Author: Ken Chan

Categories
personal injury

Top Poultry Marketing Slogans

The Washington Post reported that federal health officials have authorized the release of chickens for slaughter and sale that had consumed small amounts of contaminated bird feed. These chickens had dined on the same substance—melamine—that had sickened and killed dogs and cats across the nation in recent weeks. You can read the U.S. Department of Agriculture Fact Sheet: Melamine and Analogues Safety/Risk Assessment.

There is very low risk to humans from eating pork, chicken and eggs from animals fed animal feed supplemented with pet food scraps that contained melamine and related compounds, according to an assessment by federal scientists.

Here are some marketing slogans to help the poultry industry kick off their chicken sales:It still tastes like chicken.Now, with Melamine.Melamine? Make it mine.Of course, the bureaucratic solution is to run some formula to quantify the risk that the consumption of adulterated chicken meat poses to human health. But, the feds and the poultry industry are missing out on the big picture if they decide to release the chickens for human consumption because I for one will not be consuming any chicken for the foreseeable future until I’m fairly certain that these adulterated chickens have already passed through the system. These chickens are already tainted. If the poultry industry doesn’t dispose of them, then it will taint all chicken products on the shelf because I am 100% certain that supermarkets will not be affixing a melamine sticker to packages of adulterated chicken so that the general public can distinguish between safe chicken and low-risk chicken.

Categories
Legal Research Technology

YouTube and the Billable Hour

youtube.jpgHave you ever billed a client for watching videos on YouTube? If this sounds too preposterous, consider this blog post from David Swanner, a South Carolina personal injury lawyer. David Swanner reports that his client was waiting to turn left at an intersection when a car driving in the opposite direction spun-out and struck the client’s car. In this case, the collision was caught on video and posted on YouTube. You can find the videos as well as David Swanner’s write-up at his South Carolina Trial Law Blog.

Categories
Technology

Free Law and Business Classes

If you’re legal career took some unexpected detours and you’re wishing that you had taken that intellectual property class, it’s not too late. The MIT Sloan School of Management is offering some free online courses, including a few legal-oriented ones, such as Patents, Copyrights, and the Law of Intellectual Property. Or, if you are working as corporate counsel and believe that a strong business background would improve your position within the company, those MIT OpenCourseWare offers those classes as well, such as International Management, Building and Leading Effective Teams, and Managing Innovation.

Categories
legal marketing

Florida Bar Inspired by Amazon.com

1-click.jpgKevin O’Keefe points out that the Florida Bar took four years to propose a new rule regulating attorney web sites. Of course, we’re only hearing about this rule from a news article, so the actual text of the rule may differ. But, seriously, four years of brainstorming and the best they can come up with is 1-click?From the Orlando Business Journal:

Website Rule 4-7.6 would allow lawyers to advertise their past results and statement characteristics concerning the quality of legal services through testimonials on Web pages that are just one click past the homepage.

Now, lawyers being lawyers, we really need to see if the Florida Bar also defined “advertise their past results” and “homepage,” assuming this is how the proposed rule is worded.

  • Advertise Their Past Results. If you’re thinking this rule only applies to personal injury lawyers that list the millions of dollars that they have recovered for their clients, think again. Take a look at White & Case, which incidentally has a Miami office. Their “homepage” includes a news column which currently includes the following bullet points: (1) Bridgepoint in £360 Million LBO of Fat Face and (2) First Ever Public RMBS Securitisation by Ukrainian Bank. Sure, this isn’t exactly “$10 Million for SUV Rollover,” but isn’t this an advertisement of their past results or are press releases different. Because, I’m sure the personal injury attorney could just as well add a new column that includes press releases of their verdicts and settlements. Not so clear cut now, eh?
  • Homepage. I want to see how the Florida Bar defines a homepage. Is it the web page that is labeled “home”? Or, is it the first “web page” that you see when you type in a domain name? What if a law firm initially displays one of those Flash graphics with text zooming back and forth, which prompts you to click to enter? Is that the “homepage”? What if your website has one or more sub-domains? Is each sub-domain an individual website with their own “homepage”? Probably the most pointless part of the 1-click rule is that people “Google” now instead of “Yahoo.” Instead of a web directory taking you to the “homepage,” a search engine takes you to the most relevant page for your search query. So, even if your testimonials are “1-click” from the “homepage,” Google might take you directly to a testimonial page, completely bypassing the “homepage.” What’s the point of the rule then?
Categories
Legal Research

US Tax Court Opinions

We’ve added US Tax Court Opinions to our legal research collection. Give the Googlebot a few days to index the opinions and soon they’ll be searchable via Google.

Categories
legal marketing

Forget Link Trading. Just Put Up Free Case Law Online.

