Robert Ambrogi's LawSites

Paul F. Kenney is a well-known Boston-area personal-injury lawyer and a partner in the law firm Kenney & Conley in Braintree, Mass. Now, he is also a published novelist. This week, Kenney published his new book, Paths Along the Way, which tells a story that he says was inspired by his own life experiences as a criminal defense and trial lawyer.

I will confess that I have not yet read the book. However, I know Paul and I can attest to the fact that he can spin a story with the best of them. According to the book’s description, the story starts in 1967 with two white brothers, Christopher and Michael, living in a Boston housing project. Christopher’s evening out with his black girlfriend ends in a shooting that changes the course of his life.

Years later, the two brothers — Christopher now a prominent Boston trial lawyer and Michael a State Police detective — are reunited when the nephew of Christopher’s long-ago girlfriend is framed for the murder of a Boston cop. Christopher takes on his defense and enlists Michael as his investigator. Along the way, he risks all that he has built and hoped for.

The paperback book is 280 pages. The list price is $11, but it is currently listed on Amazon for $9.16. A Kindle version is said to be coming soon. The book also has a website and a Facebook page.

Below is a screenshot I grabbed from the ABA Journal Blawg Directory. At first glance, it looks like a typical screenshot. But something is different — the hyperlinks are all live. Go ahead, click on one. Do you want to use the same screenshot? Click on the kwout name beneath the screenshot and you’ll go to a page that gives you the embed code (or lets you post it to Twitter or email it).

This is done via a tool called kwout (pronounced like “quote.”)  It operates via a bookmarklet you add to your browser’s toolbar. Better than the bookmarklet are kwout’s Firefox add-on or Google Chrome extension. These let you grab (or “quote”) any part of a web page quickly and easily. You choose the portion of the page you want by dragging your mouse.

After you’ve grabbed the part of a page you want, you’re taken back to a kwout page (see below) that lets you set the embed size, add a border or shadow, and change the background color. Rather than embed the screenshot, you can also choose to email it or post it to to Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, and various other sites. You can also add an annotation or add a video or audio comment.

Blawg Directory – ABA Journal via kwout via kwout

There are plenty of other screen capture tools out there, of course. But while most capture only a static image, Kwout creates an image map, retaining the active hyperlinks. This makes it a great tool for embedding screenshots on blogs and web pages.

A website launched yesterday claims to be the largest freely searchable database of contracts extracted from the SEC’s EDGAR database. Called Law Insider, it says that it has indexed and made searchable more than 250,000 contracts, ranging from business loan agreements to employment agreements to redemption agreements.

Contracts can be searched by contract type, company name, law firm or state, as well as by text. Contracts can also be searched by tags, such as “debt conversion agreement.”

Search is free and no registration is required. The site encourages users to register and create an account. Registered users are able to add their own tags to documents as they search.

The site is the creation of Preston Clark, a San Francisco-based lawyer and business person who writes the eponymous blog, Law Insider. Clark was formerly assistant general counsel for the University of Miami and is listed as the vice president of business development at ThinkHR.com and as the former director of business development for 1800Accountant.com.

Within the SEC database, contracts are generally filed as attachments to forms and filings. The advantage of using a site such as this is that it extracts the contracts and indexes them directly, making it easier to find the specific contract or type of contract you seek.

It has been three years since LexisNexis introduced Lexis for Microsoft Office, a product that integrates the legal research tools of Lexis.com directly within Microsoft Word and Outlook. In the years since, Lexis also launched Lexis Advance, its next-generation legal research platform. But the Office integration remained tied to Lexis.com.

Yesterday, Lexis released a new version of Lexis for Microsoft Office that integrates with Lexis Advance. Because Lexis Advance offers features and functionality not available through the traditional Lexis.com research platform, that means that Lexis for Microsoft Office now incorporates many of those added features and functions.

For the time being, Lexis will continue to offer the version that integrates with Lexis.com. However, in keeping with its goal to migrate all its products to the Advance platform, all future development for the Office integration will focus on the Advance version.

The basic idea of Lexis for Microsoft Office remains the same. The product splits the screen within an Office application and adds buttons to the ribbon bar that bring search and citation functionality directly into Word or Outlook. For a lawyer drafting or reviewing a brief or other legal document, the result is a more natural and efficient workflow. Rather than jump back and forth from document to research platform, the two work in unison.

As an example, say you have just received an opposing party’s brief that you need to review. Click “Shepardize Cited Docs” in the ribbon bar and the tool finds all the cites in the document, formats them as hyperlinks to Advance, and adds Shepard’s icons to signal the status of cases. Click on one of these added icons in the document to see the Shepard’s treatment in the right pane.

