Intermission

Image by Camera Slayer via Flickr

Now is the time to go get your popcorn, a drink, a trip to the loo, maybe even a cigarette if you are doing the 1950’s thing.  Intermission time!

The Advocate is quitting the Studio for a few days and heading to Connecticut to a friend’s lake house. At said lake house, said “friend” (and I do mean the quotes in the context of this sentence) is vowing to get the Advocate up on water skis. It is a feat that has been attempted unsuccessfully many times before. Some attempts even caused great pain. Nonetheless, in the spirit of our Nation’s birth holiday and my “never-say-die” (gulp) attitude, the Advocate is game for another try.

Needless to say, the Advocate will not be writing about law and technology over the upcoming Fourth of July Holiday, anticipating that her fingers are to become quite sore over the next 24 – 48 hours. But I promise you, the Advocate will be thinking, and thinking hard, about law and technology, particularly as she attempts to get vertical while being pulled at scary speeds behind a motor boat. Wishing, in fact, that she was still in front of her cozy laptop seated on her comfy stool.

In all earnestness, however, I do wish everyone a very happy and safe and sunny Fourth of July. Remember why we are all doing this – we have a nation to honor! See you on the flip side, and hopefully I will not be in traction!

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You Want Dockets? I Got Yer Dockets Right Here

Thanks entirely to Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, a perpetual wealth of legal information of the free and on-line variety, I learned today of a new site called FreeCourtDockets. This site offers federal civil, criminal and bankruptcy court dockets, and material from the Supreme Court, Court of Claims and Court of International Trade.

Remembering fondly, here, those frantic calls to Iowa looking for a court docket on a dusty old case, then writing a check, then sending the check, and then patiently waiting for the pound of paper to return via U.S. Postal Service. Ain’t technology grand?

Searching Twice The Area In Half The Time

Research is all about efficiencies – you want to cover as much ground as you can in an effective manner so that you can provide the best answer. In law, the best answer should be delivered in a timely fashion, often by overwhelmingly-short deadlines.

How about splitting yourself in two and searching in two places at once? How is this possible? –  you ask, knowing full well the ethical implications of human cloning? Erica Wayne at Legal Resarch Plus has the answer: two different search functions that offer simultaneous searching!

Browsys offers the two tools: Twoogle and Twofind. Twoogle allows simultaneous searching of Google and Twitter (hence the clever name mash-up). From the site:

Twoogle provides an easy way to search Twitter and Google simultaneously, from the same site, displaying its results side by side.

Twoogle aims to make easier for people to get the best of two worlds: The realtimeness of Twitter and the relevancy of Google search results; it also provides a “Tweet these results” functionality, making it easy to share on Twitter with just one click.

Twofind allows the searcher to search two search engines simultaneously. The drop down menu on the search page shows:  Google / Bing; Google / Yahoo; Google / Twitter; Bing / Yahoo; Bing / Twitter; and, Video. The results display in two side-by-side windows within the main window, each with their own scrolling.  Since I am finding myself searching both Bing and Google these days more often than not, I love the fact you can hit one search query and get both sets of results at the same time!

Browsys offers other free features on their site as well. Their search function has a search box over tabs marked: Google; Bing; YouTube; Twitter; News; Blogs; Wikipedia; Facebook; Flickr; W/A; Ask Q&A; and, OneRiot.

Advanced Finder expands the engines accessed, including some of my semantic favs and visual search engine Searchme, with category breakdowns such as: general; images; video; news; social; files; reference; and, academic.

There is a tool called SidePad that collects all the big and little search sites one could ever imagine in the left column, and a window display area showing the selected site on the right.

Quiclip offers a notepad for drafting text and urls which then can be shared, tweeted, IM’d or bookmarked with a single click.

Browsys also offers virtual file space or folders for collecting and sharing information en masse.

I am always grateful to companies like Browsys developing innovative ways to access information on the Web and offering their resources for free! Happy searching!

