Here are some of the events at which I will be speaking in the coming months: March 11 and 12, 2010, Boston: Massachusetts Bar Association Annual Conference 2010. I am speaking two days. On Thursday, March 11, I will chair a plenary session, “Social Media for Lawyers: How to Boost Your Practice and Avoid Pitfalls.” [...]
A new legal blog, Mass. Appellate Briefs, provides an advance look at cases accepted for argument by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. “The goal,” says author Jack Cushman, “is to tell you not just what the court is doing, but what it will be doing, while there’s still time to respond — whether by helping clients prepare for changes in the law, filing an amicus brief, or sharpening your own applications for review.”
For upcoming SJC cases, Cushman reviews the questions presented, the facts and the issues in each case. He then provides his analysis of how the case might turn out. He also provides links to the case docket and the appellate briefs and notes whether the court has requested amicus briefs.
Cushman is a lawyer who recently served as a law clerk to SJC Justice Margot Botsford. His law practice focuses on providing legal research and writing services and case evaluations for lawyers.
[The following column originally appeared in print in January 2010. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]
Is there room in the legal market for a third high-end legal research service? That is the question as Bloomberg, a company known for its financial news, attempts to muscle in on the turf now occupied by Westlaw and LexisNexis. In December, it officially launched its comprehensive, Web-based service, Bloomberg Law.
For Bloomberg, it is a radical move. It is the first time the company has untethered a major information product from its trademark terminals. The terminals are ubiquitous in financial firms but have never achieved significant presence in law firms. This Web-based product represents Bloomberg’s concession to the legal market’s lack of interest in its terminal-based services.
For the legal market, the move is brazen. Bloomberg seeks to stake out a claim on terrain where West and Lexis have had years to shore up fortifications. In taking on these services mano-a-mano, Bloomberg differentiates itself as the only one that integrates legal content with proprietary news and business intelligence.
Bloomberg’s biggest challenge may lie in convincing the legal market that it needs another high-end research service. The trend in research is towards lower cost services and more open access to legal materials. Bloomberg would seem to be swimming against the tide.
One way Bloomberg will compete is by offering a uniform, fixed price as a counterpoint to the cryptic and confusing pricing plans of West and Lexis. A Bloomberg subscription is $450 per user per month. That is not cheap, but it covers all usage and is less than firms would generally pay to West or Lexis. It also offers a floating license for $1,250 a month that covers five users, but allows only one to log in at a time.
Swagger and Substance
Price aside, the bigger question is how Bloomberg measures up as a legal research service. This much is clear: Bloomberg is getting into the game with swagger. Not only is it loading up on primary legal content, but it is also creating reams of editorial enhancements. It has developed its own citator to rival Shepard’s and KeyCite, its own headnotes, and its own numbering system to rival West’s key numbers.
To accomplish all this and bring itself up to competitive speed, Bloomberg hired an army of lawyers – some 500 now on the payroll, I was told – and has them nose to the grindstone writing headnotes, tagging cases and readying a law digest.
One of those lawyers recently gave me a tour of Bloomberg Law and then gave me a trial account so that I could explore it on my own. (I cannot tell you his title because Bloomberg’s egalitarian structure does not allow job titles.)
A Work in Progress
My overall impression of Bloomberg Law was of a luxury yacht only partially constructed. It looks impressive and many parts of it are fitted out with top-of-the-line features. But as you wander around its decks, many doorways open to unfinished, empty rooms. It is seaworthy, one assumes, but still has a lengthy punch list.
This is ambition exceeding execution, perhaps. Take the Bloomberg Law Digest, for example. It is touted as a detailed index of legal topics collecting key cases, statutes, regulations and other materials. So far, however, many of the topic headings lead only to blank pages, still awaiting content from that army of lawyers.
Cases are another example. Bloomberg’s library of cases is complete, in that it has full collections of all federal and state appellate decisions and trial-court libraries on a par with those offered by West and Lexis. The cases include pagination.
However, Bloomberg Law’s reference guide and marketing materials say that cases include staff-written headnotes and points of law. Some do, but in my trials, the majority of the cases still do not have headnotes. Click the button that is supposed to display the headnotes and instead you get a message, “No headnotes available.”
