John Mayer is the Big Cheese, and other lessons learned at #CALICon11

For the third year in a row, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a delegation that represented Justia and the Free Law Coalition at CALICon, the annual Conference for Law School Computing^® from CALI (The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction).

This year’s conference was themed “Unbound,” which to CALI meant both the idea that boundaries to technology in legal education are falling away, and that the binding of books are becoming “electronically unbound,” which is certainly a theme we here at Justia can get behind.

CALI’s work on unbinding legal information in recent days has included the Free Law Reporter (we wrote about it here back in April), which uses the data from RECOP to replace traditional bound volumes with a digital ebook for free. As a tongue-in-cheek jab at those traditional bound volumes, this year’s Conference gift bag included a thumb drive with all of the Free Law Reporter content up through June in the shape of a book (shown on the left).

If you weren’t able to make it to Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee to attend #CALICon11 you can watch videos of all the sessions on the conference website, including both keynotes and my own sessions on social media for law schools, and optimizing the Drupal CMS for Speed and SEO.

The sessions covered a great deal of topics relating to using technology for legal education.  I particularly enjoyed the joint session between Elmer Masters of CALI and John Joergensen of Rutgers Camden on RECOP, as well as Dan Nagy of the LII’s session on Development in the Cloud.

And if you need any more incentive to make it out to San Diego for next year’s CALIcon, check out how the conference began below:

For those of you who didn’t stop by the Free Law Coalition booth, in the Words of Tom Bruce, “Have a Cookie”