a California-centric collection of comments and resources about complex litigation and class action practice
Blawg Review #219 is up, and somehow manages to chronicle recent legal commentary from the blogosphere betwixt more information about rocker Huey Lewis than you could conceivably want. Or maybe it is conceivable. In any event, it's very creative and highly informative.
Learn more about this floating legal blog carnival at Blawg Review.
I am speaking at the Los Angles County Bar Association Solo & Small Firm Conference. Specifically, I am talking about social media as a marketing tool for attorneys. Go figure. Below is a fascinating widget that displays twitter tweets with the hashtag #solo09:
In the hectic rush to take care of my own blog, handle the obligations of work and family, and remember to get the trash out to the street each Monday night, I routinely forget to mention the wealth of information available through the increasingly rich blawgosphere. One very rich source is Blawg Review.
Blawg Review is a blog carnival. What is a blog carnival? A blog carnival is a blog-post that contains links to posts on other blogs. In addition, a blog carnival rotates editors. The rotation is the differentiator that makes a blog carnival different from a fixed link aggregation site. Blawg Review accomplishes this rotation by allowing a different blawg to host each weekly edition of Blawg Review. The weekly editions are all available through Blawg Review's home base site.
This week's edition of Blawg Review, Blawg Review #216, is now available at Family Lore.
After several weeks working on a new hosting service, a few comments are in order. First, the new appearance has changed what information is presented on each page. I decided to work with a 2-column format. It improves readability because text has more room to breathe. However, the cost of that change is a limitation of what can be included in sidebar areas.
Second, every post from the prior hosting service, TypePad, has been moved over. There are qualifiers to that statement. When posts were copied over, I found and corrected some errors where the tile of the post was replaced with other text. I think I fixed all of those instances, but I offer no guarantees. Similarly, some posting dates changed. I think I fixed those as well, but some may have fallen through the cracks. If you find a non sequitur in historical posts, either in the title or because of a data that makes no sense, excuse it as an error in the migration tools that I used.
Because SquareSpace is so flexible, I may tinker with formatting over time, so don't be surprised if parts of the blog's appearance change and then change back with no explanation. By the way, SquareSpace is more than a blog hosting platform. For smaller lawfirms looking at creating or updating a stale website, you could spend a few weeks using the free test account and see what you think.
Thanks for the support. Please enjoy the new home of The Complex Litigator.
Visit 3 Geeks and a Law Blog for a diverse list of "must read" posts of 2009 (so far, including a few of 2008's greatest hits). The Complex Litigator is thankful for the inclusion on that list. Most importantly, though, is the diversity of topics included on the list. If you haven't visited 3 Geeks and a Law Blog yet, it's worth you time to visit a site self-described as: "A law blog addressing the foci of 3 intrepid law geeks, specializing in their respective fields of knowledge management, internet marketing and library sciences, melding together to form the Dynamic Trio."
You can follow the authors Lisa Salazar, Greg Lambert, and Toby Brown on Twitter:
The FeedBurner RSS feed for The Complex Litigator is now supplied by the RSS feed for this blog at SquareSpace. If you are subscribed to the RSS feed from The Complex Litigator through FeedBurner, you should continue to receive a feed. If your feed has been disrupted (meaning, if I tinkered with something that I should have left untouched and broke something), the RSS subscription link in the right column will directly supply the feed to your preferred reader.
The prior registrar for www.thecomplexlitigator.com provided no user access to custom DNS settings. In advance of the move to SquareSpace for blog hosting, I am moving to a new registrar (although my old registrar seems determined to make that process as slow and painful as possible). When the registrar changes, I'll need to change domain name servers. That will cause a brief "outage" as the new information propogate through the top level domain name servers on the internet. Since my current registrar is being "jerky" (a legal term used to describe certain registrars), I may not be able to control the exact time of the transfer, but Monday or Tuesday looks most likely.
Once that switch is complete, I'll redirect traffic to SquareSpace on the weekend of May 16th. That switch will cause another brief outage (anywhere from hours to a day or two, depending upon how quickly your particular DNS server refreshes its data).
Over the weekend of May 16, 2009, the CNAME DNS record that points to this blog on the Typepad service will be revised to point at this blog on the SquareSpace service. I will post multiple warnings about the switch, with information about how RSS subscriptions will be affected and what to do in general terms to restore a feed to your preferred reader. The copy of the site is nearing completion and can be viewed at thecomplexlitigator.squarespace.com until the CNAME record is updated. There are a few hiccups left to iron out; a few posts were either mis-titled or mis-dated in the import process, but most of this blog has been copied over successfully. SquareSpace offers more design flexibility and the ability to expand the site in a number of interesting ways.
If you happen to read the UCL Practitioner with any regularity, you know that Kimberly Kralowec is as cool a customer as they come. That's why I pay careful attention when she let's loose in prose on any appellate decision touching on the UCL and related False Advertising Law. Her post earlier today on the recent Court of Appeal decision in Kwikset Corp. v. Superior Court (Benson) (Feb. 25, 2009) (Fourth Appellate District, Division Three) is the most critical commentary that I can recall reading (but that criticism is well-justified, I think). I've commented previously about my own concern that Division Three of the Fourth Appellate District has moved out of step with California's policies that favor consumer protection and resolution of issues with the class action device. But the most recent Kwikset decision is little more than judicial legislation. Be sure to check out what the UCL Practitioner has to say about Kwikset.
Compliments of @acrolaw on Twitter, I was directed to an excellent blog post entitled Making the Switch to Digital: Legal Research. The article, posted by Delaware Employment Law Blog, includes some good advice about getting the most out of your online research and information management with Adobe Acrobat 9. While I wouldn't necessarily implement all of the tips for myself, there is certainly some value in creating a pdf repository of authority used in research, particularly if you've ever considered creating a fully indexed e-brief. I've seen one such brief, with each citation linked to accompanying authority, and its a thing of beauty.
The Complex Litigator reports on developments in related areas of class action and complex litigation. It is a resource for legal professionals to use as a tool for examining different viewpoints related to changing legal precedent. H. Scott Leviant is the editor-in-chief and primary author of The Complex Litigator.
