New Turf To Surf: A Round-up of Useful Legal Web Sites

There are a variety of new and newly discovered Web sites of interest to legal professionals. Here are a few that are worth a look.

Decisions in domain-name disputes are supposed to be available on the Internet, but they can be difficult to track down.

A new Web resource, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy Database, udrp.lii.info, offers a solution. It provides free access to decisions issued in accordance with the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, icann.org.

As of early summer, the database included more than 5000 decisions involving more than 8000 domain names. The developers eventually plan to include all decisions. One novel feature of the tool is that it searches for names based on how they sound, rather than by their precise spelling. The UDRP database was jointly developed by the University of Massachusetts Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution, the Markle Foundation, Cornell University's Legal Information Institute, and The Online Public Disputes Project.

In his day job William Freivogel is senior vice president, loss prevention, at Aon Risk Services, in Chicago. In his spare time he publishes two useful online guides to legal ethics and conflicts of interest. Roughly once a month Freivogel, along with Lucian Pera, a lawyer in Memphis, publishes a newsletter, Ethics and Lawyering Today (ethicsandlawyering.com). The site highlights important new cases, ethics opinions and other developments, often with links to full-text documents.

Freivogel also maintains a second related site, Freivogel on Conflicts (freivogelonconflicts.com), which he terms “a practical online guide to conflicts of interest for lawyers with sophisticated business and litigation practices.” This is an online treatise discussing conflicts of interest in a range of scenarios and tracking current case law on the topic. It is a useful and informative resource, well worth exploring.

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, (nccusl.org, is single-minded in its purpose ' to study and review state law to determine which areas of law should be uniform, and then, having targeted a topic, to draft and propose specific statutes. The conference can only propose, of course ' no uniform law is effective until a state legislature adopts it. The Web site is the repository of this law-making, containing all in-process drafts and final acts. Search them by act title, state, or committee. They can be read online or downloaded in a variety of word-processing or plain text formats.

Drafts of uniform and model acts can also be seen at a second NCCUSL site, www.law.upenn.edu/bll/ulc/ulc_frame.htm, cosponsored by the University of Pennsylvania. Laws that are in the process of being developed are indexed by title, and include all draft versions, from the first to the most recent.

Calling it “the e-business legal portal,” the European Commission's Enterprise Directorate General recently launched eBusiness Lex, ebusinesslex.net, a 12-language Web portal containing information on the legal aspects of e-business, aimed specifically at small and midsize European companies. The site contains information and resources on a range of issues, including contracts, online payments, privacy and data protection, and intellectual property rights. There's also a section on European and national legislation relating to e-business. Law texts are shown in their original language, but abstracts are written in the language of the person viewing the site.

The Birmingham, England-based International Compliance Association, http://www.intcomp.org/, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to improving compliance and anti-money-laundering practices in the financial services sector, launched a Web site earlier this year. Although access to much of the site is restricted to members, anyone can browse its useful collection of links to international regulators, law enforcement and financial intelligence units, financial oversight organizations, and other compliance-related sites.

Two Washington, DC lawyers recently created Web sites that are intended to serve as resources for solo and small-firm lawyers. Jonathan Bender's SohoAttorney site (sohoattorney.com), focuses on attorneys practicing from small or home offices. Partly a Web log, the site allows other lawyers to register and participate in developing its content. For example, Bender hopes others will add links to Web sites that they find useful, along with reviews of the linked sites. He plans to add a photo gallery, where members can post pictures of themselves. He has also included a user poll, which is currently surveying visitors about their standard hourly rates. When he is not blogging, Bender practices Internet law.

Washington lawyer Carolyn Elefant recently hung out My Shingle (myshingle.com), a Web site for solo and small firms. Elefant wants the site to be a resource for these lawyers to exchange advice, seek guidance or find local counsel in other jurisdictions. The site is primarily a Web log, but it also includes a variety of useful content, such as Elefant's “On-Line Guide to Creating a Law Practice,” containing hundreds of links to manuals, articles, forms, sample agreements, and books. Elefant recently added her interview with Jay Foonberg, author of the popular ABA book, “How to Start and Build a Law Practice.”

Law-related Web logs ' or “blawgs,” as they are often called ' became established this year as legitimate sources of legal news and information. But tracking the topics they cover remains cumbersome. Either you must follow them religiously or take your chances with a general search engine such as Google.

A new search tool addresses this problem by zeroing in exclusively on law-related Web logs. Called Blawg Search (blawgs.detod.com), and still in preliminary testing as of this writing, it allows users to search across the full text of a variety of blawgs. Users can also use it to view all postings for a selected blawg. The front page aggregates the latest blawg headlines. It is being developed by Detod Communications, Inc., a company that has built online communities for the Oklahoma Bar Association and the National Association of Bar Executives. Eventually, Blawg Search will be part of a larger site, which a Detod principal describes as “a legal portal like no other.”

For a quick review of daily headlines from law-related news and information sites, go to the Daily Whirl (dailywhirl.com). It snags the headlines from a range of legal Web logs and news sources and displays them on a single page. You can customize the configuration by selecting the blogs you want displayed and your preferred font size, background color and number of columns. The site comes from the same folks in St. Louis, who offer Daily Rotation (dailyrotation.com), a similar site with headlines from more than 190 tech Web sites.

