A 'Lawyer's Dozen' of Internet Websites

By Jim Calloway,
Director OBA Management Assistance Program 

It is getting harder to do a superior job of representing your clients without having good access to and a basic understanding of the Internet. It will get even more difficult in the future. Some day, you will not be able to do it.

Those statements must have ruffled a few feathers with some of our readers. A lot of lawyers go out of their way to tell me (and others) they do not use a computer and have no interest in doing so. But there are far fewer lawyers who say that now than a few years ago. Most lawyers who do not have a computer on their desk now seem to think that they should have one or they at least have some guilt or uncertainty about it. But they are not exactly sure of what they would do with the computer if it was on their desk. They know one thing for sure - they don't have any free time to learn about operating computers.

We are going to do several articles this year about what a lawyer should be doing with the computer on his or her desk. First, we will focus on the Internet. After all, the Internet is a hot topic these days. From Wall Street to Main Street, there is lots of discussion about technology stocks and resources that others are finding online. It often seems every business is trying to become a dot.com something. Lawyers in particular must be involved with the Internet because we deal with laws, rules, regulations and other material in the public domain. More of that type of material comes on-line every day.

The two most popular aspects of the Internet are valuable to lawyers, and they are valuable to any other kind of business or profession. These are the World Wide Web and e-mail. So this month we will discuss some Internet web sites and next month we will discuss e-mail.

There will be no attempt here to promote a "Top Ten" or "Top Twelve" list of Internet websites in this article. Many of these sites are not primarily for lawyers. Inclusion in this article does not imply endorsement of any particular website or company by the Oklahoma Bar Association or the Management Assistance Program.. We are going to provide a brief tour of the web because there are just a lot of lawyers who can benefit from a tour IMHO.1  (If you don't know what IMHO means, then you are no doubt one of them.)

So, in no particular order, here is a "lawyer's dozen" of Internet websites.

1. The Oklahoma Supreme Court Network at www.oscn.net

You would have had to made a serious effort not to be aware of the OSCN on the web by now. This site has been a model for other state's supreme courts as to what can be done with a serious commitment to serve the public and the legal community via the Internet. At a recent national conference, our court was mentioned as one of only four deserving of the highest honors.

The site features all of the Oklahoma Statutes in a searchable format. It also contains the opinions of the Supreme Court from 1949 to present, opinions of the Court of Civil Appeals from 1968 to present (which is the entire body of published case law for this court) and opinions of the Court of Criminal Appeals from 1936 to present. These are all word or phrase searchable. There is much more C Supreme Court and Court of Civil Appeals forms, docket information, the master calendar and more. This is all for free, both for you and any other person.

It was recently confirmed to me that the Oklahoma Supreme Court website still remains number one across the nation in terms of the number of years of cases available online in the database. As one nationally-known researcher, P.J. Brown of Katsuey's Legal Gateway (www.katsuey.com) noted, "There has to be a leader when it comes to technology and Oklahoma has done a good job of setting the example."

Soon we will see even more innovative projects, including local court dockets. A few of the county court dockets are already up in beta (test) form.

2. Findlaw at www.findlaw.com

This is a commercial website that presently operates on advertising revenue. There are links to many other court websites and other legal resources. Of particular interest here is the collection of U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1893. They post new U.S. Supreme Court decisions within hours after they are officially released.

Findlaw has so much information that it would make any fair list of best law-related websites. You can get free web-based mail with their justice.com address. You can research for expert witnesses across the country. There are many substantive law resources and articles.. Actually there is pretty much everything law-related that you can imagine.

There are lots of materials on lawyer marketing, including a link to an article authored by OBA General Counsel Dan Murdock and yours truly.

Findlaw also has legal news and many other features. All practicing lawyers had better be familiar with Findlaw because new lawyers entering the market certainly are. Findlaw has a large selection of law school class outlines.

3. Anywho at www.anywho.com

This is not a law-related website at all. Legal research on the web is a fine thing. But factual research is where the extraordinary benefits lie. After all, lawyers have been doing legal research since B.C. (Before Computers). Anywho illustrates one of the class of Internet sites known as people finders. There are several of these types of sites. Anywho is a fine one.