Hands-On With LawToGo’s iPhone Internal Revenue Code (Plus Offer)

Now THIS is what I am talking about: meaningful research resources no larger than the palm of your hand that can travel with you wherever you go. You never know when you will need to consult the Bankruptcy Code, the Federal Rules of Evidence, Title VII or your local building codes.  We are nudging closer and closer to truly portable information tailored to our specific needs. And what better delivery vector for that information than the iPhone?

I mentioned LawToGo’s Internal Revenue Code iPhone application in a prior post, but did not review it as I had not actually tried it. I do like those free apps and really have to have a pressing need to spend upwards of $5, let alone $14, on a phone application. Mike at Jade Nile, LLC, LawToGo’s creator, jumped to my rescue, offering a trial run with the formerly-weighty Code. Admittedly, I am not a tax practitioner, but I do occasionally have questions about tax matters, my most recent being the tax treatment of premiums paid for long-term care insurance. Even as a non-tax gal, I can definitely see the value in having a resource such as the IRC at my fingertips.

Mike explains that he is a technology and tax guy, who was inspired to create an application for the IRC. His desire stemmed from a need to be able to respond to unpredictable client calls or to settle a heated debate about the substance of the Code. His inspiration came from his trade-up from a Palm V to an iPhone.

LawToGo is simple and effective. It opens with a screenshot of the capital building, which I find quaintly amusing. The first screen after the Capital breaks down the Code into alphabetized headings, which are further broken down where appropriate, until you get to the section you are interested in.

The above shot is the first page you see after the Capital. The IRC button also takes you to this page. The search buttom allows you to search by section number, using a number scroll wheel similar to the one found in the Calendar app, or via simple boolean search operators: /# (distance between search terms), AND (or a space) and OR. Quotes around a phrase will yield the exact phrase. Search terms in your results will be highlighted in dayglow yellow (my highlighter color of choice).

Or you can simply drill down through the hierarchical sections of the Code by pressing on the desired subheadings. After passing through A. Income Taxes, 1. Normal Taxes and Surtaxes, A. Determination of Tax Liability, I. Tax On Individuals, and Sec 1. Tax Imposed, I ultimately reached the screen showing the relevant code section:

The screen scrolls to reveal the full text of the section and relevant charts.

In the above shot, you may notice right and left arrows on the bottom of the screen. Rather than backing out to the subheadings list, you can use the arrows to navigate to adjacent sections. Handy and quick!

The plus button allows you to add the section as a bookmark. The envelope allows you to email the section as the body text. The help button, obviously, offers help on how to use the portion of the program you happen to be at the time you press the button.You can view three screens / tabs at once including your search results and a bookmarked page.

Searching worked just as one would expect a boolean search to work. There was a delay of a few sections when pulling up the search results, but not a terribly annoying one.

The search screen will look familiar to any iPhone user and the results page looks like this:

Click on a result, and the highlighted search terms show as follows:

The application can be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode.

The obvious question I have, and I believe other potential purchasers also will have, is “what about updates?” The IRC is notorious for changing its stripes on a regular basis. According to the site, version 1.2 has the IRC up to December 31, 2008. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will be included in version 1.3, which will be sent as a free update to those already purchasing versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. This statement does suggest that future updates may not, in fact, be free, which could push the cost of the app up over the long haul. The site does announce that Treasury regulations, 26 C.F.R., will be coming soon.

If you hit the jump above to LawToGo’s website, you can actually see a video of the application in action.

All in all, I find it to be a nice implementation of iPhone technology and application of that technology for the benefit of legal and financial professionals. If I practiced in this area or had a more than occasional need for the IRC, I would believe the $13.99 price tag well worth it.

But, in the spirit of telemarketer Billy Mays, I cannot resist the temptation to extend an offer that Studio readers cannot refuse: a coupon code for a free copy of LawToGo IRC! Such a bargain! I guarantee you will have fun tracking down your favorite (or perhaps not so favorite) Code sections. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, please email me at advantageadvocates@comcast.net and I will offer the coupon codes to the first three requests that I receive!

