If you are an iPhone-using lawyer, you really should subscribe to the iPhoneJD blog, where New Orleans attorney Jeff Richardson keeps you updated not only on specific legal uses for the iPhone, but on all things iPhone.

Yesterday, he reviewed Fastcase, an iPhone app for legal research, and the opening paragraph could hardly have been more glowing:

I will start this review with what probably belongs in my conclusion:  Every single lawyer using an iPhone should download the Fastcase app.  Moreover, the availability of the free Fastcase app is a compelling reason for any attorney not using an iPhone to purchase one today.  This app is that useful.

The rest of his review is very thorough.

The application itself is free, but the two subscription plans offered have an annual cost of  $700 and $1000. While that’s a heck of a lot less expensive than commercial services like Westlaw and Lexis, Fastcase will hardly replace either. It will be most useful for quick lookups on the go.

A lucky few won’t have to conduct any cost-benefit analysis. Seventeen bar associations (so far) offer Fastcase to their members free. That includes several statewide bar associations. Unfortunately, California is not among them, but a couple of Ninth Circuit states are: Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.

UPDATE (2/2/10): On second thought, this application might be good for a lot more than just the occasional quick lookup. On an iPad, it will be a lot more readable. Hmmm, up until know, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to buy an iPad.

(Cross-posted at The Ninth Circuit Blog of Appeals.)

No more paper: just electronic journals with links to sources. That’s what’s ahead. All this current, Bluebook-inspired preoccupation with small caps and spacing initials and the like will go the way of the mastodon. One of these days, we’ll have just URLs. They’ll have to be correct, or they won’t work. And they’ll have to last.

If you’re an academic writer, you should check out the article. Here’s the abstract at SSRN, where you can access the complete article after signing up for a free account:

For decades, legal footnotes have been the deserving target of both ample criticism and self-mockery. Apart from their complaints as to footnotes’ mere existence, most critics draw a bead on the ballooning of footnote content. Some journal editors, aspiring to respond to this sound theme, hopefully inform their authors of a preference for “light footnoting.” But where does an author begin to trim, and what editor has the audacity to slash what the author (or her research assistant) has so laboriously compiled below the line? Changing our footnote habits is about benefits and costs. To gain the former, we must ante up. If criticism began the round of bidding, this article modestly raises the stakes, suggesting a rule of reason that might govern the author’s, the editor’s, and the reader’s expectations for footnotes. A gamble, perhaps, but one that might be worth taking.

I’m a little late on this . . . OK, I’m a lot late. Last month, Google announced a searchable database of case law and legal journals on Google Scholar:

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity [sic] of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

I haven’t had time to test it out thoroughly, but in just a few minutes I was able to find my way around pretty well, and there appear to be quite a few search options. Looking up a case by its citation is much like the paid services: just type the citation in the search box at Google Scholar. There are options on the advanced search page to limit searches by subject matter, to search only federal cases, and to search any mix of individual states. Law journals can be searched by author, journal, date range, and any combination thereof. (Don’t worry if you don’t have the citation format for the law journal handy; identifying it by full name appears to work just fine.) Google provides a page of advanced search tips.

Cases cited in documents are linked for ready access with a click, just like the paid services. Of course, authorities not archived in Google Scholar are not linked, and the cases do not have the headnotes that appear in Westlaw or Lexis cases, and the date range of cases available so far is limited. For details, check out the “About” page for Google Scholar and follow the links in the left margin.

Unlike the free searching on Findlaw, one need not create an account to use the service. That’s nice.

Overall, this is a worthwhile resource, and perhaps especially for law bloggers who want to provide links to case law that won’t expire (like those on the California court websites do) and are is accessible to all readers. I’m going to take a serious look at using it for links on this blog.

UPDATE (12/21/09): I had time to play around with this a little more and wanted to alert readers that while the Google Scholar site does not require any form of membership, getting full access to journal articles in the results may require you to open an account at the site actually hosting the article, such as SSRN (which is free). However, I did run across an article hosted elsewhere that required payment for full access.

UPDATE (12/23/09): Legal Writing Prof Blog notes a discrepancy to watch for between Google Scholar results and the official reporters, and gives the common sense advice “If you’re going to cite to legal authorities found through Google Scholar, make sure you check your results against the official (or commercial) version, as applicable, to ensure accuracy.”

