Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but there’s still time to get terrific gifts for lawyers and clients. Here are some of our favs:
- The Apple iPad — It’s sleek, small, and über cool. It holds nifty free legal apps like Fastcase to find state and federal statutes and cases and Oyez’s PocketJustice that let’s lawyers listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. When your attorney friend is done raging at opposing counsel’s latest outrageous offer to their client, the attorney can vent his or her anger by playing Angry Birds or Star Wars Falcon Gunner. Plus, it makes them (and everyone they meet) think that they’re a swell lawyer, right?
- Adopt a Volume of the Federal Reporter — No, we’re not crazy (at least not all the time)! For $1,200, you can actually make a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org to support scanning a volume or two of the first series of the Federal Reporter of the United States in the name of your favorite lawyer or law firm. The donation is to help them “adopt” a volume of federal case law from 1880 – 1924 that is now in the public domain.
- Gift Cards — When you can’t decide, nothing says you can’t decide like a gift card. Here are a few of our favs:
- eBay — Your lawyer friends can regress to their heart’s delight bidding on action figures of The Fonz (Heyyyy!), buying Star Wars costumes, and more.
- Gift Cards — American Express, Visa, and MasterCard all have gift card options that can be used at any store that accepts credit cards.
- Whole Foods — Lawyers love to eat. You probably already know that. Sometimes they don’t eat as well as they could. This place helps.
- iTunes — It’ll make ’em feel like a kid in a candy store.
- Fair Trade Chocolate — Who doesn’t love chocolate? We believe that fair trade chocolate is incredibly important, given the history of child slavery and forced child labor in chocolate producing countries like the Ivory Coast. So give a gift that’s much sweeter:
- Dagoba Chocolate is grown in Latin America, South America, and Madagascar, and committed to supporting the farmers and people in communities where cacao is grown.
- Theo Chocolate in Seattle, Washington makes sure that the chocolate it buys is grown in an “entirely ethical, sustainable fashion”
- Amazon Kindle — The Kindle is an awesome device that does a terrific job doing what it was mean to do: letting you download and carry a huge digital library of books everywhere you go. It’s great for riding the commuter train or bus to work. It’s fast, it’s small, and — are you sitting down? — there are no monthly Internet fees to access and download content.
- Books – Real books are good too. There’s nothing like flipping the pages and cracking open the spine of a freshly printed work. They also make great tea cup and coffee mug holders. Amazon has a nice selection, but so do Borders and Barnes & Noble.
- Donate to a Favorite Legal Cause — If you know a lawyer who is a passionate advocate for a particular legal cause (e.g., they are against the death penalty, do pro bono to stop violence against women or support children’s rights), consider making a donation in their honor. Be sure to ask the donee to send your lawyer an acknowledgement that a donation was made on his or her behalf. One of our favorites is ‘Puppies Behind Bars,’ a group that works with prison inmates to raise and train puppies to be bomb sniffing, drug detection, or assistance dogs.
- Time – Do you have a lawyer friend or relative whom you’ve occasionally hear say, “if only I had more time to ________.” Well, you can help them fill in the blank. Do they like to go to the movies? Take them to a new release. Do they like to fish? Take them to your ‘secret’ spot. Do you think they would like more time to spend with a spouse or their kids? Offer to babysit (you’ve done that before, right?) so the lawyer can have a ‘Date Night.’ Run errands for them — time they might be able to spend with their family.
Have fun while you’re busy gifting, and Happy Holidays from the Justia team.
