Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute just announced the debut of a legal research wiki called Wex, "a collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia."  Some of you may be wondering what the heck a "wiki" is -- it's essentially a collaborative website that allows a bunch of different people to add or edit the information that's displayed on the site.  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is perhaps the most widely-known example of a wiki -- anyone can propose a new Wikipedia entry or edit the content of an existing entry.

Wex's creators plan to be much more selective.  According to this page on editorial contributions, Wex contributors will be pre-screened before they can start writing Wex content. 

For those of you interested in reading more about wikis and how they can be used by attorneys, check out this post from Joy London's excellent blawg, excited utterances.

Thanks to Bonnie Shucha at WisBlawg for the tip about Wex.

When I started practicing law eight years ago, I must have thought "Wow, they never taught me about THAT in law school!" at least three times a day.  While law school does a great job of teaching you the things you need to know to pass the bar exam, it won't necessarily teach you how to have a harmonious relationship with a difficult client, how to market your practice, or which legal technology is worth buying.  Fortunately, today's recent law school graduates and newly minted lawyers have access to lots of valuable law practice management and client relations tips on the Internet, including the ABA's Law Practice Today, which features articles on legal technology, marketing, management, and finance.  For daily free tips on a variety of law practice management issues, I highly recommend the law practice management blogs featured in the November 2005 issue.

--Posted by Amy Wright

The January 2006 issue of Law Practice Today features an excellent roundtable discussion about evolving Internet applications and their impact on the legal profession.  If the terms "Web 2.0" and "Law 2.0" leave you scratching your head, you should definitely take a moment to read this discussion!  As Stephen Nipper points out in the discussion, the next generation of legal technology tools emphasizes collaboration and interacting with colleagues online to achieve greater efficiencies.  The reference librarians at Heafey have taken a step in this direction by using blogs to better communicate with each other and with our patrons.  We maintain this blog, Heafey Headnotes, to reach out to our patron base.  But we also maintain another internal, password-protected blog that we all use to create a permanent, searchable archive of the answers to recurring research problems, library policies and procedures, and time-saving tips and information for our colleagues.  We’ve found that using our blog as a sort of online meeting place works particularly well, and it means that we don’t have to rely so heavily on a much more static and inflexible means of electronic communication -- e-mail. 

LLRX features a useful article this month on practical web strategies for attorneys, but these tools are really for anyone who spends a significant time doing Internet research.  Frederick Faulkner IV describes how to maximize your web browsing experience by using toolbars, bookmarklets, and extensions.

It’s easy to rely too heavily on Google for all of your day-to-day searching needs -- that is, until you have to find something particularly obscure on the Internet.  That’s when it pays to expand your searching horizons and try out a different search engine.  I often turn to a meta-search engine when I want to save time by searching across several search engines at the same time.  The search interface of most meta-search engines looks quite similar to the simple Google search box, but your search results will appear a bit different.  For example, if you search on one of the better known meta-search engines, Dogpile, your search results will be a blend of results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and other search engines.  If you want to view the individual search results from each search engine, all you have to do is click on the name of that engine at the top of the search results page.  Not only will you be able to view individual search results, Dogpile will also highlight the results that appear exclusively from that search engine.  You can even click on all of the individual search engines to view each engine’s results side-by-side.  For an extensive list of search engines, visit Heafey’s search engines page or visit SearchEngineWatch.

Meredith Farkas, a librarian and blogger (see Information Wants To Be Free), just announced HigherEd BlogCon, a web-based event that will focus on "how new online communications technologies and social tools are changing higher education."  All of the resources on the HigherEd BlogCon site are available free of charge.  The schedule of online events and discussions is:

April 3-7, 2006:  Teaching

Blogs as Personal Learning Environments; Curriculum Development Using a Wiki; Legal Issues in Podcasting; and more...

April 10-14, 2006:  Library and Info Resources

Blogging and Podcasting in Libraries; Web 2.0/Library 2.0; Building an Online Research Toolkit; and more...

April 17-21, 2006:  Admissions, Alumni Relations, and Communications & Marketing

Podcasts as a Marketing Tool; Alumni E-Networks; Blogging and Podcasting for Student Recruitment; and more...

April 24-28, 2006:  Websites and Web Development

Legal Education Podcasting Project; Taking Control of HTML and CSS; Agile Web Apps; and more....

San Franciscans at SCU Law will be delighted to hear that the city has selected Google and Earthlink to furnish affordable wi-fi access to the entire city.  As this SF Gate article states, if the project continues to move forward without any glitches, "virtually everyone within the city limits will be able to get online -- provided they have a compatible computer -- whether at home, in a park or at work." 

The New York Times recently revamped its website and the newspaper is also starting to experiment with different content delivery technology, including blogs.  For the transactional lawyer or professor specializing in corporate law, the most useful of these new websites may be Dealbook.  Launched last month, Dealbook provides updates about Wall Street deals and the business world.  There’s not much in the way of opinion on the site, but it’s an excellent current awareness resource because it compiles news from several different financial news sources on one site.  You’ll find the latest news on mergers and acquisitions, investment banking, IPOs, private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, and the legal community.  Best of all, the site is frequently updated throughout the day.