A new legal advocacy group, The Family Defense Center, today unveiled a Web page designed to solicit amici curiae to support its bid to secure Supreme Court review of a decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Dupuy v. Samuels. This struck me as an interesting way to use the Web…

Two new Web sites have similar missions: making secret and hard-to-find government documents, revealed through FOIA requests and other means, available to the public in order to promote government transparency.

The first and more sophisticated, GovernmentDocs.org, is being officially launched tomorrow. It will provide a database of FOIA responses and other government documents contributed…

The Citizen Media Law Project today launched its Legal Threats Database, a collection that documents legal threats aimed at online speech, including lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters and other legal actions. From the announcement:

“The database, the first such interactive compendium, contains legal threats from 35 states and 9 countries, and is growing daily.

The 1991 first-degree murder trial of New Hampshire teacher Pam Smart drew international media attention and spawned the Joyce Maynard novel and Nicole Kidman movie, To Die For. Smart was accusing of luring her 16-year-old lover, William Flynn, and two of his friends into murdering her husband Gregory. Smart was convicted and sentenced to…

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced today that briefs filed with the full court will now be posted to the Web, available via either www.ma-appellatecourts.org or www.mass.gov/sjc. Links to the briefs may be found on each case’s docket page, just above the docket entries. (For example, here.) In an announcement, SJC…

That is not my conclusion, but the premise of writer Denise Magnell’s piece, Legal Industry Slowly Lifts the Bar to Tech Adoption, published in the Boston Business Journal. In fact, I told Denise, and she quotes me as saying, that the legal profession, overall, was ahead of other professions in using technology.…

If the conversation recorded on this YouTube video is real, then it is shocking. In it, a male lawyer seeks to convince his female client to give him oral sex — urging, “30 seconds of pleasure, big deal!” This appears to be the same recording described in these 2006 New York Post and…

According to the blog launched today, RankingsForLawyers, there are more than 700 different lists that rank lawyers in the United States. While any lawyer can name at least some of these lists — such as Best Lawyers and Super Lawyers — keeping track of all of them is an overwhelming task. That is the…

There is what looks to be a great legal marketing conference this week in Washington, D.C., and here is your chance to attend for $200 off the standard registration price. The Nov. 8 and 9 The Law Firm Marketing Strategies Conference is sponsored by the ABA Law Practice Management Section and features a…

Through The Scout Report, I recently learned of the Web site of the Legal Writing Institute, an organization that serves as a forum for discussion and scholarship about legal writing, analysis and research. Features of interest here include:

In the wildfires that spread across Southern California last week, law firms and law schools were among those forced to evacuate, as the National Law Journal reported this week. Some of the lawyers who were directly affected by the fires tell their stories on the latest edition of the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. My…

As I blogged about here last week, the editor of Blawg Review kicked off a meme he called Simply the Best, in which he listed his top 10 law blogs and then asked each listed blog to list its 10 top and so on like some blogger pyramid scheme. After expressing my disdain…