Finding Websites that Can Help Your Practice Big Time By Barbara S. Straczynski May 21, 2010, 8:58 AM
There are many free and fast resources on the Internet that lawyers should know for networking, research and get all around help for a law practice. Young lawyers are on the cutting-edge of these technologies. They’ve grown up in the world of the personal computer. Three young lawyers who are experts at using the Internet are Matthew Stenger, Jeffrey Neu and Jonathan Lomurro. In the session, “Using the Internet to Improve Your Practice,” they delivered a cavalcade of free resources. Google Maps: Get to accident sites and roadways, get map satellite pictures. Open a web browser and go to google.com, and then google maps. Put in an address like Brigantine Boulevard and Huron Avenue – see the intersection – at the top of the bar where you can zoom in, there is a small icon of a person – drag it to the intersection – it brings up a picture of the intersection (street view) -- go to bottom corner on right, move the little person to select the picture of the intersection that you like best – choose fullscreen , hit button printscreen – use accessories like paint or Word - edit and paste, now you have the exact picture of the intersection that you saw. This can be a good reference for your case. You can also do this for websites. Printscreen, paste it into Paint or Word and save. Take a screen shot and save it forever. Get the information the day of the case, before your adversary takes critical evidence off the site. Get it before they change it. State Bar website www.njsba.com: The calendar of events will give you all the meetings and events for the NJ State Bar Association. You can also access Fastcase, a free NJSBA member benefit that provides access to a complete New Jersey law library for free legal research. Shepardizing is its only limitation. Fastcase also gives you a PLO, or Public Library of Law, which is open to the public. Google Scholar: Google is publishing almost all academic and legal publications. You can type in almost any case site, and fine tune your search using the tool bar menu. It provides not only case law, but also potentially relevant statutes, articles written on the case, and more. Cornell and Washington Law have online databases for statutes. 9 times out of 10, with a Google search, you’ll get the Cornell or Washington site. Also Rutgers law library. It’s very NJ specific, with lots of NJ resources. Sometimes it includes commentary.Lawlibrary.rutgers.edu New Jersey ordinances for towns – check these sites: Coded systems E-Codes Municipal Codes on the Internet Municode.code – this is a state site that lists all municipal websites. Extremely useful for ordinances that are hard to find, or if your client is charged and you need the wording. We all don’t have time to drive to municipal court to look up the ordinance. This is a great resource for municipal court practitioners. If you do a lot of government or federal type searching, try Search.USA.gov. It came into existence in last 8 months. They are compiling all the federal websites out there and putting it into a search engine. Search for anything that the federal government is publishing, whether statistical data or some sort of report. It indexes all the federal websites. It’s fed specific -- Homeland Security, SEC IRS. USPTO, immigration. all legislation and public material. It’s a fantastic resource if you deal with fed issues. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission publishes all filings made by public companies across the nation on their website. USPTO website gives you access to patents and trademarks. Copyright registrations can be done online. Go straight to copyright.com website and find out if the name is not registered etc. IRS website: Easy and quick to grab all sorts of tax information. CMS Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services website: This should be the first place you look for Medicare and Medicaid information. Highmark Medicare services – for New Jersey –if you’re playing in the Medicare world in NJ, you need to go to Highmark Medicare services also. Njcourtsonline.com: For those who litigate, huge amounts of information is available on the judiciary’s website. End Date Calendars provide very helpful info. Search the civil motion calendar and make sure your motion is on. Some counties are putting up their orders, so you can get a pdf of all orders and motions for a Friday motion cycle. Right now, this is only offered in Middlesex County, but it’s the wave of the future. You can search county courts by vicinage for all the info you need about the court, Directions, the names of the judges, photos of court. You can get unpublished appellate court opinions from the site. After two weeks, go to the Rutgers Camden Law Library where they archive forever. It’s a powerful website with lots of information. NJ Appellate standards for review are there. Do a search and it comes right up. Social networks: Ideal for looking for character evidence, positive or negative, for your client and your adversary. It will bring up more information that you ever want to know because people are creating and publishing their lives. The most popular sites are Facebook and MySpace, and they are very public. Creating a false identity: Check out Pretexting. In a recent