Articles Posted in July, 2013

The legal technology field lost a giant this week with the death of Ross Kodner, who suffered a heart attack two days after turning 52. Ross was a lawyer — a 1986 graduate of Marquette University Law School — but was known worldwide as the founder of the legal technology consulting firm…

Animal-rights lawyer Steve Wise

Sometime in the next couple of months, in a yet-to-be disclosed courthouse somewhere in the United States, the Nonhuman Rights Project is planning to file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a chimpanzee. In what will be the first of a series of…

In a recent article about mobile marketing I wrote for Law Practice Magazine, I explained why I am skeptical about the marketing value of law firm apps. I made an exception, however, for apps that provide a useful or practical function, whether…

Imagine if you could combine a full-text case law library for research with crowdsourced editing and annotating in the style of Wikipedia and user rankings of annotations and references in the style of a site such as Digg? That, roughly speaking, is the idea behind Casetext,…

Yesterday, Law Technology News featured my article, Blogging from the Bench, a survey of present and former judges who write blogs. It grew out of an earlier post here. Since the story appeared yesterday, I have learned of three more judges who…

The calculator provides various options for calculating employment rates. (Click for larger view.)

For prospective law students, selecting a law school ain’t what it used to be. Whereas once there was a dearth of information about graduates’ employment rates, now there are any number of sources of rankings and other data. No…

The legal newspaper Lawyers USA announced that the issue it published yesterday will be its last. It will continue to post news on its website and send email alerts through the end of this month, and then cease to exist. Two members of the editorial staff are being laid off, managing editor…

If you happened to read the June issue of Law Technology News, you may have noticed a three-page “advertorial” section on cloud computing for the legal profession sponsored by the file-sharing platform Box. Or if you visited the Box site recently, you may have noticed a new teaser…

A new website founded by a Houston lawyer aims to make it quick and easy to obtain official information about businesses, including business organization filings, certificates of good standing, UCC secured transactions, IRS tax liens, trademarks, bankruptcies and civil litigation. Called Wysk.com, the site allows you to search for a…

For a geek like me, it was big news last August when the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates voted to amend the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to make clear that lawyers have a duty to be competent in technology. Specifically, the ABA voted to amend the comment to Model Rule 1.1, governing lawyer…

With the Supreme Court’s end-of-term Prop 8 and DOMA rulings, same-sex marriage is now legal in California and same-sex married couples can receive federal benefits across the nation. These landmark decisions for gay rights have sparked the question: Is nationwide marriage equality on the way? This week on our legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we…

The Web-based practice management platform MyCase will roll-out a new project-management feature this weekend, MyCase Workflow, that will enable its users to create custom templates of tasks and calendar events, including automatic date calculations, that can be applied to any case.

Say, for example, you are a divorce attorney and you…