Month: December 2009

The ABA Journal lists 2,500 legal blogs in its online directory, and with so many out there, it can be difficult to locate the ones most likely to be of interest to you.  Thus, each year the ABA Journal’s editors select what they consider to be the 100 best blawgs and list them in the ABA Journal Blawg 100.  The 2009 list includes some great ones, such as the always humorous Above the Law, the informative Am Law Daily, several well written practice-specific blogs such as Drug and Device Law, SCOTUSblog and TaxGirl, and Jonathan Turley‘s informative and entertaining website.  I was delighted to learn that the ABA Journal chose iPhone J.D. for this year’s list in the Tech category. 

This type of list is necessarily somewhat arbitrary.  Some of the sites included may not be your cup of tea, and other sites that you love may be missing.  Indeed, this year, 40 of the 100 sites are new to the list, which means that previously selected sites such as The Mac Lawyer and Ernie the Attorney are omitted even though they were better than ever in 2009.  But even if incomplete, the list remains a great resource that you can use to discover great blawgs.  I’ve already made some new discoveries in this year’s list, as I do every year.

The ABA Journal asks people to vote on their ten favorite sites out of the 100 listed and sent an e-mail to the sites selected this year, encouraging us to urge our readers to vote.  I can understand why; this is a good way to increase awareness of the list and drive some traffic to the ABA Journal website.  I know that everyone who takes the time to produce a blog appreciates being recognized, so I encourage you to click here (or on the banner on the right) to vote for your favorite sites on the list.  You need to register to do so (boo) but it is quick and free (yeah).  If you decide to vote for iPhone J.D., I would be honored.  And if you also encourage your parents, kids, colleagues, neighbors, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, e-mail contacts, pets, and fellow citizens of your country to vote for iPhone J.D., well that just shows that you have good taste.

But seriously, thanks to the ABA Journal editors for including this website in the 2009 list.  I hope that being a part of the list encourages lawyers who don’t currently use an iPhone to take a look at the device, and encourages the increasing number of attorneys who do use an iPhone to become regular readers of iPhone J.D. and hopefully get even more out of their iPhones. 

By the way, if you are one of those new visitors who found this site via the ABA Journal, welcome!  Check out the iPhone J.D. Index to catch up on what you have missed so far.  It’s been a fun first year.

I saw a lot of "what I am thankful for" posts last week in connection with Thanksgiving, but this one by Michael Arrington was particularly interesting.  Arrington is now known as the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley based blog, and I frequently link to iPhone-related posts on TechCrunch and its mobile-specific sibling, MobileCrunch.  But back in the 1990s, Arrington was just a Stanford Law grad and an associate at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.  That firm represented NeXT, the computer company started by Steve Jobs after he was kicked out of Apple, and Arrington's post provides a little insider insight on working on the deal in which Apple acquired NeXT and brought Steve Jobs back to the company. 

That deal forever changed not just Apple, but thanks to the renaissance at Apple since Jobs returned, also had a huge impact on the computer industry, the consumer electronics industry, the music industry and the cell phone industry.  And it certainly had a huge effect on me; if it wasn't for that deal, Apple may not have ever produced the iPhone, I'd probably be using a Blackberry (yawn) and I can't imagine that I would be blogging about it. 

Yesterday, John Gruber at Daring Fireball recently posted a link to an old Fortune article by Stewert Alsop in which Alsop predicted at the time that Apple was making a mistake acquiring NeXT.  Alsop wrote:  "It is very, very difficult to see how Apple will translate the value of
Next's software into something meaningful to its own customers."  Obviously, Apple did quite well translating the NeXT software into the Mac OS X that runs Macs, not to mention the operating system that runs the iPhone.  To be fair, at the time, Alsop was concerned that Apple had acquired NeXT but not Steve Jobs, writing:  "Jobs has spent most of the time since December 20 making it clear that
he will not actually do anything for Apple once Apple's purchase of
Next is complete. In other words, he's going to take his money and run."  Fortunately, Steve Jobs did return to Apple and now it is impossible to think of Apple without thinking of Jobs.

I join Arrington in being thankful for Steve Jobs, and I think you will enjoy reading Arrington's good post.