I recently had to find a specific piece of information from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Not usually a big deal, since http://www.uscourts.gov/ has all the various up-to-date Federal Rules posted online in handy PDF format. Unfortunately, that website was down (all too frequent these days - what's going on over there?), so I was left with trying to find a hard copy of the current FRCP in our office. You'd think that would be easy, since lawyers LOVE having stuff in hard copy. Alas, no. I wandered through multiple offices, and even *shudder* the Law Library. No dice. Best I could do was 2008, and I know there have been revisions since then.
What to do? Google to the rescue! Turns out Cornell Law School has something called the Legal Information Institute, where they have very well-organized rules, laws, constitutions and the like at both the Federal and State level. No guarantee that their information is as current as the government-operated sites, but it makes a handy back-up resource.
Ultimately, this explains why lawyers are always screwing up. Apparently none of them have the current versions of anything in their office! (Except the Bankruptcy people, they are quite persnickety about keeping their books up-to-date.)
3 comments:
I use the Cornell site all the time (I'm currently taking classes to become a paralegal). It's a great resource. FindLaw also has a lot of great information.
If I had a nickle for every time a lawyer tried to ignore the Rules of Court and just do their own thing, I would be a rich, rich woman. lol
Hah.
I knew about the Cornell site for a very good reason - we don't have *any* recent rules. And I work at a bankruptcy practice.
And because there is an evil Lexis conspiracy out there, those rules that do get put up as pdfs on websites for *certain* courts are nigh unreadable.
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