INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH WEEKLY
January 31, 2010
Tom Mighell

Welcome to Issue #356 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

Technology Adoption - the Latest Kennedy-Mighell Report
Lawyers are generally thought of as some of the last people to adopt the latest technologies - why is that? Dennis Kennedy and I talk about possible explanations for this phenomenon in the latest edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, entitled From Early Adopters to Late Adopters, and Everyone In Between. We also answer some questions about Windows 7 and the Consumer Electronics Show. Give it a listen!

SlideFinder Helps with Your Next Presentation
I don't know about you, but sometimes I'm preparing a presentation, and I'm completely at a loss about where to begin, or where to start on a particular topic within the presentation. Surely others have done presentations on my topic before - wouldn't it be cool if I could tap into their experiences? With SlideFinder, you can get pretty far. SlideFinder is a PowerPoint presentation search engine - it catalogs publicly available slide decks and indexes them by content. Just type in some words from your presentation, and you'll instantly see other PowerPoint presentations that include those words. Pretty slick. Granted, you can probably just go to Google and type in "[keywords] filetype:ppt," but with SlideFinder, why bother?

Blawgs of the Week
Here are some of the great law-related blogs featured on Inter Alia the past two weeks:

The cleverly-named Ahead of Schedule is a development, design, and construction law blog. It's authored by a whole bunch of lawyers at the big nationwide firm Stoel Rives. They're discussing topics like OSHA reform, defects, environmental concerns, as well as construction claims, contracts, defects, and litigation.

Another construction law blog is Best Practices Construction Law, brought to you by Matthew DeVries of the Nashville firm of Smith, Cashion & Orr. "Using experience, knowledge and technology to ensure success in the construction industry," the blog discusses construction law best practices (obviously), project management, regional construction issues, and more.

This blog occupies an interesting niche - mergers, acquisitions and investments by foreign businesses. The blog is logically titled USA Inbound Acquisitions & Investments Blog, and it's authored by Bill Newman in the New York office of Sullivan Worcester.

Here's a blog from my backyard here in Dallas. The Dallas Divorce Law Blog is brought to you by the firm of O'Neil Anderson, and they're discussing the usual topics you'd imagine in a family law blog - child support, parenting, division of property, and more.

The ABS Investor Advocate is published by Grais & Ellsworth, a New York City firm that represents investors in asset-backed securities and other structured instruments. They're discussing such topics as mortgage modifications, securitization, and the servicer safe harbor, among others.

Here's another blog from Fox Rothschild. Fair Housing Defense features on and compliance with the Fair Housing Act. It's edited by Scott Badami with two other contributing authors, all from the firm's Blue Bell, Pennsylvania office.

The LLC Law Monitor does exactly what its title says - it provides insight and commentary on the law of limited liability companies. Doug Batey at Stoel Rives in Seattle is discussing all things LLC, including dissolution, fiduciary duties, income taxes, operating agreements, piercing the veil, and more.

Help Desk

In the last issue, I started talking about ways to recover a corrupted Word document. This week we'll cover even more ways you can save that brief you've been working on for so long....

  • Extract the Raw Text. Save the document as RTF (Rich Text File) or TXT, and then open it in another word processing program that supports Word files. Alternatively, you can use a file editor (also called a hex editor) to manually extract text from the file.
  • Use Word's Text Converter. Word has its own Text Converter you can use. To try this, click File, then Open. When the Open dialog box appears, select the problem Word document. Then, choose Recover Text from Any File from the Files of Type drop-down list, and open the document. This will import straight ASCII text - you'll lose the formatting and non-text items like graphics, but at least you'll get your text back.
  • Open and Repair. Later versions of Word offer an "Open and Repair" option - just click File, then Open, and find your file. Select Open and Repair from the Open drop-down list, then open the document.
  • Find the Vista Shadow Copy. Using Vista? Bet you didn't know that it automatically saves shadow copies of some of your documents (only for files stored on NTFS volumes). To find out if there's a shadow copy of your document, right click on the document file and select Properties. If you're on an NTFS volume, you should see a Previous Versions tab, which should show any previous versions that are available.

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!


Updates from Twitter

Here are the articles and resources I found interesting on Twitter the past two weeks:

Legally Relevant – Sites on the Internet

Powerset
Wikipedia is arguably one of the most comprehensive research sources on the Internet today - but it's so darn big, it can be difficult to make sure you're getting all you can out of it. That's where Powerset comes in - it's a search engine for Wikipedia. Do a search for anything, and you'll get a listing of "Factz," and then a listing of Wikipedia articles containing the search terms. Reading the articles within Powerset is really easy - you can navigate the outline on the right, or view images or map locations related to the topic. Powerset is now owned by Microsoft, so no telling whether it will ever develop into something even more useful.

Australasian Legal Information Institute
This site has been around for a long time, and there's a good reason why: it's one of Australia's most popular online free-access resources for Australian legal information. It's a joint effort of the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales. You can research cases and legislation by jurisdiction, review law journals, legal scholarship, or libraries of specific practice areas, or view the catalog by jurisdiction, subject, community info, legal sources, and more. If you're conducting Australian legal research, this is a must-visit site.

Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
The mission of the Carr Center is to train future leaders for careers in public service and to apply first-class research to the solution of public policy problems. Check out the Research & Publications section, with articles, books, book chapters, bibliographies, conference reports, speeches, lectures, and other audio/video.

People's Republic of China Supreme People's Court
This site is probably less a useful research site than an interesting site to view. China has made this english-language site available to introduce everyone to the structure and goings-on with the Supreme Court of China. You can read judicial news, data on the Grand Justices and the chinese judicial system, laws and regulations, and PRC laws, among other things. The translations aren't the best, and some of the information appears to be a little outdated, but they're keeping the news fresh.

Social Media Policies Database
Are you representing a company that wants to implement a social media policy? Attorney Doug Cornelius has been compiling social media policies from companies across the company and making them available on his site. So far he's got 144 policies, from companies like the American Red Cross, Fairfax County, Virginia, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Navy. Great resource.

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

I enjoy using the semicolon in my writing; I think it's a useful punctuation mark. But many don't know the right ways to use it. Here's a helpful comic guide on How to Use a Semicolon.

Fragger just cost me nearly an entire hour of my day. Lob grenades to blow up people and stuff - that's pretty much all there is to it, but it's addictive.

Well, that’s it for Issue #356 – 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

Listen to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, available at The Legal Talk Network or in iTunes.

For the latest legal technology, e-Discovery and other great links, visit the Tom Mighell Linkstream.

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