Similarly, you could click “Get Cited Docs,” and the tool will pick up every citation in the document and present them in the right pane. As you move through each successive reference in the right pane, the document on the left moves to the location of that cite.

If you are drafting a document, two tools you might find useful are “Check Cite Format” and “Check Quotes.” The Check Cite tool reviews all the citations in your document and verifies that they conform to the appropriate citation style. (You can set this to Bluebook style or use either New York or California styles.) The Check Quotes tool searches your document for quotes and matches it against the actual cited text to verify its accuracy.

These citation tools are “smart” in that they recognize the placement of a citation and use the corresponding citation form. If you cut and paste text, the citations are updated to proper form. For example, if the text that contains the first reference to a case is cut and moved further back in the document, the resulting first reference is put in proper form and all subsequent references, including any that use “id,” are updated.

Overall, the differences between the older Lexis.com and the new Advance versions of Lexis for Microsoft Office reflect the differences between Lexis.com and Advance. Lexis sums up the differences in the new version as:

• Expanded content. The available research content now aligns with a user’s Advance subscription and includes additional types such as jury verdicts and settlements, expert witness analysis, administrative materials and administrative codes and regulations.
• Search preferences. Users can select alternative search configurations including the ability to toggle between natural language and Boolean searches as well as using search term synonyms and equivalents.
• Results review. Enhanced document display and more options to navigate within a document give users quicker access to the relevant content, for example jumping to document sections such as core terms, case summary and outcome.
• Document delivery. Additional print, download, email and formatting tools allow for more customized results documentation and information sharing.

Use of Lexis for Microsoft Office requires an additional subscription beyond what you pay for Advance or Lexis.com. Lexis would not provide me with a specific price, but said that it is charged on a per-user per-month basis.

Below are screenshots showing some of the features of the new release.

Search for cases from directly within Microsoft Word (click image for larger view).

Integration with Advance adds new options for post-search filtering (click image for larger view).

Advance integration provides new options for delivering and formatting documents found in research (click image for larger view).

Get background information on cited cases as you view a document in Outlook or Word (click image for larger view).

If you’re planning to launch a blog, you can take either of two routes to get there. One is to pay someone to start it for you. The other is to be a skinflint like me and do it yourself. The do-it-yourself route is surprisingly easy and can result in a blog every bit as professional as the toll route.

If you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, there are several very good companies that specialize in creating blogs for lawyers, including LexBlog and Justia Legal Marketing. They will design your blog, help you come up with a theme and title, give you tips on getting started, and help you publicize it. For many lawyers, this is money well spent.

If you’d rather do it yourself, let me offer five tips to get you started.

1. Use WordPress. There are several blogging platforms to choose from. Take my advice: Ignore the others and pick WordPress. WordPress is a versatile publishing platform that you can use to create a simple blog or even a complete website. It is ridiculously easy to use. It allows you to choose from thousands of themes to customize the design of your blog and thousands of plug-ins to customize the functionality of your blog.

Note that WordPress comes in two flavors – WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The former is the home of the WordPress software, which is open source software that you are free to use without paying a licensing fee. The latter is a commercial, hosted version of the WordPress software, offering both free and paid plans.

Because WordPress.com hosts the software, it makes it easy for a new blogger to get started. However, it restricts the full functionality of the WordPress software and does not allow third-party plug-ins, which add even greater functionality. For this reason, I recommend WordPress.org. You will have to have it installed on your own web host, but most web hosting companies will automatically install WordPress for you. The WordPress.org site lists hosting companies it recommends.

(Recently, I reviewed Ernie Svenson’s book, Blogging in One Hour for Lawyers, in which he focuses on an alternative platform, Typepad. As I noted in my review, far more blogs use WordPress and, having used both, I recommend WordPress over Typepad.)

2. Develop your theme. Give some thought to what you want to focus on in your blog. If you’re blogging as a lawyer, you’ll probably want to pick a topic that relates to your area of practice. Don’t be put off by the fact that someone else – or several someone elses – is already blogging about your topic. Your goal is to find a topic about which you’re passionate and knowledgeable. If you write with those ingredients, others will pick up on your passion and knowledge and your blog will build a readership.

