Just a couple of years ago, Mary Kay Jung’s library staff at St. Louis-based Thompson Coburn ran a routine update service. They regularly sent new articles over the firm intranet to lawyers who had asked them to monitor specific industries and clients. This information helped the attorneys prepare for client meetings and alert those clients to emerging issues and developments that might affect them. Trouble was, because the process was largely done by hand, the maintenance was rather time-consuming. It took 40-45 hours a week, and at that point there were only 20 daily feeds. Even so, the information was so useful that the partners wanted to expand the program.

In 2007 Jung seized the opportunity to automate the process, lower the cost, and geometrically increase its productivity. She worked with the IT department to create a system that automatically collected emerging news items using alerts and keyword searches and a combination of Internet information syndication technology, electronic delivery by information vendors, and the various offerings by news organizations. When they select the news items, library staff vet them to decide what will actually go into one of the feeds for the attorneys. As a result, weekly maintenance is down to 25 hours, even with 50 feeds coming out every day. Lawyers who subscribe get regular e-mails of headlines and summary paragraphs as well as links to the original sources.

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