People finders are huge searchable databases of contact information. First of all, it is like a giant phone directory where you can phone numbers for people and businesses. You may think that you already have a phone directory, but do you have one for every city in the United States? You can certainly rely on telephone directory assistance, but Anywho is free.

Having all of the information in a database has other benefits. Just take, for example, the Reverse Telephone Look-up. Type in any phone number and find the name and address of the caller. Even better, you can click on street name of the person you have found and get an alphabetical listing of all of the neighbors who live on that street or you can click on the "Map" button and be directed to www.mapquest.com where a map will be drawn of the neighborhood with the address indicated.

The people finder websites may not be totally current and generally do not list unlisted numbers, but they are a quick and easy tool.

One Dallas lawyer recently put a people finder website to good use. His teenaged daughter called and indicated that the movie was over, and she had gone to a friend's house and was calling from there. She would be there for a while and then would call back. The lawyer was a bit perplexed as he hung up the phone and noted that the Caller ID number did not look at all familiar. He went online and looked up the number in Anywho. Sure enough, it was not the friend's house nor was it even in the same town as the friend. He quickly printed a map to the location and drove over there. It apparently put quite a damper on the ongoing party when Dad showed up less than half an hour after daughter had talked to him on the telephone. Dad helpfully gave her a ride home right then.

4. Refdesk.com at www.refdesk.com

This is one incredible website. All lawyers probably need to have this one on the links bar in their web browser, not just the Favorites or Bookmarks. Let's just examine the resources alphabetically B there are links to Almanacs, Biographies, Calculators, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Fast Facts, Geography (and Maps), Holidays, Internet search engines, Journalists' tools, Kid's stuff, Libraries, Magazines, Newspapers ...... well, you get the point.

From looking up an online newspaper to checking this Day in History, from converting Fahrenheit to Celsius to looking up a word in a dictionary, from the finding a phone number, an Area Code or a Zip Code to perusing The Old Farmer's Almanac, Refdesk.com is the place to quickly find almost anything need online.

This site is so powerful and so well-organized, it is actually just hard to describe it. Check it out for yourself.

5. U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System at http://mapping.usgs.gov/www/gnis

This is an online database of geographic features. You can use it for simple things like finding the county where an Oklahoma town is located or finding all streams named after a famous person. It contains records on almost two million geographic features in the United States B from populated places, schools, reservoirs and parks, to streams, valleys, springs and ridges. It even gives you the longitude and latitude. Just scroll down to "Query the GNIS Online Data Bases" and select United States. It links to maps and aerial photographs.

(Personal note: I decided I had to test this. I typed in my childhood hometown, Vian, as the Feature and selected OK as State. I got several results: the town, the city lake, the post office and some churches. I selected the aerial photos and, after a few minutes of careful zooming in, was rewarded with a picture of the home where I grew up - obviously taken within the last ten or so years since the new owners put in a circle drive after they bought it from my mother.)

6. Law Library Resource Xchange at http://www.llrx.com

LLRX contains a wealth of information and is one that many lawyers may have bypassed because it is a site for law librarians. But the Law Library Resource Xchange is a definite must visit site, which is very information rich. Thanks to the Director of the University of Oklahoma Law Library, Alma Nickell Singleton, for directing me here. There are monthly columns and feature stories. Here are some sample titles: Locating Company Information on the Internet, Finding an Expert Through the Internet, Strategies for Online Legal Research: Determining the Best Way to Get What you Need and Litigator's Internet Resource Guide: Rules of Court. (This last one is a "must bookmark" if your firm practices in other jurisdictions.)

You will find much original content here that cannot be found anywhere else online. There are reviews of services for law firms like Shepards J and Keycite.J There is even an article less than one year old comparing the two services. No less than five articles appeared about the most controversial new online research service, jurisline.com.

If you are in a larger law firm, make certain that your librarian knows about this site and visits it regularly. If you are in a smaller law firm or a solo, you are the librarian for decision-making purposes. So either way someone in your office, should be regularly checking out LLRX.

7. Insure.com at www.insure.com

Thanks to OBA-NET user Brett Agee for telling us about Insure.com, a website with news and feature stories about insurance issues directed toward all of us as insurance consumers. Search the online database for pending class actions, company ratings and market share, consumer comments or executive compensation (insurance company CEOs averaged $4.6 million.) A great site to tell your friends and relatives to visit. Some types of information are not available yet. Read the "Oklahoma" page for state specific information concerning our state.