Thanks Mike!

Making Short Work Of Your Twitter Stream

I am on a Twitter roll today, apparently. I couldn’t help myself – I had to report on this new service called, of all things, Twitter For Busy People. According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, TFBP is a new interface for Twitter that collects the latest tweet from your follows, so that you can quickly peruse the latest statuses of more people in less time. Recent history is still available with a click of the mouse.

Twitter For Busy People: when you are too damn busy to read 140 characters or less.

Has Twitter Changed Our Usage? Ask Oxford University Press

Interesting factoids from a study being conducted by the Oxford University Press regarding Twitter and language usage: it is a hotbed for new word creation; hyper-abbreviations are rampant; participles ending in “ing” are popular; tweeters would much rather talk about the future than the past; intensives and strong adjectives densely populate; and, one of the most popular words on Twitter is, well “Twitter.” 

OUP has been examining approximately 1.5 million tweets since January in an effort to explore Twitter’s impact. Read a synopsis of results to date here. Such language-tracking is not new: OUP already performs such studies in other media, such as newspapers, magazines and blogs. However, Twitter’s inherent length limitation has Tweeters going to new lengths to get their points across. Want more data? Check out the facts and numbers here.

Hat tip for both papers to Resource Shelf.

Friendfeed for Lawyers

Image via CrunchBase

I have had a love affair with Friendfeed for more than six months now. Upon joining the aggregator / streaming service, I immediately used its tools to find and follow the people I had already connected with on other services. One of my services, Twitter, utilizes a follow list that is 90% lawyers. So I was pleased to find that a healthy number of these tech-aware lawyers had found Friendfeed before me, opened an account and were feeding already. I followed them all.

I quickly learned that the lawyers I follow on Friendfeed primarily send in their Twitter tweets and, maybe, a blog entry and, if they are really avant-guarde, some Google Reader items. There was no interaction between these lawyers and others on Friendfeed and their material quickly sped through the feed and was soon forgotten. So, I asked myself, why are these lawyers on Friendfeed?

The better question is: why should these lawyers be on Friendfeed? Consider this humble post a primer on Friendfeed, what it is and and the value it represents.

A good place to start is an explanation of what Friendfeed is. At its heart, Friendfeed is indeed an aggregator of one’s on-line content, a place to feed into a single stream all of the material one creates and shares on-line. The list of shareable items is exhaustive – take a look at the screenshot below and remember that Friendfeed is adding services all the time.

Needless to say, one can paint a thorough picture of one’s on-line life using Friendfeed as an aggregator.

Why aggregate? You can use Friendfeed as a personal content scrapbook, a one-stop shopping destination for all of your on-line hang-outs. You can find all of your Delicious links, your blog posts, your Stumbles, your Twitter posts in one space. You can find your Amazon likes, your Facebook and Linkedin statuses, your Google reader items and even your Pandora favorites. You can post video likes from YouTube and personal video conversations from Seesmic.

With respect to Twitter posts, a key benefit of Friendfeed that beats Twitter is the ability to easily search or filter your Twitter entries with a simple click of a button and ALL of your tweets will appear. On Twitter, you have to rely on a semi-reliable search function and tweets are only archived for a few days.

Click on your Friendfeed name and you will see your entire stream of on-line activity. And, for most services, your on-line content shows up fairly quickly in the Friendfeed stream. Finally, it bears noting that Google searches like Friendfeed almost as much as they like Twitter: Hutch Carpenter explains his own experiment with the rankings that a Friendfeed entry can obtain in Google on his blog here.

But Friendfeed is far more than just aggregation of your own content. To truly dive into the Friendfeed experience, a Friendfeeder should seek out others to follow and, hopefully, encourage them to follow back. Sound Twitter-familiar? It is and it isn’t. Friendfeed is where the real conversations and information-sharing occur, once you convince others that you are a worthy conversation partner. It takes some time and definitely some effort to connect with other Friendfeeders. The experience, however, is vastly superior to Twitter and worth the effort.

