At the Outset
I don't apologize for the length of this document. I feel that
there is a need for law librarians to hear from a law librarian
who was there to give a candid account of the meeting. No one
paid my expenses to attend. I took the Metro and paid my own
fare. I have edited and re-edited this document several times
until I am confident that it states what I saw and observed as
clearly as I am able. I have tried to remain objective; however,
my awful sense of humor has leaked into it a couple of times -
completely unintentionally, I assure you. Forgive me, in
advance if I have misstated anything. It is the best I can do. I do
not intend to defend this document. It is what I saw. I can't
imagine that I can add much to it if anyone disagrees. =20
NOTE: In converting this document from my word-processor to my e-mail=20
software, quotes and apostrophes came out as U's, S's, and T's. I tried=20
to edit them all out. I probably missed some. So when you see capital=20
letters out of context, know that they are supposed to be quotation marks=
=20
or apostrophes. Sorry.
The TAP Meeting
There has been much discussion about the so-called TAP
Meeting that was held at the Carnegie Institution in
Washington, DC, on October 19, 1994. There has even been a
great deal of rhetoric thrown around about what topics were
discussed at the meeting, the decorum of those present, and
about consensuses, who was there, and even about who was
invited to the meeting. I have been puzzled, and perhaps many
of you are, by the absence in every account of the meeting of
what appears to be objective discussion and behavior by persons
to whom we ordinarily attribute not simply decorous, but
friendly, courteous behavior. There were objective observers
present at the meeting. Why have they not come forward and
tried to give an objective point of view? Very simply, because
they were there, they are intimidated and more than a little
nervous about coming forward. This whole controversy has
revealed personalities that are boldly vengeful, vindictive, and
openly hostile to contrary points of view. It also further reveals
a scary feature of the internet: flaming. And one of flaming's
major features is the way that a posting or written opinion can
be over-analyzed, taken out of context and misinterpreted to the
point that it is almost not worth posting anything when you
know that there are hostiles lurking out there.
I was there. After the encouragement of many
colleagues I now come forward. I do so with trepidation. I dont't like=20
flaming. This is what I observed: =20
According to Mr. Love, invitations to the meeting were sent to
over 1,000 publishers. Shortly before the meeting, on September
29, 1994 and October 11, 1994 at the least, he also sent out general
invitations to the entire LAW-LIB discussion list inviting
listserv subscribers to attend the meeting. However, at the start
of the meeting, and in calls to the Justice Department, there was
expressed general wonderment and awe over the numbers of
persons who attended the meeting. In the meeting, the
assemblage was characterized by Mr. Love as something of an
attempt by West to create a demonstration, to pack the meeting.=20
(Apparently Mr. Kent Walker, Counsel to Deputy Attorney
General, had also expected a smaller crowd and was convinced
that West had somehow incited the masses; he remarked, when
I called in, that somehow the size of the gathering was all West's
fault.) Shoot! If I had invited a 1,000 people to a party and then
broadcast it on the 'Net I wouldn't be surprised if 100 people
showed up! Estimates of the size of the crowd range from a high
of about 100 to about 50. (My estimate is that there was about
100.) There were eight full time law librarians, at least one
professional legal researcher, a couple of text book authors, about
three lawyers and a couple of other individuals in various
capacities representing West (no West staff were present however), a=20
number of journalists, at least one observer (a staff member) from a=20
congressman's office, assorted other persons from public interest groups, t=
he
Administrative Office of the Courts, and the rest of the attendees
were legal publishers. There were also three staff members from TAP in=20
attendance.
From=20the beginning, Mr. Love expressed great dismay and
disappointment for the fact that there was anyone there from
West, or who agreed with West's position. My recollection was
that he said to all assembled that he expected only a few
publishers to attend, particularly only those who agreed with his
point of view. My recollection also was that he said something
to the effect that he only wanted to get a few like-minded
publishers together to discuss a standard vendor-neutral citation
form in the morning and then go over to the DOJ in order to
present to them "their ideas."
Only those persons or parties present who were recognized by
Mr. Love were permitted to speak. Initially there was an attempt
by him to not recognize anybody, other than West Publishing,
whom he associated with West, or who opposed his point of
view. Mr. Love was quite candid about his feelings for those
persons and continually referred to them in somewhat cynical
tones and referred to them as "the West people." It was only
after West's very forceful, yet what I perceived as polite
insistence, that any of those persons were allowed to speak. =20
In response to a request to permit librarians present to speak, Mr.