One strong and fully executed feature is the Bloomberg Law Citator, Bloomberg’s answer to Shepard’s from LexisNexis and KeyCite from West. As you view a case, an icon alerts you to its status and a panel to the right shows a graphical summary of subsequent citations. A click of a button opens an in-depth analysis showing the case’s direct history, citation history and a list of the cases it cited.
A nice feature of Bloomberg is docket searching, covering federal dockets and selected state and international dockets. It is the only legal research service that has complete U.K. dockets, I was told. It also provides tracking and alert services for federal legislation and regulations.
A Marriage of Law and News
A key emphasis of Bloomberg Law is the marriage of legal research and current awareness. The idea is to provide lawyers with primary legal content while also enabling them to monitor their clients’ industries and businesses. It does this well, integrating law and news seamlessly in a number of ways.
To this end, the home page replicates a news terminal. The lead legal news story tops the page and legal headlines appear in a box to the right. The page’s lower half has tabs allowing you to choose among Morning Legal Briefings, daily reports of top news in various practice areas; Law Reports, more in-depth stories covering court and legal developments; and top news from around the world or filtered by topic or region.
The front page also has a watchlist where you can track company stocks and click through to in-depth information and news about the company. Every public company has a page. Among other things, the pages list all recent filings in which a company is named, including from court dockets and SEC filings.
A Design that Shines
One aspect in which Bloomberg Law shines is its design. It is fast, intuitive and thoughtfully arranged. I especially like that – as do most modern browsers – it uses tabs, opening new documents in separate tabs so that you never lose your research trail or have to backtrack through it.
Searching on Bloomberg Law is quick and uses either Boolean or plain-language queries. A search can be run broadly across a range of content types (e.g., court opinions, dockets and statutes) or more narrowly by jurisdiction, practice area or industry. Filters allow easy refinement of search results by topic and industry.
The Research Trail feature automatically saves all research and documents and stores them indefinitely for later retrieval. Another feature, Workspace, allows you to save research and documents in folders and share them with colleagues. Sharing can be done only within your own firm.
Tabs across the top of the screen provide ready access to a user’s Workspace and Research Trail, as well as to saved searches and alerts. Users can set alerts for virtually any type of content on Bloomberg Law.
The left-hand navigation pane collapses with a click to provide more viewing space on the screen. The pane provides links to all of the main sections of Bloomberg Law and also to a collection of practice-area pages. These pages highlight recent court opinions and articles related to the practice area, link to key resources for the area (including blogs), and provide shortcuts to search core libraries related to the practice.
Bloomberg of
fers a telephone and e-mail help desk staffed 24/7 by lawyers, law librarians and paralegals. I e-mailed the help desk at nearly midnight about a log-in problem and received an answer within minutes, much to my surprise.
Will it Float?
For now, Bloomberg Law is a work in progress. It remains to be seen whether, once construction is completed, there will be sufficient demand for it in the legal market.
The product is targeted at larger firms, but also at smaller firms with a need for robust docket searching and financial intelligence. Few large firms are likely to dump West or Lexis and switch solely to Bloomberg Law. That means they are likely to buy this only if they see it as a necessary add-on to their research arsenal or a partial substitute for higher-priced services.
Law firms heavily involved in securities and finance are most likely to buy Bloomberg Law, given its melding of law and financial news. For the broader legal market, Bloomberg Law has a tough sell ahead and a lot of work to complete in the meantime.
Copyright 2010 Robert J. Ambrogi
[The following column originally appeared in print in December 2009. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]
Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, ponders the mission of the Web’s 800-pound Gorilla. Is Google’s purpose altruistic, to offer free and easy access to all the world’s information, or is it a marauding monster out to dominate the media and information landscape?
With Google in command of my e-mail platform, my blogging platform, my search platform, my RSS reader, my photo-storage platform and even my document collaboration platform, I certainly should be worried that Google could become the Big Brother I never wanted.
