INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
March 8, 2009
Tom Mighell

Welcome to Issue #329 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.....

News Update -- from the Inter Alia Weblog

Work on Gmail, Whether Online or Off
I've been using Gmail for my personal email account for about 8 months now, and I love it -- it is far and away the best webmail tool out there. But one thing keeping it back is the lack of an archiving feature, to allow users to back up their email to a local file.

But last week, Google fixed that by rolling out offline email. It uses the Google Gears tool to create an offline version of your email, so you can view and compose email when you don't have an Internet connection. Gmail will determine how much of your email to archive, depending on how much email you have online. Even if you don't need a way to access your mail offline, this is a great way to archive your email, in case something happens to go wrong with the online version.

To enable Offline Gmail, you'll first need to download and install Google Gears (unless you are using Chrome as your browser, where it's already installed), and then go to Google Labs, and enable Offline Gmail. It will take some time to sync your offline version, and from then on will sync quietly in the background.

Blawgs of the Week(s)
Here are some of the great law-related blogs featured on Inter Alia the past few weeks -- there were a lot of them!:

  • Here's a blog from Foley Hoag: Law & the Environment is designed to inform, update, comment and discuss legal issues regarding environmental law. Four lawyers at Foley are primarily responsible for the posts, on topics which range from Brownfields to wetlands.
  • On Being a Black Lawyer is brought to you by Yolanda Young, along with "friends....starving students....and recently unemployed journalists."
  • A couple of e-Discovery blogs for you: One thing that I have learned from working in legal technology is the importance for legal and technology to work together to get things done. That's why I enjoy blogs like e-Discovery Insights, which is published by California attorney and Management and Technology Professional Perry Segal. He intends his blog to serve as a primary source of e-Discovery information and resources, with an emphasis on facilitating the relationship between legal and technology professionals. The other is not technically a law-related blog, but because it's connected to e-Discovery, I'm including it anyway. Blogging at the Intersection of Archiving and eDiscovery is published by Mimosa Systems, a vendor that provides email archiving systems.
  • Here's a blog with two topics I really like -- marketing and technology. Marketing Technologies for Law Firms is brought to you by Heidi Sogn, a Seattle marketing consultant. She's discussing social networking, blogs, intranets and extranets, social networks, alumni networks, and more.
  • Here's an interesting niche blog for you -- The Native American Legal Update is your resource for current legal developments regarding Native Americans and Alaska Native peoples. It's published by Foster Pepper, a firm with offices in Seattle, Spokane, and Portland.
  • I always thought that family lawyers practiced within their own jurisdictions -- but then comes along International Family Law to prove me wrong. It's published by Jeremy D. Morley, a New York lawyer who works with family law clients from around the world.
  • I first met Larry Port of Rocket Matter at ABA TECHSHOW 2008 -- we had a great time talking about their then-new product, a Software-as-a-Service practice management application for lawyers. Since that time, they've been going great guns, and now they've got the blog to prove it. At the Rocket Matter Blog they're providing useful information on their product, the SaaS market in general, and other fun stuff.
  • The Train Law Blog is published by Charles Goetsch, a lawyer with Cahill Goetsch & Perry in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. He intends the blog to be a resource for rail labor, railroad employees, and victims of railroad accidents.
  • I'm not sure that Constant Content is a true "law-related" weblog, but it's close enough. Janet Ellen Raasch is a writer and ghostwriter who works with lawyers, law firms and consultants to the legal industry to enhance their online reputations and get new business through publication of content for the Web as well as print media. She's providing some great advice on the topic there.

Help Desk

Does your Word spellcheck stop at every single URL you include in a document? Well, it makes sense -- to a spellchecker a URL *is* misspelled; but here's an easy way to tell your spellchecker otherwise:

In Office 2007:

  • Click the Office button and then click Word Options
  • Select Proofing in the left pane
  • Check Ignore Internet and File Addresses
  • Click OK

If you're using earlier versions of Office, you can get to the "Ignore Internet and File Addresses check box by going to the Tools menu and selecting Options, then clicking on the Spelling and Grammar tab.

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!

This Week at Fios

It's time for our quarterly e-Discovery case law update at Fios. The Winter 2009 update will be presented this Tuesday, March 10, beginning at 1:00pm ET. Fios consultants Ken Rashbaum and Nancy Patton will offer their perspective on some important issues covered in the caselaw the past few months -- cooperation, search, cost-shifting, preservation and spoliation, inadvertent production, and international e-Discovery. To register for the free program, click here.

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

Arkansas Inmate Population Information Search
The Arkansas Department of Correction provides a great page to search for inmates, with lots of options. You can search by name, gender, age, race, facility, or by criminal history and offense. The inmate description provides a lot of information -- in addition to the usual personal data, you'll also see the inmate's prison sentence history, identifying marks, alias, and more. There's even a link to send money, should you feel compelled to send cash to an inmate.

California Court Rules
Here's another simple but useful page provided by state government. This page simply provides links to California's rules of court, in both HTML and PDF format. That's all you'll find here, but it's definitely a good page to bookmark for future reference.

Corporation Service Company ($$)
CSC will help you carry out and manage your due diligence process, from beginning to end. The company will perform UCC search and document retrieval, corporate name verification, litigation searches, flood determinations, UCC debtor as well as corporate tracking, and much more.

Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum
I really like it when a law journal makes its publications available for free online. The Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum is one such journal, with archived issues going back to 2000. AS you might expect, you'll find notes and articles about environmental law; the most recent issue includes topics such as power generation technology, climate change, greenhouse gas markets, and more. Unfortunately, they haven't updated since their Spring 2008 issue -- hopefully they'll post some new articles soon.

Election Updates
Just because the big election is over doesn't mean election news comes to a halt. At Election Updates, you can learn the latest on election laws, management and technology. It's a group blog provided by Michael Alvarez, Paul Gronke, Thad Hall, and Robert Krimmer, and its' hosted at Cal Tech.

Finally, some fun and useful sites to help start off your week:

Interesting Wikipedia entry of the day: this List of Confidence Tricks explains some of the most well known cons and techniques, like the Spanish Prisoner, Pig-in-a-Poke, the glim-dropper, and more.

Ninja Ropes is a simple little game -- help the ninja swing from cog to cog, aiming the ropes at the right times.

Well, that’s it for Issue #329 – 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

Now available: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell

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