This page links to a variety of additional destinations on the World Wide Web which you may find useful in your practice. Sections: Learning the Internet / Directories and Databases / People Finders / Business Research / Reference Works / Software / Email etc. / Usenet / Media / Calculators / Helping Services / Legal Link Collections

Learning the Internet

Here is a great site for beginners, designed to take the clueless out of the clueless newbie.

For the purpose of exploring what is available generally on the World Wide Web, there is a wonderful collection of links, well organized and compact, on HotSheet.  And here is perhaps the best reference tool for all about the internet. 

There. Now that you are oriented you are ready to learn search skills. For that go to Page Three, look at the tutorials and fool around with the search engines. 

Next, you may want to be introduced to certain technical skills you will need to make the most of the internet.

Don't miss Genie Tyburski's Virtual Chase and  Internet Research for Legal Professionals, and Glenn Bacal's Guide to Internet Research, available on the ABA site.

When the time comes you may want to read Lawyermarketing.com, "an online resource for lawyers interested in expanding their practice".

There are of course all kinds of books you can buy. Look at the Law on the Internet Booklist, for instance. The trouble with stuff in print about the internet is, (a) some of it is outdated as soon as it hits the shelves, and (b) it costs money.

Free Directories and Databases

From the 2001 ABA Tech Show:  a "Selected Guide to Free Websites for Legal Researchers".

The Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (JAKE) is "a reference source which makes finding, managing, and linking online journals and journal articles...."

Other place name servers on the internet.

The National Address Server: "Given a valid U.S. postal address, this server attempts to rewrite the address in the proper format along with the ZIP+4 code. If it is successful, you can retrieve a Postscript or a GIF file of the address for printing, with a barcode! You can also view a street map of the address, from 2 different Internet map sites (MapBlast and MapQuest)."

U.S. Postal Service zip code lookup. Two letter state abbreviations.  Purchase of stamps online.

 Package tracking with UPS or FedEx.  ZipInfo gives Census Bureau designations (County name and FIPS code, MSA/PMSA) as well as longitude and latitude, time zone, congressional district and telephone area code for any zip code.

AT&T toll-free directory. Telephone area code lookup by number. Area code lookup by place.

News flash: lawyers have associations. You may have heard of the ABA?  Here is a list of state bar associations.

If you need a court reporter, consult the homepage of the National Court Reporter's Association - NCRA.

Need a job? Scan the ads at the Legal Employment Center. You can post your resume here as well as look at job announcements for lawyers, paralegals and law students. EmplawyerNet is "the nation's largest online legal job database". See also the LawGuru Legal Jobs page.

There are several sources of online CLE.  See also the FindLaw directory of sources for CLE.

There are several map-making tools. MapBlast is a tool for showing a map location of almost any US city street address. If you don't need it maybe your process server does. Mapquest does the same thing, maybe not quite so well, but has many more features, and foreign maps as well. Yahoo has another mapmaker, and so does Lycos.  Probably the best resource for the traveler is expedia.com.

Experts and Consultants: See experts. Or experts and consultants. Or use a free search engine. See also Expert Pages. See also this index of experts on the internet.  'Lectric Law has a reading room with a lot of useful information on the subject of expert witnesses.

Two of the best sources of verdict information are MoreLaw and the Verdict & Settlements Database.

FindLaw links to online Academic Law Journals and Law Reviews. 

Basic legal documents, form based, interactive and very useful. See, for example, the living wills for the various states. Here is another directory of legal forms. And another.  See also the commercial sources of forms on Page Six.

If you want to know what your client's car was worth before some villain totalled it, look in the Kelley Blue Book.

If you need to find the cost basis of a stock or mutual fund, "The historical quotes tool will lookup a security's exact closing price for you. Simply type in its symbol and a historical date."

If you need to know what the weather was like someplace, sometime, you can find out from the National Weather Service.

Going somewhere? Look to Travelocity for plane tickets, car rental, hotel reservations and the like. Or maybe Travel Agent.  When you get there, if you need an ATM you can find it here.

