Internet Legal Research Weekly -- November 25, 2007

Welcome to Issue #285 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!

Put Your Travel Itinerary Together with TripIt
I've been using TripIt for a couple of months now, and I really like it. It's a bit like having your own travel agent, who puts together the itinerary for you. Once you make your online travel reservations -- plane, hotel, rental car, etc. -- just send all the confirmation emails you receive to TripIt -- they will configure all of those emails and combine them into one Itinerary page for you. You can add maps, directions, pictures, and other information to the page, and then you can share the page with anyone who needs to know where you're going to be. There's also a great feature called TripIt to Me, which will email you the whole itinerary or just parts of it, if you want.

Blawgs of the Week
Here are some of the great law-related weblogs I featured this past week at Inter Alia:

Caught in the 'Net

A Great Way to Keep Track of Federal Cases

I really love the stuff that Justia is doing with making access to federal resources easier and usable. One of their great sites is the Federal District Courts Opinions and Orders page, which allows you to search or browse for recent orders or opinions issued by just about any federal court in the country. You can search by Party Name, the type of lawsuit, any Federal District Court, by date, or by entering keywords into the full-text search. If documents are available, you can view them directly in the site, post them to a website, or download them as PDF files.

You can do most of this with PACER, right? Well, yes and no. All of these documents are available through PACER, but getting to them is probably not as straightforward as you would find on the Justia site. Another thing that makes the Justia page so great, in my opinion, is the ability to bookmark your case and receive updates whenever your search terms come up with new hits. When you find a case you want to keep track of, the site lets you use any of 36 bookmarking sites to bookmark the page for future reference. And when you conduct a search, you are able to save that search to an RSS feed, so that when there are new hits on your keyword, you are automatically notified.

Another simple but enormously helpful tip this week, this one for Excel users. When you create spreadsheets with lots of worksheets, sometimes it's hard to keep track of them. Fortunately, you can change the color of the individual tabs, to make them stand out for you. All you need to do is right-click on the worksheet tab, select Tab Color, choose the color you want from the color palette, and then click OK.

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!

Trade-marks Act of Canada
This is just a simple sub-page from Canada's Department of Justice website, covering the Trade-marks Act, R.S. 1985, c. T-13. The pages I read show that they were last updated yesterday! The statute is available in both french and english; just click the title of the section or its number to toggle back and forth between the two versions.

Arkansas Inmate Population Information Search
I think it's a good idea to keep sites like these handy in your bookmarks, for when you need to do a quick check on a party's criminal status. This page from the Arkansas Department of Corrections allows you to search every which way -- by name, gender, age, race, county, facility, or even by criminal offense. The search results provide basic information about the inmate, including scars, marks and tattoos and their current prison sentence history. Interestingly, on each inmate page there's a link to send money to that inmate's trust account -- odd.

Virtual Mentor
The Virtual Mentor is the American Medical Association's online ethics journal. The site is pretty basic; the home page contains links to a few select articles from the current issue, while the Current Issue tab provides links to all articles in both web and PDF format. Currently the issues go back to 2003, but there are plans to upload earlier years in the near future.

Appellate.net
This site is provided by Mayer Brown's Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group. The page primarily serves as marketing for their appellate section, but there are some useful resources here. There are over 400 briefs filed by Mayer Brown lawyers, available in PDF format. The site also provides U.S. Supreme Court Docket Reports, on cases of interest to the business community in which the Supreme Court has granted certiorari. You'll also find articles and treatises authored by Mayer Brown attorneys, as well as audio and PDF files of oral arguments. Finally, there's a nice set of links to appellate resources, primarily courts.

Federal Labor Relations Authority
The FLRA is an independent administrative federal agency that helps to resolve labor disputes and determine legal issues relating to bargaining and negotiations. The site has information on how to file a case with the FLRA, as well as a database of decisions by the Authority and court opinions involving the FLRA.

Time and Date is exactly that -- links to clocks and calendars of all types. World clocks, calendars for any year, time zone and date calculators, and a whole lot more.

In medieval times, the siege weapon of choice was the trebuchet -- at Globalspec, you can customize and hurl stuff with your own trebuchet.

Well, that’s it for Issue #285 – 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.

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