LAW PORTALS ON THE WEB
LAW PORTALS ON THE WEB
..........The portal phenomenon has spread to law-related Web sites. Nobody really needs a portal to explore the Web, but they can be helpful to beginners. Eventually, you should be able to develop a good set of bookmarks, which greatly reduces the need for a portal site. Click on the highlighted areas below to explore three of the best law portals.
1. Findlaw - This is one of the first and one of the best of the law portals on the Web. It offers free e-mail, free (but, rudimentary) law office Web pages, and free intranet resources. In addition, it offers a great deal of substantive legal information,including a legal directory and the leading law-specific search engine, Law Crawler.
2. Hieros Gamos - This is one of the deepest of the Web's law sites. It is the brainchild of Lex Mundi , a Houston, Texas based association of more than 150 law firms from around the world. The site offers a directory made up of more than 200 headings, search engines, links to law-related discussion groups, and law news.
3. LAW.COM - Law.Com was one of the first sites to call itself a law portal. It represented itself as a site for legal professionals, students, and the public, and it still offers channels for each. In the middle of 1999 it merged with related company American Lawyer Media, the nation's leading provider of law news. The new merged site resembles the ALM side of the family more than the old Law.com. It is an outstanding news resource with its "State" page offering links to law news from nine regional ALM papers, including: New York Law Journal ,
Cal Law , Tex Law ,
PaLAWnet ,
and
Legal Times , the daily online service for lawyers in the metropolitan D.C. area. More than anything else, however, the site most resembles its ALM sister site, Law News Network , which is the leading daily general law newsletter on the Web. ALM obviously feels that the most important attribute a portal can possess is news.
..........Portals are Web sites that work hard to convince you to start your Web travels there. They make it easy for you to set your browser to open at their site. They also want to keep you there as long as possible, because that translates into advertising dollars. To please their "members" they typically offer free e-mail, free Web pages, customizable news, weather, stock reports, and perhaps the kitchen sink. The leading portals sites include Yahoo , Lycos , Alta Vista , and Excite . Many portals began their existences as search engines. CNET recently annointed Yahoo as the best portal of them all. 
