The VLW Blog

Audio recordings of federal court hearings may soon be available from a court near you, but you can forget about that eight-cent price tag used in a recent pilot project. Downloading a digital audio file from a court session will cost $2.40 through the PACER system under the plan approved today by the U.S. Judicial [...]

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A West Virginia lawyer with a background in computer programming has put the rules he needs for court at this fingertips with four iPhone applications.
Robert Bailey of Charleston authored apps for the United States federal rules of procedure, the West Virginia state rules of procedure, the local federal rules for West Virginia and the [...]

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A couple weeks ago, Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s Web site ran a poll asking lawyers to weigh in on which type of computer platform they used in their practice: Mac or PC?
The poll closed today after receiving 100 replies, and the results are in: 79 percent of poll-takers use a PC for their legal work, while [...]

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Officials from Virginia attended a Maryland session yesterday to test devices designed to find illegal cellphones used by prison inmates.
Most of the technology tested doesn’t jam cellphone signals, which is prohibited by federal law. However, legislation that would allow states to conduct wireless cell phone jamming in prisons was recently approved by a Senate committee, [...]

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Lawyers attending the solo and small firm forum in Abingdon this week got an earful of tech tips from those traveling IT evangelists from Sensei Enterprises.  A recurring theme: lawyers who try using two monitor screens at their desk never give it up.  Apparently, two glowing panels really are better than one.
What seems like information [...]

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The unhip PC promoter may be losing out in the Mac v. PC commercials, but PCs appear to be clear winners with Virginia lawyers.
In the results of a tech survey released today by the Virginia State Bar, only 9.3 percent of the 300 survey respondents use a Mac operating system, while 82.2 percent use Windows [...]

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A North Carolina judge was issued a public reprimand for using Facebook to chat with a lawyer about a pending case and researching the Web site of one of the parties in the case.
As reported by The (Lexington) Dispatch, Iredell County District Judge B. Carlton Terry Jr. got in hot water with judicial officials for [...]

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We often cringe when lawyers try to describe technology that they know little about.  (See my earlier post where I try to figure out what a “wireless mesh” is.)
It’s not surprising, then, that the Supreme Court of Virginia comes in for some criticism from an Internet commentator when it takes on the issue of anonymous [...]

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The 230-year-old town of Abingdon takes a step toward the future this week as it unveils its free wireless mesh network.  As explained by the helpful folks at How Stuff Works, a wireless mesh network links together dozens or even hundreds of wireless mesh nodes that “talk” to each other to share the network connection [...]

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Norfolk Circuit Clerk George Schaefer is overseeing an ambitious project: He wants to make his office paperless. Right now, his staff scans every civil filing that comes in the door. They’ve scanned almost all the land records – which, in an old jurisdiction such as Norfolk, date back to the 1700s. The Virginian-Pilot reports that [...]

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