Current Issue

Welcome to Issue #78 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!

The big news this week comes from me. Since I started this newsletter almost two years ago, many readers have commented that I should put the newsletter on a website. This week, I am happy to finally launch my own website, covering Internet legal research and other items of interest.

It’s really more of a “weblog” than a website – a place where you can read the newsletter and other helpful information that I post on a regular basis, journal style. More on weblogs later.

I also must confess to a small deception. When I asked folks to vote on new names for the newsletter, I was really searching for new names for the website. Although I got many great suggestions, I couldn’t go with many of them because they were simply too long – I wanted a website name that was short, potentially catchy, and suitable for a URL. The top vote getter was Inter Alia. So if you get a chance today, please visit http://www.inter-alia.net, the new website.

Right now, the site is VERY primitive, and very short on information – as I learn more about website design you’ll see lots of changes. The site does have an RSS/XML feed, which should make Steven, Gary, and Genie happy; I’ll tell the rest of you more about that in the article below. The site will also have the current version of the Internet Legal Research Weekly in HTML format, as well as archives back to July 1, 2001 (I haven’t gotten all of these up yet – a work in progress). I am also considering operating the newsletter from this site, with the ability to people can subscribe from the home page. Ultimately, I hope to post an Index to all the sites mentioned in the newsletter (but that’s a LONG way down the road).

In the meantime, please take a moment to visit the site, and recommend it to others, if you get a chance. It’s at http://www.inter-alia.net. Thanks!

Help Desk

If you send out regular e-mails with the same or similar content, you know how tedious and time-consuming it can be. Have you ever considered creating a template for those e-mails? It’s pretty easy, if you have an e-mail program installed on your computer. First, open a blank e-mail and enter all the information that is always repeated. Next:

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!

As I mentioned above, once it gets going Inter Alia will be more of a “weblog” than a website. I thought I would take some time this week to talk about weblogs, how they are running rampant on the Internet, and how they can potentially help lawyers in their practice.

Weblogs have been around a long time, believe it or not. Since the early to mid-1990’s, weblogs sprang up as places for people to share their thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world. The author would post regular information about anything – commentary on current events, interesting new links, computer issues, or whatever the weather was doing at the moment. Many early weblogs began as an effort by some Internet users to share favorite websites with others (this purpose has not changed over time). This form of online diary caught on, and there are an estimated 500,000+ weblogs on the Internet. Somewhere along the way, weblog was shortened to “blog;” when law blogs started to appear, the name for those sites was again adapted to “blawgs.”

One reason blogs are so numerous is that they are easy to set up and maintain. Most weblogs are created by blogging software, and the great majority are hosted on websites like Blogspot. A blog author does not necessarily have to know a lot about HTML or web authoring software when posting an item; most of the programs are extremely user-friendly. Once an item is posted, many weblogs (like mine) offer a link for readers to make comments – I urge you to do the same at my site, if you see something that intrigues you. Interestingly, bloggers are responsible for many of the results you see at search engines like Google. Once a blogger posts a link on his or her blog, other bloggers often copy that link and post it in their own blog. Since Google relies on link popularity to generate its results, many of the results returned by Google are the result of hundreds of thousands of bloggers displaying that link on their respective weblogs.

Denise Howell, an appellate lawyer at the Los Angeles firm of Crosby, Heafey, Roach and May, writes that there are three main reasons lawyers should care about weblogs:

Currency in topic-specific information. If it’s in the news (or, better yet, not in the news but should be or is about to be), it’s in the weblogs. Replacing or augmenting your daily newspaper consumption with a read of your favorite blogs and/or material culled through news aggregation software (more on that later)….will noticeably improve your currency in developments in your field.

Adding your own topic-specific expertise, commentary, analysis, or random thoughts to the discussion.

Intra-firm efficiencies – weblogs provide an easy and robust way to compile, categorize, archive and retrieve information…keeping firm members connected and in the loop on important case or firm management issues.

Denise is the operator of a terrific weblog called Bag and Baggage. Other blogs (mostly law) worth visiting include

One nice thing about the blogging community is that everyone links to everybody else. So if you’re interested in finding other weblogs, just check out the home pages of some of the sites above, and you’ll find more weblogs than you can explore in an afternoon. For law blogs, Ernie the Attorney’s weblog has a fantastic page of legal bloggers broken down into specific categories.

