bruceb news

Lawyers will be paying subscription fees to Lexis-Nexis and West for years to come, but there are some signs that legal information also wants to be free.

Last week Google announced that Google Scholar now has a dedicated search for full-text legal opinions from federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. The results apparently include California Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases. The cases are presented in a consistent, easy to read format, and page numbers are included for official citations. Each case includes a separate tab with a list of cases citing the […] continued

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Billing Matters, the LexisNexis law office billing and accounting program, was killed last week. This was circulated Thursday and appeared in the TechnoLawyer newsletter.

"Effective September 1, Billing Matters® will be placed in maintenance mode. During maintenance mode, LexisNexis will continue to resolve known issues and provide technical support in accordance with our standard practices, but no new features or functionality will be added. Billing Matters will continue to be released in conjunction with new versions of Time Matters until Billing Matters is sunset on 12/31/2013. Existing users of Billing Matters will continue to have access to update versions

[…] continued

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Everyone who uses Acrobat might be interested in the charts prepared for the blog Acrobat For Legal Professionals. The first shows the features of the various versions of Acrobat 9 – Reader, Standard, Professional, and Professional Extended – with a focus on features useful to lawyers.

The chart below is even more useful. It compares Adobe versions 8 and 9, with a note on each feature that was added or changed in each version compared to version 7. If you’re working in an office, you probably need the full version of Acrobat; if you’re using version […] continued

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Plaintiffs, consisting of the class of all children who on or about Dec. 24, 2008 were hanging stockings by the chimney with care in the reasonable belief that St. Nicholas soon would be there, sue defendant and allege:

Throughout the fall of 2008, plaintiffs met […] continued

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Click here for a list of Adobe Acrobat training videos, focusing on features for lawyers. There are related blog articles for many of the topics, and some videos are still to come – you’ll have to check back.

The list covers the basics (including the differences between printing to PDF and the PDF makers in Office programs, which is more interesting than you thought), binders and portfolios, PDF comparison, OCR, security, redaction, Bates numbering, forms, and more.

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Acrobat 9 Professional builds on the features in Acrobat 8 that made it an important tool in many offices, especially law offices. There is a vastly improved document comparison routine and enhanced Bates numbering, for example, along with small improvements in transfers to Word, file splitting, and other features.

Acrobat 8 introduced PDF “packages,” single PDF files that contain multiple PDFs assembled from multiple sources. Packages are particularly good at storing email folders; a single PDF can contain messages that are listed individually, stored in the PDF with their attachments, and can be sorted and searched. Here’s a good […] continued

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I’ve got something that might help you out when you face your California election ballot.

A good friend who has worked in state government and politics for most of his career has written an analysis of the twelve propositions on the California ballot. It’s as close to nonpartisan as anything can be today, with solid information about the background, cost, and strengths and shortcomings of each proposition. (No position is taken or argued on Proposition 4 (parental notification of minor’s abortion) or Proposition 8 (same sex marriage).)

I encourage you to take a look if you haven’t researched the propositions! […] continued

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a fascinating article summarizing the history and effect of the RIAA’s five-year battle against online music sharing. The conclusion is compelling: every single move made by the recording industry has backfired. The RIAA has filed more than thirty thousand lawsuits and threatened even more people, turning public opinion overwhelmingly against the RIAA and the labels, and has accomplished nothing.

“The RIAA’s lawsuit campaign against individual American music fans has failed. It has failed to curtail P2P downloading. It has not persuaded music fans that sharing is equivalent to shoplifting. It has not

[…] continued

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This is for my lawyer friends and clients – and anyone who enjoys seeing a lawyer smack down a company that deserves it.

Monster Cable makes high-end, expensive audio and video cables. It’s not obvious that Monster Cables are worth the price – recently blindfolded audio aficionados could not distinguish between audio delivered on Monster Cables, on the one hand, and coat hangers, on the other hand.

But Monster Cable just loves suing people to protect its trademarks and patents. In fact, some people have suggested that maybe, just maybe, Monster Cable uses litigation bullying tactics to intimidate […] continued

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Here’s a short article from the ABA’s Law Practice magazine noting the many ways that Microsoft OneNote 2007 can be used by lawyers for everything from trial notebooks to business transaction notes. There are law-specific templates available for OneNote (as well as templates for the other Microsoft Office programs) on Microsoft’s Office Templates page.

I’ve written about OneNote before. It was just picked as the number one favorite Windows program by readers of a popular blog. (“The word love kept reappearing in the recommendations for this hard-to-describe program.”) There are video demos, as well as a […] continued

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