the (new) legal writer

Black’s Law Dictionary Digital

Here’s an interesting product available on Amazon.com: a digital version of Black’s Law Dictionary. Besides providing easy desktop access to BLD, it integrates with both Corel WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, including incorporation of the correct spellings of legal terms into the WordPerfect and Word spell-checkers. So if you’re document contains a word like usufruct, the spell-checker won’t go, “Huh?”, but instead will (if necessary) prompt you with the correct spelling.

More help with dates

You may write the world’s most brilliant, persuasive brief, but it won’t do your client any good if you miss the filing deadline. Time and date.com can help with that. It includes some handy date calculators, including one to calculate the number of days between any two dates, and another to calculate the nth day before or after any given date. For lawyers, it’s probably more useful than CalendarHome.com, which I wrote about last year.

Hat tip to Tom Mighell.

Date help

It may not improve your social life, but CalendarHome.com has several tools to help you file your next brief or motion on time.

• A day counter, which calculates the number of days between any two dates.
• A date calculator, used to determine the nth day before or after a given date.
• Like years, very handy for setting dates on pre-Y2K machines. (I used this yesterday, after changing the battery in my ancient wristwatch, to re-set the date. My watch now thinks it's 1989 again.)
• Calendar converter, for converting dates between the Gregorian, Julian, Mayan, Persian, Indian, Hebrew, Baha'i', Islamic, and French Republican calendars. For tech geeks, this tool also provides, for the given date, the ISO 8601 week-and-day and day-of-year, Unix time value, and Excel serial day (PC and Mac).