Res Ipsa Blog

1. Get back to where you were: From law school outlines to legal briefs, law students and lawyers alike often work on very lengthy documents. For the times when you don't remember where exactly you left off, the Shift+F5 combination will save you quite a bit of time. Hit both keys at the same time (as with all the combinations mentioned in this article) and Word will automatically place your cursor where you last left off. 2. Switch between text case: Highlight a ... Read More

Firefox was introduced in 2004 as a free open-source replacement for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox offered improved security and introduced tabbed browsing, an integrated spell checker, and a download manager. Today, Firefox is the second-most popular browser, with almost twenty percent of the browser market share. The popularity of Firefox continues to grow primarily because of its speed, ease of use, and the availability of free "add-ons" which allow users to add additional features to customize the Firefox browser. As the amount ... Read More

A roundup of this week’s best stories from the blawgosphere and beyond: 1. Sixty-eight percent of law librarians prefer Westlaw to Lexis Law Librarians and Lexis Nexis vs. Westlaw: Survey Results, Stanford Law Library Legal Research Series. (PDF) 2. In 2008, law school graduates will make either $60,000 or $160,000: the bimodal distribution of starting salaries in the legal profession: ELSblog and Adam Smith, Esq. 3. The importance of offering trial opportunities to attract newly minted lawyers. ABA Journal [ratings id="541"] Read More

Bluebook Rule 18 specifies how materials available in electronic formats should be cited. However, merely proving an "available at" citation does not ensure the content you are referencing will be available at the URL on a later date. In the past, printing a hard copy of the URL or saving an image of the site a PDF documents have been the preferred methods to preserve the content being referencing. Now there is a better way to ensure a website is available ... Read More

In Part I of my review of PreCYdent, I described how PreCYdent outperformed both WestLaw and Lexis in "natural language" searches. In Part II of my review, I'll cover the limitations of this new service, as well as some user-driven features that are unique to PreCYdent. PreCYdent seeks to provide lawyers, law students, and the general public with free and easy access to legal authority. While WestLaw and Lexis are used primarily by paid subscribers, PreCYdent seeks to provide anyone who has ... Read More

With more and more attorneys adopting Macs throughout their offices every day and the business world raving about the cost effectiveness of Mac OS X, today Macs are an accepted and feasible alternative to Windows in the legal community. Having recently made the switch to a Mac myself, I've put together a list of the top ten free Max OS X programs that made switching from a PC to a Mac a breeze. 1. Quicksilver Quicksilver is a program launcher that uses simple commands ... Read More

The new iPhone is set to be unveiled in less than two weeks. Here are the top new features of the second generation iPhone: 1. Browse Westlaw and Lexis Faster: 3G Connectivity The new iPhone will run on a "3G" or third-generation network. While that translates to speeds of up to 42 Mbps, (think ten times faster than DSL or Cable), here in the United States, we likely see only a fraction of that. Initially, we will see speeds approaching the speed of your ... Read More

Sending a meeting request through Outlook is an easy way to coordinate schedules and pick meeting times. Have you ever wished there was a way to easily schedule meetings with individuals that don't use Outlook? Now there is: whenisgood.net allows you to highlight the dates and times you are available to meet, and then have your highlighted calender sent to you by email which you can then forward to any number of recipients. Each recipient can then remove the time slots they ... Read More

There is a new search engine in town. It's called "PreCYdent." PreCYdent is a free service, which will eventually be ad-supported, and hopes to become a contender in the legal search provider market currently dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis. PreCYdent hopes to bring open access and 21st century technology to legal searches, effectively making searching case law as easy as running a search on Google. I decided to give PreCYdent a trial run to see how it compares to Westlaw and LexisNexis. Natural ... Read More

When it comes to losing important data, it has been said that there are only two kinds of people: those who have lost important data, and those who will. Files are lost due to accidental deletion, theft, natural disaster, and hard drive crashes. For those in the practice of law, losing a document could mean missing a deadline, failing to file a timely response, or worse. Fortunately there are easy ways to back up documents. 1. Email yourself the document. With many of the ... Read More