What is like to defend one of America’s most notorious serial killers? In 1979, having just left the Illinois Office of the Public Defender to open his own practice, Sam L. Amirante was retained to defend John Wayne Gacy, who was charged with the horrific murders of…

Users of Clio, the cloud-based law practice management platform, now have the ability to add custom fields to matters and contacts, the company announced today. That means that users can add data-entry fields of their own in addition to the pre-defined data fields provided by Clio.

Clio’s new custom fields feature…

Here is an interesting iteration of the standard law dictionary — one designed specifically to help legal professionals who are not native speakers of English. Available as an app for iPhone and iPad, TransLegal’s Law Dictionary not only provides the definitions for more than 3,000 legal terms, but…

A long time ago, I was the founding editor of Lawyers USA (when it was called Lawyers Weekly USA). I’ve had nothing to do with it for years, but I was interested to note that it launched a new podcast for lawyers yesterday. Called Lawyers in…

If you are anywhere near Boston, mark your calendar for Monday, Oct. 1, when the FirmFuture conference kicks off at the Copley Marriott. Focused on law practice management and legal technology, the conference features a great line-up of speakers and programs covering topics that range from IOLTA account management…

Last week marked the second phase of implementation of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. patent law signed into law on Sept. 16, 2011. Several key provisions of the law took effect last week, most notably new procedures for third parties to challenge patents after they have been issued and new…

The Library of Congress this week unveiled Congress.gov, a new site for U.S. legislative information that will eventually replace the 17-year-old Thomas.gov. The new site is intended to have more robust search features and a more user-friendly design, as well as to be platform agnostic, enabling it to be…

A new website, BriefMine, aims to help lawyers mine a collection of legal briefs for nuggets they can use in their own research and arguments. The site — which is still in a private beta version — uses intuitive, natural-language search to explore a database of legal briefs collected from courts around…

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…