Robert Ambrogi Blog
On this Friday the 13th, catching up on some of the week’s news and updates:
How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession. Fast Company writer Sean Captain picks up on recent posts of mine about legal startups (here and here) and goes in deeper, looking at three of the startups leading the charge: Casetext, Lex Machina, PacerPro and Ravel Law.
Free Law Project responds on judicial database. In a post earlier this week about Free Law Project’s new database of federal and state judges, I pointed out the sparseness of some of its listings and a material omission from the biography of Antonin Scalia — that he died and is no longer a sitting justice. Free Law’s executive director Mike Lissner has written a response to my post in which he says that my comparison of the database to the judicial biographies on Ballotpedia was inappropriate because they are different beasts. I encourage you to read his post for more about the database and its goals.
Lexbox out of beta. In January, I reviewed Lexbox, a free plug-in for the Chrome browser that helps organize and monitor Canadian legal research. Last week, nine months after it launched, Lexbox announced that it is officially out of its public beta stage. In that time, it has grown to have 1,000 users who have saved over 10,000 documents created over 1,400 alerts.
A blog is born. I’m an avid reader of Richard Zorza’s Access to Justice Blog, one of the best sources out there for coverage of access-to-justice news and initiatives. Now Zorza has launched another blog, Richard Zorza’s Politics and Humor Blog, which he wrote was inspired by a recent Washington Post Editorial that said: “Someday, everyone involved in American politics will be called upon to account for his or her behavior during Mr. Trump’s run for the White House.” ‘Nuff said.
And a blog is reborn. There is no better source covering Android devices in law than Jeff Taylor’s The Droid Lawyer. While it never actually died, it did go into an extended deep sleep. Now the blog is being brought out of its slumber, Taylor writes. And he’s looking for help to keep it going. So if you have an Android-related post to submit, get in touch with Jeff Taylor.
And while we’re speaking of blogs. The Paperboy’s Archive has zilch to do with law. But it’s written by a lawyer, Andrew Harris, and not only that, but a recovering lawyer who is a law and government reporter at Bloomberg News. (He’s also a really good guy who I used to work with at ALM.) His premise: Revisiting old playbills, programs, scorecards, yearbooks, magazines, newspapers and comic books — “things plucked from the on-rushing stream we call life” — to find an informal history of our time.