INTERNET LEGAL
RESEARCH WEEKLY
August 21, 2005
Tom
Mighell
Welcome to Issue #202 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 visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!
And away we go....
Follow your bus on the 'Net
Gee, it's amazing what Internet technology is capable of achieving. Take, for instance, Gary Price's recent article on Real-Time Transportation Finders -- it's a great collection of sites that help you find public transportation in your own neighborhood. The first site -- NextBus -- is worth the whole article. This site uses GPS technology to tell you when certain buses will arrive at their respective stops. It currently serves 13 states. Way cool.Here we go again
Remember Y2K, that potentially disastrous issue that turned out to be not much of a problem? Well, we may have another Y2K-esque scenario on our hands, since the federal government passed legislation recently signed a law that extends daylight savings time for four weeks. That means that all of the computers and other mechanisms that are automatically configured to change time on a set date will have to be re-configured, or they might get confused.Roberts -- Decide for Yourself
The folks at AskSam have put together this great database of The Opinions of Judge John G. Roberts. The cases have been divided up into categories for ease of use.Find Government Feeds
The FirstGov U.S. Government RSS Library is the place to keep tabs on new RSS feeds from government websites. You'll find hundreds of helpful feeds here.Blawgs of the Week
Here's this week's crop of law-related weblogs: first up is Drug-Injury.com, the product of Tom Lamb, a North Carolina lawyer who represents patients and their families in lawsuits which involve an injury or death due to serious side effects from the use of prescription drugs. Canadian lawyer James M. Bond is an Associate Counsel in the Vancouver office of Lang Michener, and he's providing developments in the business and law of franchising at Franchise Update. Paula Seeger is the librarian at the Dane County, Wisconsin Legal Resource Center, and her blawg is similarly titled; the Dane Co. Legal Resource Center Blawg offers local legal news and information for judges, attorneys, and members of the public interested in legal research, especially in the Dane County area. Law-Write.com provides legal research and writing services, and it's using some of those research skills to blog about decisions of California's highest court at the Law-Write California Supreme Court Blog. Mark is an attorney who is airing his ruminations on the business, economics, and law of sports over at SportsBiz. The Canadian law firm Lang Michener is blogging about real estate issues at the Law of the Land, the Canadian Commercial Real Estate Law Blog. Finally, The Law on Caffeine features the musings of a Marquette law student, discussing "what it takes to get through law school."
Caught in the 'Net
Google Gone Wild(card)
Google now has the ability to search by wildcard (how long has this been going on?). You can enter a sentence (for example, Chicago is the * capital of the United States) and get a relevant, specific response.
One sentence in the Google post that got me was "Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather than to learn about a topic." If you're using a search engine to learn about a topic, you're not a very efficient searcher. In fact, search engines are designed to find very specific pieces of information. If you want to learn more about a particular topic, you'll do better with a different type of search tool, like a directory or maybe a clustering meta-search tool.
Here's a tip to free up some space on your computer. If you are regularly running Windows Update (or better yet, have it configured to automatically download critical updates), Windows will automatically place an Uninstall folder in your Windows directory with a file name like $NTUninstallKB896428$ -- these files take up a lot of space! But if you delete these files, you can't uninstall the update.Is that such a problem? Usually, no -- a lot of the updates you get from Microsoft can't be uninstalled. If you were having a problem with an update, you would know soon after the update. So here's a compromise -- if you really want to get rid of some of these files, go to the Windows folder, click View, then Details, to see the date these folders were modified. It's probably safe to delete those Uninstall folders that are 4 months old or older. Keep the rest, for at least another couple of months.
Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)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 Internet
Valuation.Resources.com
This is a very, very busy site. But once you sort through the noise, you'll find some valuable information on business valuation. Among the links you'll find Industry Resources, Industry Outlook, Financial Ratios, Salary Surveys, Economic Data, Public Market Data, Transaction Data, Legal & Tax Links, and more. Each area provides a plethora of helpful links on the subject. Too many ads here, but this is nevertheless a very helpful resource.CLEOnline
Created by a Texas lawyer, CLEOnline caters primarily to other Texas lawyers, but some of the courses are available to lawyers from other states, too. The site offers online seminars that attorneys can view at any time of the day or night. There are over 100 seminars currently open for August, ranging from one-hour courses for $25 to six hour sessions for $120. Titles include "Effective Negotiation and Mediation Advocacy," "Bankruptcy Exemptions: Paradise or Minefield," and "Will Drafting in Texas."United States Tax Court
The U.S. Tax Court provides a forum where individuals and entities can dispute tax deficiencies determined by the IRS prior to the payment of the disputed amounts. The site has a great tabbed interface, where you can easily access the opinions issued today or search for prior opinions by date, keyword, judge, or other criteria. You'll find access to forms, the rules of the Court, bios on the Judges, helpful administrative contact information, a list of fees/expenses, and more. A nicely-done court site.WorldLingo ($$)
Need a transcript, manual, or other document translated? WorldLingo offers translation services in many industries, including the legal field. You can upload your document for an instant quote on translation cost. The service provides translation services in over 141 languages, and a wide variety of services are available.Business Plan Archive
A number of business schools and entities have combined to produce this Archive, the goal of which is to collect business plans for posterity. After you complete the free registration, you can search for business plans by company name, alphabetical listing, document type, market audience, market sector, or by information available. The types of documents available include actual business plans, company profiles, executive summaries, e-mails, memos, screen shots, product information, and more. Most of the companies with documents here seem to be Internet businesses.
Finally, a few fun and useful sites for you this week:
Are you an automatonophobic? Find out about this phobia, and other fears, at the Indexed Phobia List.
As someone who didn't do very well in Calculus, meeting someone named Dr. Math would be a little intimidating for me. But if you have a math question, maybe he can help.
Well, that’s it for Issue #202 – 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
Subscription Information: If you want to keep on receiving issues of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net, or visit Inter Alia and sign up there! If you no longer want to receive the newsletter, just click on the link at the bottom of this newsletter.
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 tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.