Reviews of CCH titles are always welcome, particularly when they are published in respected journals such as the Monash University Law Review. So it was a nice surprise to come across Karen Wheelwright’s review of “McCallum’s Top Workplace Relations Cases” in the latest edition of the MonLR.

“McCallum’s Top Workplace Relations Cases” examines the facts, reasoning and holdings in 35 key cases relating to labour law and the employment relationship. Professor McCallum is uniquely positioned to write on this: as Wheelwright points out he is “Australia’s most eminent labour law scholar” (check out his profile here).

Wheelwright’s review provides a detailed synopsis of the book, but what I found to be most interesting was her assessment of the key element of the book:

“Professor McCallum [is] tough-minded and prepared to explain why he believes a case is wrongly decided, or when he considers that that the law is heading in the wrong direction.”

Which makes for pretty interesting reading, considering that “many stimulating areas [are] dealt with by the book, where settled principles often need to be applied to new and difficult cases”.

The rest of the review is available in the Monash University Law Review (vol 35 no 1 2009). If it has piqued your interest you can purchase the book in our online store.

You might also be interested to hear what Professor McCallum has to say about proposed changes to OHS legislation in CCH’s HR Blog.

Last week the wise and lovely Jessica Hobson asked me for 300* words on what 2010 might bring for legal publishing. After vainly scratching around for something profound, I have resorted to the favourite tool of the hack columnist: the list.

So here we go: the top three tens for two thousand and trend, or something like that.

1. New ways of paying for content

For the last 5000 years or so, if you wanted to buy content from a legal publisher you had two choices: a book or an annual subscription. The publisher decided what content you received and how much you paid. That’s all changing. Most legal publishers, including CCH Australia, are experimenting (at least internally or in pilots) with pay per view, time-based access, user-generated content, advertising, entitlements (paying for discrete functionality) and so on. Not all these things will come to fruition, and traditional subscriptions are not going away, but the options will increase.

2. New ways of accessing content

This is related to trend number one. If you find our content via, say, Google Scholar, we’re going to have to come up with a new way to monetise that content. Similarly, if we want you to access our content in a way that is seamlessly integrated with your workflow (and all the publishers do, although we’re not there yet by a long shot) then that might require a new business model. But irrespective of the payment piece, we want our content to be more available, easier to use, and more relevant to your daily activities. We’re trialling a few different ways of doing this, including messing about with the Google Monster (always a scary thing for publishers), and experimenting with mobile devices and software integration.

3. New ways of writing and structuring content

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of legal content is written as if it will be read in a book or looseleaf (even though we know that in our case a majority of customers access our content via IntelliConnect). We need more flowcharts and roadmaps and decision trees and related content links and so on; and fewer long and winding dead end paragraphs with helpful headings like “Introduction” or “Overview”. This will take time – we’ve got a lot of content and a lot of authors - but we’ve started.

It has taken legal publishers as a group a while to recognise that online publishing is (or should be) very different to the old print world. To quote my boss, if we want to deliver value to customers in 2010 we can’t just build a better steam engine. Well, you won’t see a hover car in 2010, but here’s hoping we at least manage a Model T.

* Sorry Jess, but you knew I’d go over the word limit.

Matthew Sullivan is the Publishing Director at CCH Australia. He’s worked in legal publishing for 13 years, spending most of this time in Asia as Managing Director of CCH Asia. He’s been back in Australia since March this year.

What’s been happening recently at CCH? Well, some major surveys have been carried out which really keep our Business Intelligence team busy. In September the annual “Your Say” Employee feedback survey was sent to all CCH employees across the Asia Pacific region and North America, Canada and the UK. We also recently completed the second Customer Satisfaction survey of the year. I haven’t seen the full report on the customer satisfaction survey yet so more on that in my next post.

CCH aims to be an “employer of choice”. The “Your Say” survey is used as a metric to track progress and benchmark performance. There’s a lot of research that shows a correlation between staff engagement and customer engagement and CCH aim to deliver improvements in both.

The on‐line “Your Say” survey comprises of 40 questions which are then summarized into 15 key indicative “dimensions”. Results are then summarised, using graphical reports which are given to managers and team leaders to help them understand strengths and weaknesses in their organization.

The survey also allows for optional individual commentary. This is collated and then included in each departmental report. I always find the individual commentary very interesting!  It’s  a chance to vent but also a forum to give some constructive criticism which can be quite insightful.

We rate the company on criteria such as role clarity; work/life balance; performance culture; customer focus; innovation and growth and quality processes.  The encouraging thing is that upper management actually sit up and take notice of the results. For example when innovation and growth scored low one year the decision was made to invest more in innovation and start an innovation program. This was effective and directly led to a lift in that rating.  It is heartening for us employees when action is taken and things change to improve our working life.

There are some more sceptical people at CCH who don’t think the survey is worthwhile and will not bother to do it. Like any survey it’s not perfect but I still would prefer the company asked our opinion about key matters and gave us the opportunity to comment (anonymously) then not at all.

As the migration to IntelliConnect has progressed, some of our customers have asked for more information on how the platform works, how content is structured and what are some effective techniques to use when searching. They have also supplied a variety of suggestions for improvement. All of this feedback has made its way to the IntelliConnect development team via account managers, our customer support team and the Australian Law Librarians Association.

It is so great to have our customers engaged and offering ideas.  Part of the development philosophy behind IntelliConnect is constant improvement based on customer feedback. Release 2 and 3 (due next year) have already been shaped by the suggestions provided, and we hope that this dialogue will continue to drive improvements to IntelliConnect and CCH products.

We have compiled 25 of the top questions and answers about IntelliConnect into a document available on our website. The document covers a variety of issues, from how the library and topic filters work, to the most effective ways to search for legislation and commentary, to recommendations for improvement and how we intend to respond.

We hope this document in conjunction with our FAQ and Training Manual will answer many of your questions about IntelliConnect. If you have further questions, or if you have raised a query that has not been included in the top 25 document, please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.

Accessing individual titles in IntelliConnect has been a topic of much discussion among our customers – especially the cataloguers! To make this process easier CCH Australia has produced a Deep Linking Guide which also includes a list of hyperlinks for each title. You can view the guide here.

The deep linking functionality extends beyond linking to a title. You can also link to a chapter or even an individual document. How these links are used is totally up to the user.

For example, a lecturer or university librarian could post links for readings on their course site. All students would have to do is click on the link and they will be asked to sign into IntelliConnect with their library ID and then be taken directly to the document.

Similarly, in a law firm legal practice groups can post links to key documents on their intranet or team site.

The good news is that because it links directly into IntelliConnect, the content will be “live” and therefore always up to date.

One thing to remember is that IntelliConnect defaults to an “all content” search even if you enter via the deep link. Just tick the box next to the title and it will switch to searching within the title.

Check out the Deep Link guide for more information!