With the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries convening this weekend in Baltimore, you can expect to see a flurry of product announcements coming up. Today, the news is from Bloomberg Law, which is announcing a number of enhancements to its legal research service, including more than 30 Practical Guidance suites, new SEC Administrative Law Judge Enforcement Analytics, and new real-time delivery of BNA news.

Of course, this is not the only news today from Bloomberg Law. Earlier today, I reported that its president, Scott Mozarsky, has left, and that Joe Breda, executive vice president of product, has been named Bloomberg Law’s new president. As it happened, I met with Breda last week for a preview of these enhancements.

The Practical Guidance suites include some 3,000 practice tools, checklists, timelines, and annotated forms covering more than 200 topics, including GDPR, health care, cybersecurity, corporate and commercial transactions, compliance, and labor and employment. Bloomberg Law has been steadily building out this feature over the past year, without a lot of fanfare, but over the last six months, has significantly expanded the topics they cover and the materials they include. (List of Practical Guidance suites added in last six months.)

The Practical Guidance for an initial coin offering.

All of these suites can be found via a new Practical Guidance homepage. Each is designed to walk practitioners through specific tasks step-by-step, from start to finish. The documents are integrated with other Bloomberg Law resources, such as Bloomberg BNA manuals, portfolios, and expert practitioner-authored content.

The goal, said Breda, is to organize Bloomberg Law content in a way that lets the practitioner do a task in the shortest way possible. “We take you step-by-step through everything that needs to be done.”

As part of its rollout of more Practical Guidance suites, Bloomberg Law is also adding new Chart Builders and In Focus Resources. The Chart Builders allow you to compare state laws on a variety of topics. Pick a topic or task, select the states to compare, and create a chart of comparative laws.

The In Focus page for transgender issues in the workplace.

In Focus Resources are a series of topic-specific pages that allow users to follow news reports, track litigation or regulatory developments, access practical tools, and link to related materials.

SEC Analytics

Bloomberg Law’s new SEC Administrative Law Judge Enforcement Analytics is notable for its application of analytics to ALJ-level decisions. The goal, as with other analytics products, is to organize and present data visually to provide users with insights into trends, activity and outcomes.

SEC Administrative Law Judge Enforcement Analytics.

Analytics can be applied using a number of filters, including by judge, types of violations, type of penalty, range of penalties, and more. Users can drill down through results to the underlying source documents to better understand the visual results.

Once the user has created a result, the result can be downloaded and emailed to others or the user can create an alert to be notified of changes in the data.

Bloomberg Law says it will soon be adding analytics for SEC administrative actions. It previously offered analytics for health care fraudlabor and employment. and litigation.

Real-Time News

Bloomberg BNA has traditionally delivered news products such as its Daily Labor Report as PDF periodicals. Now that is changing. Instead, the stories that would have appeared in the composed periodical will instead be delivered as a real-time feed of news.

In addition, users will now have more options for customizing delivery of news. They can opt to receive a daily Editor’s Choice email of top stories selected and arranged by BNA editors. If they opt for this, they can also specify whether to receive the standard email or to personalize the email to provide stories and highlights matched to their interests.

If they choose to personalize it, they will be able to effectively create their own alert, right down to giving it a title and selecting from a range of options to include, including topics, agencies, statutes and locations.

“This is pretty significant for BNA,” Breda said. “It’s great to get a PDF that’s a wrap of the news, but then you’re getting what happened yesterday. So not only are we producing real-time news, but we’re also making it more customizable for the user.”

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.