Fastcase is a low-cost but wide-coverage online legal research tool with a modern, intuitive interface. Fastcase is a relatively new player on the legal research scene, but has some features that rival the bigger research alternatives, especially if your practice isn’t too dependent on deep secondary sources and you’re comfortable with, you know, a modern [...]

Mike Dahn, Vice President of WestlawNext Product Development, was kind enough to answer some of our questions directly: Do you know when WestlawNext will be available for use at law schools? Mike Dahn: We have not finalized a law school rollout plan.  Law school students will not have access to WestlawNext at launch.  However, we [...]

Update 1/28/10: Mike Dahn, Vice President of WestlawNext Product Development, was kind enough to answer some questions about availability and pricing, and we’ve posted some screenshots. Next week at Legal Tech NY, and at a number of preview breakfasts, Thomson Reuters will publicly showcase its new legal research product, WestlawNext. The basis of the new [...]

The legal research game has just taken a light-year shift, thanks to Google. Last night, Google quietly non-announced that Scholar search now includes U.S. federal and state case law and legal journals. Recently, the debate on open access to legal information has been raging, with some folks sticking up for the Westlaw/Lexis walled-garden approach that [...]

UPDATE: DigComm has created a very intriguing, standardized way of indicating the level of “material support” a blogger or social media user has received for a given post. See http://cmp.ly for details. For instance, this post would be tagged DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0. Thanks to Evan Brown (a.k.a. @internetcases) for the tip. There has [...]

This post comes courtesy of the folks over at Online Universities Weblog (not to be confused with Online Universities.com or its blog). While their site doesn’t have information for online legal study (and neither does Online Universities), there is some information on paralegal programs, FWIW. In any case, they cared enough to compile a list [...]

A Circuit Court judge in Miami-Dade County, Florida, this week dismissed a civil fraud case brought by Sky Development against Vistaview Development. The suit claimed that Vistaview misrepresented the number of units in a condo tower Sky purchased from Vistaview last year. The dismissal comes after a mistrial mid-May, when Judge Scott Silverman deemed text [...]

If you have been following along on my journey of trying to get my law school to get real about advising students on social media, you may have seen earlier posts – Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and “The Website“. Now I’m hoping you will take the [...]

Last week I attended the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)’s annual conference. It was inspiring and educational on many levels (not to mention the great food). Keynote John Palfrey from Harvard’s Berkman Center had great suggestions for law schools to collaborate rather than compete (for instance on library collections). (See liveblog archive of [...]

I had no idea when I started whining about bad advice involving Facebook horror stories that a few months later I would be offered a spot at a table with Harvard’s Berkman Center Co-director John Palfrey. Palfrey will be leading a discussion at the annual conference of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, known [...]