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Maximizing the Net in your practice
  By Carol L. Schlein

This month I’d like to share with you the sites and observations made by presenters at the program I moderated during the New Jersey State Bar Association’s annual meeting in May. The program, “Using the Internet to Leverage Your Practice, was presented to a standing-room-only crowd.

The panelists were Professor Jack Baldwin-LeClair of Montclair State University, Sean Kelly, a partner and commercial litigator with the Newark firm Saiber Schlesinger Satz & Goldstein, and Richard Levao, a member of the Morristown firm Shanley & Fisher.

While I have been using electronic mail for more than a decade and consider myself knowledgeable about the Internet and the resources on it, I learned an incredible amount of useful information from these panelists. During similar programs in the past few years, a show of hands indicated a minority of attorneys were actively using e-mail and doing research on the Internet. To the surprise of all panelists when we queried this audience, we found everyone attending the program knew what the Internet was and had seen web pages and/or sent e-mail.

There are a number of reasons for this dramatic change. First, many baby boomer lawyers whose children are at college find e-mail more cost-effective than long-distance telephone calls. Second, clients increasingly demand better access to their attorneys, and e-mail has been the primary tool. It allows clients to share information and documents with their counsel in a time- and cost-effective manner. Creative law firms even have created private areas on their web sites to allow clients greater and better access to relevant information. Finally, as was amply demonstrated by speakers during this program, the breadth and depth of information useful to practicing lawyers on the World Wide Web has made it a valuable tool for basic legal research and getting background information on clients, competitors and other key players in your field.

When people talk about the Internet, they are talking about several different technologies. The first is e-mail, which allows you to send messages to individuals or groups of people at your convenience. Unlike voice mail, recipients can answer the message when it’s convenient for them without any worry about time zone differences. If the original message was sent to a group of people, the recipients have the option, with any of the popular e-mail programs, to reply to the sender or to all other recipients.

You can attach a computer file as part of an e-mail message. For instance, each month, I send an e-mail message to my editor at New Jersey Lawyer and attach the word processing file that contains my column. By transmitting the column electronically, I spare my editor the task of retyping the text before she can edit it. This capability is extremely useful for timely review of drafts of documents by law firm clients. When you send or receive larger files, you may want to use file protocol transfer (FPT) programs. These are incorporated into many of the web pages that contain information about maintenance and new versions of software. If your firm has designed its own web page, you probably will use FPT to send your page updates to the vendor whose computers store your firm’s web pages. This vendor usually is called an Internet service provider.

Web groups

A third element of the Internet are Usenet lists and Listservs. Essentially, these are forums for people with common interests. Only a few years ago, there were a handful of lawyer-related lists. Today, there are so many that several people have dedicated entire web sites for tracking the various lists. These mailing lists send messages addressed to the group to your e-mail box. The main difference between Usenet groups and Listservs is membership on Listservs tends to be more restricted than Usenet groups and you receive copies of the group-directed messages on a Listserv in your e-mail box. With Usenet groups, anyone can join the conversation. Check www.dejanews.com for lists of Usenet groups.

Listserv groups tend to require registration and may insist participants are attorneys if the groups are practice-oriented. You can reply to an individual or post a reply that can be read by the entire group. There are many lists for law and technology as well as numerous groups for different practice areas. The best resource to obtain the legal lists is www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/law-lists. This site is maintained by Lyonette Louis-Jacques, the foreign and international law librarian and lecturer at the University of Chicago.

The final and best-known element of the Internet is the World Wide Web, which requires a browser to view web pages. The two leading products are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Netscape Communicator. These programs also include the facility for managing e-mail. The e-mail component of these programs is less sophisticated than programs such as Eudora from Qualcomm Corp. (www.qualcomm.com) and Pegasus Mail (www.pegasus.usa.com).

Eudora and Pegasus mail allow you to create folders and establish “rules” for automatically handling your messages. For example, I belong to a legal technology Listserv, Network 2d, sponsored by the Computer and Technology Division of the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association. When busy, I don’t want to be distracted by messages from this group. I have set up a rule in my e-mail software to automatically put new messages with the word Network 2d in the sender field into a special folder I can review when I have time. These filters also can be used to eliminate junk e-mail, if you can anticipate the source, to create a suitable rule. You can find more information about ABA-sponsored Listservs on its web page, www.abanet.org.

