Court Filings, Decisions and Legal Articles : JD Supra : Cases, Briefs, Documents, Forms

We are pleased to announce (for those of you who may have missed it) that The New York Times covered JD Supra and our contributors in an article entitled "Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource" in the Business section of yesterday's paper.

The article featured a great picture of JD Supra contributor Mitchell Matorin, as well as comments about the site and its benefits from Mitchell, Marc Stern, and Elena Garella. It brought lots of new visitors to the site, many of whom joined our growing community of contributors, sharing court filings, decisions, and articles on diverse subjects of use to all of us. (Keep an eye out for an upcoming roundup of new contributors and documents). 

As the Times article noted, JD Supra:

• helps people who want more background on a legal issue, or who would like to find and contact lawyers with expertise in a particular area;
  
• provides a resource of lawyers (who can search the database for work by other legal professionals involved in similar cases).

And, not surprisingly, yesterday many more visitors searched the JD Supra documents and profiles for information about the law and the people behind it. Not surprisingly, the contributors who have shared the most documents received the most exposure.

We are keenly aware that JD Supra is only as good as the lawyers who participate and the content they share. The many visitors who emailed us over the past 48 hours, clearly found the site useful and the content compelling.

For example, a company seeking a class action firm to file suit relating to the mortgage crises wrote:

"Thanks for setting up this service. It will certainly help all who need access to legal expertise and opinions"

Another, who was seeking an attorney for advice on changing his estate plan wrote:

"I want to find an attorney with a specialty in estate planning, but one I can first research on your database. Thank you."

And yet another wrote:

"This is very close to the best thing that can be done for the public and for clients and lawyers in the US."

So, from the entire team at JD Supra, please accept our most sincere THANK YOU to all of you who have crafted such professional profiles and shared your high quality work!

Greetings again from the floor of the ABA TechShow in Chicago, where earlier I had the pleasure of meeting Jordan Furlong, in his own words: "a lawyer and legal journalist specializing in law practice innovation, legal business trends, and the changing landscape of the legal profession." (He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Bar Association's magazine National; you can keep up with his blog at http://law21.ca.)

Look for an upcoming article he kindly wrote for us - for you, really - regarding ways to craft posts to JD Supra's "The Scoop" section specifically with journalists in mind. I hope Jordan doesn't mind me sharing this funny story: apparently when he arrived at the TechShow and saw the JD Supra logo on all of our name tags, he assumed they belonged to employees. "That person works at JD Supra," he thought. "And that person. And that person" And so on.

Took him a while to realize JD Supra had sponsored the lanyard. I am here, though, and I most certainly do work for JD Supra. Next year we'll have a booth. In the meantime, if you are hoping to meet for a tour of our service or just a conversation, please feel free to call me directly on my cell phone (415-209-4138).

And if the ABA sponsorship has brought you to JD Supra, I say: welcome, thanks for visiting! I know you don't work for us, but we most certainly can work for you. Please join us!

JD Supra is a proud sponsor of the ABA TechShow 2008.

It's going to be a great event. Aside from the all-star list of speakers and programs,  you won't want to miss the ABA TechShow After Dark on Thursday night, or Beer for Bloggers on Friday night. 

I'll be there. Shoot me an e-mail if you want to meet up; or find me in the crowd. From my JD Supra profile, here is what I look like:

See you at the show,
Aviva

Here is a brief roundup of some of the coverage we've seen since our launch earlier in the week. Thank you, editors, writers, bloggers, for starting conversations and spreading the good word. (For a comprehensive list of related links please see JD Supra's In the News page.)

- The Wall Street Journal Law Blog: "... JD Supra is a new site that allows lawyers of all stripes to post court docs, filings, articles, client alerts — anything relevant to a case, really — for others who are doing legal research. The homepage has a cool sidebar that keeps track of who’s contributing the most docs."

- ABA Law Journal: "... JD Supra also offers a free platform for attorneys and others involved in legal matters to market themselves and identify individuals with useful expertise. A search page allows them to look for relevant material by jurisdiction, subject matter and document type."

- National Post: "JD Supra launches the YouTube of law... Let the posting begin!"

- Justia Law, Technology, and Legal Marketing Blog: "... We are encouraging all of the law firms we work with to participate and share with JDSupra's law library. By working together we can help build a great new legal research library. This is a very nice start of a new free research service!"

- WisBlawg From the UW Law Library: "... It's not only that JD Supra is facilitating the sharing of legal content - there are other sites do that, like DocStoc or Scribd - but what makes it unique is that it is able to lend some authority to those documents by tying them to author profiles. As a librarian, I'm much more likely to rely on a source when I can verify the expertise of its author. [It's] quite ingenious actually."

- MyShingle.com: "... JD Supra gives solo and small firm lawyers a way to strut their stuff.  By posting documents, other lawyers can get a sense of what your work product is like.  And by uploading a document, you gain a listing in JD Supra , which is another way to gain visibility online."

One mention that generated an interesting conversation around the JD Supra virtual water cooler comes from LawyerKM: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms. The post - titled "Is JD Supra inter-law firm Knowledge Management?" - asks: "are any firms going to share the good stuff — the “intellectual capital” that really gives them the competitive advantage over the other firms out there?"

Two days into our launch and we're thrilled to see a question such as this one. We hope that this is not just the beginning of a worthwhile dialog about Knowledge Management but also the start of a conversation that goes to the very heart of it all: the way we value information today in the face of dramatic technological innovation (ie., web and internet and the technologies they bring forth).

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[Finally, taking a page from Tim Stanley's book (actually from the bottom of his Justia Law posting about JD Supra) here's what we're listening to today: Grateful Dead, live at Roscoe Maples Pavilion, Stanford University - Feb 9, 1973. Downloaded from the Internet Archive, streaming directly to our ears.]

I am thrilled to announce that, after a year and half in development, JD Supra – the free, online venue for the legal community to share its work - has finally launched!

Getting to this day has been fun and challenging. A venture into a new world. The best part of this experience has been meeting, working with, and getting to know, an entirely new community - programmers, designers, bloggers, web strategists and developers, who have overwhelmed me with their warmth, support, and advice (albeit sometimes unasked for).

Among the advice I received, was that we must have a JD Supra blog. Like many people, my first response was: “but I don’t have time to maintain a blog.” Thankfully, I called Kevin at LexBlog anyway.  With his help, I realized that, rather than simply a distraction from the work of JD Supra, this blog is a gift - an opportunity to continually experience, and stay in touch with, the passion that was my impetus for founding JD Supra.

That passion arises from my abiding belief that:

• “Great work in the law” happens everyday . . .
  
  . . . in artfully drafted pleadings, well-written briefs, hard won decisions, creative contracts, scholarly articles, and newsletters that keep our clients up-to-date on developments in the law that affect them;
  
  . . . in pro bono work for indigent clients and multi-million dollar transactions for international corporations;
  
  . . . in the passion and creativity that a new attorney brings to a brief, and in a seasoned attorney’s application of foresight and experience to a complex transaction;
  
  . . . in the cases we win and in the cases we lose; in the transactions we facilitate and in the litigation we help our clients avoid altogether.
   
  
• This work should be freely accessible to everyone because it has incredible value beyond the confines of a particular case and its parties; and
   
• This work should be accessible in a way that gives the lawyers behind it the recognition and exposure they deserve.
  

JD Scoop is our opportunity to highlight some of the great work that lawyers are doing, and sharing on JD Supra, as well as to hear, and respond to, questions and comments from JD Supra users. So, please share your great work on JD Supra; tell us about your scoop, so we can feature it on our blog; and share your questions and thoughts so that we can improve JD Supra for you.