidential Harvest 2016" form to submit sites for consideration.

Gender differences in law schools

Bloomberg Law blog has an interesting post that looks at gender differences in law school attendance. They point out that although almost half of law school students today are female, this is a national average and conceals an interesting gender divide. "Female law students outnumber men at schools with weak reputations while men dominate class rosters at the most prestigious schools." As am example they point to Yale where just 46 percent of students are female. At Duke University and the University of Virginia, also highly ranked law schools, women make up only 42 percent of the student body. The school with the highest percentage of women students (65 percent) is low ranked Charlotte School of Law. "This relationship between law school rank and the percentage of women students isn’t just anecdotal: across all ABA-accredited law schools, it reaches a sizable (and statistically significant) correlation of .381. Schools with a better rank, on average, enroll a substantially smaller percentage of women."