Law News
Today I used Google to find a few law news sites to review. Overall they were somewhat difficult to navigate and not very professional looking. However, they had some great content for people trying to stay up on law news.
Legal Times
The Legal Times paid for a spot at the top of Google's list so I visited there first.
It contains several sections:
- Legal Busines (Recent News, Inadmissible, Calendar of Events)
- National (Recent News)
- Court Watch (Recent News, Recent Decisions, Supreme Court, Verdicts)
- In-House Counsel (Recent News)
- Points of View (Recent Commentary, Letters to the Editor)
- After Hours (Recent Features)
There are also special reports and Pratice Focuses. The main page has links to the above sections on the left, a column of the top stories of the day (with brief abstracts), and a list of law.com services on the right. The layout is a little busy, but you can still find many things it offers. There is also a site search option and several links at the top directing you to other areas of possible interest.
After looking at the sections in closer detail I found that there is only one Legal Business article published per day. Also you must subscribe to read many of the past articles. There is approximently one National article published per week and again many of them are not available without a subscription. Courtwatch seemly be published as necessary- there are sometime multiple articles published a day or weeks between articles. The Recent Decisions section of it contains abstracts that give enough information to know the outcome, but none of them are available in further detail without a subscription. In-House Counsel is published monthly but doesn't provide many details without a subscription. The Recent Commentary in Points of View is not available without a subscription and nonsubscribers can't even see the subjects of letters to the editor. After Hours is also only available with a subscription and is updated monthly.
This looks like it might be a great resource for subscribers. However, for someone looking for free updates this is not a great option.
Legal Times. January 2006. 15 January 2006.
Law Fuel
At first glance Law Fuel appears to have a better layout. There are only three columns (instead of the four Legal Times had). The first column contains links to News Headlines, Press Releases, Articles, Resources, Jobs, and some advertisements. The center column is the widesst and contains articles titles with their source and abstracts of the articles. The third column is narrow and contains google advertisements. There is a scrolling marquee at the top of the page with titles that are linked to their articles. The articles are linked to a summary which is also linked to the full article on the source's website. You can register with the website for free, but registration is not necessary to access most of the articles.
Law Fuel. January 2006. 15 January 2006.
Find Law News
The layout is not very professional looking. The main column starts with the date and Top Legal Headlines. There are several article titles with one sentence summaries. The articles listed here are all available for free without registration at the webpage. There are also US Law, Special Coverage, International, Entertainment, and Sports categories. All of which contain articles with a legal nature. All of these articles are available for free. However, the format of the articles is not very appealing. Most of the articles are very short and do not contain very many details.
I was most impressed with Law Fuel. I would recommend it to anyone trying to stay up-to-date on legal news. It is free and visually appealing.
Find Law News. January 2006. 15 January 2006.
3 Comments:
Are you going to explore the universe of Lexis Nexis? If you could wade through that system for prospective law students and point them toward useful portions to read on a regular basis, that would be very useful. They might as well take advantage of it while they have free (thru the University) access.
nice start!
Justin Notter Says.....
This post is interesting. The first site review is kind of confusing, but comprehensive.You might consider scaling down the amount of information because it seems to make the viewer want to sprawl it kind of distorts your information.Still, great job very impressive you seem to be developing a strong pre-law vernacular.
Adam Jackson says...
This is a very detailed and organized blog entry that gives the reader a clear picture of what each of the websites offers.
The only suggestion that i have would be to give a more informative opening paragraph so the reader knows what they are about to read. Almost like an overall view of the websites mentioned in the entry. Like "these are a few great law websites...or the state of law websites is pretty dim."
Adam
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