BNA Benefits Practice Center enhancements

On July 13th, our subscription to the BNA Benefits Practice Center will be enhanced with a new look and feel, including new features.

As a reminder, this web service includes employee benefit and executive compensation cases and primary source documents, exclusive portfolios and reference guides—BNA's Compensation Planning and Corporate Practice Portfolios and three instructional manuals, including the Benefits Practitioners' Strategy Guide,content from Pension & Benefits Daily and BNA Pension & Benefits Reporter and BNA's proprietary suite of benefits practitioner-created practice tools such as compliance and due diligence checklists, voluntary compliance summaries and sample client letters.

Improvements include topic tabs for easy browsing, enhanced search capabilities, allowing you to search across Pension & Benefits news, analysis, and reference, expanded BNA Pension and Benefits Books collection, including the Employee Benefits Law treatise and the popular Section 409A Handbook and access to complimentary content.*

If you need assistance using our BNA web subscriptions, please meet with a Librarian.

*Excerpted from bnainfo.bna.com/bprc/preview.htm

Copyright and fashion

Is a 2010 Vera Wang design* just 'a strapless dress with a ruffled skirt' or does it deserve copyright protection? What about Narciso Rodriguez's 1996 wedding dress*? (These * were wedding dresses for Chelsea Clinton and Caroline Bessette Kennedy.) Both designers sold less than 100 of these original dresses yet several international labels have made millions off these designs. An ABA Journal July 2011 article discusses copyright and the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (IDPPPA), which is being supported in the U.S. Congress to prevent others from making money from designers' intellectual property.

Is it art or is it a craft? Something to think about the next time you admire that piece of apparrel.

"Real World" Legal Research

While less than two pages long (single-spaced), BYU law librarian Shawn G. Nevers' Observations for Summer Research Success [SSRN] should be handed out to every summer clerk and new first year associate by law librarians who is now working with them. Nevers' Legal Research column for Student Lawyers (Vol. 39, No. 8, pp. 22-23, April 2011) hits the proverbial nail on its head, starting with the following two tips:

Tools. An important part of preparing yourself for research on the job is to understand the research tools available to you. Your employer simply can’t provide you with the wealth of legal resources offered by your law school library. Because of that, your research tools this summer will be limited in some way. Many law students get a bit squeamish when that becomes a reality.

Asking the right questions before you start your job can help you avoid some of that research-related indigestion. Does your employer use LexisNexis? Westlaw? WestlawNext? Something else? What content is covered in their Westlaw/Lexis subscription? Does your employer pay a flat fee for Westlaw/Lexis or will your research be charged by the search or by the minute? How are clients billed for research? What print sources are available? Knowing the answers to these and similar questions can help you prepare for the research tools you’ll be using this summer.

Research interview. Although you’re not really researching yet, a critical part of the research process occurs when you meet with a lawyer to receive a research project. I like to think of these meetings as a research interview of sorts. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and clarify the research task. There’s nothing worse than spending a lot of time researching the wrong issue. Getting things ironed out initially can spare you an additional trip to the lawyer’s office just for clarification.

Depending on the situation, you may also want to ask the lawyer to recommend a good place to start your research. She may be able to refer you right away to a treatise or another lawyer in the office that could save you valuable time.

Hat tip to Deborah Hackerson's Legal Skills Prof Blog post. Her post also offers sound advice for law students heading out to perform legal research in the "real world:"

I would add a plug for checking your law school library website and any research guides that may help point you to free resources you can incorporate into your research strategy. Research guides prepared by your law librarians can also help you refresh your memory on how to research a particular topic.

Hackerson notes that "[s]ometimes I’ll even ask a 2L to come back and talk to my next group of 1Ls about his/her summer clerkship experience and how it relates to legal research." Great idea! [JH]

This is a re-posting of a great entry from Law Librarian Blog on June 29, 2011. Hat tip to them!