Judges are realizing that jury instructions & court rules may have to be amended to take the most recent technological craze into consideration. The New York Times and the Associated Press published interesting articles yesterday on this phenomenon, commenting on the number of mistrials resulting from juror's use of Twitter and Facebook.  

For more information on Jury Instructions and Court Rules, check out our Research Guides on both topics.

In a new article on LLRX.com entitled "Collaboration through Wikis at Hicks Morley," author Heather Colman discusses how her law firm started using wikis to collaborate and share their work product.  The article includes an overview of the decisions made by the firm throughout the process of development as well as a series of recommendations for the successful implementation of wikis.  Also, it is worth noting that one need not be a company to find wikis useful.  Even small groups who are trying to collaborate on one or more projects can use wikis to better centralize their work product.  Click here to see the full text of the article.

LexisNexis has introduced Lexis Web, a free way (at least as long as the search engine is in beta format) to search the web for legal authority and content.  Lexis Web is a legal-specific search engine that provides access to free web content.  According to the company, all results come from legal sites vetted by LexisNexis attorney editors.  Some example types of sites included in the search results include legal blogs, news, advocacy organizations, think tanks, court websites and government websites.

The search engine also allows users to filter and navigate their results using a left navigation frame and limit results by such factors as geography, company or individual name, or citations to specific cases.  Results can also be augmented by subscribed content available on Lexis (for users who have subscriptions to Lexis).

A free Reference Guide to using Lexis Web is available as a pdf file.  Try it out when searching the free web for legal information and post comments here about what you think.

Is there any way to reach the 1 trillion or so pages of information on the World Wide Web that cannot be found by current search engines (the so-called "deep web")?  In a new article on LLRX entitled "Deep Web Research 2009," Marcus P. Zillman seeks to provide a guide for researchers that encourages both a better understanding of the deep web and better ways to search it.  There are links to relevant articles on the deep web as well as search tools and other research resources.

ABA Journal has published its second annual list of the 100 best law blogs. All of the blogs chosen are updated at least once a week and are divided into categories like News & Politics, Practice/Career Management, and Legal Theory. There is even a category for blogs written by current law students.

You can also vote for your favorite law blogs between now and January 2nd.

CiteGenie, a new extension for the Firefox browser, promises to make the Bluebooking process easier and faster, at least when using Westlaw. LLRX has a review of the product and its features, and you can download the extension at citegenie.com.

Remember that tools like this are not foolproof (we've already found some problems with CiteGenie) and that law students and lawyers still need to learn and understand how to use the Bluebook.

The Christian Science Montior announced today that it will "become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily edition with its website".  The Bluebook is adjusting to these new publication trends with Rule 18.2 providing guidance on how to cite to Internet publications.

For further guidance on the Library's newspaper collection, see our Research Guide on Finding Newspaper Articles.

According to Google, a settlement has been reached in the class action lawsuit filed against Google Book Search by a series of authors and publishers, including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.  For more information, click here to access Google's announcement, including information on how Google Book Search will change based on the settlement agreement.  The agreement must still be approved and finalized by the Court.

You can read more about the lawsuit and the settlement in the Guardian's article "Google Settles Dispute Over Online Books" and in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article in their Wired Campus section.

As noted in the Law Librarian Blog earlier this week, Lee Peoples has posted an abstract of a new working paper entitled The Citation of Wikipedia in American Judicial Opinions (SSRN).  According to the abstract, the paper is based upon the finding that Wikipedia has been cited almost 300 times in American judicial opinions as of September 2008, and the citations are not limited to mundane references to everyday facts.

Wow.  That's pretty scary.

According to the abstract, the article will explore the impact of citations to Wikipedia in judicial opinions on the law of evidence, judicial ethics, the judicial role in the common law adversarial system, the de-legalization of American law, and the future of stare decisis.

07/30/2008 update: The reviews are in, and they aren't too favorable. See TechSmith's article, How to Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds after Launch.

07/29/2008:

Ex-Google employee Anna Patterson has started her own search engine, Cuil. According to CNN, Patterson sold important search technology to Google in 2004, but has no interest in selling Cuil. She believes the new search engine indexes more web pages than Google does, but Google disputes this. Unquestionably, Cuil's presentation of search results, which utilizes a magazine-like multicolumn layout, is very different from Google's.