Browning, The Lawyer’s Guide to Social Networking

John G. Browning, Esq. of Thompson Coe has published The Lawyer’s Guide to Social Networking: Understanding Social Media’s Impact on the Law (Thomson Reuters West 2010). Here is a summary:

This product provides a comprehensive look at how social media is affecting the legal system. It examines the myriad ways in which information from sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is being put to use in everything from criminal and family law matters to personal injury, employment, and commercial cases nationwide. The author illustrates how the pervasive social networking phenomenon is redefining traditional notions of jurisdiction, duty, service of process, and legal ethics while using actual trial- and appellate-level cases to analyze the discoverability and admissibility of social media evidence.

Debate on Free Access to Law

[NOTE: Updated on 10 November 2010 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?. Updated on 8 November 2009 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled The West Video and the Free Market. Updated on 4 November 2009 to link to Professor Berring's Nov. 3 reply, on sLaw.]

An interesting debate over free access to law is now occurring in the legal blogosphere.

Thomson Reuters, owners of West Publishing, a major U.S. legal publisher, and the Westlaw computer assisted legal research (CALR) service, recently published video comments about the free access to law movement by Professor Robert Berring of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and a well respected expert on legal research. In the video Professor Berring praises the free access to law movement for increasing competition in the CALR market and compelling Westlaw and its main rival in the U.S. market, Lexis.com, to innovate. Yet Professor Berring also criticizes the free access to law movement as fleeting, and as providing insufficient metadata to enable high quality legal research.

This week Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, responded to Professor Berring’s comments, on the sLaw blog, and yesterday Professor Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, published his response on his B-Screeds blog.

Ed Walters, Esq., CEO of Fastcase, Inc., has offered to convene a meeting of the participants of this debate.

On November 3, Professor Berring posted a reply, on sLaw.

On November 8, Professor Bruce responded with a post entitled The West Video and the Free Market.

On November 10, Professor Bruce responded again with a post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?.

Those interested in digital legal information or public access to legal information may find this debate particularly informative and timely.

HT @caminick for tweeting Prof. Poulin’s post.