Miscellaneous

?The Virtual Chase? Rises from the Ashes

By Robert Ambrogi

Two years ago in a post here, I bemoaned the shuttering of The Virtual Chase, a website devoted to enhancing the research skills of legal professionals. Founded in 1995 by Genie Tyburski, a law librarian at Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia, the site was a top destination for legal researchers, until Genie announced she would no longer put time into keeping it up.

Well, The Virtual Chase is back, relaunched this week by the legal information portal Justia, which acquired the site from Tyburski and has been quietly working on rebuilding it. “The re-launched Virtual Chase features a new design, as well as additional online legal research and community resources for law librarians and other legal professionals,” Justia founder Tim Stanley writes in a blog post.

The new site’s resources are organized within four broad categories:

• Legal Research. Here you’ll find guides to federal and state law, links to general legal resources, and practice-specific research guides.
• Other Resources. This section contains information on conducting business-related research and research on non-legal topics of interest to lawyers.
• Community. Here you will find links to law librarian blogs, listservs and library associations, as well as a constantly updated law-librarian Twitter stream.
• Law Libraries. A state-by-state guide to finding a law library.

And of course you can keep up with new developments at the site by following @Virtualchase on Twitter.

By way of disclaimer, I should note that I have personal experience with Justia’s skill at rescuing websites from the brink of disaster.

Full post as published by Lawsites on August 19, 2010 (boomark / email).