Legal Commentary

David Whelan, a longtime member of the Law Technology News Editorial Advisory Board, is manager of legal information at the Law Society of Upper Canada's Great Library.

In our May issue, Whelan was guest author of our Web Watch column, as Bob Ambrogi took the month off. In "Dowsing for Gold," Whelan takes a look at how search tools can help legal professionals divine useful information from the white noise of social media. He starts off with Twitter, and explains that there are alternatives to twitter.com/search, including Microsoft's Bing, which both highlights hot topics and then returns tweets that match your search terms. One downside: Bing only displays three results at a time.

Whelan also discusses Collecta.com, which provides only social media results, retrieving results from blog posts and comments, status updates, and multimedia posts on YouTube, Flickr, and other media. The column offers advice on how to find information on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, noting that LinkedIn can help you "crack corporate identities." Business websites, he notes, "are closely controlled and may not provide information about senior management, even if the CEO and CFO are identified."

Want more of Whelan's wisdom? Check out his April article, "Rethink Open Source," to find out why large firms may be surprised to find viable open source options, but why they should not expect it to be "free." And listen to him on April's Law Technology Now podcast.