Imagine how I — a lawyer who loves few things more than to write — felt when I got this call one day four years ago. "We’d like you to be a featured contributor to our blog," said the caller, an editor at Law.com. "The blog is hosted on one of the most visited legal [...]

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — known by most as FINRA — issued an advisory yesterday telling securities firms and brokers that they are required to supervise and retain records of their employees’ blogging and social media use. The advisory, Regulatory Notice 10-06, came out of a task force FINRA created in September to consider [...]

Last week in ALM’s Internet Law & Strategy newsletter, via Law.com, M. Anderson Berry and David Kiernan provided an excellent analysis of an issue that is of rapidly-growing importance: How can lawyers authenticate Web pages as evidence in court? The authors pose an interesting and very realistic hypothetical under which a plaintiff sues your client, [...]

In a post yesterday, Larry Bodine’s LawMarketing Blog gave us an update on an interesting RFP issued last year by a company called FMC Technologies. The beauty contest is now down to the final cut. Not only did FMC post the RFP on Legal OnRamp, an online social network for in-house lawyers, it also required [...]

To all of you lawyers who think you work in hip or particularly with-it offices, I have just one question for you: Was Snoop Dogg at your office on Friday chillin’ with your lawyers? Didn’t think so! But Snoop was at Fenwick & West on Friday for an event for the firm’s client Ustream, The [...]

Here are today’s three burning legal questions, along with the answers provided by the blawgosphere. 1) Question: I’m in London and I’d like to take in a law-related musical. Any suggestions? Answer: Your top two law musicals in London this week are probably "Enron (the Play)" and "Legally Blonde: The Musical." Tough call, but maybe [...]

In an unusual example of judicial defiance, an on-his-way-out bankruptcy judge is siding with an out-of-work and deep-in-debt law grad and issuing a rebuke to the federal district judge who overruled him. "An irascible Massachusetts bankruptcy judge known for ‘whacking lenders’ has turned his acid pen upon the chief of the U.S. District Court of [...]

On the SpamNotes blog, Venkat Balasubramani makes an excellent observation about an "unfortunate" legal blogging trend. In his post this week entitled, "What Tibetan Goatherders Can Teach us About Lawyering," Balasubramani notes that bloggers increasingly "associate two totally random things that have no connection at all, and ask what one can teach the other (or [...]

The Legal Writing Blog and the Law Librarian Blog point out in these posts that the new Google Dictionary, which was quietly rolled out in December 2009, presents a formidable competitor not only for other Web dictionaries such as Answers.com, but also potentially to niche lexicons like Black’s Law Dictionary. Up until December, Answers.com was [...]

Earlier today, I recapped some of the fabulous Facebook follies of 2009, examples of how Facebook can be risky for lawyers, judges, law students and just about anyone else. Now comes our first folly of the new year. A Georgia judge is stepping down following publication of Facebook messages he exchanged with a woman who [...]

Remember the subpoena Chicago’s top prosecutor issued seeking records of students at Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school? We reported on it in October, when Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez asked professor David Protess, director of The Medill Innocence Project, to turn over students’ notes and recordings of witness interviews, as well as the students’ [...]

While we here at Legal Blog Watch were off holiday-ing, the ABA Journal wrapped up voting for readers’ favorites among its 2009 Blawg 100. Today, the ABA Journal editors posted the final results. In the technology category, the top vote-getter was TechnoLawyer Blog. But it is a tainted victory, at best. Two days before voting [...]