AALS’s Low-Quality Mailing Lists & Unresponsiveness: A Lesson in Bureaucratic Neglect
posted by Scott Moss
It’s commonly known that when law profs want to mail out reprints of their articles, the only available mailing list is through AALS, which provides lists only (1) at a high cost (and they try to “catch” professors who try to re-use a list they buy) and (2) of extraordinarily poor quality — e.g., prof names are in all caps and not in separate columns for “first” and “last”, so you can’t (a) do a decent mail merged letter or (b) even sort by last name.
Point (1) — high cost — might be tolerable if not for Point (2); if AALS wants to finance itself by charging a lot for each mailing list use, fine, but at least they should help rather than hinder (with their low-quality lists) members who are trying to engage with other members by sending out mailings of article reprints.
I also can’t fathom why AALS doesn’t just produce a good list (e.g., separate out professors’ first and last names into different columns in Excel — not rocket science, folks), which doesn’t seem more expensive than a bad list. I suppose that changing the database program would be a one-time labor expense, but I also know they’d get more profs buying lists that don’t suck; I know profs who have their secretaries type in mailing lists rather than rely on AALS’s incompetent list compilation. Only a monopoly like AALS could care so little about the quality of its product.
I emailed AALS about the problems with their mailing lists on January 19th (my email is in italics below); within hours the addressee responded (to her credit), “Thank you for your informative email. I have forwarded your message to the appropriate people and they will be responding to you in the near future.” I have received no response since then. The “appropriate people” are behaving about as I expected — not “appropriate[ly]” at all for an organization that exists to serve professors, not (as they seem to think) the other way around. Unfortunately, this sort of bureaucratic neglect and incompetence is what you get from most organizations that think they have monopoly power and a steady supply of funds (e.g., tax dollars, or dues from law schools that can’t really opt out).
I was thinking of ordering a list of professor names and addresses from AALS, but the last time I did, I was extremely disappointed with the list I received — a spreadsheet with that only one column for “Name” that included both first and last name, e.g., “Scott Moss.” This was a significant problem because it made it impossible (1) to sort by last name or (2) to use mail merge to address a letter, “Dear Professor [last name]”. This was a surprising problem because I have never seen a mailing list compiled this way, precisely because any professional organization usually knows better; I was especially perturbed because AALS charges an incredibly substantial fee for emailing this list, even to member professors, yet the list it provides hinders my efforts to work with it.
The pool quality of AALS’s mailing list service is a well-known complaint of law professors. If AALS does not remedy the problem, the situation seems ripe for someone enterprising to compile his or her own higher-quality list of law professors (after all, to anyone with internet access, it is not a secret which professor teaches which subjects at which schools) and sell it him or herself.
If you are not the appropriate person to send this complaint, or if you cannot remedy the problem, could you please forward this email to someone who could? Ideally, I simply would like to be able to buy from AALS a mailing list that serves my simple needs; I hope that is not too much to ask.
April 1, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Posted in: Law School
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Responses (14)
Paul M. Secunda - April 1, 2007 at 5:59 pm
FWIW it’s worth, Scott, the AALS Sections that I have been involved with decided a number of years ago to just put in the work ourselves and put mailing and email lists together from the AALS directory based on the subject matter lists at the back of the book.
This allowed us to avoid the formatting problem and, of course, the high costs of getting lists directly from AALS. From what I can tell, our gathering process worked out pretty well.
Perhaps, this is the future for both people sending their reprints to colleagues (I have never purchased a list from AALS for this purpose), but also for Sections that want to communicate with their members about Section events (although on this last point, it seems that we are moving towards depending more on email lists, listservs, and blogs for these purposes).
Actually, now that I think about it, more professors are using email to at least determine whether they should send a .pdf file of their lastest piece to their colleagues, rather than rely on the old snail mail, reprint route.
All that being said, I think it would be worthwhile for AALS to update and re-format their mailing lists, and reduce the charges for providing such lists, so that professors who do want to continue using this route for sending reprints do not have unncessary obstacles placed in their way.
brainwidth - April 1, 2007 at 6:05 pm
…prof names are in all caps and not in separate columns for “first” and “last”, so you can’t (a) do a decent mail merged letter or (b) even sort by last name…
FWIW, these problems are easily fixable in Excel. You can split columns that contain spaces and you can change formats from all-caps to title or sentence case.
James Grimmelmann - April 1, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Why rely on AALS? If they can’t handle the task and it’s worth doing, the legal academy could easily do this for itself. This job has all of the attributes of one easily amenable to peer production. Set up a wiki or a similar technology, ask professors and schools to make sure that their information is accurate, add a few volunteers or RAs to check for accuracy and fill holes, and bingo. You have a valuable resource for the academy, and one that would be able to beat the AALS system on both price and quality.
Adam - April 1, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Why does AALS have a monopoly? Couldn’t you hire someone to type in the data from 160 law school web sites, and re-sell better data for less?
Elizabeth Weeks - April 2, 2007 at 8:14 am
I’m with you, Scott. Especially for those of us at public universities with fewer “amenities,” like secretarial support, anything that can be done to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the reprint mailing process would be greatly appreciated.
Ramsey Fahel - April 2, 2007 at 8:56 am
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing – and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel
Eric Goldman - April 2, 2007 at 2:22 pm
It also would be great if there were easier ways to form email lists so that we could more efficiently keep in touch with each other. Eric.
Michael Risch - April 2, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Seems like Plaxo or something similar would work well, especially if people are linked – address changes are pushed out to others.
James Grimmelmann - April 2, 2007 at 5:31 pm
An off-topic comment advocating a “Do Not Mail” list. Oh, the irony.
piscivorous - April 5, 2007 at 9:49 am
From a DBA perspective if it is first name last name only it is about 2 hours work. Add fields First Name ,Last Name and write an SQL statement that looks for a space put everything left of the space into the proper field and everything right of the space into it’s respective field while converting the text to the proper case. It is not much more work to to account for middle Initials or names and post scripts like Jr or III.
Shannon Love - April 5, 2007 at 10:15 am
The type of field manipulation you require is trivial for us computer geeks. If you need some done shoot me a mail, no charge.
By the way, how much do they charge for the list? I smell a business opportunity here.
Ryan - April 5, 2007 at 10:44 am
Not to detract from the main point of the post (I agree that this organization should be providing a higher-quality list), but just by way of information:
I can best Mr. Grimmelmann’s solution by about 1 hour and 58 minutes. (Though his solution sounds like more fun…) You can split the name column into two very easily in Excel. First insert a blank column after the column you want to split. Then go to Data > Text to columns… and follow the directions.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy fix for the all-CAPS names. Maybe a macro would do it, but I’m not that smart.
steve - April 5, 2007 at 1:23 pm
use the excel function proper() to put all caps in mixed case.
PJ/Maryland - April 5, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Just to drag us further off to the hinterlands of the topic:
Excel has a Proper() function that will convert text so each word has an initial cap. PROPER(“SCOTT MOSS”) produces “Scott Moss”. Applying it to a few thousand rows, then copying and Paste Special/Value would take a few dozen seconds.
Apparently the AALS is not spending their income on Excel geeks.
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