In a blog post this afternoon, Google has announced that it will be making some changes to Buzz.

That’s good news.

In the future (“starting this week”), new users will be presented with clearer options. At some later time (“over the next couple weeks”), users whose privacy has already been compromised without their knowing might be [...]

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I received lots of feedback to yesterday’s post “Lawyers (or journalists) with Gmail accounts: Careful with the Google Buzz”. My focus was the privacy implication of Google automatically publishing the identity of people you have communicated with in the past.

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Do you use Gmail, even for personal mail? Do any of your clients use Gmail?

There was a pretty massive shift in your privacy a couple of days ago. You might not have noticed it. But unless you take a few steps to protect yourself, Google may be sharing some of your confidences [...]

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While we’re in the process of moving to electronic briefs, perhaps the time has come to rethink how we record trial court proceedings.

A recent post on CourTex raises that question and links to a report from a national court administration group that suggests digital recording for trials.

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“Human sacrifice, judges and lawyers ‘friends’ on Facebook… mass hysteria!”

The greatest source of terror that lawyers face online is not from spyware, malware, phishers, or scammers. It’s from well-meaning regulators trying to apply legal ethics rules to the online world.

When legal ethics commissions wade off into a new area of technology, they can make [...]

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For a few years, the Texas Supreme Court has made limited requests for PDF versions of briefs. The request was made only for those cases that were chosen for full merits briefing, after making it past the petition stage. Those PDFs proved useful to the Court, and the same PDFs were also made [...]

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I’ve written before about how to use Google’s normal search index to find unpublished opinions in Texas.

Google has now formally added legal opinions to another of its products — Google Scholar — promising new ways to research legal case law (and some legal journals, too).

This is something that I have been expecting to see from [...]

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There is a pending case in Louisiana that could become very significant for lawyer advertising in Texas. In Public Citizen, Inc., et al. v. Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board, et al. (E.D. La. Aug. 3, 2009), the court struck down parts of Louisiana’s rules about attorney advertising on the internet — including the requirement that [...]

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There was a really interesting recent thread on the Volokh Conspiracy about whether West or Lexis selling access to appellate briefs was copyright infringement.

Both sides have something to say. Once a brief is filed, it takes on a certain public character that may inform the fair-use analysis. On the other hand, West and [...]

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I came across a tweet talking about unpublished opinions in Texas and whether practitioners, to be safe, have to use Westlaw and Lexis to search for those opinions.

It cites a legal research blog post titled “Practioners Beware… Research on Westlaw / Lexis is a Necessity in Texas?”, which in turn discusses a St. Mary’s Law [...]

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This funny picture now appears on the Texas Supreme Court’s home page:

That’s the icon used to denote RSS feeds. And it quietly announces that the Texas Supreme Court has started publishing its own set of RSS feeds. A list of feeds and an explanation is here. One of those feeds is for [...]

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This blog often mentions the Texas Supreme Court’s new requests for full briefing on the merits, which, as court watchers know, can signal what issues are on the Court’s radar.

There is a new way to follow those requests and find cases that matter to you. In the blog’s left-hand sidebar is a list of [...]

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