Personal Injury and Social Security Disability Blog

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

This story is from England, but there's no reason it couldn't happen in the United States. A judge has authorized a plaintiff in a commercial lawsuit to serve one of the defendants via Facebook!

The lawsuit involves a dispute between investment managers and a brokerage firm accused of overcharging the investment managers. One of the defendants was proving difficult to locate. The plaintiffs weren't certain of his last known address, and had no easy way to find him. However, the plaintiffs had been monitoring the defendant's Facebook account, and noticed he had just added two "friends" there.

I guess the moral to the story is that if you're trying to hide, be sure you don't make new friends.

 

Featured Link - DownForEveryoneOrJustMe

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe is a little Web site does only one thing, but it's come in handy for me. Have you ever tried to visit aWeb site and gotten a 404 error? Don't you wonder whether the site is really down or if it's a problem on your end? This site will tell you. Check it out.

Featured Link - Calendar-365.com

Calendar-365.com is a simple site that just has calendars. But the site makes it easy to move backward or forward to other years so you can check what day of the week a particular date fell on. Another handy feature is that you can click on a holiday in 2010 and see when that holiday will occur in future years. This is certainly helpful for a "floating" holiday such as Easter, but I love it because I can never do the math to figure out what day of the week Christmas or Halloween will be on next year.

Tips to Keep Kids Safe Online

These computer safety tips are adapted from a publication by the Texas Young Lawyers Association:

• Keep computers in a common area of the home so you can monitor your child’s online activities.
• Encourage your child to use a nickname rather than his or her real name when online.
• Tell your child to be careful when posing for pictures or videos.
• Remind your children that anything they post can potentially be viewed by millions of people.
• Teach your child to think about what he or she is posting before doing so.
• Tell your child it’s never okay to meet someone he or she has met only online.
• Teach your children to keep identifying information about themselves and photos off of their blogs and social networking profiles.
• Learn about the social networking sites your child uses; if he or she has a MySpace page, learn how to use MySpace.
• Teach your children to set their personal settings on social networking sites to “private” and make sure they “friend” you.
• Be engaged, and communicate with your child; let him or her know that you will check the computer history and text messages or even Google their names.
• Tell your child to keep passwords secret. Watch your child for signs of cyber-bullying.
• If your child is being cyber-bullied, save all evidence, including e-mails and text messages.
• Tell your children to talk to an adult if they are being cyber-bullied.
• Remind your children to treat others the way they would like to be treated.
• If your child knows someone who is being cyber-bullied, encourage him or her to reach out and help that person.
• Teach your child not to forward photos that may be embarrassing or hurtful to others.
• Talk with your child and create a relationship of trust.

Featured Link — Pipl.com

Pipl.com is a search engine limited to finding people. It works exactly as you would expect. You enter a name and any other information you have, and you get page after page of possible links to that person. The link categories include the following:

• Contact Details
• Background Reports
• Personal Profiles
• Professional and Business
• E-mail Address
• Publications
• Public Records, and more

Legal Research On a Shoestring Budget

In a recent post by Anurag Acharya on the Official Google Blog, anyone can now find federal and state court case opinions with Google Scholar. By entering either party names or topic (for example, disability) you can now search for the full text of legal opinions and articles. And it’s free!

According to Acharya’s post, this addition to Google Scholar will allow the average citizen to:

∙ be empowered by helping them learn more about the laws that govern us all;
∙ understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions by exploring citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages; and
∙ learn about the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.

We are grateful to the Google Blog for making everyone aware of this new feature. The following individuals are to be thanked as well for their efforts in making these legal resources available through Google: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), and Tim Wu (AltLaw).

Since we practice Social Security Disability law in Texas, which is in the Fifth Circuit, we gave the Google Scholar a test. We entered the following search terms: “treating physician fifth circuit”

This search pulled up the important Fifth Circuit case from the year 2000 where the court set out, in Newton v. Apfel 209 F.3d 448 (5th Cir. 2000), the rules that govern how the Social Security Administration assigns weight to medical opinions and treating physician opinions.

Featured Link - Google Maps Gadgets

It's really just astounding how many add-on applications people have dreamed up for Google Maps. You'll find a big directory of them at the Google Maps site.

Featured Link - Tweetake.com

Do you use Twitter a lot? Do you worry about losing a record of your friends and fans, and your old tweets? You can back up all that at Tweetake.com. It's very simple to do, and dumps everything into a spreadsheet file.

Featured Link - ZabaSearch.com

ZabaSearch is another of the many new search engines in the Internet. This one specializes in people searches and has a few feature Google doesn't. It's free, so take a look. Here's their one-paragraph description:

Telephone Numbers and Addresses Revealed Free. No Registration Required. Instant Results. Three Times More Residential Listings than White Pages Phone Directory

Featured Link - Readability

Do you read a lot of articles on the Internet? If so, you're going to love this nifty tool. Readability is a Web browser plug-in that you add to your links toolbar. When you find a long article you want to read, just click on the Readability icon and suddenly everyone on the page disappears except the article, and the article is nicely formatted for ease of reading. The style and size of the text is customizable. It's a really helpful little tool. Check it out.