The number of lawyers who describe their practice as a “virtual” law practice declined this year to 5 percent, from 7 percent the year before, according to the 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report. The number of virtual law practices is higher among solos, where 7 percent describe themselves as virtual, and among firms of…

A coalition of legal groups concerned about protecting courts from the influences of money and partisan politics launched a website yesterday, Fair Courts Litigation, that is intended to track litigation that could impact the fairness and impartiality of court systems. The site will serve as a…

What are the most popular legal and business smartphone apps among lawyers? According to the 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, the most popular legal app by a long shot is Fastcase. The most popular business app is Dropbox.

The survey asked lawyers whether they had ever downloaded legal-specific smartphone apps and,…

The percentage of lawyers who say they use cloud-based software and services jumped from 21 percent in 2012 to 31 percent this year, according to the 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report. Given that the percentage had held somewhat steady for three years — 20 percent in 2010, 16 percent in 2011 and…

Lawyers’ social media use continues to grow, but only modestly, according to just-released findings of the 2013 American Bar Association Legal Technology Survey Report. More lawyers and law firms blog, tweet and participate in social media sites this year than last, but the growth is far from dramatic — generally just a few percentage points.…

You know how it goes: You sign up for a new website and you get an automatically generated email thanking you for registering. Well, when you sign up with Estate Map, you get a personal email from the company president, Joe Henderson, welcoming you and encouraging you to contact him directly…

The legal technology field lost a giant this week with the death of Ross Kodner, who suffered a heart attack two days after turning 52. Ross was a lawyer — a 1986 graduate of Marquette University Law School — but was known worldwide as the founder of the legal technology consulting firm…

Animal-rights lawyer Steve Wise

Sometime in the next couple of months, in a yet-to-be disclosed courthouse somewhere in the United States, the Nonhuman Rights Project is planning to file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a chimpanzee. In what will be the first of a series of…

In a recent article about mobile marketing I wrote for Law Practice Magazine, I explained why I am skeptical about the marketing value of law firm apps. I made an exception, however, for apps that provide a useful or practical function, whether…

Imagine if you could combine a full-text case law library for research with crowdsourced editing and annotating in the style of Wikipedia and user rankings of annotations and references in the style of a site such as Digg? That, roughly speaking, is the idea behind Casetext,…

Yesterday, Law Technology News featured my article, Blogging from the Bench, a survey of present and former judges who write blogs. It grew out of an earlier post here. Since the story appeared yesterday, I have learned of three more judges who…

The calculator provides various options for calculating employment rates. (Click for larger view.)

For prospective law students, selecting a law school ain’t what it used to be. Whereas once there was a dearth of information about graduates’ employment rates, now there are any number of sources of rankings and other data. No…