Extremely useful, especially for the traveler: an online bookmarks manager from Clickmarks. This gives you access to your bookmarks wherever you have access to an internet browser. At home, at the office or on the road.

Consumer World® "has gathered over 1100 of the most useful consumer resources on the Internet. Whether you want to check an airfare, find an ATM machine anywhere in the world, file a consumer complaint with a state agency, read 100s of consumer booklets, find a low rate credit card or mortgage, research a law, look up the wholesale price of a car, locate a Better Business Bureau, find a toll-free number, listen (literally) to the latest news, contact a company's customer service department, comparison shop for bargains and last minute travel, check stock quotes or CD rates, read a movie review or see a preview, clip electronic coupons, or search the Internet, you can do it in Consumer World."

FindLaw has a Consumer Law Center providing general information about consumer legal issues. The GSA has a Consumer's Resource Handbook.

Statistics.  All kinds.

People Finders

 Here is a selective guide to people finding (even more selective than this one).  An article in Online Journalism Review has good guidance for using public records to find out about people.

Teldir.com "is the Internet's original and most complete index of online phone books, with links to Yellow Pages, White Pages, Business Directories, Email Addresses and Fax Listings from over 150 countries all around the world."

One stop shopping for some of the directories listed below, and some others, is on a site called The Ultimates, which provides an efficient way to do multiple engine people searching on several white page, yellow page and email databases.  

Josh Blackman placed a very useful People Finder chapter from his book online.  trackem is also a pretty good compilation. 

AT&T's AnyWho is easy to use, and has many options.  However, you cannot do a criss-cross search on a specific street address.  You can do that with Infospace.  There are a lot of other national and international telephone and email directories: 555-1212.com /  Switchboard / Bigfoot / WhoWhere / US West national white and yellow pages / A few have a criss-cross service (enter a phone number or address and get back a name).  Some have email address searches as well.

Experience here with US West  indicates that where the baby-Bells are online that is a good place to start.  Many of the other white-page searches will find me (and an unrelated guy with the same name) in Arizona.  However, only US West had the phone number I answer by voice or machine.  The others, including AT&T, had the number I use to connect to the internet and otherwise ignore.

Voter registration information is available locally, and from a commercial service called governmentrecords.com, subject to state regulation as to use. Cheap!   $11 for a statewide search, currently, $25 for nationwide.

Dead people search:  Ancestry.com includes a Social Security Death Index. So does RootsWeb.  The Mormons too have an Ancestor Search page. Conceivably, the Genealogy Homepage may be of help.  Or Obituary Links.  Or Legacy.com.

Here is what looks like a hobbyist people finder page which beats a lot of the pros.

You might find someone by using Sam Spade Tools.

Netscape has a people finder page. Here is another one.

If the person you want to find is a lawyer, that used to be easy, using Martindale's lawyer finder or  West's Legal Directory.  Neither site is as good as it used to be.  What happened?  And by the way, the Martindale rating system is probably best ignored.  The methodology employed is unexplained, but it appears to be based on some essentially meaningless peer review system.  It assigns plaudits to at least one hopeless incompetent and that makes the whole thing suspect. Martindale's new directory includes legal staff as well as lawyers, but is far from comprehensive.  The ABA incorporates the Martindale database on it's "finder site".  FindLaw has links to lawyer and law firm databases.  The former House of Representatives Internet Law Library, now hosted by the LawGuru and others, links to Attorney and Legal Profession Directories.

If he/she is a doctor of medicine, try the AMA online Doctor Finder.  Medi-Net will sell info about the doctor you seek for $12.50. 

The Private Investigator homepage might help you find people (especially if they are private investigators).

The Webgator is a start for do it yourself snoops.

