Though I have detailed its flaws, PACER’s existence as the centralized interface containing electronic access to Federal court dockets and documents makes our jobs as law librarians much easier. State courts, on the other hand, are the wild west of electronic docket and document access.
Continue Reading Quickly Check the Availability of State Court Electronic Docket and Document Access With CourtReference.com
Ravel Law incorporates the age-old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” into legal research. Visualization is fundamentally incorporated into Ravel Law’s software design. When users conduct a search on a legal topic, or a prior case, Ravel delivers an interactive graphic displaying cases associated with this topic or prior case; the cases that are the most heavily cited have larger icons, thus signifying quickly to researchers which cases are fundamentally important to whatever topic or prior case they’re researching.
Interfacing with PACER is just a fact of life, especially for those of you working in Bankruptcy practice groups. Our country’s Bankruptcy courts, of course, are electronically accessible via PACER, and feature cases with massive dockets comprised of thousands of filed documents; many trees are destroyed during bankruptcy proceedings. So, the ability to locally store dockets and documents and keep these files organized is a Herculean challenge—in practice, most legal professionals presumably end up querying PACER over and over again, pulling the same documents multiple times. The issue with this: every time you pull a docket or document from PACER, you are charged a fee ($.10 a page, capped at $3.00 per document). It doesn’t matter if you pull the same document three times, you will be charged a fee every time you pull it.
Continue Reading Inforuptcy: Enhanced & Cost Effective Bankruptcy Docket & Document Retrieval
I have been lucky enough to give a few presentations that usually require a brief explanation of cloud computing. I am intrigued by the concept, of course, but am always terrified I am going to lose the interest of my audience as I ramble on about private clouds, software as a service, security concerns, and the like, so I have been trying to discipline myself to really keep definitions to a sentence or two, and not ramble excitedly on about technological ephemera. My typical fall-back summary of the cloud is: cloud computing basically puts the internet in-between you and your hard drive. And because the internet is connecting you to your data, you now have the option of connecting other users to your data. This concept of collaboration is one of the fundaments of the cloud-computing/network age.
Continue Reading PacerPro Unveils DocketShare
If you have ever pulled a federal court document, then you are familiar with Pacer. Pacer’s critics are many and prone to point out the software’s numerable flaws including its arcane UI and user costs. Luckily, we are riding a wave of programmers and entrepreneurs who have been willing to improve upon this outdated interface (see my previous write-up of DkT). The latest is the impressive Pacer Pro, which, as Robert Ambrogi writes in his excellent review of Pacer Pro in the March 2014 issue of ABAJournal (available here) “provides universal search[ing], more robust search tools, more informative search results, and better ways to manage documents and downloads”. He’s right, this is a vast improvement on the Pacer UI–and it’s free! Here are some of the really good things Pacer Pro does:
Continue Reading Pacer Pro is Pacer Improved
Bloomberg Law has announced the release of a new app that works in conjunction with your Bloomberg Law subscription. The app is available both for the Apple iOS (via the App Store) and the Android operating system (via Google Play).
Continue Reading How is Bloomberg Law’s New App?
If you work in the legal field, there is no doubt you have experienced working with PACER; it’s the interface that enables users to access and file federal court documents. DkT (available here) is a brand new app that puts an easily-navigable, streamlined mobile user interface on top of PACER, enabling users to access documents via their mobile devices. PACER does have its own mobile interface, but DkT has design features that clearly separate it as a better option for users, including:
Continue Reading App Review: DkT
Lexis has created two apps that do the exact same thing: the Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com apps allow user access to the same, giant directory of attorneys. Lexis, though, clearly has different audiences in mind for the two apps, having tailored Martindale-Hubbell to attorneys and Lawyers.com for the public.
The Martindale-Hubbell app is intended to be
Of the many apps in the West/Thomson Reuters oeuvre, there exists the CFLR DissoMaster. What does this app do? Co-produced by CFLR and the Rutter Group, this app’s sole purpose is to calculate child support in California. Yes, child support strictly in California.
Child support calculation in California follows a statewide, uniform equation that starts
Everybody’s favorite U.S. Supreme Court blog, SCOTUSblog, recently released an accompanying iOS app. At this point, the app’s main feature is to display the blog entries from the SCOTUSblog site, enabling on-the-go attorneys an easy method of staying abreast of the latest happenings at our nation’s court of last resort. Users have the ability to
