Our legal news podcast Coast to Coast this week looks at Diversity in Law, discussing whether progress has been made since 1999, when the chief legal officers of 500 large corporations agreed to push their outside law firms to hire more minorities and women. Joining us to discuss this topic are Veta Richardson, executive…

Google today began rolling out a feature that automatically enables instant messaging within Gmail. Some users will find the chat feature enabled already, others will see it over the next few weeks. Chats can be saved, searched, forwarded and printed.…

Bonnie Shucha made my day, helping me discover my hitherto unrealized resemblence to Mel Gibson. Her recent post alerted me to MyHeritage.com’s face recognition tool. The idea of the tool is to allow uploads of multiple family photos without having to identify each person in each photo manually. The demo version matches…

In other news from The Thomson Corporation, its Thomson Elite division today announced the winners of its 2006 Excellence in Legal Marketing Awards. The awards, which were presented during a Jan. 20 ceremony, recognize excellence and innovation in three categories. Winners were:…

Michael Wilens, president and CEO of Thompson Legal & Regulatory’s North American group, which includes Thomson West, Elite and FindLaw, has been named vice president, corporate chief technology and operations officer for the entire Thomson Corporation, it was announced yesterday. Over more than a decade at West, Wilens earned respect among many in the…

The law library at my alma mater, Boston College Law School, has launched a blog, Reference Question of the Week. Written by Legal Information Librarian Joan Shear, the blog features questions posed to the law library’s reference staff together with their answers. Writes Shear:

“We thought other members of the law library

I recently noted that Ken Lay’s defense team had launched a Web site. Now another Ken in Texas has followed suit, launching a Web site as part of his defense strategy, the Houston Chronicle reports. This Ken is Kenneth Cuadra, a school district official accused of tampering with government records.…

The Web site of the Bad Credit B Gone Law Firm assured visitors it was a real law firm, “supervised by directing attorney James Brennan.” But federal postal inspectors say the site had no lawyer behind it, and instead was run by a fugitive with a history of bad debts and minor criminal charges, the…

I wrote on Jan. 21 about a way to search anonymously on Google and Yahoo. Since then, I’ve come across two articles that provide much greater depth and detail on searching and surfing anonymously. They are:…

Our legal news podcast Coast to Coast this week takes on the topic of tort reform in 2006. Joining us to discuss some of the critical issues in tort reform this year are Laurie Beacham, communications director for the Center for Justice and Democracy, and Tiger Joyce, president of the American Tort…

Microsoft has released the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 7. With tabbed browsing and RSS support, it looks surprisingly familiar to those of us who prefer to use Firefox.…

This week, an Illinois man who spent nearly two decades in prison for sexual assault was released after DNA evidence exonerated him. A week earlier, DNA evidence freed a Florida man after more than 24 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments…