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LegalPad: A Blogging Platform Specifically for Attorneys
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: August 28, 2015
You know you have to blog (and tweet, and FB, etc.), but it is a pain, and yet, you’ve spent countless hours figuring out how to make WordPress, or Tumblr, or Blogger, or Medium, work for you.
Somehow, though, you think someone should come along and make a blogging platform for lawyers. Well, someone has.
The folks at Casetext have just released a blogging platform designed specifically for attorneys. Called LegalPad, it is free, has been described as “Medium for lawyers,” and has any number of features that could make all y’all get right over there and start working with it.
Casetext (www.casetext.com) is, according to its website, “the best place on the web to write about the law.” It is basically a community of legal writers sharing information, formed as a sort of open-source platform for legal writing.
Out of that platform comes LegalPad, which can be found in a “take the tour” format at https://casetext.com/draft/1adWWPjiyVecWlmC_LIQNg. As of this writing, this is so new that you can’t actually Google it yet.
LegalPad itself is free, and will always be free as long as it sits in Casetext. Obviously, you can link to it from your website, which adds hosting fees or whatever, but its basically free.
Here are some LegalPad features include the ability to perform legal research within the platform, instead of constantly switching between researching and writing.
Quotes and citations that have been bookmarked during research can be accessed quickly and imported right into the draft, and cases can be accessed directly inside the draft.
It can create automatic links to cases.
When you start typing in a case name, it has enough intelligence to start filling in the name.
Formatting: just highlight whatever text is in your draft to pull up the formatting toolbar to make headers, lists, quotes, and links.
Highlighting text from the case you’re reading adds a formatted quote to the draft, with the citation.
One click can import various media and text, including a legal brief, support data, photos, and other media.
Check it out. Best tip/app/whatever of the year, as far as I’m concerned.