Legal research

Sean Kelly began his discussion of strategies for conducting legal research on the Internet by describing search engines. These are tools that allow you to look for words or phrases that might be key words on a web site or are merely mentioned on one of the pages of the site. The most popular search engines are Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Infoseek (www.infoseek.com) and AltaVista (www.altavista.digital.com). You will get different results with each major search engine. Sean’s example was to find articles about cases concerning Megan’s law.

As he explained, the general search engines are good for background research. There are several legal-focused search engines that will assist in finding statutory language, recent cases, etc. He showed LawCrawler (www.lawcrawler.com) to demonstrate the added benefit of limiting the search to reliable legal resources on the web. Another resource he demonstrated was a meta-index, which, unlike the search engines, organizes information by practice area and subject matter. The site he showed was the World Wide Web Virtual Law Library (www.law.indiana.edu/law/v-lib/lawindex.html) maintained by the University of Indiana School of Law.

He showed the type of information available from the federal government at sites such as that maintained by the U.S. Department of Justice. His example demonstrated there is certain information useful to clients that is available only on the Internet. In contrast, New Jersey state agencies only recently began to focus their efforts on providing quality information at web sites such as the N.J. State Courts Homepage (www.state.nj.us/judiciary).

Rich Levao, who practices environmental and education law, gave a demonstration of how he uses Listservs to keep up to date with statutory developments in his practice areas. For instance, he explained how he monitors the status of proposed environmental regulations and rules that might impact his school-district clients. Both Rich and Sean were critical of the efforts of state officials in New Jersey. Rich compared the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection web page (www.dep.state.pa.us/) with the bulletin board service offered by the New Jersey agency (NJDEP at (609) 292-2006).

Other resources

Rich discussed resources available through some major Internet service providers such as America On-Line, Microsoft Network and CompuServe. In addition to providing affordable access to e-mail and the web, each offers value-added services that can be useful to lawyers. America On-Line and CompuServe have chat or forum areas dedicated to legal professionals. These can be useful places to discuss hot legal issues or cases as well as to get feedback from lawyers around the world about what software they use to solve different problems in their firm.

Many software vendors also maintain forums on these commercial services. These discussion areas can be particularly useful as an alternative to expensive and time-consuming telephone-based technical support for their products. Rich also discussed some benefits of the Counsel Connect service in providing access to lawyers for referrals and updates on legal developments.

Jack Baldwin-LeClair gave an eye-opening presentation on how to find out more about your competitors or your client’s competitors using sleuthing techniques on the web. For instance, he explained that by understanding the structure of web pages developed on Windows NT compared to those placed on computers running Unix, you often can find documents and information the sponsor of the site did not intend to make public, but can be found through back doors. He showed a revealing example of “hallway conversations” of nuclear scientists during a convention. Jack also showed how to use search engines to find parts of web pages not intended to be accessible to snoopers.

Jack also provided some tips on setting up your firm’s web page. Among them was not to assume you have to spend a lot of money. Time and again, less-expensive web sites have been determined more effective than those costing 10 times more. Spend some time surfing the web to see what other similar firms are doing with their web page before committing your marketing dollars.

Law sites

As an added bonus, each panelist included additional sites of special interest to lawyers. If you have trouble reaching any of these sites, try removing a section a time after the slash until you can access part of the site. For instance, if you are unable to reach the Indiana Law School page at www.law.indiana.edu:80/law/v-lib/lawindiex.html, you could remove /lawindiex and reissue the search. If you’re still unable to reach it, you could remove /v-lib, etc.

Here’s a list.

Carol L. Schlein is president of Law Office Systems, a Montclair-based training and consulting firm specializing in law firms. She formerly chaired the Computer and Technology Division of the ABA Law Practice Management Section. A lecturer for ICLE, she can be reached at (973) 746-6454 or carol@losinc.com.



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