INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
January 11, 2009
Tom Mighell

Welcome to Issue #325 of the Internet Legal Research Weekly, a newsletter that delivers relevant and timely legal research information, and other fun stuff, to your inbox every Sunday. If you like what you read, please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to do the same! To subscribe, all you have to do is visit Inter Alia and fill out the subscription form -- it's free!

And away we go.....

News Update -- from the Inter Alia Weblog

Blawgs of the Week
Here's a selection of some of the great law-related blogs featured at Inter Alia over the past 2 weeks:

  • I wish the folks at Event ACCess would post more often -- this looks like a really valuable site. It's brought to you by the Association of Corporate Counsel, and it's designed to provide news and updates on ACC events and seminars held in the US, Canada, and Europe. Terrific idea -- you just have to post more than once a month!
  • I've been eager to announce this blog for awhile now -- it's from my former law firm, Cowles & Thompson here in Dallas. Reverse & Render is published by the firm's Appellate Law section, namely Mike Northrup, Byron Henry, and David Oliveros. They're providing insight and commentary on Texas appellate law, with a focus on Dallas and North Texas opinions. Give it a look -- you'll find some terrific stuff there!
  • Another appellate blog for you this week: In Their Opinion is published by Michael Rigney, with the Chicago office of Kelley Drye & Warren. He's focusing on one court -- in this case, the Seventh Circuit -- and he's discussing recent decisions that they've issued.
  • Here's an interesting niche blog for you: Lawdable is published by Counsel on Call, a company that provides contract lawyers and paralegals to legal departments and law firms. They're discussing cost-effective and flexible legal solutions to be gained by using contract legal workers.

Help Desk

I'm still covering Outlook 2007 tips this week. Before I get to the new tips, I wanted to mention an email I got last week about one of my tips in the last issue. The reader mentioned that there's a much easier way to find large attachments in your Inbox, without going through the Advanced Find route: in your Inbox, simply click on Arrange By: and choose Size. Outlook will automatically place the emails with the largest attachment at the top. This is the easiest way to find large attachments in your Inbox; my tip was aimed more at the email contained in all of your folders -- you'll need to use the Advanced Find method to search more than one folder at a time.

On to the new tips.....

Can't keep track of all your meetings and appointments? Set up your calendar to use different colors so you can easily distinguish one from the other. Within the calendar, go to View, then Current View, then Customize Current View. Click on Automatic Formatting, then click Add to create a new condition for your color appointments. You can specify the keywords, people or groups for the appointments you routinely schedule, and assign a specific color for those appointments. The next time you schedule a meeting with those keywords, Outlook will automatically use the predetermined color.

Another New Year's cleaning tip: delete your Deleted Items!! I can't tell you how many people I know who put items in their Deleted Items folder, but never empty that folder because they "never know if they're going to need that email." Wimps! Take a stand and make some decisions about what email you want to keep and what you want to delete. If you can't bring yourself to delete the email, create a separate folder for it and store it there. Then click the Tools menu, then Options, and select the Other tab. Check the box next to Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting. Finally, your Deleted Items folder will be doing the work it was born to do.

Do you have a question about searching the Internet or your computer in general? Drop me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net – I’ll post your question (don’t worry, I won’t use your real name) and try to get an answer for you!

This Week at Fios

The Fios webcasts will start up again at the end of January. I'll keep you posted!

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

Researching Medical Literature on the Internet
I haven't mentioned anything from the great legal research site LLRX in a while, so I'm glad to talk about this article. It's published by Gloria Miccioli, a law librarian for Manatt Phelps in Washington, D.C. She provides a great listing of sites that will help you research medical literature on the Internet. Much of the article is taken up talking about the fantastic National Library of Medicine databases, but you'll also find other U.S. government sites, medical metasites, medical libraries and librarians, drug information, journals and textbooks, visual information, medical search engines, and a lot more. This is a terrific resource.

South Africa Litigation Centre
I may have mentioned this site a while back, but it's such a great international law resource I wanted to talk about it again. The Centre was launched in 2005 as an initiative of the International Bar Association and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, with support from megafirm DLA Piper. The Centre focuses on three areas: support for human rights cases, advice on Constitutional advocacy, and training in human rights and rule of law issues. The Newsroom provides links to the latest news on these topics from Southern Africa, and there's a searchable index of the cases they are working on. Check out the Library, which provides domestic materials, decisions, and more from the Southern African countries.

TradeAgreements.gov
This site represents an interagency effort by the United States to provide the public with the latest information on America's trade agreements. You'll find links here to learn more about free trade agreements, including news, speeches, press releases, and fact sheets. And of course the site has information on pending and existing free trade agreements, which you can browse by country.

California Board of Chiropractic Examiners
Of course,the purpose of this site is to provide licensing and other information for chiropractors in the state of California. But consumers and researchers can use it too, to learn more about their rights where chiropractic service is concerned. Most of the information is available only in PDF, but that means you can save the documents to your computer. You can search licenses, referral services, and corporations, and learn about how to file a complaint. The proper forms are available for download, too.

The Carcinogenic Potency Project
The Carcinogenic Potency Project is an international resource of the results of 6540 chronic, long-term animal cancer tests on 1547 chemicals. It provides easy access to qualitative and quantitative analyses of both positive and negative experiments published over the past 50 years in the general literature. The site's not very pretty, design-wise, but the information it connects to is undeniably useful.

Finally, some fun and useful sites to help start off your week:

Check out Mike Arrington's list of "2009 Products I Can't Live Without" -- I currently use 11 of the tools/services on this list. The chart is interesting to see how Mike's list has changed over the past 4 years.

In Jelly Towers, you learn how to keep a hydra fed with big blocks of jelly. Yes, you read that correctly.

Well, that’s it for Issue #325 – I hope you liked it! If you did, pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage him or her to subscribe. Also, feel free to drop me an e-mail any time if you have questions, or if you have websites or other topics you want included in a future issue.

Tom Mighell

Now available: The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell

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Questions? New websites? Just want to talk? Send me an e-mail at tom(at)inter-alia(dot)net.