Skiptracing - a practical exercise: Do you have any old uncollected but faithfully renewed judgments lying around? You can try and locate the debtor and do a simple asset search without bothering (or paying) your private eye. Say the guy's name is Billie Bob Ryebread and you think he's in Alabama somewhere. Say you ask Infospace if there's anybody by that name in Alabama and you get his name, address and phone number in Falkville (pop. 1309), and a map showing where he lives. Say you use the Cities & Towns InfoSystem to look up Falkville, AL, and find out it's in Morgan County. Say you use the Counties InfoSystem to try and find the county assessor. Say you get some county office phone numbers, call around and find out Billie Bob owns the house he lives in and some other real estate in Morgan county. Would that be twenty minutes well spent?

Maybe too neat a story for the real world. For a serious asset search you may have to spend money. See this comprehensive set of links to private investigation firms and databases.

Here are links to public records online, nationwide.

According to an investigative reporter, ". . . in the past five years the growing power of computers and the expansion of commercial data bases have made it quicker, cheaper and easier than ever for private eyes to collect individualized information that their gumshoe predecessors could not piece together even through weeks of dogged surveillance and research. The result is more time, money and pressure to produce nonpublic information on a thriving gray-to-black market in purloined privacy." (Front page story, NY Times, Sept 15, 1997) The Times helpfully provides links to outfits which allegedly do that kind of thing. Me too. See Page Six - Information for Sale. See my commercial site as well.  Forbes Magazine gives us an update with substantially the same theme in a cover story called The End of Privacy.  The Forbes article mentions Docusearch and some of the links mentioned above.

Business Research

The New York Times Business Connection. Free (for now) subscription required for access here, as well as to the general index. Genie Tyburski has authored a useful eight step guide for researching company information, recently supplemented by an article on competitive intelligence.  See this LLRX article as well.

"Business Researcher's Interests is a searchable knowledge map of Contemporary Business, Management and Information Technology issues. It provides access to hundreds of full-text articles & papers, magazines & journals, case studies and tools, and thousands of other resources on some of the hottest issues of interest to Business, Technology & Information professionals."

The business research guide from Josh Blackman's book is online.  DePaul University has a good one as well.  

EDGAR is the SEC's database of corporate information. Global Securities Information, Inc., gives us this:  "More than just a document retrieval system for EDGAR filings, LIVEDGAR WEB is engineered as a powerful research tool and resource for legal writers and financial professionals."  See also Edgar Online and FreeEDGAR.

10K Wizard enables searching for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission full text filings for public companies from 1994 to the present. Search by ticker symbol, company name, or keyword.

FindLaw has a new Business & Finance research page.

See also Annual Reports Online and Investor Relations Information Network.

The Thomas Register of American Manufacturers is a large company database which can be searched by product, company or service.

See also the D&B - Lycos collaboration Companies Online, and D&B Internet Access for credit card customers.

WSRN.COM can be used to research US and Canadian companies, and mutual funds.

Need a historical stock or mutual fund price?  Go here.  "The historical quotes tool will lookup a security's exact closing price for you. Simply type in its symbol and a historical date. This is a great tax and estate planning tool useful for individual investors, attorneys, accountants and stock brokers to find the historical cost basis for stock and mutual fund holdings."  You can do that on Yahoo as well.

Dot Com Directory can be used to find ownership info from a company website.  Name search for both public and private companies.

If you need a Standard Industrial Classification, find it in the SIC Codebook. Ditto for Standard Occupational Classification: see the SOC document linkages. The 1987 SIC Code is being replaced by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).

Search by state and name or state and category with BigBook or Zip2.

In Dec '96 US West posted a nationwide white and yellow pages search page.

Looking for a company website?  Try Websense, Inc.

Want to register a domain name, or just find out whether it is available?  See Register.com.  Want to create a domain name?  Check out the Domain Name Wizard.  See also Domainator.

Reference Works

If you thought Martindale's The Reference Desk had everything under the sun you were almost right. Fact is, the Virtual Reference Desk has some things Martindale overlooked. So does Lawyer's Reference Quest.

Here is an encyclopedic list of glossary links, including legal glossaries for Adoption, Family Law,  Estate Planning, International Law, and several other legal dictionaries.

