Articles Posted in October, 2003

According to Suffolk Lawyers for Justice, the Federal Trade Commission has cancelled its investigation of the Massachusetts public defenders’ group, initiated in August after lawyers refused to accept appointments to new criminal cases. The SLJ’s announcement says that its board was informed by its attorney, Joseph Kociubes of Bingham McCutchen, that…

A new study of diversity in U.S. law firms, released this week by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says that women now make up 40 percent of lawyers in medium- and large-sized firms, compared to 14 percent in 1975. The number of Black lawyers in these firms doubled since 1975, to over 4…

Also in the 10th anniversary issue of Law Technology News, I edited this piece, 1993-2013: The Future, the Past, collecting thoughts on the future of legal technology from an array of lawyers and legal professionals, among them such esteemed blawgers as Ron Friedman, Dennis Kennedy, Jerry Lawson, Joy London,…

Who could be so presumptuous as to do something so preposterous as pick the 10 best legal sites of the decade? I am afraid that would be me. But it was for good reason — the 10th anniversary issue of Law Technology News. (You will need to register to read the article, but…

I am sad to say that Tim Robinson died at the age of 58 of complications from colon cancer surgery. Tim was a giant both in legal publishing and in online publishing. A former Washington Post reporter who covered legal affairs, he became editor of the National Law Journal in 1980 and then editor…

Who had the first-ever law blog? Greg Siskind claims the title.…

I missed Eugene Volokh’s day 2 BloggerCon panel on blogs and the law, but Doug Simpson reports that Volokh, commenting on why lawyers blog, said the motive is largely not monetary. Rather, many law blogs are what he called “prof blogs,” written by professors or folks with “professorial behavior patterns.” Not…

“Are you a 10?” Chris Lydon prodded attendees at BloggerCon, measuring the significance they attach to blogging as a phenomenon. I didn’t have to think hard to know I’m somewhere on the high end of the scale. But I did have to think a bit harder about why. Are blogs as significant as…

No talk of blawgs at BloggerCon, although several references to the legal issues surrounding blogging. Should shield laws protect bloggers? What is a blogger’s duty to retract a potentially libelous statement? Will efforts be made to regulate blogging? What are an educational institution’s obligations under COPA?

But a handful of lawyer-bloggers in attendance. As…

Yesterday’s BloggerCon felt at times like a revival meeting, preaching blogs as the Internet’s second coming, if not humanity’s salvation. Yet I could not escape the irony of the place. Amid fiery talk of blogs cracking the matrix, of blogs as the second superpower, of blogs breaking down social, political and cultural barriers, the…

The latest issue is up of LLRX.com, taking on the question du jour, Will RSS replace e-mail? Fortunately, author Robin Good gets that out of the way right off: “E-mail is a two-way communication medium while RSS is only a distribution one. From that simple realization, you can immediately derive that e-mail is…

Lindsay Thompson is an old friend, a well-regarded “super lawyer” in Seattle, Wash., and one of the best writers I know. He’s not a blogger, although he should be, but he’s back after a many-year hiatus editing the Washington State Bar Association Bar News, and everyone should read his monthly editor’s…