Best Practices Construction Law : Construction Lawyer & Attorney : Matthew DeVries : Stites & Harbison Law Firm : Green Building & LEED Litigation

Last fall, I attended the Mobile Healthcare Technology Summit sponsored by Smith Seckman Reid, Inc.  My post about the summit included five construction and design lessons when dealing with either new construction or renovations of existing health care facilities. Technology and innovation continue to improve in the arena of health care construction.  Two weeks ago, Johnson Controls announced a new offering to reduce energy consumption in surgical environments. 

The problem: An operating room’s HVAC system (running continuously even when the room is unoccupied) uses a substantial amount of energy to effectively ventilate and eliminate airborne contaminants  

The solution: An innovative program called Healthcare Environment Optimization™ that integrates a hospital’s building automation system with surgery scheduling to optimize air exchange rates and energy use.  The offering was developed in collaboration with HDR, Inc., an architecture, engineering and consulting firm.

According to Johnson Controls, some benefits of the solution include:

• The ability to track air exchange rates and temperatures for record-keeping purposes.
• An optional user interface display which gives surgical and facility staff control of the room conditions, including a manual override to adjust temperature.
• Real-time alarms which allow occupants to immediately address HVAC system problems.
• The ability to earn credits toward LEED® and ENERGY STAR® certifications.

As to the last point, credits may be earned under either LEED® New Construction or LEED® Healthcare, which made its debut this spring following a comment period by USGBC.

Image: US Navy

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Heads up Westlaw, LEXIS, FindLaw and all you other law-related databases.  There is another giant in the field of legal research.  Last night, Google launched a new feature on Google Scholar that makes 80+ years of US federal caselaw and 50+ years of US state caselaw searchable and readable. Here's what you may find: 

• The entire opinions are indexed and available
• Every citation is hyperlinked to the full text of the opinion cited
• Every opinion includes a "How cited" tab showing how the current opinion was cited by the referring opinion
• All opinions include their official citation and include page breaks and page numbers

Let's take this scholar on a test drive. Years ago I worked on a case involving the construction of a power generation facility owned by an entity named Choctaw Generation Limited Partnership.  When I GoogleScholar-ed the name of the owner, my search immediately returned the Second Circuit decision.  That's it!  The hyperlinks to the footnotes and other citations ... check.  The page numbers ... check.  So far, so good.

What's happened to the Choctaw case over the past eight years?  All you have to do is click on the HOW CITED tab and you will find a wealth of information, including the cases that have cited the decision, as well as snippets of the quoted material:

Here are some early insights about Google Scholar as a research tool and how business should approach its use:

• This is a great offering from Google.  Ask any associate attorney in my office where I suggest that they start a research assignment and the answer will be: Google.  Is that the only legal research an attorney should do?  Absolutely not!  But it is the best place to start.  And Google Scholar just opened a wealth of additional data for these preliminary searches.
• One of the enhanced features of Google Scholar is the Advanced Scholar Search that allows you to search by name, jurisdiction, and subject area.  Again, I believe this enhances the preliminary searches that are performed.
• Before relying on Google Scholar exclusively (...which would probably be years before doing so ... ), I would want the public to fully test the scope of the database.  It will be important to watch how timely case law is collected and stored.  

Despite the benefit that Google Scholar results from provide public access to case law, the question remains: will this benefit the practice of law and resolution of disputes in general?  Some of my clients are empowered by their ability to do research and to assist in the trial preparation, while others would simply prefer to show up for the final judgment.  I think for the former group, Google Scholar opens up a pool of available research.  The later group would not bother.

If I had to limit my comments to one sentence, it would be: Great new tool for preliminary research!

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I received an email this morning with the following warning: "The following message is intended for construction audiences only. Do NOT watch this clip alone or in the dark. Please wait 30-minutes after eating before watching this clip. DO forward this video on to a friend or colleague."
 

A couple of my observations about AGC's campaign for its annual convention:

1. This is very smart.  When I usually receive mass email alerts and messages, I put them in a "review later" folder and come back to them later in the week.  Not this one.  It caught my attention and I immediately clicked through the links.
2. This is very timely.  Sending this particular message during the week of halloween was ingenious.  Although the AGC Annual Convention is not for another five months, the message was tailored for the season and I am sure we can expect similar treats over the next coming months.
3. This is very exciting.  What AGC did here was step out of the cookie cutter approach to marketing.  It's a sign of the construction industry embracing Social Media and using technology in new ways.  Kudos, AGC!

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