Love remarked that this was unnecessary because Bob Oakley
had already spoken for all 5,000 law librarians in his letter to
Janet Reno. Further, that since Lynn Foster, Chair of the AALL
Task Force on Citation Forms, had faxed to him her draft of her
committee's "draft recommendation," the entire membership
had spoken its unqualified support of the idea of vendor-neutral
citations. Therefore, it was unnecessary to allow the law librarians
present to speak because, since seven of the eight happened to
oppose both TAP's agenda and Bob Oakley's viewpoint, and
most of us had never seen Lynn's draft and disagreed with the
basis for the draft rules anyway, we obviously represented not merely
a minority point of view, we also were also obviously "in West's
pocket." For the record, the other six librarians present were:
Joan Howland, Donald Dunn, Gene Wypyski, Linda Will, Anne
Ellis, another firm librarian whose name escapes me at the
moment, and myself. Jean O'Grady joined the group later at the
DOJ. For the record Don Dunn was allowed to speak and gave a
very good summary of how I think that many law librarians who are
skeptical of TAP's agenda, feel about the issue. In a word, he said
that he had the interests of our patrons at heart. That the
current system of citation forms serves patrons well, and that if
it isn't broken, it shouldn't be fixed. He also pointed out that he
was sure that the full ramifications of what was being discussed
had not been fully thought out, and urged caution before
making any changes to the current system before it was too late.
Allegations have been made by Mr. Love and others that West
was rude in the meeting. I want to go on record rebutting this
allegation. Since Mr. Love explicitly derided West at the
beginning of the meeting and indicated his reluctance to give
them the floor at all, I thought West was quite composed in
insisting on there being a debate on the issues. It should be
pointed out here that there were at least two publishers not
associated with West who spoke up quite adamantly against the
TAP agenda. Mr. Love reiterated that time was wasting and that
they had intended to spend their time speaking about possible
vendor neutral citation forms, NOT debating the need for them.=20
In the course of West's attempts to have its decidedly minority
(in this crowd anyway) point of view heard, Mr. Love shouted
profanity at the West lawyers and threatened to "have security
come and throw them out." From my point of view, the West
attorneys handled the incident quite professionally.
There has also been reference to an incident in which Bob
Berring's integrity was impugned and a "hysterical" librarian
sprang to his defense. A publisher whom I shall not name, at
two points in the TAP Meeting said that a report that Bob
prepared a couple of years back for presentation before a
congressional committee at the request of Barney Frank, was
tainted because he had served as a consultant for West on at least
one occasion; the person also tried to insinuate that the report
had somehow been contracted for by West. He was trying to
insinuate that the report and the research underlying it were
"bought" by West. Joan Howland forcefully defended Bob's
integrity. Objective parties, who witnessed the incident I think
will agree, that she exercised remarkable restraint in her
remarks.
There has been reference made to a consensus that was reached
at the meeting. At the end of the morning, Mr. Love
summarized the consensus that had been reached. I was there,
and I failed to identify a "consensus" on anything. So I asked
Mr. Love exactly what the consensus was. Initially he=20
stated that there was consensus on the issue that "any publisher
should be allowed to publish any public document that s/he
wished to publish" Of the between 50 - 100 people there, a vote
revealed twelve or thirteen staunch supporters and two staunch
"nays." He then added that there was consensus on, (a little less
clearly, I'm afraid), something like, "and that there needs to be an
efficient (a standard?) way of citing to those documents." When
a "vote" was taken on this issue, the numbers came out to
something on the order of five for, and two against. A number
of publishers there refused to take a stand at the time, including
the Thomson Company family of publishers, Lawyer's Co-Op,
Matthew-Bender, Oceana and others. Mead Data Central
supported the idea of vendor-neutral citations, but was very
much opposed to the idea of a government public domain
database. Shepard's/McGraw-Hill stated that they had, as a
company, never experienced any problems getting access to, or
otherwise using, internal citations, but that they would be happy
to accommodate any new citation system that happened to come
along. I think that the companies that were not there or failed to
speak up or out, such as CCH and BNA would have had very
interesting comments, since each publishes several reporters and
services that compete head to head with West on state and
federal levels with no appreciable diminution of value or
competitiveness. The only "big companies" weighing in with
Mr. Love were Lexis (with its qualification noted above) and
Lexis Counsel Connect (which I include in this category because
of its parentage- I"m not sure that it has yet earned the
designation as "big"). Tax Analysts was the only "major"
publisher (my apologies to all the rest of you in attendance that I
am not including in this category - I am speaking and observing
as a law librarian, not as a partisan), who squarely sided with the
"TAP position," Tom Fields, the founder of TA, sat right next to
Mr. Love. Two major publishers of cases who were noticeably
absent were LRP and Andrews Publications. =20
Mr. Love posed an interesting solution to a hypothetical posed
by one of West's lawyers: The question was, If we create a
vendor neutral citation system that does not refer to a specific
body of cases, (i.e., a database), then is it then a citation to
nowhere? A general follow up then was, who will be
responsible for maintaining the system, assigning the citations
and generally administer this theoretical citation system to
nowhere? Mr. Love replied that perhaps there should be a
consortium/coalition of publishers that could administer the
system.
