Will the Supreme Court dismiss a class action suit brought by smokers in Maine, who say they were misled into believing that "low tar" and "light" cigarettes are a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes? The case argued before before the high court this week, Altria Group v. Good, raises the question of whether smokers' state-law claims against tobacco giant Phillip Morris are preempted by federal law. On this week's legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we discuss the case with two experts:

• Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, internationally known for blowing the whistle on tobacco company Brown & Williamson. Wigand's courageous story ultimately led to a landmark case against big tobacco and changes in cigarette advertising, and was the inspiration for the movie, The Insider. He now devotes much of his time to the organization he founded, Smoke-Free Kids.
  
• Tony Mauro, Supreme Court correspondent for Legal Times and Law.com, who has written about the case and attended this week's arguments.
  

You can download or listen to the show from this Legal Talk Network page. As always, you can keep up to date with all Lawyer2Lawyer programs by subscribing via RSS or using iTunes.

Law.com has my column, Ten Legal Podcasts to Keep You Informed, which updates my 2005 column, 10 Essential Podcasts for Lawyers.

This is part of the Legal Channels series, produced by the Legal Talk Network in cooperation with Law.com.

FindLaw has added RSS feeds for case summaries from the Supreme Court, the federal circuit courts and state appellate courts in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas. It has also introduced practice-area feeds that provide case summaries for 16 practice areas, from bankruptcy to tax. The feeds provide summaries of the opinions and link to the full text. The full list of feeds is available here: FindLaw: RSS Feeds.

The New York Legal Marketing Association has posted the slides from our Sept. 17 panel on social and professional networking (pdf). As I had noted in an earlier post, the other panelists were Doug Cornelius, a lawyer and frequent speaker and writer on the legal profession's use of knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and social networks; David Johnson, a former partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and a member of the advisory board of Legal OnRamp; and John Lipsey, vice president of corporate counsel services for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, who is overseeing the launch of Martindale's new professional networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. I served as moderator.

This week's episode of Lawyer2Lawyer marks our 150th podcast and third anniversary! For this special show, my cohost J. Craig Williams and I revisit some highlights from the past three years and welcome two special return guests, Eugene Volokh, professor at UCLA School of Law and founder of the blog The Volokh Conspiracy, and lawyer/musician/humorist Larry Savell, founder of LawTunes and LawHumor, who discusses his new album, The Lawtunes: Live At Blackacre, and introduces his new song composed and recorded especially for Lawyer2Lawyer.

You can listen to or download the show from this LegalTalkNetwork page. As always, you can keep up to date with all Lawyer2Lawyer programs by subscribing via RSS or using iTunes.

On this auspicious occasion, let me express my sincere thanks to our listeners all over the world. A special thanks to those of you who take the time to write us with your comments about the show. And enormous thanks to the folks at the Legal Talk Network for their superior production and engineering work on the show, especially LTN founders Lu Ann Reeb and Scott Hess, our producer Kate Kenney and our audio engineer Mike Hochman. Last but not least, sincere thanks to my cohost Craig Williams, who talked me into this crazy undertaking in the first place. (He didn't have to talk too hard.)

Peter Schilling, IT director at Amherst College, surveyed this year's incoming first-year class of 438 students about their technology use. He has posted the results, in the form of the Harper's Index, as the IT Index. For anyone wondering about the future of social networking, the numbers speak volumes. Consider:

• Of the 438 students, the number with Facebook accounts: 432.
• The number with iPhones: 93. The number with landline phones: 5.
• The number who brought computers and electronic devices: 370 students registered 443 devices. The number of desktop computers: 14.
• Third- and fourth-year students are more likely to own PCs, while first- and second-years are more likely to own Macs.
• Percentage of applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%. Percentage who applied online last year: 89%.
  

Plenty more to read in his full post, but here's one more worth noting: Amherst receives an average of 180,000 e-mails a day, of which 94% is spam.

