Current Awareness Resources for Summer Associates
April 18, 2019
We’re getting close to summer and that means starting summer jobs at law firms, government agencies, externships, etc. Perhaps you want to prepare for your job by learning more about the hot topics in an area of law, or perhaps you want to learn about some of the clients and industries you’ll be working with. Current awareness resources can help you prepare for your summer positions! Many of the databases that the UNC Law Library subscribes to offer newsletters and news alerts in a variety of subject areas that can help you get up to speed in a given topic and help you stay relevant throughout the summer. If you have any questions about accessing this content or about signing up for email alerts, contact the reference librarians via phone, email, chat, or stop by the reference desk. Good luck this summer!
Bloomberg Law offers a variety of current awareness services. There are news pages and curated newsletters for many subjects, such as banking, corporate, tax, environment & energy, IP, and many others. These pages allow you to filter by topic within these broader legal subjects. You can sign up to receive email alerts for these topics as well. Bloomberg also has blogs, such as the Corporate Transactions Blog: Here’s the Deal.
Law 360 is a news service owned by LexisNexis that offers legal news on several different topics, such as intellectual property, securities, bankruptcy, employment, legal industry, as well as others (60 total sections). Users can also search for news, cases, companies, and law firms to find additional information. There is even a Law 360 podcast if you would rather listen to a weekly recap of big stories from the service.
Cheetah offers a number of Dailies, Newsletters, and Treatise Updates. The Dailies are available for practice areas such as Banking & Finance and Trademark. For some of these daily offerings, you can customize topics and jurisdictions or subscribe to all of them. You can also sign up to receive critical alerts throughout the day if you would like to track a specific story, company, or industry. Newsletters are also available for each practice area on Cheetah. You can subscribe to newsletters in their entirety or you can create custom searches and aggregate email alerts to receive content from multiple practice areas in one email.
Westlaw Edge has a News database that allows searching of blogs, international content, newsletters, papers, magazines, and more. Also, Practitioner Insights are available for some practice areas (ex: Data Privacy). News databases specific to certain practice areas are also available, and users can create alerts for specific content.
LexisNexis owns Law360, but Lexis Advance also includes news databases for current awareness. The Legal News database includes content from ALM Media, CCH, Matthew Bender, and others. Users can select a state or practice area to serve as a filter. On specific practice center pages, you can access Law360 materials for that subject, as well as legal news and industry news related to that practice area.