More Great On-Line Resources

Stephanie Kimbro over at the Virtual Law Practice blog has posted a GREAT list of on-line resources that are more-or-less law-related or at least of interest to lawyers.  These were culled from Ms. Kimbro’s CLE presentation at the NC Bar Center for the Bar’s Annual Practice Skills seminar. The list from the presentation, dubbed “Sixty Websites in Sixty Minutes,” includes some of my old favorites, as well as many new sites that I had not yet heard of but look forward to exploring.  Just doing my part to pass along the “free” and “useful” to anyone willing to hear!  Thanks Stephanie!

Ooops! Guess They Got West’s Attention

Back a few posts ago, I mentioned a Firefox extension called Jureeka that recognizes citations on webpages and creates links to open source court documents. Another extension, called Zotero, developed by George Mason University goes one step further: it couples “automatic citation capture” from webpages with formatted citation export and WordPress integration to create “one stop shopping” for academic and legal writing. 

Guess this news was not lost on Thompson / Reuters, Westlaw’s parent, which has promptly brought suit against the University, as reported by Richard Koman on ZDNet. Thompson is claiming that Zotero user are impermissibly accessing Thompson’s EndNote software in violation of license agreements. Specifically, Thompson complains that Zotero improperly converts Thompson’s proprietary .ens file style to free, open source, easily distributable .csl files.

Guess the best defense (in the open source wars) is a strong offense!

LinkedIn For Dummies

Not really for dummies, but I thought I would pass along this nice little instructional video produced by Lee LeFever that I found by way of Kevin O’Keefe’s “Real Lawyers Have Blogs” site. It has lots of good information about how to use LinkedIn to your best advantage.  Thanks Lee and Kevin!

See, I’m Not The Only One Thinking About It

A couple of posts ago, in an entry titled The Internet: All This And ESP Too, I talked about how great it would be to be able to speak at our devices and have them follow our detailed instructions to “tweet” or otherwise communicate, hands and keyboard free and how one of my Twitter follows “tweeted” about such a service, Dial2Do. ESP alive and well.

Well, I am not alone in my imaginings. Caught this note on PrawfsBlog which links to a statistic that Americans do more texting than talking! Adam Kolber then envisions that “Brave New World” where we could just “think” about what we wanted, a converter would then turn it into speech that sounds like our actual voice and the machines would be off and running, doing all the interacting for us.

Sounds crazy, I know, but given my own “Twilight Zone – Meets Tech” experiences of late, I won’t rule out any possibilities!

Music & The Law Are At It Again

If you have been reading this blog, you probably know that I love the intersection of music and the law and have commented on it in prior posts on this blog. Well, I am not alone in my fascination. The Legal Writing Prof Blog tipped me off to this law review article to be published in Volume 64, 2007 of the Washington & Lee Law Review, by Alex B. Long at the University of Tennessee College of Law (what do you expect out of Nashville?). The Abstract reads as follows:

Abstract:
Legal writers frequently utilize the lyrics of popular music artists to help advance a particular theme or argument in legal writing. And if the music we listen to says something about us as individuals, then the music we, the legal profession as a whole, write about may something about who we are as a profession. A study of citations to popular artists in law journals reveals that, not surprisingly, Bob Dylan is the most popular artist in legal scholarship. The list of names of the other artists rounding out the Top Ten essentially reads like a Who’s Who of baby boomer favorites. Often, attorneys use the lyrics of popular music in fairly predictable ways in their writing, sometimes with adverse impact on the persuasiveness of the argument they are advancing. However, if one digs deeper, one can find numerous instances in which legal writers incorporate the lyrics of popular music into their writing in more creative ways.

Just like those lawyers and judges who use humor in their writing, there is nothing like a little anachronistic pair-up to catch the reader’s attention!  Hope you follow the link and enjoy the read!