Even so, I am lulled into complacency by the simple fact that Google does what it does so well. So it is with Google’s entry into case law research with its recent announcement that Google Scholar now allows users to search full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state appellate and trial courts.
Even before the cases were added, Google Scholar was a useful research tool for lawyers. It allows researchers to search a broad selection of scholarly books and articles, including law journals, drawn from the Web and from academic and library collections.
But case law takes Scholar to a whole new level of usefulness. As you would expect from Google, the search interface is simple and familiar. Enter any name, word or phrase and hit “search.” The default search covers all of Scholar’s collection of federal and state cases and law review articles.
An advanced search page lets you tailor your search more precisely. You can specify words and phrases to include and exclude and set a date range. You can choose to search just federal cases, just a single state’s cases, or across multiple states. Searching multiple states requires you to check a box for each state, so if you want to search a significant number of states, you’ll have a lot of checking to do.
You can also search by citation, but be careful to put the citation in quotes. If you search 794 F.2d 915, the results will include cases that have “794,” “F.2d” and “915″ anywhere in them. But if your query encloses the citation in quotes, “794 F.2d 915″, you get the cited case plus any others that cite it.
Other Features, Other Questions
Scholar has no Shepard’s or KeyCite for flagging the status of a case, but it does have a nice feature for showing a case’s subsequent citation history. As you view a case, a tab on the top of the screen lets you switch to a second screen showing how it was cited.
This second tab shows a list of cases and articles that cite your case. It also includes a separate list of cites showing a quote extracted from the case at the point of the citation. The quote helps you see the proposition for which your case is cited. Click on any of these quotes and jump right to that point in the citing case.
I could not find within Google Scholar a description of the scope of the case law database. According to a post by Tim Stanley at Justia’s Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog, http://onward.justia.com, it includes all Supreme Court opinions since the start of U.S. Reports, federal circuit opinions since 1 F 2d 1 (1924), and many federal district court opinions.
Scholar also has opinions from all 50 state supreme courts dating back to 1950. I was able to determine that intermediate appellate courts are included for some states, but I could not tell whether they are included to the same extent as state supreme courts.
There remain many questions about Google Scholar’s case law search. Google offers sparse documentation so answers are hard to come by. Besides not knowing the precise parameters of the database, we also do not know how often new cases are added. Google has not disclosed where it got the cases but has said the supplier will continue to provide new cases as they are released. We also do not know what kind of quality control, if any, Google has in place to ensure the cases are checked for typographical, scanning and coding errors.
Still, putting the power of Google search behind a comprehensive database of federal and state cases is more than just a good start. Google’s engineers clearly put a lot of thought and effort into this and I expect there will be further refinements and enhancements to come.
Whither Wexis?
Inevitably, Google’s announcement leads to another round of predictions that 2012 has arrived for Westlaw and LexisNexis. Legal blogs have been abuzz with speculation about this.
Both LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters issued statements saying, in so many words, that they are not worried about Google’s entry into case law research.
“Free case law is not new to the Internet and is included on some of our own sites like lexisONE, LexisWeb and lawyers.com,” the LexisNexis statement said. “However, our legal customers generally require more than raw, unfiltered content to inform their business decisions. They look to LexisNexis to find needles in the ever-growing information haystack, not the haystack itself.”
Thomson Reuters said: “Google has shared with us their plans to expand Google Scholar to include the search of publicly available case law and some legal journals. We believe that government-authored information should be accessible to the public, and Google joins existing sites such as FindLaw, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School and scores of others as sites that offer this information free of charge.”
“Our customers rely on us for very specialized information and legal insight, and use Westlaw to find exactly the right answer on very specific points of law.”
My belief is that LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters will continue to remain healthy and profitable for many years to come. I’m not privy to their finances, but I suspect that case law research has become a less-important source of revenue for them.
What they have that others do not are significant databases of secondary legal-research materials. These include treatises, specialized legal-research products in particular areas of concentration, and ever-growing collections of public-records data, court and deposition transcripts, docket information, and all sorts of other information that remains largely unavailable or inaccessible elsewhere online.
