Legal Marketing & PR

App of the Week: Nolo’s Plain English Legal Dictionary

By Timothy Stanley

This week, I am reviewing a free iPhone and iPad app by our friends at Nolo. Nolo’s Plain English Law Dictionary aims to make the often confusing landscape of the law easier for everyone to understand.

I am not a lawyer myself, nor have I gone to law school. While I have learned much about the law since I started working here as a programmer in 2006, I still come across terms that I don’t understand. One of the best sources I’ve found for looking up legal words and phrases is Nolo’s Legal Dictionary, which is accessible for free at nolo.com/dictionary.

The Nolo Dictionary is a must for people like me who find themselves wondering what habeas corpus means or what ADR stands for. The online legal dictionary at Nolo.com has always allowed me to easily find these answers when I’m at my computer. However, what if I’m out to lunch with a lawyer and I need to understand the difference between a no contest and guilty plea to fully participate in a discussion?

Well, our friends at Nolo have made their legal dictionary available for free on both the iPhone and iPad as an app. The app is simple, but effective. The bottom of the screen features four buttons: Dictionary, Lawyer Directory, Nolo and Settings.

The Dictionary is the main feature of the app. On the iPad, the dictionary may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode. In portrait mode, the Categories button toggles the appearance of the dictionary menu. In landscape mode, the same menu appears in the left column. I found it easier to browse and quicker to find what I was looking for in landscape mode. For longer definitions (like habeas corpus above), switching to the portrait orientation allowed me to focus more on what I was reading. It’s a nice touch that Nolo provides both.

Another feature is the ability to customize the appearance or “theme” of the app within Settings. The default theme goes well with the Nolo.com layout, but if you are feeling a bit more traditional, you can switch to the Classic theme which presents the app with a textured, antique parchment background.

The other two buttons–Lawyer Dir. and Nolo–summon the Nolo Lawyer Directory and the Nolo.com website, framed in a web browser. The lawyer directory allows users to find a lawyer by location and legal issue, while the Nolo button shows a mobile-version of the Nolo.com website for browsing their vast free legal resources as well as their catalog of easy-to-understand books on all aspects of the law.

Overall, the app performs a simple task very well without excess complexity. Considering that the app is free, it should find a home on the the iPhone or iPad of those who are interested in the law or who frequently encounter new legal terms.

The additional iPad controls (drop-down browse menu, and landscape orientation modes) are fantastic, but I found myself thinking that the layout seemed a bit sparse on the iPad. So, I am looking forward to future versions of the app to see how Nolo might better utilize all the extra screen real estate they have on the iPad. Perhaps, Nolo might present a pane of related articles or Nolo books. I would also welcome a link that lets me quickly purchase a Kindle or ePub version of a Nolo book so that I can read them straight away in the Kindle or iBooks app.

All in all, Nolo’s Plain English Dictionary is a fantastic free legal app. Thanks, Nolo, for putting out this informative app.

Full post as published by Justia Legal SEO Blog on October 25, 2010 (boomark / email).