This type of page reflects a trend that I think we will see increasing. We all understand how commercials and other forms of advertising work; they are anything but unbiased. Some publications like Consumer Reports attempt to give unbiased product information, but you have to make an effort to locate this information. The Internet provides openings for distributors of unbiased information to create profitable websites trading in information.

There may be some products tie-ins with insure.com. I do note some insurance companies advertise there. But knowing whether an insurance company has 2 percent of the Oklahoma market or 25 percent may be useful in making a purchase.

8. Coram Nobis.com at http://coramnobis.com

There are several parts to this website, but they all focus on capital defense, just capital defense and nothing but capital defense. That's what this site is all about.

If you do not defend death penalty cases, you will probably never need this website. Although if you ever do handle a death penalty case, be sure and stop by here. Capital Defense Weekly has links to and analysis of all the recent death penalty cases, online articles republished from law reviews and information on subscribing to an electronic mailing list for capital defense professionals. When we've checked on it, it has always been updated within a week.

There is also the "A Capital Defender's Toolbox" which feature links to numerous online resources, excerpts from the Capital Defense Weekly, substantive law guides for various states, sample pleadings and many briefs in a brief bank. (They claim there are links to downloadable or viewable briefs from more than 100 cases. I didn't have time to count.)

These cases may not be your cup of tea, but it shows how the Internet can be used effectively for one narrow legal area on a nationwide scale.

9. Google.com at www.google.com

We've all heard of Internet search engines and portals. The Internet contains so much information that you have no hope of finding anything without a good search engine and the ability to use it. In fact you need to be familiar with several Internet search engines. Recent studies suggest that the very best and most comprehensive search engines may only catalog 13 percent of the Internet. So if you find what you are looking for in one, that is great. But if you do not, you should try several search engines before giving up.

Many Internet researchers like to use meta-search engines like dogpile.com, which send the queries out to numerous other search engines. Not only are you doing a much broader search that way, but if several search engines return only a few responses, while one returns hundreds or thousands, you may have located a good engine for future searches in the same subject area.

Yahoo is already a household word. But, if you heard of Google.com, you probably discounted the site because of the silly name. Do not make that mistake! Google may be one of the best search engines on the Internet. Google returns results in a more relevant and orderly fashion than most because it responds to your query using an automated method that ranks relevant websites based on the hierarchical structure of the Internet itself.

Try a few sample searches with google.com. We think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

10. A Chronology of U.S. Historical Documents at www.law.ou.edu/hist

You have to admit that "A Chronology of U.S. Historical Documents" is certainly not the most eye-catching name for a web site. But this great resource provided as part of the University of Oklahoma Law Center's web page should also be on every Oklahoma lawyer's bookmark or favorites list.

After all, shouldn't every lawyer be able to access such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Federalist papers, Constitution, all of the presidents' inaugural addresses and much, much more at the click of a mouse?

You can access presidential inaugural addresses and other famous speeches such as the First Thanksgiving Proclamation, Mayflower Compact, maps of U.S. battlefields, selected Manhattan Project documents regarding the use of the bombs and the Japanese surrender documents of World War II. The chronological sorting makes them easy to quickly locate.

11 Efax.com at www.efax.com

Efax is not a website that you can use for legal or other types of research. It is the front page for the efax service, which you must first register to use. We do not really mean to promote this service specifically, but this service gives a hint of some of the many advances we have ahead of us in the future as more Internet applications are developed.

This is a pretty simple concept. Register with efax and get a free fax number. You don't have to buy a fax machine or pay monthly for a phone line. You just have free fax receiving capability. When someone sends you a fax, you can either elect to receive the image of the fax as an attachment to an e-mail sent directly to you or you can download it from the efax website. You can also set up this service to work with voice mail, too.

It is a pretty simple concept. But when you think of the possibilities, the mind boggles. As the promotional material says on the efax website, "No more standing around the fax machine waiting for your fax to arrive. No more wandering eyes looking at your confidential documents. No more missed voicemails. With eFax Free you receive your faxes and voicemail as attachments in your e-mail account."