Friendfeed has Twitter beat as a conversation station by virtue of its better organization and interface. Friendfeed on the Web offers the key features that Twitter users can only obtain through third party tools and resource-costly desktop applications. You can group your users and pay attention to certain portions of the feed, filtered by those groups. You also can filter topics through saved searches. Check out this awesome post by Bwana on what saved searches are and how you can use them effectively. You can join existing or form new “rooms” (topic-based Friendfeed accounts) and invite other Friendfeed users to join you in those rooms (either public or private) for targeted conversations about any topic imaginable.

Friendfeed automatically “trees” conversations by allowing you to “like” and “comment” on entries that you view. Those readers who are on Facebook might recognize these features as part of Facebook’s latest overhaul – they were taken directly from Friendfeed’s model. It becomes far easier to enter and track a conversation and return for further discussion. It also becomes easier to forge connections when you can actually engage in a conversation that is so easily tracked.

How do you break into Friendfeed? First, complete your profile and import whatever services you are interested in sharing. Obviously, for a professional presence, some of your content may be less interesting or valuable than other content and your target reader should be kept in mind. Next, import your friends from other services. These include Facebook, Linkedin, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. You also can find popular users and recommended users. Search out public groups that may be of interest to you based on your professional or personal bent and subscribe to them. Then jump into the conversation.

For some more detailed tips on getting the most out of Friendfeed, I heartily recommend this article from KnowtheNetwork.

Friendfeed is at that same place in the popularity arc that Twitter occupied  a few years back – it currently is populated mostly by technology-forward types, the shining lights among tech bloggers, hard-core programmers and coders and individuals who appreciate its initially-challenging but ultimately more rewarding interface.

I am writing this post now because I recently have seen more of my Twitter friends showing up on Friendfeed and subscribing to my feed. This jump seems to have coincided with debut of the new “real-time” interface  and the loud noise the tech press made heralding the change.

Why now? Undoubtedly, those of us who spend some time on-line, particularly in the news sources, hear about the next big thing and are eager to try it, even if we don’t understand it. And that is my sense of the reason for this next wave of Friendfeed users – they want to join in, but simply are not sure what to make of Friendfeed.

A few months back, I sought feedback from my Twitter lawyer friends as to why they were on Friendfeed when they were simply feeding in tweets and not fully exploiting its value. The short answer I received from those kind enough to respond was just that – these people were not sure what it was or how it could be used to their advantage.I just listened to a very recent podcast by two tech luminaries in the legal world discussing Friendfeed. These are people well-respected by other lawyers for their opinions on tech matters. I was only slightly surprised to hear that these individuals were themselves unsure of what Friendfeed was and what it could do for them and whether it really was worth it to spend time on yet another social site. They could sense that Friendfeed had value but could not precisely quantify what that value was.

I will not lie – Friendfeed’s learning curve is a bit steeper and longer than Twitter’s learning curve. Furthermore, with fewer people in the Friendfeed stable, it takes a bit more engagement to connect to others and achieve the level of sharing that makes Friendfeed so unique. I believe that Friendfeed will gain in prominence among professionals and the general population as more people discover and utilize its features. But those intrepid attorneys braving the uncharted waters need to engage to win here. If you only have so much time to spend on-line, don’t rule out Friendfeed – you can still track your Twitter peeps on Friendfeed and even reply to their threads on Twitter via Friendfeed with a simple setting adjustment.

Friendfeed as a marketing and business generating tool? You betcha! I have gotten the same number of leads for professional work from Friendfeed as I have from Twitter. Although the work has differed (undoubtedly due to the different audiences I follow on the two sites), the numbers read the same. Bear in mind that I am currently pushing close to 1,000 Twitter followers and have only just over 300 Friendfeed followers. You do the math. The quantity and quality of responses to my questions on Friendfeed far exceed the return from my Twitter follows. The only conclusion I can reach is that the higher the quality of connection, the better the chances that your networking will yield results. And Friendfeed offers the better connection.

