Hi Friends,

I had a great meeting yesterday with my friends at vLex.com. vLex has relaunched their Website, which has laws from many different countries (vLex is based in the EU, and have offices in South America and the USA ). I was given a full tour of the vLex system. They have nicely cleaned up the user interface. The only thing I would add is having the country flags on their home page glide back and forth like album covers on iTunes 🙂
vLex also has great plans for their future, which I am sure they will announce when they are ready 🙂 vLex truly listens to their users, as the product development shows. I am very excited about the new vLex features that will be coming online, and have full faith that what they are doing will be a huge win for practitioners throughout the world. Check them out at vLex.com. And best of all the USA information is free 🙂

Hi Friends,

Congrats to Susan Athey who was just awarded this years John Bates Clark Medal in Economics for the top young economist under 40. She is the first woman to have won the medal. This is a BIG deal in the male dominated arena of economics.

You can read more about her work on the American Economic Association site here and visit Susan’s Web page at Harvard here. Many years ago, I had a few classes with Susan and she was very nice and very very smart (she once taught our class when the teacher was out, even though she was in it herself :). While she was getting her PhD from the Stanford Business School, she was the obvious star among the economic students going into teaching/research. Needless to say it was early attention that was well deserved and an initial light on what was to come. Again congrats to Susan.

Hi Friends,

Cicely and I made a presentation to the Stanford Law School Advanced Legal Research class today. There was a law librarian Liza MacMorris from Wilson Sonsini who gave students the reality of research working at a large law firm and a guy from Bloomberg who gave details on Bloomberg’s plan to run for President and showed their docket search (which seemed kind of like Justia’s Free Federal Court Civil Filings Search + a Pacer account for the documents, but Bloomberg also has runners who will get dockets that are not in the system and is tied into other investor and legal information and of course it costs money). Well he certainly hinted that Bloomberg might run, although like most New York Republicans, he more suited to run as a Democrat.

We covered the free part of alternatives to paid Lexis and West. California is in pretty good shape for free information. We focused on free sources like LexisOne and Cornell, as well as some inexpensive alternatives like FastCase and VersusLaw. And of course quite a bit of focus on blogs.

In H.P. Tries to Create Printers That Love the Web, the New York Times reported on this comment by Vyomesh I. Joshi, the Executive Vice President of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group:

“Reluctantly, I am doing blogs,” he told the employees at the companywide coffee talk. He said he needed to understand how they work. “Otherwise, we will be irrelevant.”

So, how might blogs make HP irrelevant?

Hi Friends,

I “skipped” work today and went to the SF Giants opener with Acendi Software CEO Charlie Moore (who took us all — thanks!!!!), one of my many attorneys Ruben Sundeen, bike photographer Kent Williams and Acendi team members (others were also going to home openers :). Charlie used to work with my previous attorneys at Venture Law Group (now part of Heller Erhman) and worked with Yahoo! and others when they were just starting out. The Giants lost by a touchdown, but it was nice day to talk code and Acendi’s new online forms service RocketLawyer.com, which allows users to create legal documents online. And I took a lot of Barry and Barry pictures (in the extended entry 🙂

Hi Friends,

As promised… here is the Conrad Johnson – Jimi Hendrix montage of multimedia, legal education and Google.

As you may know, Conrad runs the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at Columbia Law School. He also plays guitar.

Hi Friends,

Here are some photos from the Jurist 10th aniversry conference.
Jurist’s Bernard Hibbitts opens the conference.

If you’ve never heard of ConnectU, you are not alone. In a case of Ivy League intringue, ConnectU filed suit against Facebook for copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, among other charges. The story goes that ConnectU, formerly known as the Harvard Connection, had engaged Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to complete computer programming and database definitions for the Harvard Connection website. Instead, Zuckerberg allegedly takes the code and trade secrets from the Harvard Connection to launch Facebook, a competing website.

Here’s my favorite line from the Complaint: “With respect to Internet websites, the first to enter a market has a substantial advantage.” So, how much of a lead in launch time did Facebook have over ConnectU? Facebook launched on February 4, 2004 and the ConnectU website launched on May 21, 2004. So, it only takes 107 days to build such a substantial advantage that your competitors are sent packing their bags and closing shop. Right.

Read the ConnectU Inc. v. Facebook Inc. et al. Complaint

Hi Friends,

UPDATE 30 March 2007: Here I am with Mr. Jurist himself, Bernard Hibbitts -- I am putting some more photos up here and here on our Law Reivew blog

UPDATE: Looks like the USPTO is working on fixing the ability to have permanent links and bookmarks to individual patents.

Hi Friends,

Here is some interesting news… the United State Patent and Trademark Office has broken all of the static URLs of links to patents. In fact you can not even get a new static URL to link or bookmark to as each URL is now tied to browser session. Erik Heels has a post on this here and what you can do communicate with the USPTO.