A Game Changer
Even so, there is no ignoring an 800-pound gorilla. Google’s entry into the field of legal research is definitely a game changer for the entire legal industry. More than that, it is without doubt a turning point.
In announcing the new feature, the Google engineer who spearheaded this project, Anurag Acharya, acknowledged the prior efforts of the “pioneers who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land.”
He mentioned such trailblazers as Tom Bruce of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, Jerry Dupont of the Law Library Microform Consortium, Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray of the Australasian Legal Information Institute, Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, Daniel Poulin of LexUM, Tim Stanley of Justia, Joe Ury of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, and Tim Wu of AltLaw.
Acharya is right to credit all the pioneers who blazed this trail. But where they yielded machetes, Google drives a bulldozer. If this is progr
ess — and I believe it is — its pace is about to accelerate.
Copyright 2009 Robert J. Ambrogi
[The following column originally appeared in print in September 2009. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]
There are a number of new legal sites to bring you this month. They range in focus from enhancing legal research to simplifying document assembly to facilitating pro bono volunteerism.
We start with two legal-document sites, one for sharing and one for assembly. The document-sharing site, ExampleMotion, is a place where lawyers can share pleadings, motions and other legal documents. But it adds a unique twist. Rather than just share documents, lawyers can sell them.
While some documents are free to download, others must be purchased, generally at a cost of between $10 and $50. Lawyers who upload a document get to set its sales price and receive half of any purchases, with the site taking the other half.
Documents can be searched by jurisdiction, type of law, stage of proceedings, and document type. If the document you seek is not there, you can post a document request anonymously. If another user posts it, an e-mail notifies you.
Initially, the site is focusing on building a collection of California legal documents. It plans to expand into other states and welcomes attorneys from any state to upload documents now. The site also allows users to store and organize documents without sharing them.
Easy Document Assembly
The document-assembly site, WhichDraft.com, enables automatic assembly of contracts and other legal documents. Users start by finding the type of document they want and then they fill them out by answering a series of simple questions. The site provides its own collection of documents and also allows users to post documents.
Attorneys are sometimes reluctant to rely on form documents. A feature of WhichDraft is that lawyers can also use it to automate assembly of their own documents. The site allows users to upload their own documents and build their own sets of questions and answers for completing them. Lawyers can keep these documents private or opt to share them.
The site also includes simple collaboration tools. These include the ability to share documents with others by e-mail, to track multiple versions of a document, and to compare versions with red-lining. All the site’s features are provided without cost.
In Search of Better Search
Different methods of searching each have their limits. Keyword searching can be too literal. Boolean searching can be too formalistic. Mark Johns, president of a U.S. company called Littlearth believes there is a better way. For certain types of document collections – such as cases and codes – a “discovery engine” is the better search tool, he says.
His company hosts three free legal-research sites that employ his DocumentDiscovery technology: PatentSurf, USCodeSurf, and Case-Law. The sites operate on the ideas that the best form of search is natural language, that the more natural language used in a search the better the results, and that the best natural language to use is that of a relevant document.
While a query could begin with just a few keywords, a researcher could also opt to input an entire document as a query. As the search proceeds and finds other relevant documents, it can be refined based on the text of these documents.
Quick Case Digests
The legal research service Casemaker has launched a new case-digest service providing summaries of the most recent cases decided by the courts. Called CASEMAKERdigest, the initial roll-out covered only state and federal courts in Texas. As of this writing, it had added Oregon and planned eventually to cover all 50 states.
The service provides summaries of cases soon after the cases become available. Summaries are listed by date and can be sorted by area of practice, court, judge and jurisdiction. They can also be searched by key word. Additionally, a user can subscribe to an RSS feed that shows the 50 most recent cases published on the site.
The service is offered free for a trial period of 30 days. After the trial runs out, the service will be offered for a subscription price of $39.95 a year.
Casemaker General Manager Steven Newsom says that the company is investing heavily to hire highly experienced staff to write the summaries. The company also plans to launch a citator product to flag whether cases in its legal research database remain good law.
Legal Scholarship
Harvard University launched a Web site in September, DASH, devoted to providing access to scholarly articles written by faculty and students. While articles on the site cover a range of topics, Harvard Law School was a key contributor to the site’s launch.