For the really hardcore researcher, accessing weblogs using a news aggregator is definitely the way to go. A news aggregator is a software program that can travel to any number of weblogs and download just the headlines from each site. That way, you don’t have to visit dozens of sites to get the information you need. News aggregators (the ones I’m familiar with, anyway) can’t work unless the website has an RSS or XML newsfeed; this is a page that is created as part of a weblog, but is gobbledygook for anyone to look at. If you go to my website at http://www.inter-alia.net and look down the left-hand column, you’ll see a button that says XML on it. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to a page with a lot of junk on it. This page is read by the news aggregator to provide the headlines you see in that program. If you’re interested in trying out a news aggregator, check out Headline Viewer, FeedReade, or AmphetaDesk for free, and NewzCrawler if you don’t mind paying for it. In addition, law librarian Steven Cohen has two great articles on these products on LLRX; you can find them here and here, respectively.

If what you read here interests you about blogging, you might check out a great book by Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook. If you like you can purchase the book direct from Amazon.

Do any of you visit weblogs you’d like to mention here? If so, drop me a line and I’ll mention them in an upcoming issue!

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

This organization, which claims to be the largest and most successful credentialing organization in psychology, is “committed to advancing psychology as a profession and improving the delivery of health services to the public.” The main feature of this site is the Online Searchable Database of psychologists. You’ll have to register (it’s free), but then you can search for a registrant by location or by name (Note: the free part only includes a small number of searches. For unlimited queries, you’ll have to purchase a subscription). I searched for a Behavioral specialist in Brain Injuries in Dallas, and got one hit – the results showed me the doctor’s name, address, phone, areas of specialization, certification, school attended, and state(s) of licensure.

Another one of those sites I love so much – a list of links on a single focused topic. Compiled by Maryland attorney Terry Berger, this page is simply a listing of state links for finding corporation information and agents for service of process. There is also some good information at the bottom of the page on the status of providing this information on the Internet. If you are regularly or even occasionally suing people in one state or another, this is the place for you.

This is a tremendously interesting site for lovers of constitutional debate to explore. The premise of the Constitution Project is that constitutional decision-making cannot be left solely to the courts, but is also the responsibility of the people. From the Project’s mission statement, it “creates bipartisan blue-ribbon committees of former government officials, judges, scholars, and other prominent citizens to reach across ideological and partisan lines, and across divides among the executive, judicial, and legislative branches.” There are five current initiatives: Courts, Constitutional Amendments, Death Penalty, Election Reform, and Liberty and Security. Each initiative provides a tremendous amount of information about the subject, including news, task force reports, a list of members, and numerous other resources. You can sign up for free updates by e-mail, and even sign up to be a part of the Project.

I’m not sure this site is worth mentioning, but for those of you who may require information from the EPA on pesticides, it may be worth a look. Here, all you can do is learn how to make a Freedom of Information Act request for documents from the Office of Pesticide Programs. You cannot request them online, but there are 15 separate tabs to teach you how to mail in your request for documents. Probably useful information, but it’s also an example of government bureaucracy at its best.

The name of this site makes me wonder whether I can trust its services, but the concept is certainly intriguing. Serve-Em is an Internet-based process service clearing firm that provides “accountable Inter-Jurisdictional process service.” And it’s oh-so-easy to use. Just fill in the form to request process service pickup from your front desk, or fax the papers directly to Serve-Em. The company charges $98 for service within 5 business days, and $196.00 for same-day service. You can also see the rules for service for all 50 states, international treaties dealing with service of process, and a few select forms for federal and state cases. Once you find the agent for service at Terry Berger’s site above, head over to Serve-Em to get ‘em served.

Last but not least, a few fun and useful sites for you to explore. First, a site you may hate me for, but I couldn’t resist – a pictorial History of Michael Jackson’s face.

When you’re done there, head on over and take the Are You a Nerd?. I scored a 79.02%, which means that I’m nerdier than Ernie, but not as nerdy as Bert (whew!).

So you wanna try something you’ve never done before? Check out SoYouWanna? to find instructions for doing hundreds of things, from buying a wedding gown to getting a sex change.

Well, that’s it for Issue #78– 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.

Subscription Information: If you want to keep on receiving issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, send an email to tom@inter-alia.net, or visit Inter Alia sign up there! If you no longer want to receive the newsletter, just send me an e-mail at tom@inter-alia.net and I'll remove you from the list.

Archives: Miss an issue? You can read previous issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly in the Archives.

Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tmighell@swbell.net.