Great Books Online is Bartleby's astonishing collection of all kinds of books: reference, verse, fiction, non-fiction.

The Library of Congress has an online catalog.

The Internet Public Library has an equally astonishing annotated collection of links in its Ready Reference Collection where you can browse by title and search by keyword.  There are also 12,000 titles in the Online Texts Collection, searchable by title, author or dewey decimal.

Search 53 dictionaries at once. All kinds, except, unfortunately, legal dictionaries. The Black's on your desk is much better than anything online to date. You can find lawyerly words like "justiciable" here and there. Then you can go to Strunk's Elements of Style to figure out how to use it in a paragraph.

Look up a word from One Look, a database purporting to contain the content of 596 dictionaries. Here are a bunch more dictionaries, including a Swedish Rhyming Dictionary, should your practice require rhyming in Swedish. In another directory you can find an English word translated into any of about 150 languages.

Nolo's Shark Talk does a good job of translating legal jargon into plain English. You won't find "justiciable" there (who, after all, needs it?) but it's a good resource if you need to explain something like res ipsa loquitur in layman's language. There is even a tip-off that the cool ones among us call it "res ips".

If you really want to look up "justiciable" you can find it here:

Here is your authority if anyone challenges your superior command of The King's English.

Research-It has a compendium of search tools, some of which you may want to bookmark. Need a quote from Shakespeare? Bartlett's? Those are in there. So is Roget's Thesaurus. If you like that sort of thing, there is also Bartlesby's, from Columbia U. Hallelujah: The Bible Browser is back. And we still have The Bible Gateway. And now there are umpteen versions to search in The Unbound Bible.  For the Book of Mormon or the Koran you have to go here.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has charged big bucks for access until now, but its new free site is "designed to be the most trusted source of information, learning and knowledge on the Internet" (sic).  For miscellaneous oddments see Information Please, which includes the Columbia Encyclopedia.

You will probably never have a use for the Statistical Abstract of the United States, but here it is just in case, compliments of the Census Bureau. Massive.

CIA Publications and Handbooks, including the CIA World Factbook for 2001.

The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School provides a remarkable collection of hyperlinked historic documents, including the Code of Hammurabi and the Charter of the United Nations, and all kinds of things.

Here is a way to search scientific journals.

Here is a wonderful compilation of speeches and transcripts from all over the place.

Gary Price's Almanacs/Factbooks/Handbooks & Related Reference Tools is exactly the kind of mish-mash it sounds like: miscellaneous data sources, most of which you never heard of and couldn't care less about, but with a few you may want to bookmark.  

This is not really a reference work, more of a trick, but you can make an almost perfect translation (sometimes) of a short passage from English to French, German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, and vice versa.  It is not to be relied on for any degree of precision, as in translating a statute or something of that sort, but you can get a general idea of almost any passage.  You can also translate an entire website with the tool.  InfoSeek has a similar translator available.

Software

FindLaw has an extensive set of links for legal software products and vendors. So does the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center.  So does the Lawtek Group.

Consultwebs.com has a good summary and review of software for the law office.

Microsoft will gladly refer you to reviews of Office 2000.

Do not (obviously) use e-mail for confidential communication unless you encrypt it. Internet Service Providers are insecure conveyers. Fortunately, the trade name Pretty Good Privacy - PGP - is overly modest. Actually, it is very good indeed. See the PGP Awareness Project.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader is software which enables reading and searching numerous government documents in Portable Document Format (PDF), and can be downloaded free. Many government sites, including those providing IRS and Arizona tax forms, and the Arizona state archives, link to Adobe for downloading. Such things as a 584 page Manual for Complex Litigation can also be downloaded in PDF. The advantage of PDF is that it retains the original fonts, layout and formatting of the documents, giving them the same appearance as the original regardless of the browser being used for viewing.

Here is a source of foreign language fonts.

Here is an article on intranet systems for law firms.