Commentary: The Trouble With Law School

What an excellent essay on law.com concerning passage through the portal known as “law school” from the age of innocence to the age of experience.  It is refreshing to read such a poetic vision of the education in and practice of law.  Thank you Ellisen Turner.

lawjobs.com Career Center – Commentary: The Trouble With Law School

The Internet: All This and ESP Too

Soon there will come a day when we can just imagine what we want and the object of our desires nearly instantaneously will become a reality.  Just like Captain Jean Luc Picard on Star Trek Next Generation when he would talk to that little sliding door – “Earl Grey, Hot” – and a steaming cup would appear.

Wait a minute, that day is upon us.

This post is about Twitter and a cool service previously unknown to me, Dial2Do. So, at 11:04 a.m., September 23, I post the following Tweet: “Won’t it be cool when you can talk to your phone and computer and out comes a Tweet?” (11:04 AM September 23, 2008 from web.) Now, I follow Nicole Black on Twitter, an attorney in Rochester, New York.  Nicole does not follow me. In other words, she does not see my Tweets. She posts a Tweet about five hours later as follows: Interesting voice transcription service-emails, texts, tweet: “Dial2Do” ( http://www.dial2do.com/ ) 04:09 PM September 23, 2008 from twitthat

How cool is that? Dial2Do works with your phone and lets you accomplish tasks by merely dialing a number and saying what you want to have happen. The person answering the phone asks a couple of questions like what do you want to have done and to whom and Dial2Do “makes it so.” The services that are included are reminders, email, text messages, “listen to email”, Twitter, Jaiku, translate, weather and calendar. During beta testing, the service is free, but I don’t expect that this benefit will last.

Not sure what I am more impressed with, the features of Dial2Do or the unnatural prescience of Twitter-ers.

Why PDF When You Can Flash?

Here is a nice little note from LawyerCasting on why a law firm (or any business converting print to on-line newsletters) might want to consider using flash rather than uploading a PDF to their business website. Why? Well, for one, you can track measurable aspects of readership of the flash version. You can still print the flash by clicking the print icon and you can hot link items within the publication. Text within the flash is searchable by the viewer and search engines and video can be inserted. Why would you choose any other format?  Oh yeah, habit.

Check out LawyerCasting’s example of a flash newsletter here. 

Get Linked. Get Paid.

Larry Bodine over at his Law Marketing Blog reports actual examples of lawyers successfully trawling for biz on LinkedIn. Bodine lists two firms, Davis & Kuelthau and Godfrey & Kahn, which have effectively used the professional networking site to their economic advantage. While the firm representatives concede that it takes time to get to know the ins and outs of LinkedIn and it takes persistence to cultivate the fruit, the rewards are definite and tangible.  Nice to know that all this viral connectivity has an upside!

Badger State Lawyers Get Clients Using LinkedIn : Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog

LexisNexis Search By Topic

Just got a PR release from LexisNexis about a search functionality called “Search by Topic.” This new method permits a search within a topic area, retrieving all relevant sources by jurisdiction. This is the converse of the more traditional method of picking a jurisdiction or authority and constructing a search that hopefully encompasses the pertinent aspects of law. According to the release:

A common concern among attorneys conducting legal research is that they may not be constructing their search correctly.
The fear is that if a search is not constructed correctly, key pieces of information may be left out.

Search by Topic addresses this fear by changing the way searching works on LexisNexis. Instead of choosing the source and typing in search terms, Search by Topic flips the process and prompts you to choose a topic from the extensive Search by Topic taxonomy. Once you’ve chosen your topic and jurisdiction, Search by Topic will automatically show you all the relevant sources. All you have to do is check the sources you want, and you can run a search even without typing in search terms.

If you are only interested in caselaw, you can use our Search by Headnote functionality and pull up headnotes and additional cases pertaining to the topic you’ve chosen.

This new feature resides under the Search tab at Lexis.com and all of the traditional features are available. You can download a free white paper on Search by Topic here. You can register for a free 20 minute webinar to see the new search method here. Happy Hunting!