There is tremendous variability within the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in terms of how each of the individual 8,000+ patent examiners treats an application and the inconsistency of allowance rates within similar art units. Similar art units can have as much as 50 percent variability* in allowance, leaving patent prosecutors to wonder how…

The Dutch ODR platform Rechtwijzer has garnered broad acclaim.

Twenty years ago, I published an article, Cyberspace Becomes Forum for Resolving Disputes, about the promise and potential of online dispute resolution (ODR). Someone active in the field recently told me that mine was the first published article about ODR. I don’t…

After reporting yesterday on Avvo’s launch of Avvo Legal Forms, I had an opportunity to speak today with the company’s CEO, Mark Britton, who is in Las Vegas, where he is attending Avvo’s annual Lawyernomics conference.

After my post yesterday, Ken Adams of the blog Adams…

LawToolBox is an online, rule-based deadline calculator that I reviewed in some depth in 2013. Ever since 2013, it has integrated with Microsoft Outlook through an Office 365 app. But the integration was one way, meaning that all calculations and changes had to be made…

Crossing into a territory already occupied by companies such as LegalZoom and RocketLawyer, Avvo announced today the launch of Avvo Legal Forms. But Avvo’s new offering has one big difference from those other companies — all of its forms are free.

Today’s…

Is prepaid legal insurance an answer to bridging the gap in access to justice? The insurance company ARAG believes it is. A longtime provider of legal insurance through employer-sponsored benefit plans, it is today introducing a direct-to-consumer plan, ARAGlegal.com, that will allow consumers to purchase coverage for a range of legal matters for…

For many trial lawyers, the iPad has become an essential accoutrement. It is used in discovery, depositions, research, jury selection, trial presentations and even settlement negotiations. For a couple of years now, I’ve surveyed some of the best iPad apps for trial lawyers for the Bullseye expert witness blog of

ALM has converted Texas Lawyer from a weekly newspaper to a monthly magazine and is instead beefing up the TexasLawyer.com website with more robust daily offerings, it announced this week. The first issue of the new magazine came out this month.

According to the announcement:

TexasLawyer.com now offers expanded

In deference to privacy, I have blacked out names.

As I logged in to Foxwordy, the professional networking site for lawyers, for the first time since it banned me last fall, I couldn’t help but conjure up that Groucho Marx quote, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would…

Clio now integrates with Vonage VoIP phone services.

Time to play catch-up on legal technology news and notes from the past few weeks:

Take credit cards in MyCase. The practice management platform MyCase already has the ability to accept online payments directly from a client’s checking account. At the recent…

I’ve been publishing April Fool posts here for the last couple years. Last year, it was the Invisible Girlfriend spin-off, Intangible Lawyer. The year before that, it was the joint announcement by Westlaw and LexisNexis that they were opening their databases to free public access.

So, no, yesterday’s guest…

[Editor’s note: It was a major milestone in the legal blogging world when President Barack Obama published a guest post Feb. 24 on SCOTUSblog. Just a day later, he also published a post on LinkedIn. Even with the president’s seemingly newfound interest in contributing to social media, I certainly never…