There is one drawback at this point. Oklahoma is not included in the list of states where local numbers are available. So these faxes will all be long distance calls. But for a person who travels on business much, it is still better than locating the fax number for the business center in every hotel where you stay, worrying about someone reading confidential information and making long distance calls back to the office to tell them where to send the fax. It does appear that you will be able to change to a local number when local numbers become available. For $2.95 per month, the company offers the Efax Plus service that allows you to send outgoing faxes as well and adds some other services. If you send many long distance faxes, this might be something to investigate.

I'm not an efax subscriber. Like so many lawyers, I have a fax machine right in the building where I work that is a local number. But if I'm ever out on the road and someone has something important to fax to me, I now know how to become an efax subscriber almost instantly.

Note: With rudimentary knowledge of how to operate a scanner, your office should be able to scan incoming faxes and other documents and send them to you as e-mail attachments on the road. But if this saves transmission time and staff time, it is still valuable. Besides there are occasions when a client wants to fax you something after the staff has gone home for the night.

12. The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School at www.law.cornell.edu

LII is one of the oldest established Internet law sites. It is also one of the most comprehensive. You can subscribe here to e-mail summaries of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The site contains what is possibly the most up-to-date version of the U.S. Code and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure available for free on-line. There are also current news briefs about high court decisions of note. This site includes a nice legal subject matter topic index in its "law about" section.

There is a great effort expended by the managers of this site to be topical. On the site's front page during a recent visit, there were three news sections concerning the Vermont civil union law, the Elian Gonzalez case and the uncertainty regarding the Miranda decision as it relates to recent challenge now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Following each of these topics are links to the applicable statutes, court decisions and other primary resources.

A few searches with the site's search engine expose the true depth of this site as you get titles like the "Marriage Laws of the Fifty States, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico" with a similar listing for Divorce or Adoption. This is always my first stop for researching the law of other states. Not only is it sometimes difficult to quickly locate the law of an unfamiliar jurisdiction, but you can have greater faith in the accuracy and updating of this respected site from Cornell Law School than some other purveyors of Internet information. The LII also features "Law About" pages which provide brief summaries of law topics with links to key primary source material, other Internet resources and useful off-line references.

13. Your two state bar association websites at www.okbar.org and www.oba-net.org

Surely no one reading this thought we would cruise all across the World Wide Web without mentioning our two bar association sites. Our site at www.okbar.org is public and accessible to anyone with Internet access. The OBA-NET is our private online member service that has a charge - either $60 for six months or $100 for a year of unlimited access.

When you consider that both of these websites were launched at the beginning of 1999, we think we have come a long way in a short time, at least when measured in real time and not "Internet years." (Actually the OBA-NET was online in beta form during a part of 1998 and started much earlier than that as a private forum on CompuServe.)

Okbar.org features news about the OBA, including feature stories, legislative reports, CLE programs and other upcoming events. Each department of the OBA has member information arranged for easy viewing or downloading. The Law Related Education Department, for example, has downloadable lesson plans for teachers and a host of other education-related materials.

The Oklahoma Bar Association offers at no cost, a series of informational brochures on a variety of legal topics of interest to the general public. These brochures are all available online.

A search engine just for okbar.org makes finding the information you want a real breeze.

OBA-NET was mentioned in last month's article, so we won't belabor things again. But with downloadable forms and OBA CLE manuals, a searchable membership database, an on-going exchange of information about substantive law and law office management tips, this is easily worth the $100 for one year's unlimited access. One thing that we have found especially positive about the OBA-NET is the on-line mentoring that beginning attorneys are receiving. There have been several new lawyers inquiring about their first jury trial or their first case in a certain area. It's exciting to see them getting feedback from the more experienced lawyers.

Another thing about the OBA-NET is that the subscribers have long ago heard about and been using most of the websites in this article as we feature a new one each week in our "Website of the Week" part of the OBA-NET. You can also look through the previous Websites of the Week - a different one almost every week since March 1, 1999.

1. IMHO is an often used online abbreviation for "in my humble opinion." It is noted that it is often used by many writers for all of their opinions, whether humble or otherwise. 

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal May 6, 2000 - Vol.71; No.14