August 5, 2007

Welcome to Issue #274 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!

These folks will Fixya Up
Have a broken DVD player, cell phone, or washing machine? Getting help with fixing broken consumer electronics is easier said than done -- you often cannot get the help you need just by calling the company's customer service line, and taking the device to a repair shop can waste time and cost you more money than you want to spend. So before you call that repairperson for your gas range, check out FixYa -- it's a community featuring technical support, user guides, and repair services, and more. You can search by product, or enter keywords to "find a solution." If you can't find a previous solution to your problem, you can ask your own question, and one of the online experts will hopefully get back to you with a solution.

Scan for viruses in about a minute
Hopefully, all of you are not only using some type of anti-virus software to keep your computer protected against nasty infections, but you are also keeping those anti-virus definitions up to date. If you practice safe computing (for example, not clicking on e-mail attachments you don't recognize, or downloading and installing programs from questionable sites), viruses should really never be an issue for you. Here's a program that you don't download to your computer, but it can scan your PC in about a minute and determine 1) whether you have any viruses, and 2) what anti-virus program you're using and whether it's up-to-date. Nanoscan is a product from Panda, and it works really fast -- good for a quick confirmation that your computer is still safe.

Blawgs of the Week
In the three weeks that I've been gone, I've featured a bunch of great law-related weblogs on Inter Alia. Here are just a few of them:

When you surf the Internet, your Web browser helpfully keeps track of all the sites you visit, so you can go back and see them again. If you don't want this record of your searching history to stay on your computer, here's how to fix it, depending on the browser you use:

Internet Explorer 6: Click Tools, then Internet Options, then click Clear History. To keep your browser from keeping your history, set "Days to keep pages in history" to 0.

Internet Explorer 7: Click Tools, then Delete Browsing History, and then Delete All. To set the days the history is kept, click Tools, then Internet Options, and under Browsing history click Settings. Set "Days to keep pages in history" to 0.

Firefox: Click Tools, Options, Privacy and then Clear Now. To clear your history each time you shut down your browser, click Tools, then Privacy, and then uncheck everything under the History section. Finally, check "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox." WARNING: This clears not only your history, but everything you have set it to clear under the Settings Button -- make sure you're aware of what you're deleting before pressing Clear Now.

Caught in the 'Net

TWiL and Avvo

I listened last month to the latest edition of This Week in Law, or TWiL, which was titled Rate-A-Lawyer. Some of my Between Lawyers friends, Denise Howell, Ernie Svenson, and Dennis Kennedy, along with attorney Mazyar Hedayat, sat down with Mark Britton, CEO of Avvo, a new attorney ratings service you may have read about in the news.

I thought the podcast was great, and urge all of you to listen to it -- but I think the gang let Mark off easy on a couple of things. I have taken a look at Avvo, and I think the concept is great -- a easy-to-use tool that helps consumers and others find attorneys. However, there's one thing about the site that I have trouble with, and another thing that I don't think the people behind Avvo have taken seriously enough.

On Avvo, each lawyer has a rating that's based upon a "mathematical model" that considers the information in a lawyer's profile. The formula is not available to us, and I can accept that. But based upon a number of the profiles I have reviewed, I'm wondering whether there's a flaw in the ratings process.

For example, I checked out the listing of all Dallas lawyers. The first fifty or so lawyers in the list are rated 10.0, or "Superb." In looking through many of these profiles, I found that most of them contained very little information, except under the "Recognition" tab. On that tab, you can find Awards, Associations, Publications, and Speaking Engagements -- and most all of these 10.0 lawyers were listed as "Texas Super Lawyers," which in Texas, as in most states, is more of a marketing tool than anything else.

In fact, when looking at the elements of an attorney's profile -- Experience, Recognition, Client Ratings, and Peer Endorsements -- I would weight the Recognition area probably the lowest when searching for a qualified lawyer. Yet more than 50 Dallas attorneys are listed as "10.0 Superb," seemingly only on the basis of the awards they've won and positions they've held. I do believe that these things deserve to be included in a lawyer's rating -- I'm just not sure they are weighted appropriately.

I also hope Avvo takes seriously the concern Dennis raised during the podcast that state bar regulators may become interested in Avvo and whether it runs afoul of lawyer advertising rules. As Dennis pointed out, some state bars have reacted negatively to new technologies, and using the Internet for advertising a lawyer's practice. Hopefully Avvo will not come under close scrutiny from the various state bars.

If you're not already listening to This Week in Law, you should. Denise and her gang of commentators consistently come up with some great topics to discuss.

Heart Surgery Forum
This site, described as "a cardiothoracic multimedia journal," is edited by Dr. Mark Levinson. You'll get access to abstracts of past issues of the Heart Surgery Forum Journal (full articles are not free), view discussions on cardiac issues in the Forum (or even subscribe to the mailing list), and listen to audio interviews with heart doctors.

Oregon Blue Book
This is the official state directory and fact book about all levels of government in Oregon. It does pretty much what you'd expect a directory to do -- provide you with names, addresses, and phone numbers of government agencies and individuals. There are also quite a few pages on interesting Oregon facts, including economic stats, scenic images, notable Oregonians, and more.

Work.com
This isn't really a research sites for lawyers *as* lawyers, but it might be for lawyers *as* business owners. Work.com provides how-to guides for your business, which help you learn how to tackle business tasks. Just click on an area where you need help (including Employees, Government, Management, Operations, Sales & Marketing, among others), and you'll find information on various sub-topics. Each guide allows you to email, save or print it out. A nifty resource with lots of small business advice to share.

Strategis
Strategis is part of the Canadian Federal Government, which works with Canadians to build a growing, competitive, knowledge-based economy. The site provides a wealth of links to important information -- under Subjects you can find Company Directories, information on Trade and Investment, Business Support and Financing, Consumer Information, and more. There are also a number of services provided by Industry Canada, including a Bankruptcy Search, Federal Incorporation, Mergers and Competition, and Intellectual Property. And did I mention the guides on how to start and run a business in Canada? Check out this site.

The Atlas of Canada
Let's keep with the Canadian sites -- the Atlas of Canada is another government site, providing access to about every type of map imaginable. You can view them by category, and there are a lot of them -- Environmental, People/Society, Economy, History, Climate Change, Freshwater, and Health. Some of the maps are free, some are available for a fee.

Finally, some fun and interesting sites to start off your week (and maybe waste your Sunday ;-) ):

Did any of your ancestors come through Ellis Island? Want to find out? Just visit the Ellis Island Foundation site, and after you've registered for free you can search for passengers who came through the Port of New York.

wOne is a fun little game where you have to maneuver a tire to knock out barrels and stars.

Well, that’s it for Issue #274 – 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 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.

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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.