Archive and New Site

Future posts on this blog's subject matter will appear at Crablaw Maryland Weekly's new homepage at http://www.crablaw.com/weekly. This site is being preserved as an archive.

Thanks very much!

Blogospheric Sourcing and the Law

Over at Daily Kos, Kagro X has an excellent post about The New York Times' Frank Rich. While the post mentioned a highly provocative piece from Rich about George Bush and U.S. policy regarding torture, the main thrust of Kagro X' piece was to praise Rich, and to criticize most newspaper reporters and columnists, for their respective use and non-use of linking technology. Kagro X maintains, and I would agree, that the linking technology is a superior method of establishing and presenting source material for online journalists.

Many newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and the Maryland Daily Record, use links suboptimally. (I would provide an example from the Daily Record now, but their whole site seems to be down at this date and hour.) The Sun could provide links in its articles to source material at least for publicly available documents (e.g. government websites) to bolster its discussion and content richness. Even the Sun's outside columnists do not seem to use links, though I don't know whether this is a matter of editorial policy.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, seems to use links (as in this example) in the mostly self-referential manner criticized by Kagro X:

When a newspaper says, "President Bush today announced his intention to invade Liechtenstein," the links are on "President Bush," and "Liechtenstein." And they link to archived articles about President Bush and Liechtenstein, in every other context in which that paper has written about those subjects.

Useless.

Unless, of course, you don't know who President Bush is, or more plausibly, what Liechtenstein is. In which case the links are perfect.

But for the rest of the reading world, it's not only useless, but a lingering sign of the traditional media's continuing inability or unwillingness to acknowledge and adopt a superior system developed outside of their auspices.

I think that it would be an excellent move for courts to require or encourage that attorneys not only file court documents in electronic format but that attorneys provide hot links for such for briefs, memoranda and other court pleadings. The federal courts have moved in this direction; most pleadings and other documents in many federal courts require both a paper and an electronic filing, with the court itself often taking only the electronic format. The courts do not require attorneys, however, to provide hot links for their legal citations, which I think would assist attorneys and courts alike.

Readers not familiar with legal citation may find this fairly-well written Wikipedia section on "case citation" of assistance.

Part of the problem is that many of the most useful, user-friendly research databases and archives are private. While one could devised links that might, hypothetically, link a reference to a case or statute to a particular database, there would have to be a gate to allow the private database to charge or confirm the reader as a subscriber. Furthermore, one might have to link multiple databases including inter alia Westlaw and Lexis in one link or set of links to be "fair" or "thorough," in a manner comparable to the extended citations to U.S. Reports, Supreme Court Reporter and the Lawyer's Edition [WARNING: PDF.]

Compare legal briefs to the Internet as a whole. You may be familiar with Technorati, the link tracker for most of the blogosphere and the Internet as a whole. Technorati is nothing more than the concept of Shepardizing taken from case and statute cites to the whole Internet for link "cites" - no more or less regarding legal content than any other content.

The legal profession is infamous for its slow embrace of technology. A great deal depends, I suspect, on when one went to law school. In 1995, the Internet was quite new; an acquaintance (now good friend) had to explain to me what it was. I graduated in 1994, when Lexis and Westlaw were available by dial-up at my law school, when AOL was cutting edge. Perhaps there are some newer attorneys who would consider my approach to technology Jurassic, though I generally have a laptop within ten feet of me at all times, and often log on from coffee houses in the field. (If those fools were smart, they would charge for the Internet and serve the coffee for free.) Attorneys a little older in practice than myself have exhibited great resistance to technology. Because the "rule makers" in the profession are, generally, politically connected senior members of the Bar with either anti-competitive or pro-government orientations from the Bar or Bench, they may be less interested in rapid change than would be a 38-year-old blogger attorney who makes his living largely on the Internet.

Back to Work

I have been out of the blogging world for about a month now, with the exception of a few comments on other bloggers' sites. Since shutting down Crablaw Maryland Weekly and other blog projects associated with this site, I have been focused on getting full-time employment in Washington and Baltimore. Frankly, the market fluctuations in my sub-market have been a source of deep aggravation and demoralization for me, but the market has righted itself at long last. Tomorrow I start an interesting project with excellent prospects for permanent placement.

I stopped all of my prior blog projects for a number of reasons. The biggest reason was, perversely, that I had been too successful at blogging on politics. My professional profile needed to be focused on permanent employment. While the site did generate some income net of expenses, it was not even close to being a substitute for full-time work, but people would find artemia jokes and my rants about the weaknesses of Maryland's public transit system before finding out that I was a skilled attorney. Meanwhile, my full-time, very lucrative work ended without a successor project - the nature of my type of consulting/contract work. The decision was partly the result of Google's search engine algorithms which placed my name prominently among Maryland bloggers and vice versa, but to the subordination of my role as an attorney, i.e. the line of work that pays the mortgage and the diaper mafia and Sallie Mae and the car notes.

Also, I knew deep down that I would be sorely tempted to focus on blogging during the hiatus rather than on staying the course towards my employment goal. I would rationalize it, saying that I needed to make fresh content, keep the readership up, that I would not have a better time to blog, ever, than during a period of partial or complete unemployment. I needed to stay on task - getting employed full-time. The results were pretty good in the end: not only did I get a good full-time temp slot but one that has a meaningful prospect of permanent employment, along with a number of other job interviews, etc., along the way. Had I diverted my attention away from Job 1, I suspect I would have been less successful at this stage.

Part of the challenge that we have as a family is that I essentially have to be sole-breadwinner. Out of the two of us, I, rather than my wife Sunday, carry both the expensive sheepskins and the substantial debt burden servicing them. We have two boys who are autistic, making ordinary day care difficult if not impossible, let alone economically unfeasible. So we have a different set of challenges from some professional couples, e.g. two-lawyer no-child couples.

I am looking forward to the work starting tomorrow, and to getting back to blogging work here, at my new blogging home.

Welcome to Legal Contact

Welcome to my new blog "Legal Contact," a blog from an entrepreneurial-minded business and criminal defense attorney practicing in Maryland and Washington, DC.

The bugs of the new format are being worked out now, so bear with me.

I have enjoyed blogging at the purely personal level for many years on a variety of topics, but this blog addresses issues specific to the legal profession, the practice of law and legal and business developments affecting working attorneys.

Thanks for your interest.