Articles Tagged with Legal research

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Symposium: 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent:

“The Web is fluid and mutable, and this is a “feature” rather than a “bug”. But it also creates challenges in the legal environment (and elsewhere) when fixed content is necessary for legal writers to support their conclusions. Judges, attorneys, academics, and others using citations need systems and practices to preserve web content as it exists in a particular moment in time, and make it reliably available.

On October 24, 2014 Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C. will host a symposium that explores the problem of link and reference rot.” [Link to symposium website.]

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Hat tip to Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites blog post: WellSettled.com Mines Cases for Established Principles,” which introduces us to wellsettled dot com: “It is well settled…

I bet you can’t search just one (word or phrase), but this “one” is a non-hedonic hyperphagia compulsion, so enjoy.

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Rent a Law Book? Want to get App App Appy?

Read: “Legal Research Revolutionized,” by Dan Giancaterino, in GP Solo, Vol. 31 No. 3:

“…. Law libraries will survive, and even thrive, in the future. An article in the May 2013 issue of ABA Journal estimated that only 15 percent of the unique volumes in U.S. law libraries have been digitized….

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David Lankes tells a familiar “Death by Failure to Research” story in his free eBook, “Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today’s Complex World:

…. In 2001 Ellen Roche, a 24-year-old lab technician, entered into a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University’s Asthma and Allergy Center. The trial was investigating how the lungs responded to chemical irritants. Researchers had Roche inhale hexamethonium. Roche was the third volunteer to do so in the study. The first volunteer had developed a slight cough that lasted a week. The second volunteer had shown no adverse reactions. Roche developed a slight cough that got worse and worse. Five days after inhaling the chemical, Roche was admitted to intensive care. Less than a month later, she was dead. What makes this story all the more tragic is that Roche’s death could have been avoided. As part of the funded clinical trial, the researcher did a literature search. He searched a database that indexed studies from 1960 to the present day. He found nothing on hexamethonium. However, had he not restricted himself to the Internet-accessible version of the database he would have found studies from the 1950’s linking hexamethonium to significant lung problems. Because of Roche’s death, all drug studies at Hopkins must now include a consultation with a librarian and pharmacist….” [Lankes, p. 80 [PDF p. 87] Link to free online versions of David Lankes’ latest book: “Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today’s Complex World.”  The digital version of this book is free to download and distribute. It is in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and iBook formats.]

Read more about “Principles and Standards for Legal Research Competency.”

 

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Gallagher Blogs reminds us that Headnote of the Day still lives!

A dog cannot recover for emotional distress?

You are probably well aware of the West Key Number System and headnotes but are you familiar with Westlaw’s Headnote of the Day provided on Thomson Reuters’ Legal Solutions Blog? ...” [Link to blog post.]

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Oregon Landlord-Tenant Law is a lot more complicated than people imagine. Landlords and tenants should seek current and accurate legal information and, in most cases, get professional legal advice from a licensed Oregon attorney who specializes in landlord-tenant law.

Everyone should do this BEFORE trouble strikes.

It’s a lot more expensive to fix a legal problem than it is to prevent one -just ask any landlord-tenant attorney – or any landlord or tenant who thought leases, evictions, and escrow accounts were subject to Common Sense Rules or the If it’s Online it Must Be OK “Rule” instead of the You Have to Research the Actual Law Rule. That person is now paying a lawyer lots of money to fix a problem that might have been avoided – or gnashing teeth over the Unjustness of the World. (Yes, life is sometimes unfair in your favor, but seldom when it comes to landlord-tenant law.)

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Anything But Law School Graduate Scholarship

The flip side of  “too many lawyers“:  Some reports estimate that 55% of attorneys are baby-boomers. If that % is correct, and the tail end of baby-boomer-dom was 1958, it’s quite possible we’ll need a lot of replacement lawyers really soon.

Some lawyers retire in order to do other things, but many lawyers will retire because the practice of law isn’t much fun anymore (e.g. legal research has become no “more than a google box on top of a legal database.”

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If you research the law online, you need to have authenticated, official laws – yes, you do!

There is no point relying on statutes, cases, regulations, and other government legal documents that aren’t correct, aren’t from the year(s) you need, and are missing the source’s official imprimatur.

Most online laws have Disclaimers that advise and warn you to verify what you read online with official, legal text.

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