A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a CLE on the use of technology in trial preparation.  At the time, I had just finished a trial where the complaining witness had a website, which I found and used to emasculate his perjurious testimony.  It was a great cross-examination, if I do say so myself.

That made me competent to talk about the subject back then.  In retrospect, the idea of an old codger like me (meaning anyone over 30) talking about technology is laughable.  Today, if you haven’t tried any of the tech ideas that appeared online in the past 30 minutes, you’re out of date.  I am, regretfully, out of date.

Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer Jamie Spencer is busily keeping codgers like abreast of new developments, which has the terrible side-affect of preventing him from finishing many of his blawg posts.  One of the things he’s found is this website,

Felonspy.com – You need to know who your neighbors are. Especially if they’re dangerous criminals

Unbelievable!  Put in an address and this website will tell you all the felons in the neighborhood.  What an incredible thing this is.  Not.  It turns out that it’s just a scam.  My “felons” turned out to be the exact same as Jamie’s “felons”, and I happen to know that nobody by the name of “Vincent May” lives in the same house as Abby Rockefeller.

Compare this to Gideon’s discussion of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.  Gid, a self-proclaimed techno geek (not something that one would openly admit in my day) talks about how useful it is to be able to sit at one’s desk and “see” a crime scene in order to understand police reports, road layouts and such.  I’ve often used Google Earth for the same purpose. 

These are not only real tools, but incredibly useful ones to be capable of accomplishing things that would take us half a day, and usually require us to go back a couple more times, in the old days.  In fact, I find that I get a more useful view from these photos, since they can provide a broader image of an area than one can see in person, than visiting the scene itself.

The point is that there is incredibly good and useful stuff available now that codgers like me never dreamed of, and complete crap that might serve to trap the unwary, and if relied upon, make one appear quite properly a fool.  It’s understandable that every twenty-something, or younger, wants to create the new, greatest website phenom.  A handful have become billionaires this way, and a lot more have become relatively rich.  As the philosopher Tevye said, it’s no crime to be rich.

But we have become inundated with techno miracles.  Even the really good stuff, like the competing “Earths”, leave us in a quandary.  Why two competing versions?  Which is better and why?  And most importantly, how do we find the time to figure it out?

From the great mass of unwashed lawyers side, there are too many miracles appearing to keep track.  I try my darndest to follow, and I can’t.  And in the mix of lawyers over 30, I’m considered quite techno-savvy.  I even have a blawg!  I must know something, right?

While many lawyers come here to read Simple Justice (and I thank each and every one of you), the vast majority have never read a blawg in the life.  As I stumble across new blawgs daily, I’ve come to the realization that my RSS feeder is already overloaded with far more than I can read.  It’s not that new blawgs are unworthy, but that it takes time that I just don’t have.

I’ve hit the wall.  The internet may be limitless, but the real world is not. 

There’s a folder on my browser with all the new-fangled legal websites that provide information, caselaw, searches, investigative tools, you name it.  It’s got so much stuff in it that I can’t find anything when I need it.  I look at the names of the websites and I can’t remember what they do or why I put them into the folder. 

Many call themselves by strange names, non-words that constitute “hard trademark” fodder like google and yahoo!.  That used to be cute.  Now it’s just unhelpful.  Give me a name like “Find 2nd Circuit Decisions” so I’ll have some clue when I look at it in the future what it does.

But the problem is exacerbated by the daily hourly minute second nano-second growth of new websites with ever-greater, newer, more novel ideas.  And then toss the scam websites in to really gum up the works.  We’re way overloaded.  Who can blame that great mass of lawyers who, unlike me and Gid and Jamie, aren’t totally techno-savvy, for concluding that there is no way they are going to jump into the middle of the internet now and figure out what’s good and bad.  It’s overwhelming.  It makes my head spin.  It gives me a headache.  No, that’s the red wine. Sorry.

This gives me an idea.  Someone should create a website and call it something like “Legal Source.”  It should scour the internet for every tool, blawg, database, whatever, that could possibly serve the needs of lawyers, and then categorize them so that if you need something, you can find it.  It should distinguish the real from the scam, and then rate them on utility, accuracy, reliability, cost. 

Instead of each lawyer googling to try to find out if there’s something out there to use to locate “Joe Blow” and figure out if he a lying skel, we could just go to Legal Source and see everything that’s available and which would be best to use.  This website could update it’s sources every quarter second to make sure it’s up-to-date, particularly since whoever runs this website has nothing else to do and no actual life.  He or she would live to serve lawyers.  Oh, what a wonderful cyberworld it would be.

This isn’t a bad idea at all.  It probably already exists and I just don’t know about it yet.  I haven’t got the time to look.  I told you I hit the wall.

Twitter Version:  2 many websites; need new one 2 aggregate.  Sleepy.