State Bar of Texas Blog : State Bar of Texas Blog : News & Features on Lawyers & Attorneys & Legal Professionals in Austin, Dallas, Houston & TX

Casemaker, which provides free caselaw for Texas lawyers, has launched a unique case digest service for Texas legal pros. 

The site kicks the traditional digest up a notch by allowing keyword searches and sorting case summaries by practice area, court, and even judge. Take a look now for free, and starting on September 1st sign up for a free 30-day trial of the service, which will cost $39.95 per year.

For a tour of the new case digest service, sign up for a free webinar, offered every Monday.

Remember that Casemaker 2.1 is free to all Texas lawyers and includes the full text of cases from all 50 states and an expanded federal library. Casemaker offers free live and recorded webinars on its research tools.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

File this one under "the small things that count." Casemaker 2.1, our free legal research tool, has quietly added some new printing options you'll find useful.

Looking at the full text of a case, you'll see a print dialogue in the upper right (see below) which now allows you to print the case, save it as a PDF or Word doc, or email it to yourself. You can also create a PDF of or email Casemaker search results.





 

Using the email feature, for example, you might have a Gmail account dedicated to legal research where you email cases for access anywhere.

Texas attorneys can access Casemaker 2.1 anytime from My Bar Page on TexasBar.com or on TexasBarCLE.com. Casemaker now includes free case law from all 50 states and an expanded federal library.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In May, Bill Medaille of Austin became the 10,000th Texas lawyer to register for Texas Bar Circle, our social and professional network for State Bar of Texas members. Since then, 800 more lawyers have joined the ranks.

We’re recognizing user 10,000 because he met a goal of the 2008-2009 State Bar Web Services Committee, which helped launch the community in 2007 as the first-ever social network by a bar association. Recently, the California, Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, and Tennessee state bars, and others, launched or announced their own communities.

So how is Texas Bar Circle doing? The trend line of registrations for the first half of 2009 matches lawyer adoption of LinkedIn, which Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog called an “avalanche” and Stem Legal’s Steve Matthews estimated at 840,000 in June 2009, up from 406,000 in December 2008. Of course our numbers won’t approach those, but it seems the legal industry is catching on to the value of social networking.

Texas Bar Circle users have created more than 250 groups on topics ranging from business development (Solo and Small Firm Practice, Rainmaking) to regions (Houston Attorneys, Austin Attorneys) to hobbies (Biker Barristers,  Musical Lawyers) to eclectic (God Forsaken Places to Practice; Killers, Thieves, and Lawyers). They’re also making direct connections and finding opportunities on a platform which we hope, as an exclusive community of lawyers, has a unique value among tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, which lawyers should also embrace.

If you’re a Texas lawyer and not yet a Circle member, check it out at www.texasbarcircle.com. You won’t find the bells and whistles of a Facebook or LinkedIn, but you will find a usable tool for building relationships – which is what social networking is all about.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Legal technologist Richard Susskind created a huge buzz among attendees of last week's ABA Techshow with his keynote speech about the future of the legal profession. Susskind's latest book, "The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services," foretells radical changes to business of law, including a commoditization of nearly every aspect of legal services aside from a lawyer's own expert judgment.

According to Susskind, in order to meet client demands of "more for less," lawyers will have to become much more efficient, which they'll do through commoditization of legal work and "multi-sourcing" (breaking up a legal matter into many pieces which are handled by different providers). They must also, says Susskind, learn to collaborate through community-based sharing of legal knowledge. Online social networking, he predicts, will dominate legal services.

Lawyers of the future will be project managers and risk managers, not "expert trusted advisors" as they're thought of today. Rather than frame his predictions with gloom and doom, Susskind emphasized that we're not near "the end of lawyers" but in a time of tremendous opportunity for those willing to innovate and approach work differently.

A free video of Susskind's keynote will be posted soon on the ABA Techshow website.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks