Not as magic bullets, but as helpful reference librarians.

Courtesy: Arlington, VA Public Library

Remember in middle school when you had to write a report about how many lobsters were caught in Maine each year? You went into the library and told the librarian your project.

She (and in my middle school days, it was

Most of us in the business can remember clients who call us to say something like, “We’ve done some pretty serious Googling, so you probably won’t find anything.” We had a prospective client some years ago who said exactly those words, and I wrote them down at the time.

It got to the point that

Lawyers need to find witnesses. They look for assets to see if it’s worth suing or if they can collect after they win. They want to profile opponents for weaknesses based on past litigation or business dealings.

Every legal matter turns on facts. Most cases don’t go to trial, fewer still go to appeal, but

We’ve written plenty before about Europe’s “Right to be Forgotten,” under which governments tell Google and other search engines to take down links to legal, public documents that are deemed embarrassing or inconvenient for the people involved. We thought four years ago that this problem wouldn’t go away, and we were rightrighttobeforgottenfrance.jpg.

We never

According to KRQE news in Albuquerque, New Mexico, landscaper Gary Mares was busted for fraud once again.  This time, he solicited landscaping work on Craigslist, collected large sums of money for the jobs upfront, and then never performed the work.  Previously, he was working as a landscaping subcontractor for a legitimate company, Milligan Scapes.  According