As of this writing, the site’s law collection includes 64 faculty articles and one student paper. An announcement said that Harvard expects the collection to grow significantly over the next few months. Articles can be searched by keyword or browsed by topic. The full text of an article is provided in PDF format.
Domestic Violence Directory
The American Bar Association launched a site in August that is intended to serve as a comprehensive resource for lawyers who want to volunteer their services to assist victims of domestic violence. The National Domestic Violence Pro Bono Directory, features a database of programs nationwide that provide pro bono legal services in these cases.
The database entries describe the various programs and tell how attorneys can become involved in them. The site also provides a calendar of training programs throughout the country and has a collection of articles, links and other materials for attorneys to use as resources in handling these cases.
The ABA’s Commission on Domestic Violence created the directory in partnership with Pro Bono Net, a national organization that works to increase access to justice. Development of the site was funded through a grant from the Avon Foundation.
Resources on Capital Cases
As part of its programming to help judges better manage death-penalty cases, the National Judicial College has developed a Web site, Capital Cases Resources. The site provides resources for state trial judges who sit on capital cases, but one need not be a judge to find it useful.
A featured resource is an overview of Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding capital punishment. Written by Indiana University criminal law professor Joseph L. Hoffmann, it provides a case-by-case walk-through of the substantive and procedural issues decided by the court.
Other sections provide links to circuit- and state-specific case law and legal materials. Another compiles articles and publications on key topics, such as jury selection.
Copyright 2009 Robert J. Ambrogi
Sam Spencer was once one of the most prominent leaders in legal publishing. For many years, he was publisher and CEO of the Lawyers Weekly chain of publications, based in Boston. Then he became a senior vice president of Dolan Media, helping drive that company’s further expansion into legal publishing. In fact, Dolan eventually turned around and bought Lawyers Weekly. From his home outside Boston, Sam seemed to spend more time on airplanes than anywhere else, traveling the country to Dolan’s newspapers, corporate headquarters and elsewhere.
All that came to a screeching halt five years ago, when Sam suffered a stroke. But Sam is not one to sit on the sidelines for long. He has more energy than the Energizer Bunny. Unable to continue his newspaper career, he took up a new career as a full-time volunteer for his local Council on Aging, delivering meals, driving elders to appointments, and “dispensing kindness and the gift of gab,” as Sue Scheible writes in this profile of Sam’s new life in The Patriot Ledger.
Sam was also my boss a couple times over. More years ago than I care to admit, he lured me away from my law practice in the Virgin Islands to become editor-in-chief of Lawyers Weekly in Boston. Several years later, after he joined Dolan, he brought me in to serve as temporary publisher of the Idaho Business Review just after Dolan bought it.
Scheible’s profile also included this video about Sam’s new life:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN89l4-inPs]
Some people think big. Not Toronto lawyer Jordan Farkas. He prefers to think small, as in small claims court. As a matter of fact, he calls himself
Mr. Small Claims Court and has created a Web site where he markets himself as “the recognized authority on the Ontario Small Claims Court.” As his LinkedIn profile explains:
I have practised exclusively as a commercial litigation lawyer since 2004. In 2008 I founded www.MrSmallClaimsCourt.ca which offers Ontario-wide small claims court consultation services at affordable rates. It has created a niche in Ontario legal services and has attracted media attention. In addition to small claims court, I also consult for self-represented litigants in higher courts across Ontario.
His Web site offers reasonable flat fees and includes a page of testimonials from satisfied clients. You can also find him on Twitter as MrSmallClaims.
A new cloud-based document assembly system aims to offer solo and smaller-firm lawyers a tool on a par with the enterprise-level system the company already markets to large firms and corporate legal departments. Called ContractExpress.com, the new Web-based software-as-a-service was launched this month by the London-based company Business Integrity, which modeled it on its enterprise-level document assembly program ContractExpress DealBuilder.
