General

In 2010, a series of 15 workshops were held across the country to explore the idea that primary U.S. legal materials should be readily available to all and that government institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. Public.Resource.Org,  together with Point.B Studio and Foolish Tree Films, created a 15 DVD set…

Reverse-auction websites where lawyers bid on cases posted by potential clients are nothing new. I’ve written here before about sites such as Shpoonkle and the now-defunct sites Tip-Mart.com and LawyerQuotesFast.com. Now there is a fledgling new entry in…

Coming Oct. 26 and 27 in Washington, D.C., is the annual Futures Conference presented by the College of Law Practice Management (of which I am a fellow) and the Georgetown Law Center. The conference focuses on the leading edge of law practice…

How has technology changed the practice of law and what does it suggest about the future of law practice? These are the slides from a presentation I gave Oct. 1, 2012, at the FirmFuture conference in Boston.

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Users of Clio, the cloud-based law practice management platform, now have the ability to add custom fields to matters and contacts, the company announced today. That means that users can add data-entry fields of their own in addition to the pre-defined data fields provided by Clio.

Clio’s new custom fields feature…

Here is an interesting iteration of the standard law dictionary — one designed specifically to help legal professionals who are not native speakers of English. Available as an app for iPhone and iPad, TransLegal’s Law Dictionary not only provides the definitions for more than 3,000 legal terms, but…

A long time ago, I was the founding editor of Lawyers USA (when it was called Lawyers Weekly USA). I’ve had nothing to do with it for years, but I was interested to note that it launched a new podcast for lawyers yesterday. Called Lawyers in…

If you are anywhere near Boston, mark your calendar for Monday, Oct. 1, when the FirmFuture conference kicks off at the Copley Marriott. Focused on law practice management and legal technology, the conference features a great line-up of speakers and programs covering topics that range from IOLTA account management…

The Library of Congress this week unveiled Congress.gov, a new site for U.S. legislative information that will eventually replace the 17-year-old Thomas.gov. The new site is intended to have more robust search features and a more user-friendly design, as well as to be platform agnostic, enabling it to be…

A new website, BriefMine, aims to help lawyers mine a collection of legal briefs for nuggets they can use in their own research and arguments. The site — which is still in a private beta version — uses intuitive, natural-language search to explore a database of legal briefs collected from courts around…

Self-help legal websites such as LegalZoom, Nolo and Rocket Lawyer are no match for a real lawyer, Consumer Reports concludes in an evaluation of the three sites published in its September issue. The magazine recently used each of the sites…

Eleven years later, and my memories are as vivid as ever of that horrible day in New York City. In a 2006 post here, I described my own remembrance of 9/11. As I wrote then, I was far enough from the towers to be safe, but close enough to see. But wherever you were…