I used to be the chair of my firm's Ethics Committee and I currently have responsibility for approving all new file openings, so I frequently find myself analyzing legal ethics. As is true for many areas of law, there are lots of great Internet resources that can assist with an ethics analysis, from paid services such as the ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct to the free but excellent Freivogel on Conflicts. But none of these sites are optimized for the iPhone.
As a Louisiana attorney, I was thrilled to learn that Loyola (New Orleans) Law School Professor Dane Ciolino, an expert on legal ethics, recently started the website Louisiana Legal Ethics. The site includes not only frequent blog-style updates on legal ethics but also some great resources for Louisiana attorneys. For example, the site includes a free and updated version of the book Louisiana Professional Responsibility Law and Practice which was published by the La. State Bar Association in 2001 and updated in 2004 and 2007, but which is now out of print and out of date. Thus, you can easily view the current text of the Louisiana Rules of Professional Conduct along with background information on the rules, related ABA resources such as the comments to the corresponding ABA Model Rule and annotations including Louisiana case law.
The iPhone angle here is that Prof. Ciolino, who bought his first iPhone just a month ago, knew from the start that he wanted his website to work well on mobile devices because he hates working with websites that are not mobile-friendly. (Don't we all.) Thus, he created his site using WordPress and then worked with a free plug-in called WPtouch iPhone theme to create a version of the website specially formatted for the iPhone screen (and which apparently also looks good on other smartphones). Ciolino tells me that it took some tweaking to get everything working, but it was fairly easy to do. Thus, if you go to the Louisiana Legal Ethics website on an iPhone, you will automatically see a version optimized for the iPhone screen:
You can even tap the arrow at the top right of every page to get a pop-up menu that allows you to search the site and jump to other main sections:
Ciolino plans to update Louisiana Legal Ethics on a daily basis, and even though the website is new, I know it will quickly become the go-to resource for Louisiana legal ethics issues. iPhone users will love the ability easily access the current rules, comments, etc. I am often asked to assess a legal ethics issue when I am not at my desk or at my computer but my iPhone is with me.
Ciolino's website will primarily be useful for Louisiana attorneys, and while I know a bunch of them who read iPhone J.D. (and I love y'all!), the other reason for my post today is to express hope that other great legal resource websites will also create iPhone-friendly versions of their websites. iPhone apps may be all the rage, but an updated website that is optomized for the iPhone screen is often just as useful. (For example, my favorite iPhone weather app is not an app at all: the iPhone-optimized version of Weather Underground, located at i.wund.com.) Safari on the iPhone is better than any other mobile browser, but there are still some websites that don't display great on the iPhone screen because they require a lot of back-and-forth scrolling. The solution is to offer an iPhone version of the website.
By the way, I have often thought about creating an iPhone version of this website, but I haven't done so because I actually think that iPhone J.D. looks fine on an iPhone when you double-tap the middle column to zoom to the entries. I don't use any fancy, wide-page formatting other than the single graphic at the top. Having said that, I still may do this one day just to figure out how it is done. If any of you have experience setting up an iPhone theme for a TypePad website, let me know what you did.
Thanks to Dane Ciolino for creating a great resource for Louisiana lawyers, especially those of us who use an iPhone.