3. Practice before you publish. Do not make the mistake of announcing your blog to the world with your first post. Many bloggers do this, only to embarrass themselves by never writing a second post. Before going public with your blog, take some time to settle into the routine and make sure it is comfortable for you. Write several posts. Figure out where and how you’ll get your topic ideas. Find a good time in your day or week to research and write your posts. If you can stick with it for a month or two, then you can confidently announce your arrival in the blawgosphere.

4. Develop your voice. Writing a blog is not like writing a brief. With a blog, you want your own voice to come through. You want at least a degree of informality in your words. You want to write as if you’re having a conversation with your readers, not as if you’re lecturing them about law. Some lawyers find it hard to break out of the rigidity of legal writing. Trust me, as you begin to blog and do it regularly, you will find your voice. In fact, that process of finding your voice is one of the rewards of writing a blog.

5. It’s not about you. We call it “social” media for a reason. Blogging is part of a continuum of various forms of online conversations that extend through Twitter and Facebook and beyond. Don’t start a blog purely for SEO. Don’t start a blog just to boast about your accomplishments. If you’re going to blog, do it because you believe you have something useful to contribute to your readers.

And then engage with those readers. If they comment on your blog, reply. Visit other blogs and post comments. Read other blogs and cite them on yours. Give credit to others’ good ideas, even if that other person is a potential competitor. If you treat blogging as a conversation, and contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way, your blog will develop an audience.

A new guide to the legal protections available to reporters in Massachusetts was published this week by the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

The PDF guide, Newsgathering in Massachusetts, covers core topics related to news reporting in Massachusetts, including open meetings and public records laws, access to courts and courtrooms, recording courtroom proceedings, recording the activities of public officials in public spaces, and protection for anonymous sources.

The guide, which is 24 pages long plus footnotes, was written by Cyberlaw Clinic and DMLP staff. In addition to describing the applicable law, it includes several case studies that illustrate how the law was applied to actual events.

The guide is free to download and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

The Women’s Legal History website is home to a searchable database of articles and papers on pioneering women lawyers in the United States. It also houses the indexes and bibliographic notes for the book, Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz, the story of the first woman admitted to the California bar, written by Barbara Babcock, the first woman appointed to the regular faculty at Stanford Law School.

The site is maintained by the staff of Stanford’s Robert Crown Law Library in Babcock and her students.

The site allows you to search for a specific lawyer or simply browse through the listings alphabetically. Listings vary in their detail, from skeletal to extensive. Most include at least basic facts about the lawyer’s career, such as where she went to law school, where she practiced, and the positions she held. Many include photographs and links to further research materials about the lawyer. The biographies can also be searched by ethnicity, law school, practice area, state, region or decade.

I will confess that I found a mistake in the data when I searched my law school, Boston College, and read that a woman named Jessie Wright Whitcomb graduated from there in 1887. Given that BC Law was founded in 1929, something seemed amiss.

From Whitcomb’s biography, I followed a link that brought me to a PDF of the 1890 issue of The Green Bag: A Useless But Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers. It included a lengthy article surveying the women lawyers of the United States written by Lelia J. Robinson, the first woman to graduate from Boston University Law School, in 1881, and the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts bar, in 1882. Her article revealed that Whitcomb was in fact a graduate of BU Law — the second woman to graduate from there.

I do not mean to pick nits, because this site is fascinating and full of rich detail. In addition to the biographical search, the site includes a  bibliographic search for articles and authors, a listing of historical articles and papers about women lawyers, links to other web resources, and an infrequently updated blog. As mentioned, it also includes the index and bibliographic notes for Babcock’s book about Clara Foltz

The Massachusetts Probate and Family Court, together with the Massachusetts Justice Project and others, today announced the launch of an online resource designed to help self-represented litigants more easily complete court forms in Massachusetts child support cases.

Click for larger view.

The free site uses a series of online interviews to help self-represented litigants complete the court forms needed to file cases seeking establishment, enforcement or modification of a child support order, or an answer to a complaint seeking any of these orders. The system guides users through a series of questions, and the answers to the questions are used to prepare forms and instructions.

The site includes several videos and articles to help users better understand the child support process. A Spanish translation of the interviews will be available this summer.

The site was funded with the help of a Technology Initiative Grant from the Legal Services Corporation and launched with assistance from the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, South Coastal Counties Legal Services and the Trial Court Access to Justice Initiative.

The system uses the LawHelp Interactive platform, which was developed by Pro Bono Net. It uses a donated version of HotDocs document-assembly software and A2J Author, a tool for creating guided interviews that was developed by Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Access to Justice and Technology and the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

This dashboard view shows recent captures from my Twitter feed.

