ZiefBrief

Online Resources for New Attorneys

Keith Lee at Associate's Mind has compiled a comprehensive list of online resources for new attorneys, including practice-specific resources (criminal, family, and tax law to name a few).  There are also helpful legal tech links.  Hat tip to Legal Skills Prof Blog!

West Study Aids Online Subscription

If you are a fan of study aids published by West, such as Gilbert's Law Summaries, the Exam Pro series, and Nutshells, you may want to consider West's online study aid subscription option for law students. A three-month subscription is $75.00 and gives law students access to the following materials:

An online library of over 300 study aids for law students featuring case briefs, outlines, overviews and exam preparation titles from West, Foundation Press and Gilbert. Available to law students by subscription, it offers a new cost-effective way to study. Series include: Acing Series, Black Letter Outlines, Exam Pro Series, Gilbert Law Summaries, High Court Case Summaries, Nutshell Series, Sum & Substance Quick Reviews and Turning Point Series.

The study aids are searchable, and you can also take notes and highlight text.  The big downside -- you can't export to an e-reader. And yes, the law library has looked into purchasing a subscription for the entire law school community, but the cost for an institutional subscription is jaw-dropping.  

"My Legal Projects" App from Westlaw

West has developed an app called "My Legal Projects" for iPhones and iPads, which is designed to help law students and attorneys track deadlines and manage projects.  It's only $1.99, and it seems like it would be a handy tool for law students and beginning attorneys.  One of the features that I like: it includes a checklist of information that you should gather from your supervisor at the time that you receive the assignment (jurisdiction, cost restraints, project deadline, etc.).  For a detailed discussion of this app, see this post on the Westlaw Insider blog.

What You Say On Facebook Can And Will Be Used Against You.

ZiefBrief has commented in the past on the pitfalls of Facebook and other social networking sites when it comes to becoming a lawyer. Now the incomparable Bruce Schneier's blog at Schneier on Security has uncovered a new service calling itself Social Intelligence Hiring. It seems that the good folks at S.I.H. will prepare a full dossier on a subject drawing from "Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and 'thousands of other sources'." They then render their research down into categories like  "Poor Judgment," "Gangs," "Drugs and Drug Lingo" and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." Click here for more about Social Intelligence and their pre- and post-hiring monitoring programs.

So the lesson for all of us is to think twice about what we post about ourselves on the web. Recently, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that the day will come when you will have the option to clean you digital slate and start over as a new digital entity. But for the time being, remember what goes on the web probably stays on the web.

The Kindle Reading Experience

I was on the fence about getting a Kindle a year ago, but my husband surprised me with one last fall, and I'm glad that he did.  I was doing a lot of traveling between California and the East Coast, and the Kindle is truly a godsend for those unfortunate enough to be spending a lot of time in airports and on planes.  I've read about 15 books on the Kindle, and I don't experience any eye fatigue from the screen.  I've changed the text size to be slightly larger than the standard text size, and while that means that I have to click to turn pages more frequently, it seems to keep eye fatigue at bay.  You can read the Kindle in a variety of light settings, including bright, bright sunlight.

The Kindle is pretty hardy.  I've dropped it a few times, and it's survived.  But my fears of hitting myself in the face with the Kindle when I fall asleep reading have been realized.  I have bonked myself in the nose with the Kindle several times when I fell asleep reading, and yes, it hurts worse than having an open book fall on your face. 

The battery life is amazing.  If I turn the wireless off, I can read for several hours a day for over a week without having to recharge.

Browsing and buying in the Kindle store is extremely easy and fast.  For example, I purchased and downloaded Wolf Hall and Matterhorn, two huge tomes, in less than 45 seconds. And there is a ton of classic literature available for free on the Kindle.  I have the complete works of Charles Dickens on my Kindle now. 

