P.I.S.S.D. -- Personal Injury, Social Security Disability. Dallas Texas Lawyers

Featured Link - Web 2.0 Directory

Are you one of those baffled by all the talk of Web 2.0? Here's the Wikipedia definition:

Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.^[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.

But the Featured Link is a cool directory of Web 2.0 sites, each represented by the company logo and searchable by category. As of now, there are more than 2300 sites represented at Go2Web20. Check it out.

Featured Link - Public Library Of Law

The Public Library of Law bills itself as the world's largest free law library. For lawyers on a budget, or motivated non-lawyers, it's a great resource. Here's the site's description:

Searching the Web is easy. Why should searching the law be any different? That's why Fastcase has created the Public Library of Law -- to make it easy to find the law online. PLoL is the largest free law library in the world, because we assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites -- all in one place. PLoL is the best starting place to find law on the Web.

What is available on PLoL?

• Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
• Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
• Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
• Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more!

PLoL also includes free links to paid content on Fastcase. PLoL is already the Web's largest free law library, but with additional links from Fastcase, it is one of the most comprehensive law libraries in the world.

Featured Link - SearchSystems.net

SearchSystems.net is a great collection of searchable databases. You can get access to many of them for free, but for less than $50 per year you can have full access to more than 40,000 searchable databases that contain tons of information about you that you thought was private.

This site can be a great help to lawyers who represent personal injury clients and Social Security disability claimants and who need to locate or verify personal information about either our own clients or about defendants and witnesses. Here is a statement from the site:

Welcome to Search Systems - the original, largest, most up-to-date and reliable directory of public records and best resource for background checks and criminal records on the Internet. Online since 1997 and ranked Number One for public records since 2001, SearchSystems.net continues to be by far the best resource of business information, corporate filings, property records, deeds, mortgages, criminal and civil court filings, inmates, offenders, births, deaths, marriages, unclaimed property, professional licenses, and much more. Easy access to billions of records!

Browse the site, then Sign up for DirectPass to access our directory AND get discounts on our Premium database of over 300 million state, national, and international criminal records (the largest on the Internet), and a database of over 100 million bankruptcies, judgments, and tax liens.

Now over 41,212 Searchable Public Record Databases!

Featured Link - Find Out If Someone Has Died

Whether you're trying to locate a defendant in a personal injury claim or just curious about a long-lost acquaintance, sometimes you might wonder if the person has passed away. I've written before about the very helpful Social Security Death Index. Now a fellow member of the Dallas Trial Lawyers Association has reminded me about Legacy.com. This Web site allows you to search the obituary notices of many newspapers and determine if your "person of interest" has died recently.

Link of the Day - Cornell University Law School Ethics Web Site

Do you have a question about legal ethics? You'll probably find your answer at the Cornell University Law School ethics Web site. Here's some info about the site:

Scope of the American Legal Ethics Library

This digital library contains both the codes or rules setting standards for the professional conduct of lawyers and commentary on the law governing lawyers, organized on a state by state basis.

Major law firms and legal academics, working on a pro bono basis, are contributing narratives on the law of lawyering of their states. As of Jan. 2006 the library includes narratives from 22 jurisdictions, including most of those with the largest lawyer populations.  It also includes the codes of professional responsibility for those jurisdictions, numerous other states, and the European Community. There are several additional states for which narratives are in progress.  More jurisdictions will be added as they are completed.

The American Bar Association's ethics materials are included in the library to permit the rules of a particular state to be compared with the ABA model provisions, including the extensive 2002 revisions, and with related provisions in other states.

Link of the Day - A Really Fast Online Dictionary

NinjaWords.com is a Web site that does only one thing, but does it really fast. If you need a quick definition for an unfamiliar word, check it out.

Link of the Day - Federal Legislative History

Whatever you need to know about federal legislative history can be found at the Thomas Web site. Here is the site's description:

THOMAS was launched in January of 1995, at the inception of the 104th Congress. The leadership of the 104th Congress directed the Library of Congress to make federal legislative information freely available to the public. Since that time THOMAS has expanded the scope of its offerings to include the features and content listed below.

• Bills, Resolutions
• Activity in Congress
• Congressional Record
• Schedules, Calendars
• Committee Information
• Presidential Nominations
• Treaties
• Government Resources
• For Teachers
• Help and Contact

Link of the Day - Law.com Newswire

One easy way to keep up with the latest legal and law firm news is to subscribe to the daily Newswire from Law.com. Check it out.

Link of the Day - AltLaw.org

AltLaw is a new legal search site, still in beta version. Here's a description from the site:

The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find. Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

AltLaw is a small effort to change that—to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public.

AltLaw Features

• Full text search of the last decade or so of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.
• Advanced search options (proximity searching, Boolean, concentration, wildcards, etc.)
• Fast and free
• Updated daily (not yet, work in progress)

AltLaw Limits

• Coverage, for most Circuits, limited to about the last 10 to 15 years.
• West Reporter Citations (i.e., 23 F.3d 178) not yet available (work in progress)
• As of yet, no state law or district court cases.

AltLaw is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School.

Ask.com Gives Option Of Deleting Your Search History

The Dallas Morning News reports today that the search engine Ask.com is allowing people to delete their search history at that site. The new policy, called SearchEraser is due to debut today.

The article points out that Google and Microsoft retain search histories for 18 months, and AOL and Yahoo retain them for 13 months.

The only drawback to this new policy is that because Ask relies on Google to deliver many of the text-based ad links on its pages, some information about search requests and clicks will still end up on Google's computers even when AskEraser is turned on.