INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
June 23, 2002
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #72 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is send an e-mail to ilrw-subscribe@topica.com. It’s free!
And away we go…..
News Update
Beware E-Mails from Afghanistan
If you have never received an e-mail from the Nigerian scam artists, you are really missing out. The newest scam arrives as a purported e-mail from a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, who has found untold riches. But watch out.Who’s Bigger Now? Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah
For all of my raving about Google, I’m big enough to admit when it’s not the best at something. Now the AllTheWeb search engine announces that its database contains 2.1 billion web pages, just ahead of the 2.07 billion web pages indexed by Google (Google’s still the better search engine, though…).Argh, Matey – Most of Us Are Pirates
A software industry trade group finds that the majority of Internet users fail to pay for software they download for use on their computers.The TechnoLawyer Awards – Part II
When I last wrote in this space, I took a break from legal research and instead discussed another of my favorite topics – legal technology. The TechnoLawyer Awards are given each year in twenty-five different categories, to the best and brightest in legal technology solutions for the previous year. This week, I’ll finish out the rest of the awards given by TechnoLawyer members.
First up is the category of Favorite Legal Forms solution. The winner of this award is LexisNexis Automated Forms. The site provides interactive templates that ask you questions and use the answers you provide to fill out customized forms. So far there are only thirteen states with forms online, but those states have hundreds of forms available for your use. Of course, nothing is free anymore, and these forms are kinda pricey – a single user license (for a year, presumably) ranges anywhere from $150 to $900, depending on the package you order. Quick&Easy was the runner-up in this category, and the winner in the Favorite Practice Area Solution field. This company offers software packages with many of the same forms offered by LexisNexis, and the prices range from $200-$400.
The next category is Favorite Legal Website – and the winner and runner-up are obvious choices. Law.com and FindLaw are both terrific websites, but both have a different layout and focus. Law.com seems to concentrate more on legal news from around the country; it has partnered with several law-related newspapers to round out its coverage. Law.com also has many other wonderful resources and features – check it out. FindLaw, on the other hand, will remind you of Yahoo! for lawyers – the directory-style portal is a great starting point to find legal information elsewhere on the Internet. Law.com also won the TechnoLawyer award for Favorite Online CLE. The prices are reasonable ($29-$69 per seminar), and the offerings are plentiful. CLEonline was the runner-up in this category.
What is your favorite Litigation ASP? And before you go making any rude jokes about lawyers or reference to Cleopatra, you should know that ASP stands for Application Service Provider – it’s a service that provides remote access to an application you don’t have on your own computer. The company providing the service runs the software on its own computer, so you don’t have to worry about it. Tops in the Litigation ASP category is Casevault, a subsidiary of Summation, the great litigation database application. Attorneys use Casevault as a document repository, to store important case documents and transcripts, with the ability to view them 24/7 on the Internet. The runner-up in this category is Casecentral, which provides similar document storage services to Casevault, but gives added value by including calendaring, case news, and contact lists for litigation management. Both sites are worth a look. Speaking of Summation, it was named the best Litigation Support Solution.
Winning both the Favorite New Legal Software and Favorite Time Billing Solution this year is Time Matters. As with most time billing software packages these days, Time Matters offers the practitioner much more than just billing capabilities. This program handles contact and client relations management, document automation and management, phone tracking, timers, and a full set of time and billing options.
In the category of Favorite Transcript Management Solution, the winner is RealLegal. RealLegal offers a myriad of electronic solutions for document management, including the RealLegal Binder, which is desktop software that assists attorneys and paralegals with transcript management, including receiving real-time transcriptions from their court reporter. An unlimited number of transcripts can be handled with this program, with the ability to import, file, search, review, annotate, and report on depositions, motion hearings, and trial testimony. Runners-up in this category were Live Note and the venerable Summation Blaze/iBlaze.
The last award goes to Favorite Print Legal Technology Publication. The winner (and one of my favorites) is Law Office Computing; the online edition basically provides you with indexes to the print edition, but if you have a print subscription you can access the software reviews online. Runner-up was Law Technology News -- most of what you’ll find on this site brief blurbs of new products, and news relating to companies that sell legal technology products. If you regularly keep up with the latest in legal technology, both of these publications are a must for you.
There were a few other TechnoLawyer awards given, but I simply don’t have enough time and you probably don’t have enough interest. If you use a legal technology application that didn’t win an award but should have, drop me a line at tmighell@swbell.net and I’ll try to mention it in an upcoming issue!
Help Desk
Do you use Microsoft Word’s Grammar Check when you check your spelling? I do, and it routinely shows me purported errors in my grammar (yikes!). However, sometimes the grammar checker can be a bit too helpful, stopping for almost anything. Changing that is a breeze – just go to Tools, then Options, then select the Spelling and Grammar Tab. Near the bottom of that tab, click the Settings Button. There you can uncheck the less useful elements of style, and they won’t be flagged the next time you do a grammar check.
Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me a line at tmighell@swbell.net– I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!
Legally Relevant – Sites on the InternetThis is really less a legal research site than a web research site. Consumer WebWatch is a project funded by Consumers Union, the same organization that publishes Consumer Reports. WebWatch hopes to emulate Consumer Reports by rating websites on various issues: disclosure of transaction fees, data collection policies, website advertising, and others. There are two research reports currently available, on Trust and on Travel Websites, but it’s the Resources section that’s worth checking out. There you’ll find many links to organizations in different sectors, all interested in providing quality information on the Internet.
The U.S. Department of Energy maintains this site to provide bibliographic records for energy and energy-related scientific and technical information from the DOE as well as its predecessor organizations, including the Energy Research and Development Administration and Atomic Energy Commission. The database dates back to 1948. A search for “benzene” turned up more than 100 results. Each result contains basic information on the citation, but full-text capability is currently not available on this site (you can access full text of some items through the DOE Information Bridge via a link available on the site).
For those of you who have experience with HIPAA, this website may be of interest to you. The Health Privacy Project is dedicated to raising public awareness of the importance of ensuring health privacy in order to improve health care access and quality. You can find a complete set of the federal laws relating to health privacy, including current regulations, 107th Congress House and Senate bills, as well as congressional testimony on these bills. There is also a report available with a summary of state health privacy statutes. The Resources area provides articles written by the HPP, Privacy Stories and other HPP Fact Sheets, and an area called Health Privacy 101, for those of you not familiar with the subject.
National Organization of Bar Counsel
This site caters to – you guessed it – bar counsel. This includes the personnel of every member attorney disciplinary agency, as well as former bar counsel who have a continuing interest in attorney discipline matters and legal ethics. The online presence of the NOBC does not have a lot of content – you can find a listing of all current members of the organization, as well as a description of the disciplinary cases discussed at previous NOBC conferences.
Statistics on 3,163 airplane crashes are available in this website’s database. From the menu on the front page, you can access a great deal of information – 100 Worst, Pictures, CVR Transcripts, Unusual Accidents, Statistics, and the ability to search the database by aircraft type or operator. For each accident you can get the general information, including date, airline route, passengers aboard, fatalities, and a detailed description of the accident and the factors leading to it.
No fun sites this week, but here’s a useful one. But only if you’re a scientific or brainy type, or if you can’t afford a proper scientific calculator. But here's a scientific calculator that has all of the features you need to calculate impossibly difficult equations.
Well, that’s it for Issue #72 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.
Tom Mighell
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