I do miss the ability to easily refer back to earlier pages.  Professor James O'Donnell describes the Kindle reading experience perfectly in this Chronicle of Higher Ed article: "The Kindle is great for reading the way ancient Greeks read, on papyrus scrolls, beginning at the beginning, proceeding linearly, getting to the end, absorbed in one book, following the author's lead. That makes it just fine for lots of fiction for entertainment or diversion."  But when you're reading a more complex text, it can be really annoying to be unable to flip back quickly to an earlier chapter that contains important reference information. I still can't imagine using the Kindle or any other e-reader when I'm engaged in a complex research project.  But would I recommend the Kindle for voracious readers who do a lot of traveling?  Absolutely. 

Technology, Distraction, and the Latest Safari Browser

[Links to items discussed in this post are all gathered at the end, for reasons mentioned in the post itself.]

This week the zeitgeist has delivered to ZiefBrief a lot of musing about how our digital life may be affecting the ways we think. There's this week's front-page New York Times story "Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price." There are any number of reviews of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. And there are blog posts and ensuing debates about the practice of "delinkification." (This is putting links at the end of a post or article, rather than embedding them in the text. The aim is to minimize distractions for readers who'd prefer to read the document as a whole. That's what ZiefBrief is trying right now.)

The concern the Times reports on and Carr frets over is that the more we flit from link to link to link, and the more we succumb to the distraction of the latest email message or text or tweet or Facebook update, the less able we are to concentrate on complex ideas for long stretches of times.

If that's so, ZiefBrief is concerned about the lawyers-to-be at USF and other law schools. We observe that at least some law students seem to find it hard to engage in depth with long documents. But despite all the technological changes of the last decades, the law is still embodied in long, difficult texts, and success as a lawyer depends on close, detailed reading, analysis and synthesis of these texts so as to exploit them to craft creative solutions to clients' problems. (Though ZiefBrief is hardly one to talk. We left law and became a librarian in part because we have the attention span of a gnat and would much rather help others find relevant cases than read them ourselves!)

No one wants to lose the benefits of our digital world, but no one seems to know exactly how best to retain our ability to sustain concentration and engage in deep thinking in the face of all of the distractions.

Which brings us at last to the latest version of Apple's Safari browser. If Safari calculates that you are reading an article, a blog post, or other long-ish stretch of prose, it will offer you, via a button in the address bar, the option of invoking the "Reader" function. The Reader function displays the text prominently while minimizing the surrounding graphics, ads, and other chaff.

So, if you invoke the "Reader" function while reading Berghuis v. Thompkins, the Supreme Court's recent decision on how suspects must invoke their right to remain silent, you'll see this:

 

… instead of this more typical view:

 

Oddly soothing, we think, and one way to reclaim your attention.

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Links for this post:

New York Times: Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price 

Our Cluttered Minds and Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain: reviews of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr in his RoughType blog on Experiments in Delinkification

Canadian law blog Slaw on Hypolinking

Laura Miller at Salon on The Hyperlink Wars

Berghuis v. Thompkins courtesy of Justia's Supreme Court center and Oyez.org.

Safari 5.0 is free and is compatible with Macs running Leopard or Snow Leopard, and PCs running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista or Windows 7

Technology Hurts

David Cambria, manager of law department operations at Aon Corp., has a great Law Technology News editorial on technology woes and how to fix them.  One of Cambria's pet peeves:  "Who hasn't been involved in an e-mail stream 15 messages long when a simple face-to-face conversation would resolve the issue in minutes. I hate it when technology makes me less efficient." 

I've been thinking about this particular aspect of technology a lot because, due to a shoulder injury, typing doesn't feel particularly good these days.  Consequently, I pick up the phone or talk to people face-to-face to get things done at work and at home a little more than usual, and you know what?  On the days when I just say no to email, my work and personal life are richer and more productive because of it.  I used to scoff at firms that had "email blackout" days, but lately, I think there's something to be said for reducing reliance on email. 

Wireless Printing From Your Mac at USF Law

A question from a student and fellow Macintosh user reminded us at ZiefBrief that we've been wanting to post some handy instructions on how to print wirelessly from Macs at the law school here at USF.

A hat-tip to our excellent law school IT staff, who put these instructions together!

(Wireless printing instructions for PC users are also available.)

[Updated 10.11.2011]