You still want another benefit? Far less spammers than Twitter. Although I am sure even spammers will eventually discover it and figure out a way to break in.

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Keeping Tabs on the C-Suite, Twitter-Style

Here is an innovative real-time information filter for business-oriented Twitter-holics: ExecTweets. ExecTweets is a beta site offering the tweets of the movers and shakers, the captains of industry and the power play-makers across sectors. Backed by Microsoft (who else?), the site has this to say about itself:

ExecTweets is a resource to help you find and follow the top business executives on Twitter. Created by Federated Media, in partnership with Microsoft, ExecTweets is a platform that aggregates the tweets of top business execs and empowers the community to surface the most insightful, business-related tweets.

ExecTweets is also available as a  free iPhone application, offering organization by topic, popularity and industry. I was going to copy the list of participating executives, but the list truly is too long! Hit the jump to their site above to see the “wealth” of information. Instead, check out this list of hot topics on ExecTweets as of the time of publishing this post:

love help week other google please twitter facebook social people work video media use check than business know also did blog make youre right world

I notice a glaring absence of posts on MJ. How refreshing!

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Expand Your Legal Knowledge for Free with On-Line Courses

Nice resource for lawyers:  MentorCLE offers free on-line courses on legal subjects for Illinois lawyers. Included is this course on Persuasive Writing For Lawyers by Helen Gunnarsson. You can pay $19.95 to convert your time into an hour of CLE credit.

There is a list of a number of great presentations on the site here. Got 15 minutes and a cup of coffee? Why not learn something new? Great job, MentorCLE!

Save A Briefcase, Use A Kindle

I have long suspected that e-readers in general and the Amazon Kindle in particular could serve a higher purpose for lawyers. There is no doubt that we, as a profession, drown in paper. While we are in much better shape in this regard now than we were, say, 10 – 15 years ago, there is still a lot of paper wending its way through the practice. And, of course, lawyers by definition are avid readers, by both choice and necessity.

Many thanks to Justin Rebello at the Wisconsin Law Journal for his short list, of lawyer-specific reasons to grab a Kindle. Quoting from Justin:

Read depositions.

The most common use for attorneys is exploring read-only versions of deposition transcripts.

The Kindle allows the user to make notes on the screen or on the Web via an online content manager.

There are also applications — such as Accureader — that can transfer a Kindle file (a .ptx file) into a PDF for text conversions, and have it e-mailed to a laptop.

“It’s an easy way to keep track of the case no matter where you are,” said Finis Price, a personal injury lawyer in Louisville, Ky. “A laptop or other reader is too clunky for [converting files].”

Take private records home with you.

The days of an attorney piling ultra-sensitive case documents into a brief case are over.

The Kindle allows the user to upload documents onto the device using Amazon’s Digital Text Platform self-publishing tool.

Find new ways to release your own book.

Speaking of self-publishing, the Kindle gives attorneys looking to release their own book more options.

You can use the Digital Text Platform to upload, format and sell your book at the Kindle Store. Hundreds of law-related books are already available.

Keep up on blogs.

If your Google Reader is constantly showing 1,000+ unread items, the Kindle can download a number of blogs so you can stay up to date while on the go, all without a web browser, says Price. [Yep, the Studio can even be loaded onto your device, via Amazon!]

Save on printing costs.

The Kindle certainly isn’t cheap ($359 for the current iteration, $489 for the DX), but it can actually save law firms money in the long run.

Firm policies and manuals can be uploaded in a read-only format. Web versions of magazines and newspapers can also be converted.

As more lawyers adopt this facile method for dealing with the mountains of paperwork (and email) that pervade their lives, briefcases and backs are certain to breathe a sigh of relief.

Hat tip to Legal Writing Prof Blog.