I receive e-mails to trade links all the time. Usually, these e-mails are from people I’ve never heard of telling me about websites that I’ve never visited before. I just assume that the names are all fake and are sent in bulk to e-mail addresses harvested from around the web. Today, Seth Godin blogged that he received such an e-mail from a well-known company. A very well-known one, especially if you are a lawyer or conduct a lot of legal research. This company is none other than Reed Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis. Just put all your case law online for free and everyone will be more than willing to link to you. Seriously. 🙂

Categories
consumer law

Cancel My Order

Many companies allow their customers to place an order online, but if you ever try to cancel an order, good luck. To them, the Internet is an easy way to take your money. Want to cancel? Well, that’s what waiting on hold over the telephone is for. And that’s a shame. To wait on hold for 15 minutes and then have some customer service representative tell me how he will solve my problems and try to sell additional services is simply a waste of time. Believe me, no one is buying at that point. And, if they subjected new customers to that treatment, no one would ever buy.Before I pay another dime to some subscription service or an untested vendor, I am going to call them by telephone first to see what response I will get when a problem arises. If that sales call picks up on the third ring, but that call to cancel an order is shunted to Muzakland, that pretty much tells me to keep on looking around.

Categories
humor immigration

Real Immigration Reform

Kansas City Star: Florida bill would outlaw language denoting `illegal aliens’. Florida state Sen. Frederica Wilson is sponsoring a bill that would outlaw the use of “illegal alien” on state documents. Wilson prefers the use of undocumented citizen or undocumented immigrant.

A certificate of naturalization? Oh, that’s a mere document. Nothing more than a slip of paper. A few scribbles on a piece of paper, really. The oath of allegiance? A few meaningless words. Seriously, an undocumented citizen? Let’s see someone try that one in court.Trafficking in Stolen Property. I am really the undocumented owner of the property in question.Kidnapping. My undocumented child custody order stated I had possession of the kids.Bad Check. My undocumented bank statement said I had enough funds.And, if you ever lose at trial, there’s always the undocumented reversal that the appellate court issued in your favor.

Categories
humor

No Bubbles Here

If you’re ever bored, take a look at Domain Name Scoop, a tool that “appraises” a website based on various publicly-available metrics. Just pinning a dollar figure on a website must provide tremendous entertainment value, at least it did for me and probably for others as well. Thus, the site has a tendency to go down. Madly hitting the refresh key does solve the problem though. 😉 Let’s punch a few buttons and what various legal websites are worth.Sitting at the top of the heap is lawyers.com, and no one else is even close. Compare their valuation to martindale.com. Essentially the same content, but one is designed for consumers and one is designed for lawyers. By repurposing their content, $6 million suddenly becomes $154 million. Wow!

lawyers.com $154,017,560 Worth more than everyone else! Combined!!
lawinfo.com $20,629,620 Fighting with FindLaw for second place.
martindale.com $6,251,550 Ditto.
westlaw.com $3,553,600 Neither as valuable as FindLaw, nor LexisNexis.com
legalzoom.com $2,811,620 $2.8 million will buy you a lot of legal forms.
llrx.com $1,316,310 Too good to be worth only a million.
nolo.com $1,114,960 Definitely one of the more useful legal web sites.
lexblog.com $202,496 Kevin O’Keefe’s blawg company.
legaline.com $69,116 Robert Ambrogi’s website and blog.

Since the valuations are based on ongoing web metrics, these values will fluctuate depending on the data that that site pulls from (i.e., check in a week from now and the values may all be different).

Categories
Legal Research Technology

Top Five Reasons to Check Out Justia’s Docket Search

dockets-justia-com.jpgJustia just released a beta version of their Federal District Court Filings & Docket search engine. Want to know why you should check it out?

  1. Free. It won’t cost you a dime, or a nickel or even a penny. It is free. No registration required. Nothing. It’s really free! But that’s not all…
  2. Fast. It is fast. Almost too fast, if that is even possible. Just like when Google returns relevant search results in fractions of a second that leaves you wondering whether it really searched through each and every web page in its database. Justia’s docket search is that fast. What about all the allegedly frivolous litigation clogging the courtrooms? Surely, it must take a few seconds to scan through all those records, right? Nope.
  3. Fun. Who knew lawsuits could be so much fun? Look up which companies are suing and which ones have been sued. Before, it would have cost you some pocket change to run the same searches on PACER. Now that the cost of searching is free, you can try out all those searches that previously weren’t worth paying for (or that you couldn’t bill to a client).
  4. Search by Type. Let’s say you’re interested in certain types of lawsuits, such as torts, real property or civil rights. Well, you can select from a list of 105 different types of lawsuits to view. How’s that for customization?
  5. RSS Feeds. Don’t want to return to the Justia site to run the same search each morning. Then, subscribe to an RSS feed. For example, you can grab a feed of all federal lawsuits involving Google.