California case, a law firm was caught Pretexting to get phone records of board of directors, and other information on the Board. Search Wilson Sonsini – Pre-Texting to read about the case. Twitter: This is basically text messages posted online. Twitter will often give you the GPS coordinates from where something was sent. Then go to Google Maps, put in those coordinates, and it will tell you where they were when the message was sent. Linkedin: A professional social network with the individual’s professional associations. Potentially, it can give you something useful, whether for your client or against the adversary. Lawyer Rating Sites: It’s good to be aware of what people are saying about you. Avvo –They pulled out everyone’s licensing info. So your name and address is there. That’s it. However, If you take ownership, you can update your profile for free. They will eventually rate you if you fill out the info yourself. The more you fill in, the higher the rating. You can rate other lawyers. Find out what people are saying about you. Your profile is already there. You may as well make it look good. LawyerRatingz – People go here to vent about bad lawyers. Check to see if something bad is being said about you. SuperLawyers – Not bad to update your profile if you have one. Any publicity is good publicity if you do it right. Department of Corrections: For those who take pool cases, it’s good to find out about the client. Sometimes you’ll catch a victim or witness. A good way to find out about a state imprisonment. Federal Bureau of Prisons: To find out about fed crimes Find people and find interesting things about them: Division of Consumer Affairs has a database of any licensee -- doctors, architects, plumbers anybody. Department of Law & Public Safety, Division of Consumer Affairs -- look up any type of license, any licensing board. For physicians: Search the Office of the Attorney General, Division of Consumer Affairs, New Jersey Health Care Profile. Legal actions, med mal claims, judgments and settlements against them will showup. Licensing restrictions in this state, another state, a criminal conviction in the last 10 years, and more will all show up. New Jersey State employee phone directory: Every phone number for every state employee With a google search – enter rphonebook; put in name and where they are. You will get information about the person. Change that r to a b and it will search business listings. Zabasearch: Aggregator search site for people, it will come up with anything that is publicly available. Wayback Machine, picture of every website since 1998: It will come up with dates, everytime it changed and pictures of the website. Also valuable for social networking sites. Goes all the way back and shows all web pages. Saved each time there was a change. It will not save deeper contact, you can get a snapshot of what it looked like, but not deeper content. The site may improve as they move forward. Datamasher: A good site for litigation. You can generate lots of reports, or make an argument based on data field or reports from around the state or country. You can bring up a couple reports, compare them, and get one report. Enter the information that you want, and it will aggregate data previously unaccessible. Forget about manually gathering and comparing data. Wikipedia: It’s the encyclopedia of the Interent, BUT user contributed. It should not be cited or used as an authoritative resource. Good for checking but it should never be used as a primary resource. Wiki Leaks – People are posting confidential information that they find to be particularly egregious, and it’s posted online anonymously. It can be incriminating. More in the vein of this is something happening and it’s bothering someone’s moral or ethical code. APP.com: Asbury Park Press has a Data Universe with lots of public information. Public payroll, home info, tax records, property sales and transactions, (there is a lag time) Everything that is public knowledge. You can use it to locate people. If you have an idea where someone lives, you can pull them up by searching their property. Zamzar – Free website file converter, as long as the file you’re uploading is limited to 100MG , you can upload, it will email a link, you can convert files, download off the link and get the file in a completely different format. It will do the best that the conversion will allow. PDF to Word , the most accurate PDF to Word converter. Open Office – Free Microsoft office. Openoffice.org , takes any word doc or wordperfect doc , you can do pretty much anyting and it’s free. Gimp2.6 – free photo editing software.www.gimp.org Audacity – freeaudio editing software Thunderbird 3, very similar to open office. Much more flexible, and faster Defensive Driving, Traffic School & More – online course instead of attending course, nice tool Idrivesafely.com and SafeMotorest.com Black’s Law Dictionary online. Law.com dictionary Whois – identity for everyone - if you need to find the owner of a website, or the owner of a domain YouMail 6.99 a month, message on your voice mail. Rather than listen, this program turns the voice mail message into text and emails you. The transcription will appear on your phone. You don’t have to listen to voice mail. Saves hours if you get a lot of voice mail.
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