Welcome to all first-time visitors led here from the mention of me and the blog in the May 2008 California Lawyer article, Debate Heats Up Over Unpublished Opinions. (For those who haven’t seen the piece, it highlights the recent case of Hild v. California Supreme Court (No. C-07-5107-JCS (N.D. Cal. filed Oct. 4, 2007)), which the article describes as arguing “that the state’s publication rules violate Californians’ due-process and equal-protection rights by creating ‘a de facto policy of refusing review of unpublished decisions in civil cases.’” The piece discusses the case in the context of the ongoing debate over whether the rules should allow citation to unpublished opinions.) My original post on Hild has some useful links, including a good article by How Appealing’s Howard Bashman.

By the way, the writer of the piece is freelance legal writer Lorelei Laird, whose own cleverly named blog, I Am Not a Lawyer, examines legal issues from the perspective of a non-lawyer.

I’m eager to get into the cover story for this issue, which is about law blogs, but I haven’t had a chance yet. From the look of the cover, though, it appears to make the legal blogosphere look scary! In any event, I’ll put up a post this weekend about my thoughts on the cover article.

Again, if you’re here because you saw the article, welcome! Stay awhile and poke around. Check out the sidebar information. If you’re going to scroll through entries, go back at least two weeks; last week was a light blogging week. Try pulling up all posts in the Legal Writing category, all posts in the Appellate Procedure category, or any other category in the right sidebar that catches your fancy. And come back soon, or subscribe to the RSS feed. (Not sure what an RSS feed is? Click here.)

UPDATE (5/8/08): Per my usual practice with these “welcome” posts, I’m going to leave this post atop the blog for the next few days so the targeted readers don’t miss it as they trickle in. Please look for new posts below this one until then.

I was stunned by the results of my search [for "in personam jurisdiction"] on PreCYdent. The top six cases were the leading U.S. Supreme Court cases I studied in Prof. Reimann’s jurisdiction class. Each of them is fundamental to an understanding of the application of personal jurisdiction in federal courts. I have never seen a such a highly relevant set of search results on any electronic case search engine. Not in Westlaw. Not in Lexis. Not anywhere.

***

This stellar result was no accident or the result of preprogammed “best bets.” I tested a few other terms (e.g., “abortion” “sodomy”) and had comparably stellar results. The statute search also worked quite well. And this is the “Beta” release!

Before you discount the review, consider that it is from David Hobbie, the Litigation Knowledge Manager for Goodwin Procter. He’s in the information business.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that lawyers well-versed on a paid subscription service are going to convert completely to any of the public domain services any time soon. There’s always the problem of trying to get lawyers to try something new. And the paid services will look for ways to stay a step ahead of the game.

For lawyers who find Westlaw or Lexis unaffordable, however, it looks like PreCYdent may already be a useful adjunct to combing through the digests looking for case law. And there will surely be more to follow.

This Month’s California Lawyer has a terrific “how to” article on uses of the Google search engine that many of us perhaps never thought of. Learn how to use Google to search a specific domain, research a patent, search for files by file type, and even search across all U.S. Government sites — and only U.S. Government sites. Some nice little gems in there!

My biggest day of blog traffic to date (and this blog is nearly a year old) was last Thursday, and more than half of the hits were to my post complaining about the misuse of “which” for “that.” Curious, I checked my Sitemeter stats and saw that a tremendous number of those hits were referred from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, to which I linked in the post.

I was ready to attribute the traffic spike to some sort of automated web crawling by the school’s servers, but there were also a huge number of clicks out from my post to several of the links in it. All of which makes me wonder if people are really hungry for clear guidance on grammar.

As much as I enjoyed the traffic spike, my writing posts will continue to concentrate on style, with the occasional grammar post. I’ll leave the regular grammar instruction to Grammar Girl.

LawHelp.org will link you to your state’s legal information web site. Supported by legal aid organizations, pro bono programs and courts, these web sites generally cover information that is applicable to low- and middle-income people in areas such as divorce, orders of protection, landlord-tenant law, and debt collection. The information is generally written in plain language.

The site describes itself as “your gateway to America’s nonprofit legal services providers.” The home page links to self-help sites in all 50 states. Clicking the California link, for instance, takes you here.

When I must turn away prospective clients, I usually refer them to their county’s bar association to inquire about lawyer referrals. From now on, I plan to recommend that they check LawHelp also.

