LAW PRACTICE TIPS

OBA-MAP Unveils New Internet Directory
By Jim Calloway, Director
OBA Management Assistance Program

If you ever listened to one of my programs or read very many of my articles, you know I believe that every practicing lawyer should be Internet-savvy, or at least have an employee on staff who is.

Lawyers deal in information of all kinds — far more than the obvious sources of law like court rulings, agency rulings, regulations, ordinances and statutes. We may have to learn science or biology. A lawyer in a medical malpractice case may have to learn about a rare disease or a lawyer in a claim of child abuse case may have to learn about the different types of bone fractures. A lawyer doing a title opinion may have to become a bit of an amateur historian. Everything from genealogy records to the time of sunset on a particular day may become involved in a client’s problem.

All of this information is available on the Internet. The problem is locating it within a reasonable amount of time. For many of us the problem is locating it at all.

To assist the busy lawyer with Internet research the Oklahoma Bar Association Management Assistance Program has now published the OBA-MAP Internet Directory. It is online.

This resource provides links to some of the most useful sites online that a lawyer might use, or that anyone might use for that matter.

If a client came in with a matter involving the National Football League drug testing policy, could you quickly find the policy online?

If you need a copy of the local rules for an unfamiliar federal district court, do you know where to look?

What about an online calculator for Oklahoma’s child support guidelines?

Service agents are another interesting area. Suppose you want to find the resident service agent for an Alaskan corporation or one domesticated in Georgia. Did you know that forty one jurisdictions now have free web access to find a corporation’s resident service agent? (Oklahoma is not included among them.)

What about if you need to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit or yards to meters? You still remember how to do that from high school, right? Currency calculators are nice, too. Since the rates fluctuate, converting German marks to dollars may vary from day to day.

Just suppose you need to read a story from the front page of today’s Washington Post without traipsing down to the specialty newsstand. And you may have quite a search ahead if you need to see the latest Taipei Times.

You can find links to all these and more at our Internet Directory.

We have exercised some editorial discretion in compiling this collection. There may be a dozen sites that provide information on a certain topic. We will just include three or four of the best. We’ve decided that three or four top sites provides a better tool than a dozen. But if you really need to find a dozen, we have also linked links to other sets of links. If we’ve left out your favorite site, e-mail us at jimc@okbar.org and we’ll consider the addition.

Go and investigate this new web resource, particularly if you just don’t understand why some lawyers just rave about Internet research. They probably aren’t talking just about legal research. Your door to using the Internet is waiting for you here .

Speaking of great web sites, we featured over 130 web sites on our OBA-NET feature "The Website of the Week." All of the archives are still online on the OBA-NET even though perhaps some of the sites may no longer exist. So some other OBA members out there have long been aware of the sites that we are linking to from our new Internet Directory.

I had the pleasure of demonstrating the OBA-NET to a group of lawyers the other day. One very prominent, well-known lawyer had lots of questions about the OBA-NET. At the end of the demonstration he said, "You have a treasure trove of information there." At the end of the program, another lawyer who has been a OBA-NET member for two years walked up to him and told him that there had been several times where she got a single answer to a difficult problem that was worth the hundred dollar annual fee. Needless to say, he signed up and joined OBA-NET right at that meeting.

The OBA-NET is a true bargain and one of the premier online communities for lawyers anywhere. (I can say that with some assurance now after demonstrating it for a program on online communities for lawyers for the National Association of Bar Executives.)

We have more than five years’ worth of downloadable CLE manuals and more than five years’ worth of past Oklahoma Bar Journals. All of these are available for downloading at no extra charge for OBA-NET members. OBA-NET has legal forms and other files for downloading. OBA-NET has links to the hot legal online news stories.

But most of all OBA-NET allows you to collaborate with hundreds of other lawyers. You can ask a question or argue a fine point of law. It is the electronic version of the courthouse coffee shop. You can discuss everything from the effect of new statute to the unreasonable opinion of a title examiner to the best software for a certain type of law office operation.

On Wednesday Nov. 14, in conjunction with the OBA Annual Meeting in Tulsa, we will have a reception for members of the OBA-NET from 5-6 p.m. It will be quite interesting to see some people who have been collaborating and helping each other for years meet in person for the first time. Later that night OBA-NET members will give some demonstrations of the OBA-NET features that they find most useful. If you are curious about OBA-NET and attending the OBA Annual Meeting, be sure and stop by and ask some questions.

But why wait?

We hope to soon welcome you to our online community.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal Nov. 3, 2001 - Vol. 72; No.32