Minnesota: We publish a substantially augmented Minnesota Judges Directory that includes a reconciliation of recent appointments to bring it fully current and appointment press releases which often contain valuable background information about the judge being appointed. In many instances information about a judge includes the year the judge joined his or her present court.

First, the MLPI now includes the online publication, The Minnesota Journal of Business Law and Entrepreneurship, making its appearance in the index for the first time.

Second, older articles involving legal ethics issues and the Lawyers Board that appear in full text on the Lawyers' Board site have now been livelinked to the index entries for these articles as they originally appeared in a Minnesota legal periodical. Previously the oldest article livelinked by MLPI was 1998. Now, the oldest livelinked article dates all the way back to 1986, although the older the date, the fewer and farther between those livelinks become.

The addition of these additional livelinks makes MLPI even more valuable for research and retrieval of articles involving legal ethics issues pertinent to the Minnesota bar. The MLPI on LawMoose is literally the only spot on the Web where you can comprehensively find not only legal ethics articles written by the Lawyers Board but also those authored by private practitioners, bar leaders, and academics.

Currently, MLPI now holds information about 19,297 articles, 797 livelinks to online articles, and 744 links to cases - more than 1500 live links in all.

If one assumes the average editorial content of an article in the index is the equivalent of 3 printed pages -- we're ignoring advertisements here -- we're also dealing with articles that range from lengthy law reviews to news items so this is just a guesstimate --, there are approximately 60,000 pages of article content -- a mini-law library in its own right -- brought under your complete control, courtesy of the MLPI.

First, on the World Legal Resource Center home page, you now see a clear introduction explaining the general purpose and nature of the World Legal Resource Center, "a specialty search engine indexing a selection of valuable legal research sites. We make special effort to include sites describing and linking to legal reference materials worldwide." And you now find an explanation that you can either enter free-form search terms in our search box or click any one of our prewritten Super-Easy search links, organized to generate results pertinent to every country in the world, each of their capital cities, and every U.S. state and Canadian province.

Second, we have expanded the labeling on our CaseFinder view of the Minnesota Legal Periodicals Index so that feature is more obvious to the casual user.

1. it extends back to 1984,
2. it literally spans the professional memory of most Minnesota lawyers practicing today,
3. it contains the only comprehensively subject-classified Minnesota-specific legal information available on the free Web
4. it contains more than a thousand live links to articles and cases cited in articles, and
5. the Case Finder option lets you find the most noteworthy cases decided in Minnesota -- the ones worthy of writing articles about -- and often view the cases themselves and the full text of the articles discussing them.

So, as of today, while Minnesota is still the "default" starting community, any time you want to do so, you can personalize LawMoose, (with a cookie value) so that, the next time you visit, LawMoose will start up right in your own community. You can visit the other communities whenever you like., of course. And if you find yourself using one of our other communities more than your current starting community, just reset your personalization.

This is one signficant way in which we keep LawMoose focused on you instead of making you deal with more complexity as LawMoose expands its capabilities. You want what's relevant to you; that's what we intend to deliver! Personalization is the key to how we're going to do it.

Wisconsin: And ... we now provide integration between LawMoose search results and the Wisconsin Statutes. Our "Find out more about" links at the bottom of each search results page provide the option to search the Wisconsin Statutes. Carry forward your search term or modify it as desired. Results come from the official statutes, not LawMoose.

But integration with the LawMoose World Legal Resource Center vastly expands the scope of the search available to Internet Law Library users. It literally takes you across the globe in a second to your destination in one to three clicks.

Why does it work so well? It's a combination of our editorial selection of sites and the quality of the included sites themselves. Quality wins out over sheer quantity of search results any day.

Our most powerful new feature is the ability to move from community to community by clicking on map icons. Ever since we released LawMoose, people have been asking us if LawMoose is going to be available for other states. As of today, the answer is "yes".

Wisconsin: We are publishing LawMoose Wisconsin as our second state because of the substantial cultural and economic connections between Wisconsin and Minnesota, the high quality of the information available on Wisconsin legal web sites, and the high percentage of Internet users in Wisconsin.

Whether you are a member of the Wisconsin legal community, a casual user of our Wisconsin legal community knowledge server, or a first time visitor, we'd love to hear your suggestions for how we can further enhance the Wisconsin legal web ecosystem.

World Legal Resource Center: We are also pleased to announce the launch of our new LawMoose World Legal Resource Center. (What a day!) Search a collection drawn strictly from the world's leading law sites, with a special emphasis on international law and the laws of countries around the world, in addition to US law.

Our World Legal Resource Center home page features live Super-Easy Search links for each country of the world and as well as their capital cities, U.S. states, and Canadian provinces. We genuinely think the World Legal Resource Center is one of the very best places in the world to start your search for information published on the Web by or about the legal world and the global legal community.

The World Legal Resource Center builds on many unique experiences we have had -- and lessons we have learned -- from serving as a successor publisher of the former U.S. House of Representatives Internet Law Library, http://www.priweb.com/internetlawlib/1.htm. But the technology that powers the World Legal Resource Center is much more sophisticated, making it possible for us to acquire additional content as needed and refresh it at regular intervals.

Minnesota: Ever wished you could just quickly click over to read a section of the Minnesota Statutes cited in a court opinion or an article? Wish no more. LawMoose can do it for you. It's our new "AutoLink to MN Stats" link on our "Power Links" row of links that accompany each search result.

You have to use it with some discretion. Even many cases do not cite to any statutes. But when you have the right sort of page, loaded with citations to a variety of statutes, just click, and you'll find that LawMoose is a powerful connector, bringing you the law as it really is - an interconnected tapestry.

Now... if we could only do that with cases that cite other cases, you say? Surprise, we could do it in an instant if Minnesota would adopt the universal citation format for court opinions, and implement it in the right way. If you want better connectedness between and among your primary legal reference sources, let bar leaders and the courts know we need universal citation format now, not later!