Email etc.

The Free Email Address Directory is the most comprehensive one available.  Here is another site with a lot of information about email.

Here is a review of email clients you may find useful. Also, when you are on the road there are several ways to access and manage your email via the web. See MailStart and MailStart Plus.  Also ThatWeb and EmuMail. There is another approach, too: With hotmail you can have a free supplementary (or primary) email client to use at home or anywhere else you have access to the web. The ad banners which support the site are not too hard to take, and you can opt for some "push" services. For similar services see Yahoo Mail and Rocketmail and umailme.

Yes, there are ethical considerations in using email. For a detailed discussion read "How to Avoid Losing Your License...". Eye-catching title. 

On March 10, 1999, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility published a commonsensical Formal Opinion 99-413 on Protecting the Confidentiality of Unencrypted E-Mail. Sort of a green light for routine uses. For more important and sensitive matters it seems obvious that a lawyer should use email only with suitable encryption. Unfortunately, there are significant obstacles to general use of encryption at present. If you need a consultant on this, a leading authority is John Messing, webmaster at Law-on-Line.  

John is also an expert on electronic filing.  Here are links for electronic filing.

I have used Efax - a way to receive free faxes via email, for a few months.  Very satisfactory.   FindLaw offers a similar service, and it does not appear to be restricted to lawyers.  I have been waiting for a free service to both receive and send faxes via the internet and now there is fax4free.  Useful in the office, perhaps, as a backup, but probably of most interest to those who want a fax capability at home.

Jfax is a commercial service offering unified email, voice mail and fax management. You can send and receive faxes, for a price, and manage all of your electronic communications.

Send faxes, free, via the internet, using SwissClick.  docSpace provides a secure way to store, manage and transmit documents, even very large ones, using nothing but a web browser.  NetDocuments is an alternative - also free for the basics, with a premium service as an option.  Visto.com offers a free web-based email, calendar, address book, task manager and document repository.

Bookmark Tracker is a free website for managing your bookmarks (or IE "favorites").  It is not as easy to use as the one your email client provides, especially if you have a slow connection, but it is a very handy additional tool.  You can easily put all of your existing bookmarks onsite so that you can access them from the internet anyplace in the world, and you have a backup in case your system goes kaput.  Or you can create a special set of bookmarks for use while traveling.  Or you can use the site for transferring bookmarks from your pc at home to the one at the office and vice versa.  See also MURL and ItList and Bookmarks2Go.

ListBot provides a convenient way to manage a mailing list.

What's this?  Free unlimited long distance telephone calls?  Too good to be true?  Maybe, but that's what dialpad.com offers.  I tried it and it works, sort of, at least for now.  See also Phonefree and deltathree.  For calls abroad on the cheap:  net2phone.  For video calls:  visitalk.

Here is information about free ISP's. A good number have disappeared recently.  A few survive, for now, including NetZero and FreeWorld.   

FindLaw Office now offers email accounts, "NetDocuments" and websites for lawyers.

Usenet

Search usenet discussion by keyword with Google Newsgroup Search, formerly Dejanews, and Deja.com. With another kind of newsgroup search tool you can find out, for example, what law-related groups are out there.  ListTool.com makes it easy to subscribe to a large number of law lists.

Discussion groups: The University of Chicago has a huge alphabetical directory of law-related internet mailing lists - hosted special interest discussion groups - with instructions on how to subscribe and a keyword search page.  The ABA sponsors some groups; open, closed and private. LawGuru has an easy way to locate and subscribe to legal mailing lists. So does FindLaw.  

Net Lawyers is "a mailing list comprised of lawyers, librarians, law students, judges, paralegals, and others who are interested in sharing experiences about using the net to research and practice law." Note: This is the pick of the litter. Its archives are a good source of information and opinion on a variety of topics. The list also has a Resource Page. 

