Find Info Like a Pro, Volume 1
By Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch
Published by LPM Publishing
Reviewed by Laura Calloway
Nothing could be more aptly titled than Find Info Like a Pro, Volume 1, the new book from Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch, the brains behind the highly useful Internet for Lawyers website.
Find Info Like a Pro, Volume 1 shows what you need to know to use publicly available information on the Internet to find and background people, locate people even when you don't know their full names, find telephone numbers and addresses, and harvest useful information about clients and opposing parties from social networking sites. There are also chapters on finding and backgrounding expert witnesses, finding altered or removed Web pages and getting Internet resources admitted into evidence. And there's an appendix with relevant court cases and forms.
The book is a particularly useful reference work for lawyers because of its brevity and the way it's organized. Chapters outline a type of Internet-fact research you might find useful in your practice, then list the best websites for that purpose and indicate whether they are free, require registration or are fee-based. Best of all, the book tells you when to use paid sites, and how to get the most for your money when you do. There are also "war stories" that are both entertaining and bring alive for the reader just how much stuff there really is online, if you just know where to look and how to find it.
Find Info Like a Pro, Volume 1 is available through the Practice Management Assistance Program's Checkout Library (contact Kristi Skipper at [334] 517-2242 or kristi.skipper@alabar.org) or, if you think you need your own copy–and you probably do–you can purchase it at a 15 percent discount through the member benefits page of the bar's website.
Find Info Like a Pro, Volume 2 will cover searching public records online and is due out this month. Stay tuned for information on it as soon as it's available.
—Laura Calloway, director, ASB Practice Management Assistance Program
