Reprinted with permission from Internet Search Advantage, ZD Journals. http://www.zdjournals.com
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Internet search engines are a supplement to, not a substitute for the databases you have come to rely on in your profession. In general, if you are a lawyer, trying to search for information about specific cases on the Internet at large is likely to be time-consuming and futile, because that kind of information is not typically made available for free or posted in plain HTML pages. The services that focus on that kind of information charge subscription fees and/or store their information in databases, which means the information is not indexed by public search sites. If you want information about a specific case, you are best off using the services you have always subscribed to, such as Lexis-Nexis http://www.lexis.com. They are in the business of gathering, categorizing, organizing legal information.
There are exceptions. For instance, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University University http://www.law.cornell.edu/index.html makes lots of good material available for free (including Supreme Court decisions) and much of it is indexed at AltaVista. But it would probably be simpler to go straight to that site and to some of the law-specific resources referenced there, rather than do general searches through the entire AltaVista index.
Lawcrawler, http://www.lawcrawler.com, provides a middle ground. Their site searches a subset of the AltaVista index -- only including pages that are directly related to law. They also have links to a number of related law-related sites.
But there are many instances when the information a lawyer needs is not specifically law-related. You may want to do background research on a specific subject or locate a person. In that case, using AltaVista to search the vast unstructured reaches of the Internet may help you uncover information that previously was inaccessible.
If the name is rare -- unusual name or unusual spelling -- also try AltaVista. First, in Simple Search, try the name is quotation marks (a phrase -- match these exact words in this exact order) and in lower case (match either upper or lower case), as "richard seltzer". If that doesn't work, then go to Advanced Search and try
firstname NEAR lastname
e.g., richard NEAR seltzer
That matches all instances of those two words within 10 words of one another and in any order. In other words, that would catch all the likely variants of a name such as
Seltzer, Richard
Richard W. Seltzer
Richard Warren Seltzer
If those techniques do not work for you and if you are not in an immediate rush, consider trying the "flypaper" approach (described in my article Flypaper: using AltaVista Search in reverse to let people find you ). Basically, create a Web page tailored to your search need. The HTML title of the page should consist of the name of the person you are trying to find, followed by anything known to be near and dear to this person (i.e., terms this person might conceivably search for). The first line of text should be the same as the HTML title. Those are the two factors that make the most difference in how a page is ranked in a list of matches.
After that, simply state why you want to find this person and how this person should get in touch with you. You don't need to have links to this page from anywhere. Simply post it on the Web, go to AltaVista, click on ADD URL, and at the bottom of the next screen enter the complete URL of the page you just created. Within a day or two that page should be in the index. You might want to also ADD URL at other popular search sites, such as Excite and HotBot. Then if this person ever does a search for him/herself, he or she will find your page. And, in fact, many people do use search engines to look for themselves.
This is not a sure-fire method, but it will work sometimes, uncovering individuals who otherwise would never be found.
Similarly, if you are trying to find witnesses or possible members of a class action suit, create Web pages calculated to maximize the chances that the people you want to find will find you -- putting likely search words in the HTML title and the first line of text, and clearly explaining who you are looking for and why.
And, of course, the same technique can and should be used to market your legal practice -- setting up your Web page in such a way that it will be likely to be found by people in your specialty in your locale. If you have access to lists of prospects -- perhaps members of an industry association related to a specialty of yours -- consider posting such a list on the Web. At the top of the document indicate what these people have in common and say, briefly, how you can help them, with links to your other Web-based content. Then perhaps offer to add email addresses and URLs to the list, if people want to send them in. And perhaps offer to host at your site discussions among these folks on topics of common interest (by way of forum and/or chat-style software).
Once again, ADD URL for this specific page at the major search engines Then people on that list, when they look for themselves may very well find your page and be motivated to contact you.
Keep in mind that not only does AltaVista Search run on the public Internet as a free service, but also there is a product sold by Digital Equipment which can run on private corporate intranets. The intranet version has been designed based on experience at the public site, which acts as an enormous test-bed for search technology. It has the same look and feel as the public service, but it is in many ways far more powerful. While the public site only indexes static HTML pages, the intranet version can handle over 200 different document types -- including Acrobat, PostScript, PowerPoint, and Word. With this software and a related software developer's kit, a large corporation could centrally index and make findable virtually all of its documents, including the text contents of its databases. For instance, Digital runs this on its corporate intranet and has indexed over a million documents.
Consider the implications of this capability for corporate law. Remember the IBM anti-trust case of the 1980s. In that day, for "discovery" IBM delivered truckload after truckload of paper documents, literally filling buildings with them; and it took long years for the court to try to sort through them all and make sense of them. Today, all major corporations have company-wide networks, and if they were to use software of this kind, it might be possible to find all the information relevant to a given case in a matter of hours, rather than years. This hasn't happened yet, but it's easy to imagine that a technology-savvy judge could order a company install such software of this kind, index all its documents, and give the court access to them on-line. This could be considered an essential element of the discovery process, and by balking at such a request a company would be demonstrating its unwillingness to cooperate with the court.
Go to Richard Seltzer's AltaVista Search tutorial
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