For the consumer: a new, untried and pretty interesting experiment: Post a legal question on a LawGuru BBS and see if you get some kind of answer. If you like the answer, think about hiring the lawyer who gave it to you. For something similar, see Free Advice - and decide for yourself whether there are ethics considerations. LawGuru also has a handy mailing list manager.

Usenet digest: "BigEar listens to a variety of law-related listservs and newsgroups. From each, it selects messages which contain references to Net documents, and constructs a convenient cumulative listing which shows the title of the document, a link to it, and a link to the message 'announcing' it on the listserv. At the end of a week's time, the old listing is scrapped and a new one started. It thus offers a (slightly distorted) view of what's new on the Net for lawyers, and of what people are talking about. "

"Reference.com makes it easy to find, browse, search, and participate in more than 150,000 newsgroups, mailing lists, and web forums."

Search

Media

For research on current happenings you need daily papers. Also national newspapers and magazines. For the online press worldwide, see Newspapers Online. Electric Book is a directory of online U.S. and foreign newspapers, magazines, and books. Here is a directory of online newspaper archives. Some of these people (brace yourself) want to charge a fee for searching their archives. Publist.com is a comprehensive searchable periodicals directory.

American Journalism Review - AJR - Newslink connects to web sites of United States newspapers, news magazines, radio and television networks, radio and television stations, and news services. CNN has a good searchable site.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service. "The FBIS database indexes translated transcripts of foreign radio and television broadcasts and selected foreign newspaper and periodical articles as republished in the FBIS Daily Reports by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."

MediaFinder is a database of 90,000 publications, or so it says.

Law Practice Management magazine has many articles of general interest. Also from the ABA, a journal for general practice: The Complete Lawyer. Other online legal journals and periodicals. Here is another compilation.  The best source of current legal news is probably Law News Network.  See also its affiliated National Law Journal.

Calculators

You have to see this. The Martindale collection of online calculators is phenomenal.

In fact, it is so comprehensive that it is hard to use. Here is another, less comprehensive, but more user-friendly.  And another.  Maybe the most user-friendly, if somewhat childish, collection of calculator links is provided by calculator.com.

Special purpose: Should a prospective European client write and tell you she is "1.70 tall, 95/68/92, blond with green eyes", here is a quick and easy metric unit conversion calculator.

Here is a quick and easy amortization calculator.

Here is a good collection of financial calculators, for almost anything relating to personal finance.

The Cost of Living and Percent Change calculators from NewsEngin have all kinds of uses. One example: Enter the value of a house in any given year. For a pretty accurate estimate of the value in any later year, calculate using the increase in the cost of housing where it is located. Then calculate the percent change.

Use the Classic Currency Converter to find out how many Angolan new kwanzas you can buy with your Albanian leks.

Helping Services

Here is the American Arbitration Association homepage. See also ADR Resources.  See also Useful Conflict Resolution Web Links.

The Department of Justice has an Office for Victims of Crime page, with a lot of links.

For help with a dispute resulting from online activity, see The Online Ombud's Office. 

The national credit reporting services are: Equifax: (800) 685-1111); Experian: (888) 397-3742); and Trans-Union: (800) 916-8800.

The Better Business Bureau homepage provides a locator by zip code for local offices, and there are other useful links onsite.  It is now possible to file a complaint online, and there is a link for dispute resolution.

The Small Business Administration has an Answer Desk you can reach at answerdesk@sba.gov and a help desk URL.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) are linked on the Office of Family Assistance homepage.

Here's a different kind of help - technical help with your computer problems at no cost.  Or if you have to spend money you can get bids on allegedly expert advice at expertcity.

Legal Link Collections

Summa Cum Laude: FindLaw | Legal Information Institute | American Law Sources Online

Magna Cum Laude: WWW Virtual Library | Hieros Gamos | Legal Resource Guide | WashLaw | LawGuru | The Virtual Chase | Legal Engine | Legal Gateway | LawIDEA.com | LawLinks (for UK, EU and international)

Cum Laude: Katsuey | Rominger | Law Research |  CataLaw | LexNotes | VidElex | Jurist