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Net Law: How Lawyers Use the Internet

by Paul Jacobsen, Songline/O'Reilly, 1997, paperback, 233 pages (CD-ROM for AOL access included), $24.95

Reviewed by Diane Cabell

Net Law: How Lawyers Use the Internet is a book eminently suited to the technophobes of the legal profession. In brief and simple language it presents information and a CD to get on the Net, beginning with equipment requirements, service provider criteria, email and browsers and proceeding on to Netiquette and newsgroups, HTML and search engines.

Net Law goes beyond Dummies, however, as it reveals the Net's particular value to the legal profession. Speed, breadth of information and 24-hour availability make the Internet useful in any practice, but for the small firm or solo it becomes "the great equalizer." Mr. Jacobsen spares the novice hours of research time as he neatly summarizes the major legal sites and highlights their real-world utility in personal vignettes provided by individual practitioners.

As an example, one attorney relates:

A partner of mine tells the story of how he and two associates wrote a brief together. Nothing earth-shattering about it, except that the partner was in London on business, one associate was in Miami on vacation, and the other associate was at his house 30 miles away from our office. They were working over the weekend on a 30-page brief that had to be filed on Monday. Ten years ago, all three would have canceled their plans and worked together in the office-with a secretary-to shepherd the brief through completion. Five years ago, the two associates would have canceled their plans and faxed drafts of the brief to the partner in London. Email allowed all three people to keep their plans and work on the brief together...all three lawyers could spend more time with their families, and the secretary's weekend wasn't affected at all.

Net Law covers such subjects as:

Another Net application is described by a New York partner:

From my home I checked the Government Printing Office's web site, to determine the status of new regulations addressing the completion of suspicious transaction reports. Sure enough, just two or three days before, new regulations had been published in the Federal Register. I downloaded the new regulations, and was able to integrate the new regulations into my outline easily (without having to retype them). All from home, without expensive research time and with perfect integration of the regulations into my outline.

Mr. Jacobsen's presentation of email encryption and secured Internet communications is especially well done. His book balances its enthusiasm for the Web with clear assessments of the limiting factors in this embryonic technology.

Many attorneys have avoided the Internet in apprehension of a complex learning curve. As a streamlined tutorial, Net Law: How Lawyers Use the Internet cuts that time to a fraction by illustrating how simple a resource the Net has become.

Experienced web heads will find this compact volume elementary and overly dependent on the experiences of a few "name" players. Newbies who have just come online, on the other hand, will find it a wise and helpful resource where technobabble is restricted to the glossary.

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