Self-help legal websites such as LegalZoom, Nolo and Rocket Lawyer are no match for a real lawyer, Consumer Reports concludes in an evaluation of the three sites published in its September issue. The magazine recently used each of the sites…

Eleven years later, and my memories are as vivid as ever of that horrible day in New York City. In a 2006 post here, I described my own remembrance of 9/11. As I wrote then, I was far enough from the towers to be safe, but close enough to see. But wherever you were…

Lest there be any doubt about how tardy I am in reviewing these two books, let me point out that, in the time it has taken me to get around to this, the authors of one of the books have already written and published a second book.…

Police in several major urban areas — most notably the Los Angeles Police Department — are turning to crime prediction software to aid in targeting rising crime rates. Based on algorithms used to predict earthquake aftershocks, these “predictive policing” programs forecast the highest risk times and places for crimes to occur.

In this week’s legal-affairs…

A Massachusetts divorce lawyer yesterday launched Massachusetts Divorce, an app for the iPhone and iPad that can be used to calculate alimony and child support under Massachusetts law and then generate a court-ready form. It can also be used to calculate dates.

The app was created by lawyers from…

The federal judiciary has issued new jury instructions aimed at deterring jurors from using the Web and social media to research or communicate about a case. The instructions, to be delivered by the judge at the outset of a trial and again before deliberations, tell jurors not to use the Web to conduct their own…

Rocket Matter, a cloud-based legal billing and law practice management application, today launched an iPhone app to facilitate mobile access to the application’s core functions. The app runs on all versions of the iPad, the iPhone 3GS and higher, and iPod touch…

Virtual lawyering is all the rage, but what exactly does it mean? Merriam-Webster tells us that, in this context, “virtual” means “being on or simulated on a computer or computer network.” Lawyers such as Stephanie Kimbro and Richard Granat are good examples of lawyers “being…

Here are two things that happened in August 2005:

Facebook.com was launched. Our Lawyer2Lawyer podcast was launched.

I’m not sure whatever became of that Facebook thing, but our podcast rolls on. This week, we marked the seventh anniversary of our weekly legal-affairs podcast. That adds up to more than 350 episodes (I…

Last April, Mark O’Mara, the lawyer defending George Zimmerman against charges of second-degree murder in the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, did something unusual for a criminal defense lawyer — he launched a social media campaign for his client. He created a website and blog, a

Lawyers’ use of web-based software and services has grown only slightly in recent years, a new survey indicates. Growth in use of the cloud is greatest among solos and small firms and lawyers in these firms are more likely than their larger-firm counterparts to use cloud-based applications.

These are among the findings of the recently…

In 1926, the editor of the Harvard Law Review, Erwin Griswold, produced a pamphlet covering proper forms of legal citation. Originally published with a brown cover, the cover was changed to blue for the sixth edition in 1939 as a patriotic gesture to get away from a color associated with Nazi Germany. Now in its…