The popular notion of the Web and social media is that, once something’s out there, it will never disappear. The truth, however, is that much of what exists on the Web and social media is fleeting and constantly changing. The website or Twitter feed you view today may well be different from what it was just yesterday.

From a legal standpoint, this can be a problem. Often, there is a need to preserve something on the web as it is at a particular moment. You may want to capture a web page as evidence of a possible trademark violation. You may practice in a state where professional responsibility rules require you to maintain periodic snapshots of your firm’s website. You may work for a corporation that has a legal responsibility to preserve certain forms of web content. You may want to keep a record of an opponent’s site during litigation.

I have been testing a platform, Reed Archives, that makes it easy to archive websites and social media. More importantly, it does it in a manner that is forensically sound so that the archived information can later be authenticated and used as evidence or as proof of compliance. The platform is a product of Reed Technology, Horsham, Penn., which is a company owned by LexisNexis.

Notably, web pages are archived not as static images, but in their original formats, including their source code and metadata, so that they function just as they did on their live sites. “When you capture a native web archive,” Rod Wittenberg, director of Reed Technology, told me, “you maintain the ability to replay it and use it as it was originally experienced.”

As web pages are archived, they are digitally signed with unique hash values and date-stamped to verify that they are digital carbon copies of the original as of that point in time.

Archive on Schedule or As You Browse

Websites can be archived in either of two ways, either as scheduled captures that you configure in advance or as on-the-fly captures using a browser plug-in.

To schedule a page, you simply enter its URL and indicate how often you want it captured. Scheduled captures can range from hourly to monthly. Options allow you to designate a folder to store the captures or specify tags to assign to them.

Alternatively, you can archive any web page as you browse using a browser plug-in called the Reed Tech Web Preserver. The plug-in adds two buttons to your browser toolbar. Click one to capture a single web page. Click the other to turn on recording and capture an entire browsing session.

Unfortunately, the plug-in works only with Internet Explorer. For users of the Firefox or Chrome browsers, a bookmarklet takes the place of the plug-in. The bookmarklet lets you capture a web page, but it does not allow you to record a browsing session.

Archive Social Media and RSS

In addition to capturing web pages, Reed Archive can also be configured to archive social media and RSS feeds. For example, you can set up a feed to capture all Twitter posts by a designated person or regarding a designated topic. When you capture from Twitter, the capture includes any items linked in the tweet, such as a linked article or photo.

Likewise, you can add an RSS feed to capture every update on the feed. In this way, you could capture every new post on a blog, for example.

Beyond capturing specific pages or feeds, Reed Archives can be configured to monitor social media for specific search terms and keywords. This could be used to watch for appearances of a client’s name, for example. When new matches are found, Reed Archives notifies you by email.

Once in the archive, everything is available to you by way of a central console. In addition, it is all fully searchable using either simple or advanced search. Items can be assigned to folders or given tags. Items can be exported, either individually or in bulk, to PDF or EDRM XML format, with the digital signature included. The XML format includes an HTML index file that will replay the archived pages in their original format.

The cost of a subscription to Reed Archives is $35 a month for a single user. As you add more users, the price per-user drops, down to a minimum of $12 per user for larger firms and companies. The subscription includes 10 GB of storage for your archived data, with additional space available as needed.

The Bottom Line

Reed Archives is easy to use to capture web pages, social media and RSS feeds. It preserves digital duplicates of web pages and assigns them forensically defensible encrypted hash values. It has a broad range of applications for legal professionals, from securities compliance to records retention and management to evidence preservation and litigation holds. At a cost of roughly $1 a day for a single user, it is a reasonable value for any legal professional with a need for a website archive.

Back in November, I announced here the final episode of our legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. After seven years of weekly shows, my cohost J. Craig Williams and I were calling it quits, due to the closing down of the company that had hosted our show, the Legal Talk Network.

Well, turns out it wasn’t over after all. At the 11th hour, new owners came in and saved the Legal Talk Network. After meeting and talking with the new owners, Denver-based LAWgical, we decided to continue the show under their mantle. They have many good ideas for not just continuing the Legal Talk Network, but expanding and enhancing it.

So, our first show since November is now up. Our topic is the prosecution and potential sentencing of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. To help us explore the topic, we have two well-qualified guests: Jack Cunha, a highly regarded criminal defense attorney in Boston, and Douglas Berman, professor of law at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and author of the popular blog, Sentencing Law and Policy.

Listen to the show or download the MP3 from the Legal Talk Network.

A reminder that you can subscribe to Lawyer2Lawyer in the iTunes library or via RSS feed.