What is the Public Library of Law?

Searching the Web is easy. Why should searching the law be any different? That’s why Fastcase has created the Public Library of Law — to make it easy to find the law online. PLoL is the largest free law library in the world, because we assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites — all in one place. PLoL is the best starting place to find law on the Web.

What is available on PLoL?

Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more!

PLoL also includes free links to paid content on Fastcase. PLoL is already the Web’s largest free law library, but with additional links from Fastcase, it is one of the most comprehensive law libraries in the world.

LifeHacker ends its post with a reference that tests your internet savvy: “. . . Public Library of Law is, despite its unfortunate URL [http://www.plol.org], nothing to laugh at.” Get it?

UPDATE (2/19/08): If you don’t get the “unfortunate URL” remark, see my comment to this post for an explanation.

How would you like your name up in lights? Or at least mentioned in a presentation? I can’t promise either, but you have a shot at the latter if you respond to my call for assistance at the end of this post.

I am preparing a presentation for a section of the local bar on the use of blogs in legal research. This will be something like the presentation I gave to the Los Angeles County Bar Association Appellate Courts Committee, though there I emphasized my personal experience a great deal, which I intend to downplay on this occasion.

For the upcoming presentation, I’d like to have a better feel about how my readers use blogs in their practices — for research or otherwise.

Most of my non-subscription readers — at least on those days where I am not linked to or from another blog — appear to reach this blog through Google searches. The client inquiries I’ve received through the blog tend to be self-represented litigants, but the stats occasionally show Google hits from very large (“BigLaw”) firms (only the domains of large firms show up by name, typically), which suggests to me that these searches are being conducted by lawyers for research purposes.

I’m curious how these searches are being used. For example, is the search the first legal research step, akin to opening up Witkin for general background, or is it undertaken instead after an attorney is stumped on an issue and hopes to find some recent development that hasn’t made it into print?

I suspect some of the searches are to supplement Westlaw research. For example, if I find a case on Westlaw decided in the last month or so, I might Google it to see if other bloggers or commentators are discussing its implications. That, in turn, could help my own analysis of the case. The Google search terms usually give this away by incorporating the names of the parties.

Another use I know of is to find out if anyone is talking about YOUR case. I have had litigants contact me when I posted about their cases. One did so publicly in the comments. Another contacted me by e-mail. So I know that parties are out there looking.

In any event, I would very much appreciate comments from readers about how legal blogs have influenced or aided their research or practices. Anecdotes would be great. Broader comments about your habits are fine, too. Any background information about the nature of your practice and the blogs you follow would be helpful.

I prefer you make your remarks in a comment to this post rather than by e-mailing me. That way, after the presentation, I can refer the attendees to this blog post if they want to read your comments in detail.

Please note that by submitting information in response to this request, you are granting me permission for me to use all submitted information in the course of my presentation (which shouldn’t be a big deal, since you’re posting it publicly anyway, and might even get you some small amount of publicity). But if you want to leave an anonymous comment, that’s fine, too, and I will present it as such.

UPDATE (02/14/08): Thanks to the following for getting the word out about this post on their own blogs:

• Mitch Rubinstein, Adjunct Law Prof Blog.
• Victoria Pynchon, Settle it Now Negotiation Blog.
• Lorelei Laird, I am Not a Lawyer. (She’s a writer — ed.)

It appears to “rank” cases much in the way Google ranks web sites. For example, typing in “qualified immunity” in PreCYdent doesn’t just give you a random list of cases. It gives you the leading cases. Saucier v. Katz, for example, is the leading modern day case on qualified immunity. It’s also the first result.

Not all searches run that well, as the writer points out in what amounts to a mini-review, but the service shows promise. You can read more about the service at Right Coast in a post authored by one of the co-founders of the company developing the service.

UPDATE (1/31/08): I’ve corrected the first link in this post to go to the intended post at Crime & Federalism. I had initially linked directly to my comment at that post, instead of the post itself. That was inadvertent. I’m not that narcissistic. Honest. No matter what Judge Kozinski says.

UPDATE #2 (1/31/08): Also posting about the new service is Robert Ambrogi’s Lawsites, which includes some details about the service and several informative links. Thanks to Appellate Law & Practice for the Ambrogi link. And thanks to both of them for this link to the PreCYdent service.