General

As of Wednesday, Nov. 14, a new labor-relations agency replaces and consolidates three long-standing agencies overseeing labor-management relations in Massachusetts. The new Division of Labor Relations came into existence as the result of legislation merging the Labor Relations Commission (where I was a staff counsel in the 1980s), the Board of Conciliation and…

The law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice is introducing a new tagline, “Innovators at Law,” and releasing four animated videos that illustrate the theme using the firm’s mascot, Winston the bulldog. In the first video of the series, titled “Zip Past…

Carl Malamud’s nonprofit organization Public.Resource.Org and the legal research company Fastcase today announced an agreement that will allow Public.Resource.Org to publish 1.8 million pages of federal case law in the public domain. The archive, which will become available sometime in 2008, will include all U.S. courts of appeals decisions since 1950 and…

Matt Homann called it a You Tube for legal documents, and I can’t think of a more perfect description. The site is called docstoc, and just as You Tube does for videos, docstoc allows users to upload and share professional documents. Documents are categorized as legal, business, financial, technological, educational or creative.…

I noted here in August that two federal trial courts had started posting audio recordings of courtroom proceedings online and that three others were slated to follow. Now one of those three has started posting audio of its proceedings, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The two courts that…

A Massachusetts company, ConRoy Corp. LLC, has launched a new Web site to track toy recalls, Toy Recall Alert. It appears that the recalls listed here are the same as those listed on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Toy Hazard Recalls page. The CPCS offers an RSS feed for its toy…

In their attempts to show solidarity with lawyers in Pakistan, lawyers in the United States are showing their own lack of solidarity. Different bar groups are organizing rallies of lawyers in the same cities, but scheduling them at different times and in different locations. If our point is to show solidarity, why don’t we stand…

I wrote here in August about the planned launch of JD Supra, a new legal site with the premise, “Give content, get noticed.” A preview site has been up ever since, but now the site’s founder, San Francisco business lawyer Aviva Cuyler, tells me the site will…

After my trip to Russia last May, I gave a presentation in Boston on Russian courts and the news media. I have now converted that presentation to Flash and posted it here, should anyone be interested in viewing it.…

A new legal advocacy group, The Family Defense Center, today unveiled a Web page designed to solicit amici curiae to support its bid to secure Supreme Court review of a decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Dupuy v. Samuels. This struck me as an interesting way to use the Web…

Two new Web sites have similar missions: making secret and hard-to-find government documents, revealed through FOIA requests and other means, available to the public in order to promote government transparency.

The first and more sophisticated, GovernmentDocs.org, is being officially launched tomorrow. It will provide a database of FOIA responses and other government documents contributed…

The Citizen Media Law Project today launched its Legal Threats Database, a collection that documents legal threats aimed at online speech, including lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters and other legal actions. From the announcement:

“The database, the first such interactive compendium, contains legal threats from 35 states and 9 countries, and is growing daily.