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New York Law Journal Launches NYLawyer.com

The New York Law Journal has a new Web site. NYLawyer.com <http://www.nylawyer.com/> features practicing law information and news to young lawyers with a free e-mail newsletter. Daily Buzz has issue
updates from the News Watch and future articles from New York Lawyer magazine. The site also features a byte of Brain Candy, daily Web columns, and links to additional sources.

NYLawyer.com also lists the state's 100 largest law offices, including recent mergers (so not all of the firms are in-state.) The list is provided in alphabetical order at http://www.nylawyer.com/az/. Clicking on the name of the firm gets you links to news and stories on the firm (if available) and information on how the firm ranked on several industry lists.

Computerworld Announces Online Resource Centers

IDG's Computerworld has announced its new Resource
Centers <http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/itresources> for its online users. The 14 Resource Centers, which range from ASPs/Outsourcing to Website Management, feature IT reports, such as white papers and market research, access to study courses and events through a training locator, and a directory of e-business providers.

In addition to the Resource Centers, the page <http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/itresources> also links to IT Research, Special pages, and Peer to Peer forums and communities. Search options are available for Computerworld and the RFP Center.

Survey Finder now Available on Salary.com

Salary.com has announced its "first professional compensation tool." The Survey Finder provides data sources and surveys for purchase, as well as an
opportunity to apply to participate in a compensation survey. 350 surveys from the United States and Canada are included in the Survey Finder, located at
http://surveyfinder.salary.com/.


Search using one or more options in the industry, geographic region, and employee population drop boxes. The results page will give you a list of surveys relevant to the options you have chosen. Click the checkboxes of the ones you want and click the "Show Profiles" button to see them, or click on individual survey titles. Profiles provide a summary of information about the survey, open and close date (some surveys are always open) and pricing information. All the surveys I looked at had "Contact sponsor" in the pricing information area.

On the left side of each profile there are two checkboxes. One is Apply to Participate (not all surveys are available for you to participate in) and one is Contact sponsor to purchase. If you click on one of those boxes and click on the Continue button beneath them, you'll get an extensive form to fill out, after which you will receive more information.

West Group Offers Online Continuing Ed

West Group offers a way to satisfy continuing legal education obligations from your desktop with its WestLegalEdcenter. The program guide lists 83 online
courses, some of which are live. Additional information about each course includes its date, provider and cost. State requirements are provided for all states plus the District of Columbia, and the list includes notations for those that do not have manadatory CLE requirements. The site has a search option, but does require registration.

State Alcohol Laws Database

The University of Minnesota has put together a database of state alcohol laws at <http://www.epi.umn.edu/enacted/> . Three drop-down menus allow you to specify a state, a category (from advertising to underage possession and consumption) and year of enaction.

The results page will give you a list of the bills with brief summaries of each (if you're looking for the results count, it's at the bottom.) Click on abbreviation of the bill's name and you'll get another page with the name of the bill, the number, the author, and the dates of enaction. You'll also get a brief summary and what looks like a timeline for the legislation of the bill. At the bottom of that page is another link, "Display full text in HTML" Click on THAT and you'll get the actual bill text in HTML. A notation at the top shows special annotations for added and deleted text, but I didn't see any added or deleted text in the bills I viewed.

Researchville Expands Its Newspaper Collection

Fill-in-the-blank engine Researchville <http://www.researchville.com> has added over 400 daily newspapers to its research site.

If you've used the site before, you know that you can apply a search to several engines at once and have the results open up in new windows. The newspaper links don't work that way. Instead, you pick a state from the drop-down menu on the left side of the screen. On the right side of the page a list of newspapers will appear. Above the list you'll see a query box. Enter your query in the query box and click Ok.

The page will refresh with your query above the list of newspapers. Click on a newspaper name and a search will be run on the query you entered. I know this sounds a little "around the elbow," but at least the site performs several queries at a time for you. Also, once you've entered a query it'll stay loaded if you choose newspapers from another state.

Not all newspaper archives are this easily searchable; some states have a "or re-type your query at" list of newspapers which can't accept the query from your query box. These need to be delineated a little bit more; I don't know if I'd bother to list them at all.

Acrobat Reader 5 Now Available

If you're into PDF files, you need to know about this. Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 is now available. You can get it from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

Among the improvements Adobe notes in this version are support for screen readers (Windows version only), better display of text on LCD screens, and the ability to save copies of files downloaded in Web browsers.