Flying on commercial airlines is certainly no fun these days. So to make it a little better, when you make your next reservations online first open SeatGuru.com and minimize it. When you are making your reservations and it is time to request a seat, go to SeatGuru.com and click on the airline and then type of plane. You will find helpful comments about what seats to select and, more importantly, what seats to avoid. It is free, quick and easy.

And if you are still confused about what liquids you can carry on board, here’s the official word. Changes are "unlikely" in the near term.

This week brings an all-mobile phone theme issue of the Solo Newsletter (from ABA GP/Solo Division.) This newsletter has four very brief treatments of several phone issues.

All of these are worth reading, but if you only have time to read one, it has got to be David Leffler’s great essay on how his smart phone makes him feel like a superhero. Great job, David. This is must reading for all those lawyers who say they have no use for a camera or other advanced functions in a phone.

Solo Newsletter Volume 12, no. 3
Table of Contents

My Cell Phone—My Superhero
By David Leffler

Making a Choice—Cell Phone or Converged Device?
By Jeffrey Allen

You’re Just Not That Important!
By jennifer j. rose

Buying a Cell Phone
By Daniel J. Siegel

Here’s something entertaining. The Official Seal Generator site lets you design customized seals from a variety of colors, borders, graphic images and other elements for free. You can then either download the seal or copy it. It’s pretty cute. You could use it for gags, maybe some humorous corporate seals for some small business clients, your children’s teams or groups of friends, clubs and civic organizations where you participate, or maybe just sending your friends or relatives a customized Seal of Approval.

I learned of this from Dan Pinnington, ABA TECHSHOW 2007 Chair, and all around good guy. I’ll see him this week when I speak at the Pacific Legal Technology Conference. If you are in the area, it’s not to late to register and attend.

I know that many of you receive the magazine Law Practice, which is the official magazine of the ABA Law Practice Management Section. If you do not receive the magazine and would like to receive it, this post will tell you how.

First of all, if you are a member of the American Bar Association, you should simply join the ABA LPM section. The annual cost is $50 and you will receive the magazine as well as other such benefits. But non-ABA member lawyers and non-lawyers can now enjoy the benefits of the Law Practice magazine by subscribing. You will find all of the information that you need to subscribe here. The subscription rate is $64 per year and you can subscribe online, by phone or by U.S. Mail. This is one way you can make sure that a steady stream (eight issues per year) of law practice management information regularly comes into your office at a reasonable price.

Is your law firm one that still needs to implement software to help you run your law office? Choosing among the many available options can be confusing and time-consuming. That is why many law firms choose to utilize a consultant to help them through this process. There is one Web resource that provides you with a lot of information in one place. The Fredric G. Levin College of Law of the University of Florida publishes Computerized Case Management Systems. It includes a comprehensive list of software vendors, their products and contact information. There are links to numerous authoritative articles, many written by top-notch expert (and all ’round good guy) Andrew Z. Adkins III, the director of the Legal Technology Institute at the law school. There are also FAQ’s and several sample worksheets for a firm to use internally in preparing to implement this process and getting bids from consultants and vendors. This great, free information source is our long-overdue Website of the Week.

I have just learned from the OBA-NET (our bar member’s only online service in Oklahoma) that you can download all titles of the US Code from a website provided by the US House of Representatives. Here’s the link: http://uscode.house.gov/download/downloadPDF.shtml

According to Robert Don Gifford, an OBA member currently working in the US Attorney’s office in Reno, NV: "These are large files (up to 37MB), with each USC title occupying one or two files. They don’t correspond to any printed version, because they incorporate the materials from the supplements into the 2000 edition. This makes them more convenient for research, but less so for cite-checking."

The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility homepage provides free ethics and professionalism resources for lawyers, such as an online version of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, links to many ethics and professionalism resources and various reports and studies. This is the place to retrieve ABA Formal Ethics Opinions. Access to the ethics opinions is free for the first year after their issuance for ABA members. You can also purchase individual opinions for $7.50 each, become a member of the Center for complementary copies of all ethics opinions or take advantage of their ethics opinions subscription service to have them delivered to you as they are issued. Another service that is not always free, but may well be worth the modest fee when you need the help is their ETHICSearch Research Service where staff lawyers do the research for you.