New data released today and a companion website rank the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico  on the degree to which they use best practices for ensuring access to justice. Compiled by the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law School, the Justice Index 2016…

An offshore investment scandal known as the Panama Papers has taken the world by storm. The controversy centers around the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and its connections to high-ranking political figures, their relatives, celebrities, and business figures, including Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson.

Recently, a German newspaper announced that 11.5 million confidential…

Free Law Project has launched a database of biographical information on some 8,500 federal and state judges. The database can be searched through Free Law Project’s Courtlistener. It also can be downloaded as bulk data or accessed via APIs (application…

For the source of this image, see below.

Here is a round-up of some of the news from recent weeks:

It’s Bashman’s birthday. Happy birthday to Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog, which turns 14 today. Here it began. On Wednesday, Bashman teased an announcement he’d be making today,…

When I first reviewed TheFormTool in 2012, I called it smart, simple document assembly. My opinion has not changed. TheFormTool is an add-on to Microsoft Word that makes it easy to create document templates and generate documents using those templates. The basic version of TheFormTool was then and still is…

When last I visited Cheetah, the new legal research platform from Wolters Kluwer, it was for a review I wrote for the ABA Journal. At the time, the new platform covered only three practice areas: securities and corporate, antitrust and competition, and litigation, with tax and intellectual…

I know, I know. We’re all already sick of hearing about robot lawyers and how artificial intelligence is the next new thing that will change the practice of law.

Eric Laughlin

However, when I learned that no less a bastion of legal publishing and technology than Thomson Reuters was getting into the AI…

I am very happy to announce that I and this blog are joining the Above the Law network, as part of ATL’s enhanced focus on solo and small firms.

Making the news even better is that I am joined in this move by my long-time friend and sometimes collaborator Carolyn Elefant. Carolyn…

Uptime Legal Systems, a Minnesota company that provides private cloud services to small and mid-sized law firms, today announced it has acquired JurisPage, a New York City website design, internet marketing and SEO company for lawyers.

JurisPage was founded in 2013 by lawyer Andrew Cabasso and website designer…

Logging in takes you to a page showing all your courses.

It’s been several years since I’ve written anything about Lawline, which I once described as a company that was disrupting the CLE industry. What brings me back to Lawline this week is the company’s roll-out of a…

Widgets on matter pages can now be rearranged or removed.

It has been over a year since I last wrote about Firm Central, the cloud-based practice management application from Thomson Reuters. I’ve been meaning to write an update since January, when Firm Central got a notable new feature, but…

A recent post of mine drew a lot of attention for stating that the number of legal startups had nearly tripled in two years. Relying on the Angel List roster of legal startups, I observed that the number had grown from 412 two years ago to 1,094…