The TechnoLawyer Blog recently launched a regular feature it calls YouLaw, which reviews law firm advertising videos that are posted to YouTube. New York medical malpractice lawyer Gerald Oginski writes the
reviews. At the end of each review is a section called "Back Bench," in which other experts add their nutshell opinions. Now I've joined the Back Bench, along with bench-warmers Kelly Chang Rickert and Neil Squillante, TechnoLawyer's publisher. My first contribution is now up, as part of Oginski's review of the video of a Fresno DUI lawyer. Check out the video and see if you agree with us.

Today we recorded the 150th episode of our weekly legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. The show is not yet ready to post, but as we were recording, our favorite lawyer/recording artist Larry Savell of LawTunes surprised and honored us with our very own Lawyer2Lawyer song that he composed and recorded to mark our third anniversary. It is very good, if I may say so myself, and VERY funny. He has posted it at this Lawyer2Lawyer song page in a choice of high- and low-fidelity MP3 and Windows Media files.

The Law Library of Congress has converted its Global Legal Monitor from a static, monthly PDF to a dynamic and regularly updated Web site. The monitor tracks legal news and developments worldwide, drawing on information from the Global Legal Information Network and other sources.

From the announcement:

The Law Library of Congress is pleased to announce the launch of the redesigned Global Legal Monitor. The Global Legal Monitor has transformed from a monthly published PDF to a dynamic continuously updated website. The new Global Legal Monitor has the ability to view legal developments by topic (more than one hundred so far) and by jurisdiction (over one hundred and fifty). The content of the Global Legal Monitor can also be searched through its advanced search interface.

Each legal development has its own permanent link for easy access, sharing, and bookmarking. To keep up to date on new legal developments in the Global Legal Monitor subscribe to its RSS feed.

The official Web site of the U.S. court system has finally enabled RSS feeds for news and rulemaking. There are five feeds:

• Newsroom
  
• Video News Archive
  
• The Third Branch: Newsletter of the Federal Courts
  
• Federal Rulemaking
  
• Hurricane Season 2008: Court Status Updates

Find them all on this page.

[Hat tip to Abbie Mulvihill at AbsTracked.]

A newly launched blog is the first I've seen to focus on the topic of furniture law. The Womble Carlyle Furniture Law Blog comes from the Intellectual Property Group at the law firm of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Winston-Salem, N.C. The blog will focus on IP and patent issues that affect the furniture industry, covering case filings, court decisions and legislative affairs. The blog's authors are Jack B. Hicks, a patent attorney in the firm's Greensboro office, and Jacob S. Wharton, an IP attorney in the Winston-Salem office. Upon first look, the blog appears solidly built and nicely finished.

When Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast, lawyers were not spared. Many lawyers were hard hit in both their profesisonal and personal lives. On this week's episode of the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, my cohost J. Craig Williams and I interview Bill Livesay, executive director of Andrews Kurth LLP in Houston, and Miriam Rozen, staff reporter for Texas Lawyer newspaper. They share their accounts of Hurricane Ike and discuss its impact on the broader legal community.

Listen to or download this week's program from this page.

I am often asked whether professional networking sites such as LinkedIn ever generate new clients for lawyers. I previously mentioned one such success story. Now, here are several more, detailed in this Wisconsin Law Journal article published yesterday, Attorneys are Getting LinkedIn to Clients Online.

Goodwin Procter attorney and KM guru Doug Cornelius, Morrison Mahoney IT director Jenn Steele and I will team up Oct. 2 in Boston for a panel on social networking for lawyers and legal IT staff sponsored by the International Legal Technology Association. The lunchtime panel is free to attend and open to ILTA members and non-members alike.

More information about the event and registration is available at this ILTA page.

Doug and I were half of a four-person panel on social and professional networking last week for the New York Legal Marketing Association. As another of the NY panelists, John Lipsey of LexisNexis, noted on The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell, attendees there showed great interest in the topic. "Here was a room filled, to standing-room-only capacity, with legal marketers eager to embrace and make sense out of professional networking," Lipsey wrote.