ContractExpress.com is notable for its simplicity. Templates for various types of documents — leases, contracts or any standardized legal document — are stored in workspaces accessible through a Web browser. To create a document, simply choose a template. A series of questions will prompt you for the information needed to fill in each of the template’s fields. Workspaces and templates can be shared with other users.
The templates can be set up so that fields are filled in by specific answers to questions (such as a party’s name) or by alternative blocks of text depending on the answer given. Fields can be made compulsory or optional. Once you’ve completed the questions, the document is generated and appears in your workspace. Click its name to download and open it in Microsoft Word.
You create these document-assembly templates within Microsoft Word and then upload them to the site. When you first register for ContractExpress, you are prompted to download a Word add-on called ContractExpress Author. This is the tool you use to create templates using a simple menu that lets you choose and insert fields. You can also insert fields manually simply by enclosing them in curly brackets.
One limitation of ContractExpress.com is that this authoring tool only works in Word 2007 and only on Windows computers. If you have an older version of Word or if you are a Mac user, you are out of luck.
The site offers a 60-day free trial, so you can try it and judge for yourself. Once the trial expires, the cost to use the service is $195 per user per month.
For smaller-firm lawyers, ContractExpress has two obvious advantages. One, it is easy to use and makes it easy to create templates. Two, because it is based in the cloud, there is no software to install and maintain. For a lawyer who generates even a modest number of standardized documents, this is a system that could pay for itself.
This week’s episode of our legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer explores the topic of cyberbullying and the law. Just recently, 15-year old student Phoebe Prince from South Hadley, Mass., took her own life after she was subjected to constant cyberbullying by a group of students at her school. Phoebe’s story is one of many that has left communities reeling, schools in the hot seat and parents enraged by the lack of protection of their children and a lack of discipline against the perpetrators.
My co-host J. Craig Williams and I welcome David T. Tirella, partner at the Tampa, Fla., firm Eaton, Powell & Tirella and a consumer and child advocate who helped bring about enactment of an anti-bullying law in Florida, and Debbie Johnston, founder of Students For Safer Schools and mother of Jeffrey Johnston, a Florida teen who killed himself after becoming the target of cyberbullying. We discuss the latest in cyberbulling prevention, legislation against cyberbullying and what to do if your child becomes a victim.
Listen to or download the program from the Legal Talk Network.
I picked up the Boston Globe this morning and found the obituary of Dan Sharp, a friend, a lawyer and a former colleague when he and I worked together at Lawyers Weekly in the early 1990s. Seeing that his funeral was this morning, I jumped in my car and went. Afterward, when I returned to my office, I found an e-mail from the Virgin Islands bar notifying me of the death of Dave Dilts, a lawyer on St. Croix who was the first associate I ever hired when I had a law office on St. Thomas in the 1980s.
After Dan left Lawyers Weekly, he went on to establish a highly regarded law practice with his wife Elaine Whitfield Sharp. They became known internationally for their legal work on behalf of Louise Woodward, the then 19-year-old au pair convicted in 1997 in the death of the 8-month-old boy she was caring for. Dan was a tireless fighter for civil rights. Three years ago, when two of his cases were in the headlines on the same day, I sent him this e-mail:
After reading about two of your cases in the news today, it struck me how much I’ve come to respect your work as a lawyer — the cases you take, the work you put into them. Both … show the lengths you’ll go to for a client. As someone who knew you when and respected you when, I thought I’d let you know that you continue to have my respect.
Now I find out it was right around then that he learned he had a brain tumor, which he found for three years, continuing to practice law much of that time. Dan was an avid sailor, and at his funeral this morning, someone quoted him as applying to his life a lesson he learned on the water: “You can’t direct the wind, but you can adapt your sails.” A good thought to live by.
As for Dave Dilts, I know nothing more other than that he died Feb. 15 at his home on St. Croix. I hired him around 1986, when my solo practice on St. Thomas grew too busy for me to handle alone. He joined my office brimming with enthusiasm and intellect and also knew how to cook up a mean gumbo, thanks to his New Orleans roots. I last saw him two years ago, when I was on St. Croix to present a CLE program. I’m glad now that I took some time while I was there to visit him. We had beers and relived those days working together as young lawyers.
