MyShingle, the website and blog for solo practitioners is still going strong. Check it out if you haven’t visited it for a while or ever.
Check out MyShingle’s Soloformania (lots of great checklists!), Free Stuff, Topics (for previous blog posts), and other pages.
When The Google isn’t good enough and you need Good Value (i.e. not full-service & not expensive) for full-text, all-cases or statutes (or almost all) legal research database searching:
1) Law Library of Congress: How to Locate Free Case Law on the Internet
2) Georgetown Law Library’s Free and Low Cost Legal Research Guide
If that dusty law book in your office hasn’t been scanned yet (assuming copyright allows you or another repository to do so), PLEASE Don’t Throw it Out!
(If you want to know how to get rid of used law books, read our “How to Dispose of Used Law Books” guide.)
Some very popular Oregon reports that are used a lot in print, but have also been scanned (yay!), including these:
Jim Calloway, at the Oklahoma State Bar, alerts us to these “Ten Improved Fastcase Tools,” including this intriguing one (among others):
“PACER Searching
Searching federal dockets with PACER is slow and difficult, especially if you have to search multiple courts. So Fastcase has worked with Justia to build a tool that can search across all PACER sites at once. It’s the depth of PACER with the power of Fastcase. You can also filter by state, court, date or type of suit. When you select a document you’d like to download, the tool takes you to the individual PACER site, where standard charges apply.” [Link to Jim Calloway’s blog post.]
Law offices without law librarians can also save time and money with the tips and reviews in the 2013 “Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual.”
1) How to deter and refuse unsolicited shipments: Do you know about 39 U.S. Code 3009?
2) Do you really need annual print supplements? (They can be expensive up-front and to file/shelve.)
How many legislators know how to compile a legislative history? My guess is not many. But they have many skills the rest of us lack, but need. Who among us has the patience to shepherd bills through the state or federal (or local) legislative process without going berserk – and having everyone scream at you day and night? Not I.
Try shadowing a legislator for a day and you’ll see what I mean. (Try shadowing a teacher for a day, too, and see how much like legislating that job is, with just as many people screaming at you.)
Legislative assistants can compile legislative histories and so can government documents and law librarians. For us, legislative history compilation skills are a job requirement, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it, especially if we’re far from the seat of government and can’t visit the official and complete archives where complete bill files can be found.
Lawyers at Adler Vermillion & Skocilich, LLP have made this remarkable copyright resource publicly available – and free.
Copyright Codex (Beta): A Free Treatise for Lawyers and Artists
Many thanks for the tip from Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog, where you will find information about the Copyright Codex and much more, including a link to the Trial of Whitey Bulger website.
Lawyers at Adler Vermillion & Skocilich, LLP have made this remarkable copyright resource publicly available – and free. (Thank you!)
Copyright Codex (Beta): A Free Treatise for Lawyers and Artists
Many thanks for the tip from Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites blog, where you will find information about the Copyright Codex and much more, including a link to a Trial of Whitey Bulger website.
Library (and law firm) database (and eBook) licensing can be tricky, to put it mildly.
There are hundreds, thousands even, of fee-based subscription databases used by lawyers, legal researchers, librarians, historians, etc. If you need to negotiate and manage a database contract, here is a useful primer, and much more:
The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has posted the following Code of Best Practices for Licensing Electronic Resources guidelines on its website, with easy access for everyone, not just AALL members:
Politwoops: “Deleted Doesn’t Mean Inaccessible: Search and Access Deleted Tweets By Politicians,” from the 4/29/13 LJ InfoDocket post by Gary Price.
(Priceless Meanderings: Diamonds are Forever (Fleming & Bond) and Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend (Loos and Monroe) and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Lennon and McCarthy) and Tweety Bird (of course!).)
Oregon Legal Research Blog