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Friday, October 03, 2003
LLRX.com takes on the future of RSS The latest issue is up of LLRX.com, taking on the question du jour, Will RSS replace e-mail? Fortunately, author Robin Good gets that out of the way right off: "E-mail is a two-way communication medium while RSS is only a distribution one. From that simple realization, you can immediately derive that e-mail is here to stay." He goes on to offer a thoughtful discussion of whether RSS will replace e-mail as the preferred tool for newsletter distribution via the Internet. A challenge to critics of legal services Lindsay Thompson is an old friend, a well-regarded "super lawyer" in Seattle, Wash., and one of the best writers I know. He's not a blogger, although he should be, but he's back after a many-year hiatus editing the Washington State Bar Association Bar News, and everyone should read his monthly editor's column, especially this one: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Running Legal Services? A Challenge to Its Critics. And then this one: Leadership, of a Sort. And while you're there, this one: They Did What? Blawgers at BloggerCon Any blawgers going to BloggerCon this weekend? I am. I know Doug Simpson is. And Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds of course. Anyone else? (Here's the BloggerCon blogroll as of today.) And just who is a "blawger"? Is it any blogger with a law degree? Or does it depend on what they blog about? Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Documents in trademark disputes can now be accessed online On Monday, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office introduced TTABVue, a system that allows users to view images of documents relating to trademark disputes via the Internet. According to the official announcement, TTABVue includes images of most documents filed since January 2003, as well as some starting from June 2001. Ed Meese: librarians push porno beSpacific reports that former Attorney General Edwin Meese, appearing yesterday on NBC's Today show, said that "librarians are more interested in pushing pornography than fighting terrorism." American Library Association President Carla Hayden disagreed. Associates rank the best law firms What are the best law firms at which to be an associate? The results are in of The American Lawyer's 2003 Associates Survey. Topping the list: Houston's Bracewell & Patterson. Monday, September 29, 2003
A knowledge base of business contracts Operating on the premise that research on contracting is stymied by a lack of available contracts, the Contracting and Organizations Research Institute at the University of Missouri, Columbia, is working to create a digital collection of contracts and make them available over the Internet. The collection so far contains more than 10,000 contracts, drawn primarily from filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database, where company filings frequently include contracts of interest to investors. CORI downloads, extracts and categorizes these contracts and makes them available via a full text search and retrieval system. Users can search the library by full text or according to contract type. Available contracts cover mergers and acquisitions, employment, finance, joint ventures, leases, licenses, purchases, joint ventures, agriculture and underwriting. In addition to the digital contracts, CORI has a collection of hard-copy contracts, including HMO-physician agreements, sports stadium leases, container shipping contracts, and more. These contracts are described at the site and can be ordered by e-mail. Images of an asylum trigger memories of first law job Through pure happenstance, two state-run "insane asylums" in Massachusetts were the backdrop for significant firsts in both my journalism and legal careers. As a journalism undergrad at UMass/Amherst in the early '70s, the Daily Collegian assigned me to cover U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro's tour of Belchertown State School, a facility for people lumped together in those days by the label "retarded." Judge Tauro was taking an aggressive role in enforcing efforts to improve conditions for patients at state schools and hospitals, and his tour had attracted a flock of print and TV reporters. At one point, he directed the reporters to wait behind while he toured a particular building. A UMass professor in Tauro's entourage motioned for me to continue along. Thanks to him, I became the only reporter to cover the entire tour. The story I wrote for my college newspaper was my first ever to be picked up and distributed by the Associated Press. I was so proud of the $5 check AP sent me that I didn't want to cash it, but so broke that I did -- only after photocopying it. Flash forward a couple years to my first year of law school, supporting myself by driving a cab nights in and around Boston. After twice being robbed in my cab at gunpoint, I decided it was time to look for my first law-related job. I became an intern with the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee, an agency operating under the state Supreme Judicial Court. MHLAC assigned me to run its field office in Worcester State Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill. A couple days a week, I sat in a tiny room, counseling chain-smoking patients about civil commitments, guardianship and conservatorship, and a range of day-to-day legal concerns, while also learning a lot about the so-called mentally ill and our ignorant ways of dealing with them. So what's all this have to do with a blog that reviews Web sites? A new site, Danvers State Insane Asylum, revives ghostly memories of those days with a series of photographs of the now-abandoned state hospital in Danvers, Mass. In fact, it even includes photos of the also-now-abandoned Worcester State Hospital where I spent part of my first and second law-school years. The haunting collection of images is taken from a new book, Abandoned Asylums of New England: A Photographic Journey. |
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