Personal Injury and Social Security Disability Blog

Featured Link - Public Library Of Law

The Public Library of Law bills itself as the world's largest free law library. For lawyers on a budget, or motivated non-lawyers, it's a great resource. Here's the site's description:

Searching the Web is easy. Why should searching the law be any different? That's why Fastcase has created the Public Library of Law -- to make it easy to find the law online. PLoL is the largest free law library in the world, because we assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites -- all in one place. PLoL is the best starting place to find law on the Web.

What is available on PLoL?

• Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
• Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
• Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
• Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more!

PLoL also includes free links to paid content on Fastcase. PLoL is already the Web's largest free law library, but with additional links from Fastcase, it is one of the most comprehensive law libraries in the world.

Featured Link - SearchSystems.net

SearchSystems.net is a great collection of searchable databases. You can get access to many of them for free, but for less than $50 per year you can have full access to more than 40,000 searchable databases that contain tons of information about you that you thought was private.

This site can be a great help to lawyers who represent personal injury clients and Social Security disability claimants and who need to locate or verify personal information about either our own clients or about defendants and witnesses. Here is a statement from the site:

Welcome to Search Systems - the original, largest, most up-to-date and reliable directory of public records and best resource for background checks and criminal records on the Internet. Online since 1997 and ranked Number One for public records since 2001, SearchSystems.net continues to be by far the best resource of business information, corporate filings, property records, deeds, mortgages, criminal and civil court filings, inmates, offenders, births, deaths, marriages, unclaimed property, professional licenses, and much more. Easy access to billions of records!

Browse the site, then Sign up for DirectPass to access our directory AND get discounts on our Premium database of over 300 million state, national, and international criminal records (the largest on the Internet), and a database of over 100 million bankruptcies, judgments, and tax liens.

Now over 41,212 Searchable Public Record Databases!

Featured Link - Find Out If Someone Has Died

Whether you're trying to locate a defendant in a personal injury claim or just curious about a long-lost acquaintance, sometimes you might wonder if the person has passed away. I've written before about the very helpful Social Security Death Index. Now a fellow member of the Dallas Trial Lawyers Association has reminded me about Legacy.com. This Web site allows you to search the obituary notices of many newspapers and determine if your "person of interest" has died recently.

Link of the Day - A Really Fast Online Dictionary

NinjaWords.com is a Web site that does only one thing, but does it really fast. If you need a quick definition for an unfamiliar word, check it out.

Link of the Day - Google Guides

Many thanks to my friend Jim Calloway for his alert about the nifty Google Guides, especially the two-page Google Cheat Sheet and the Google Calculator Cheat Sheet. Thanks Jim!

Ask.com Gives Option Of Deleting Your Search History

The Dallas Morning News reports today that the search engine Ask.com is allowing people to delete their search history at that site. The new policy, called SearchEraser is due to debut today.

The article points out that Google and Microsoft retain search histories for 18 months, and AOL and Yahoo retain them for 13 months.

The only drawback to this new policy is that because Ask relies on Google to deliver many of the text-based ad links on its pages, some information about search requests and clicks will still end up on Google's computers even when AskEraser is turned on.

Link of the Day - Time And Date Calculators

When representing our personal injury clients and Social Security disability claimants, we frequently need to do date calculations -- whether to know the deadline for appealing a Social Security disability denial, or to learn the last date a defendant can respond to a discovery request.

But you don't have to be a lawyer to need date calculations, and now there's a Web site that will do the calculations for you. TimeAndDate.com has calculators for the duration between two dates, and also for the time expired since a particular date. (Use that one to see how many days have elapsed since you were born.)

Link of the Day - Traffic Cameras Around The World

TrafficLand.com is a site that indexes traffic cameras from all around the world. I'm sure there are many useful reasons to visit this site, but it's also pretty interesting just to see the great variety of roadway and landscape images available here. You can skip from a view of Columbus Circle in New York City to the Gold Coast Highway in Brisbane, Australia with a few mouse clicks. Here's the TrafficLand story:

TrafficLand launched its public website on Monday, September 10, 2001, feeding video from 32 roadside cameras in Northern Virginia. The tragic events of the next day immediately made TrafficLand.com an invaluable tool for area residents seeking to evacuate the city after the attack on the Pentagon and local media seeking reliable information about ground conditions. The one day old TrafficLand public website met the challenge. The company has since built a record of success in each of its market segments and today provides live video from thousands of cameras worldwide.

The TrafficLand public website and its subscription services help the driving public avoid traffic congestion with online services that provide access to live traffic views from desktop computers and web-enabled cell phones and PDAs. TrafficLand.com users can select and see live traffic views from thousands of public cameras from around the world. The free service uses interactive traffic maps to display available traffic cameras and simple point-and-click navigation to launch live traffic video.

Link of the Day - Draze.com

Another interesting Google alternative is Draze. Craze searches across Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and combines the results for you. One of the interesting features is what they call Peek-a-Boo, which lets you view the entire Web page of your search result without leaving the Draze list. So you can go through all your search results and see the pages found without ever leaving the results page. It's a nice feature -- take a look at it.

Link of the Day - Journal Of The American Bar Association

I've been a member of the American bar Association pretty much since I began practicing, and I recommend it to all lawyers, even though the emphasis of the organization is definitely not on personal injury clients and Social Security disability claimants.

The Web site of the Journal of the American Bar Association provides a wealth of information on many legal topics, including law office management.