There also some interesting discussion about whether pinpoint
cites should be identified by using a system of percentage
markings that would direct the user to the location of a quote in
a case by identifying the location as, "58.01," or "58 per cent and
one-one-hundredth of the way through the opinion."=20
Fortunately for us all, this was dropped from discussion. Other
ideas discussed were a system that used paragraph identification
and one that used paragraph and sentence. TAP had been faxed
a draft of Lynn Foster's Committee's draft of AALL Task Force=D5s
report, which they then made available to attendees as they
signed in, but no one had had time to read it so there was no
comment directly on it. It should be noted that Lynn's draft was
taken as THE position of the AALL. It seemed of no concern to
Mr. Love and his group that the eight or so law librarians who
were in attendance had never read the draft nor been consulted
about their ideas. They were dismissed out of hand as cranks
associated with West Publishing. The main reason that they
were dismissed, was NOT because of what they said or believed
about the issue, it was because West paid their airfare for some to=20
attend the meeting. (However, from my point of view, flying coach
nowadays is torture, not something anyone could necessarily be
bribed with! Note: This was a joke.)
There has been some question about just who IS TAP. Well,
that question was asked and answered quite candidly. For those
of you who haven't read about this elswhere, TAP is three
people who are professional consumer advocates. Vendor-
neutral cites happens to be the issue of the day; tomorrow it
could be carrot farmers or foreign-nationals taking over MDC.=20
None of the TAP people has a law or library degree. Apparently
they became active in the issue after someone brought it to their
attention as an issue that needed working on. For some of you,
this may explain an ignorance or a blindness on TAP's part, on
the ramifications of what is being proposed, or a perceived
awkwardness from them in framing the issues or the solutions.
For my part this explains the atmosphere that pervaded the
morning and afternoon session with the DOJ. The entire day
seemed orchestrated. An individual on another list has reported
that there exists an "official committee," that met secretly on or
about the same day as the October 19th TAP Meeting. It seems to
me that the "committee"(if it exists) and Mr. Love may have felt
that the DOJ was not giving the meeting enough attention so they put
out the notice on the various list-servs in order to rile West and
others who were antagonistic to the whole game. This
prompted additional calls to the DOJ and standard, ordinary
politicking by West: press conferences, news releases, ads in
papers, etc. This gave the meeting a much higher profile than
Mr. Love would have been able to gain otherwise. In a sense, a
read on the whole thing is that West played into a cleverly laid
trap. (Anyone who does not like this opinion, forget I ever
mentioned it. I was born a skeptic and try as I might, I just can't
break myself of it.) Another possibility is that Mr. Love may
have simply underestimated the strong feelings and broad
interest that the issue would awaken in observers of all sorts:
publishers, writers, law librarians and other educators, etc.=20
Nothing could have been more obvious to many: that West
would pull out all the stops to combat what it perceived as a
direct attack, and that law librarians would be concerned about
the impact on access to information, and that many small
publishers would jump on any bandwagon that promised to
give them an advantage in the marketplace. =20
Overall, it was a lousy day filled with a lot of complaining. West
complained about the meeting and TAP, and TAP complained
about West, and others simply complained. It was intense and
draining.
You might ask, where do I stand. Fine, I'll tell you. Paragraph
numbers, to me destroy the integrity of the whole case, giving
too much importance to a smaller unit within the text of the
case. If paragraph numbers are used, I believe that this will
radically change the way we think of cases: we will begin
thinking of paragraphs instead of opinions. Someone has observed=20
that this could lead us into using paragraphs in a way similar to how=20
we now use section numbers in codes. It is potentially dangerous
and "anti-intellectual." Paragraphs out of context can potentially
stand on their own and can lead to some bizarre intellectual
problems with the doctrine of "stare decisis." Besides, many
paragraphs are too long as it is. I also don't believe that
computers will bring us any closer to utopia. I therefore don't
believe that it is wise for us to adjust the status quo to fit an
electronic future, that we don't fully appreciate the ramifications
of yet. Like Shepard's, I don't see a problem. I do see profit for
Shepard's, however. In fact, they are probably the only ones who
will profit from this. Legal researchers will not. =20
That's about all I have to say on the matter. Aagain, please don't=20
flame me. These are my observations, opinions and perceptions. If
any of these are wrong, please simply dismiss them.=20
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