There are a variety of new and newly discovered Web sites of interest to legal professionals. Here are a few that are worth a look.

Decisions in domain-name disputes are supposed to be available on the Internet, but they can be difficult to track down.

A new Web resource, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy Database, udrp.lii.info, offers a solution. It provides free access to decisions issued in accordance with the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, icann.org.

As of early summer, the database included more than 5000 decisions involving more than 8000 domain names. The developers eventually plan to include all decisions. One novel feature of the tool is that it searches for names based on how they sound, rather than by their precise spelling. The UDRP database was jointly developed by the University of Massachusetts Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution, the Markle Foundation, Cornell University's Legal Information Institute, and The Online Public Disputes Project.

In his day job William Freivogel is senior vice president, loss prevention, at Aon Risk Services, in Chicago. In his spare time he publishes two useful online guides to legal ethics and conflicts of interest. Roughly once a month Freivogel, along with Lucian Pera, a lawyer in Memphis, publishes a newsletter, Ethics and Lawyering Today (ethicsandlawyering.com). The site highlights important new cases, ethics opinions and other developments, often with links to full-text documents.

Freivogel also maintains a second related site, Freivogel on Conflicts (freivogelonconflicts.com), which he terms “a practical online guide to conflicts of interest for lawyers with sophisticated business and litigation practices.” This is an online treatise discussing conflicts of interest in a range of scenarios and tracking current case law on the topic. It is a useful and informative resource, well worth exploring.

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, (nccusl.org, is single-minded in its purpose ' to study and review state law to determine which areas of law should be uniform, and then, having targeted a topic, to draft and propose specific statutes. The conference can only propose, of course ' no uniform law is effective until a state legislature adopts it. The Web site is the repository of this law-making, containing all in-process drafts and final acts. Search them by act title, state, or committee. They can be read online or downloaded in a variety of word-processing or plain text formats.

Drafts of uniform and model acts can also be seen at a second NCCUSL site, www.law.upenn.edu/bll/ulc/ulc_frame.htm, cosponsored by the University of Pennsylvania. Laws that are in the process of being developed are indexed by title, and include all draft versions, from the first to the most recent.

Calling it “the e-business legal portal,” the European Commission's Enterprise Directorate General recently launched eBusiness Lex, ebusinesslex.net, a 12-language Web portal containing information on the legal aspects of e-business, aimed specifically at small and midsize European companies. The site contains information and resources on a range of issues, including contracts, online payments, privacy and data protection, and intellectual property rights. There's also a section on European and national legislation relating to e-business. Law texts are shown in their original language, but abstracts are written in the language of the person viewing the site.

The Birmingham, England-based International Compliance Association, http://www.intcomp.org/, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to improving compliance and anti-money-laundering practices in the financial services sector, launched a Web site earlier this year. Although access to much of the site is restricted to members, anyone can browse its useful collection of links to international regulators, law enforcement and financial intelligence units, financial oversight organizations, and other compliance-related sites.

Two Washington, DC lawyers recently created Web sites that are intended to serve as resources for solo and small-firm lawyers. Jonathan Bender's SohoAttorney site (sohoattorney.com), focuses on attorneys practicing from small or home offices. Partly a Web log, the site allows other lawyers to register and participate in developing its content. For example, Bender hopes others will add links to Web sites that they find useful, along with reviews of the linked sites. He plans to add a photo gallery, where members can post pictures of themselves. He has also included a user poll, which is currently surveying visitors about their standard hourly rates. When he is not blogging, Bender practices Internet law.

Washington lawyer Carolyn Elefant recently hung out My Shingle (myshingle.com), a Web site for solo and small firms. Elefant wants the site to be a resource for these lawyers to exchange advice, seek guidance or find local counsel in other jurisdictions. The site is primarily a Web log, but it also includes a variety of useful content, such as Elefant's “On-Line Guide to Creating a Law Practice,” containing hundreds of links to manuals, articles, forms, sample agreements, and books. Elefant recently added her interview with Jay Foonberg, author of the popular ABA book, “How to Start and Build a Law Practice.”

Law-related Web logs ' or “blawgs,” as they are often called ' became established this year as legitimate sources of legal news and information. But tracking the topics they cover remains cumbersome. Either you must follow them religiously or take your chances with a general search engine such as Google.

A new search tool addresses this problem by zeroing in exclusively on law-related Web logs. Called Blawg Search (blawgs.detod.com), and still in preliminary testing as of this writing, it allows users to search across the full text of a variety of blawgs. Users can also use it to view all postings for a selected blawg. The front page aggregates the latest blawg headlines. It is being developed by Detod Communications, Inc., a company that has built online communities for the Oklahoma Bar Association and the National Association of Bar Executives. Eventually, Blawg Search will be part of a larger site, which a Detod principal describes as “a legal portal like no other.”

For a quick review of daily headlines from law-related news and information sites, go to the Daily Whirl (dailywhirl.com). It snags the headlines from a range of legal Web logs and news sources and displays them on a single page. You can customize the configuration by selecting the blogs you want displayed and your preferred font size, background color and number of columns. The site comes from the same folks in St. Louis, who offer Daily Rotation (dailyrotation.com), a similar site with headlines from more than 190 tech Web sites.