vLex's Faus and Gerami on Foreign Legal Research - France's Judicial Analytics (Over)Reaction - AALL Recap

After a week of Washington, DC heat and humidity, we are back to discuss all things legal information with a slant toward technology and management. We have a recap of the American Association of Law Libraries annual conference, #AALL19, where Marlene runs through her packed schedule of events which she attended, presented, or wished she'd attended. Greg was just happy to rotate off the AALL Executive Board, which he's been a part of for most of this decade. Don't worry.... there's still plenty of other AALL work for him to do. On this episode, Marlene and Greg go international for the topics. We talk with Lluis Faus and Masoud Gerami of vLex about the recent merger of Gerami's longtime foreign legal information platform, Justis. Faus and Gerami tell us the story of how they were able to blend the two platforms together, and the process of how they are able to pull together information from over 30 different countries, all with different levels of transparency and access to their legal information.  Information Inspirations  France recently outlawed the use of judicial analytics which allows for the searching and identifying the names of the judges. We reached out to Tara Tubman-Bassirian, a French lawyer practicing in the UK, about the reasoning behind France's criminalization of judicial data. Tubman-Bassirian says that the reasoning rests somewhere between the country's effort to protect its Civil Law structure and the anonymity of the judges, and a flat out fear of what technology might be bringing in the ways of analytics, AI, and other unknown advancements.  Marlene's inspiration comes from our friends at CLOC, and their release of their 2nd Annual State of the Industry Survey. The survey covers topics like Expenditures, Headcount, Technology, and Law Firm Evaluations. Best of all... it's free! Artificial Lawyer blog has a great breakdown of the legal technology portion of the survey.   Listen, Subscribe, download Jerry’s music, and Send Us Tweets and Voicemails, Too!! Remember that you can contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. We’d love to hear any ideas you’d like us to cover in future episodes. Also, subscribe, rate, and comment on The Geek In Review on your favorite podcast platform.  As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca, thanks Jerry! (TIP: Listen to the very end of the show for some "extra" Jerry this week.)