Random Jottings

Some new stories from around the world:

Honey – I forgot to renew the domain name

That’s the story out of a free public website in Massachusetts: The site provides the public with online copies of opinions from both the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. C. Clifford Allen head of the SJC’s Reporter of Decisions office woke up to find that his website was gone and that a notice — “massreports.com expired on 11/08/2010 and is pending renewal or deletion” – was substituted.

If they did send a (renewal) notice, it must have been caught in the spam filter. We are dealing with it as we speak.

Allen said the site gets 750,000 hits per year and that 7,000 people subscribe to a daily e-mail with links to the opinions of that day.

Wolters-Kluwer buys a bit of Lexis

Lexis has yielded the German market to Wolters-Kluwer. The German annual sales are estimated at between 40 and 50 million euros. Wolters Kluwer Germany Chief Executive Ulrich Hermann said “This acquisition is an important milestone to establish Wolters Kluwer as a comprehensive and efficient online service provider for legal information in Germany”. Wolters Kluwer said the transaction was subject to regulatory approvals and was expected to close around the end of the year.

Jammies, Juice and Judges

In St Charles Illinois, the Kane Law Library has sponsored “Family Reading Night with the Judges” in which three judges will share their favorite bedtime stories. The program, for kids in second grade and younger will feature cookies and punch. Pajamas can be worn and kids can tour courtrooms and meet judges.

Can’t get them into law libraries too young

Crunching Numbers in Legal Research

Dalloz’s parent Les Editions Lefebvre Sarrut in Neuilly has announced an interesting partnership with Temis to build Jurisprudence Chiffrée,” a Web-based application enabling lawyers and other legal researchers to gain immediate insights by visualizing relevant quantitative data from decisions handed down by 35 different Courts of Appeal across France.

« Les arrêts de jurisprudence des trente-cinq Cours d’Appel françaises drainent des centaines de milliers de données : indemnités de licenciement, montant des préjudices subis en cas d’accidents du travail ou de la circulation, indemnités d’éviction ou d’occupation, montant des loyers en cas de renouvellement d’un bail commercial, montant des prestations compensatoires en matière de divorce… Autant de chiffres que de cas, mis aujourd’hui à la portée des professionnels et directement utilisables. »

You can look at the service on three different websites.

Caselaw in numbers sound interesting. Common lawyers haven’t done enough to mine our legal databases for such data.