Our Lawyer2Lawyer podcast this week looks at the fall of Lehman Brothers and the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Read further details about this episode and listen to or download it from this LegalTalkNetwork page.

Not quite a monopoly, but darn close. The now-final $4.1 billion acquisition by Reed Elsevier -- parent of LexisNexis-- of ChoicePoint Inc. would have given Reed control over 80 percent of the $60 million market for the sale of electronic public records to U.S. law enforcement agencies. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission moved to alleviate the potential anti-competitive effects by requiring Reed to divest itself of the two ChoicePoint services most directly targeted at law enforcement customers.

Within 15 days after its Sept. 19 closing on ChoicePoint, Reed is required to sell ChoicePoint's AutoTrackXP and Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR) services to Thomson Reuters Legal. You can read more in this FTC announcement in these FTC legal documents. See also this article from DMNews and this blog post from beSpacific.

The FTC documents said nothing about the acquisition's impact on the broader public-records market. Given that both LexisNexis and ChoicePoint are major providers of public-records research, I have to assume the FTC looked into this. If any readers have further information, please post it below.

Further to my recent posts about the controversy over reported link sales by FindLaw, the National Law Journal today has this story: Blogosphere Tries FindLaw for Link Sales. It includes a quote from me -- although, as quotes tend to do, it oversimplifies what I was trying to say.

Several times since I've been writing this blog, I've received requests to delete or amend posts. Until now, I never have. These requests never said my post was inaccurate or even unfair. Rather, the typical request was one in which the circumstances had changed but my post continued to show up in search engines. For example, one came from a company that had been sued. Later, well after the lawsuit was settled, searches for the company name continued to bring up my post. Given that the post was accurate when I wrote it, I saw no reason to delete it later on. Lawsuits are settled every day, after all, but that's no reason to pretend they were never filed in the first place.

Today I received a phone call asking me to alter a post I wrote yesterday. The post pointed back to an earlier post I'd written about Sept. 11. Yesterday's post included a parenthetical that I labeled an "odd footnote" describing an e-mail I'd received about that earlier post asking me to change a reference it contained to a corporate name. My post yesterday described this e-mail as "either callous or clueless."

Today's call was from the author of that e-mail. He apologized for sending it, conceded it appeared callous, and explained that he had not, in fact, read the substance of my earlier post. He did not work for the corporation in question but for an outside agency helping with its marketing and branding efforts. Given that he recognizes his e-mail was a mistake, and given the feedback he was receiving due to my post, would I consider taking it down, he asked.

I think it is my background as a newspaper editor that makes me bristle at such requests. The record is the record, after all. As much as we all sometimes wish we could undue the past, we all know we can't. In the days when news was published only on paper, there was no thought of deleting the historical record, only of correcting or updating it. When news went digital, newspapers wrestled with how to maintain consistency between their print and electronic reports and, for the most part, decided to handle both the same way. News Web sites generally do not delete stories even when they may have been incorrect, but instead append the correction to the story.

After I hung up from today's phone call, I tried to research whether other bloggers have considered this issue. As it turns out, just yesterday at The Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Eugene Volokh wrestled with much the same question, asking readers for their thoughts on how he should handle the situation. The comments are thoughtful and enlightening. After reading through them, I found myself thinking that my old-school newspaperman's distaste for changing what's been written is, perhaps, irrationally rigid.

In my situation, the "odd footnote" was gratuitous. It had nothing to do with the reason for my post or the solemnity of the day. At the same time, it had the effect of embarrassing or possibly even undermining someone within his company -- someone who probably first sent me the e-mail with the best of intentions and in furtherance of his job responsibilities. Why would I care enough about a gratuitous comment to ruin someone's day or endanger someone's job? I asked myself. The answer: I don't. So I deleted it.

Two years ago here, I posted my own remembrance of 9/11.