KCLL Klues: Washington State Legal Research

King County Elections has just sent Special Elections ballots to voters in six districts for its February 14 Special Election.  The Auburn, Federal Way, Renton, Tukwila and Vashon Island school districts all have bond and levy measures and King County Fire Protection District No. 10 is seeking bond funds for equipment and facilities remodeling.  If you haven’t taken the time to visit the KC Elections web site, you should.  In addition to information about the operations of that office, it also includes a Voter’s Guide lookup feature that enables you to search for upcoming voter’s pamphlet information based on your name,  links to the forms you’ll need to register to vote in our State and a link explaining how to find the 5 ballot drop boxes you can use to return your completed ballot if you forget to drop it in the regular mail.

Washingtonlawhelp.org is a fantastic resource for self-help law guides written specifically for the general public.  The list of topics covered by the site is extensive and includes a variety of guides describing various aspects of home foreclosure law.  Recently, the editors at Washington LawHelp have added a new guide discussing the issue of short sales.  A short sale is an alternative to foreclosure where the buyer and the lender agree to sell a home for less than the balance owed on its mortgage.  The guide is brief–only 3 pages–but provides a good overview of the short sale process and discusses the pros and cons of pursuing a short sale.  It also links to another more extensive guide authored by the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions titled Short Sales Information and Seller Advisory.  Together, these will help you understand how a short sale works and whether or not to consider it as an alternative to a traditional foreclosure.

The GOP news release below came to us directly from Cynthia Etkin, Sr. Program Planning Specialist in the Office of the Superintendent of Documents.  Thanks for the update, Cynthia!  GPO Access was launched in 1994 and has been the official source for Federal government information online.  FDSys is the “next generation” system and includes expanded source materials in multiple formats , a more robust searching mechanism and the use of metadata for retrieval.

Direct from GPO — On Friday, November 4, 2011, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) draws one step closer to shutting down GPO Access. Once the Friday editions of daily updated content (e.g., Federal Register, Congressional Record) have been uploaded, GPO will cease updating GPO Access in terms of both database content and HTML pages. This will mark the start of the archive only phase of GPO Access and new content will only be loaded to FDsys. During this phase, GPO Access will remain publicly accessible as a reference archive.

 In order to make the switchover from GPO Access to FDsys as seamless as possible for users, GPO is in the process of creating one-to-one redirects from GPO Access content to the FDsys equivalent. This will ensure that bookmarks, Web links, URLs in print publications, and other GPO Access references point to valid Web resources. Once this has been completed, GPO Access will be taken offline. A date has not yet been established for the final shutdown of GPO Access; however, it is slated for fiscal year 2012.

Our online public access catalog, powered by EOS International, now has an interface developed specifically for mobile devices. If you’d like to use your iPhone, Droid, Blackberry or other Internet-capable phone to search our collection, simply point its browser to http://207.67.203.67/K80000. If you have any questions about searching our catalog or accessing our collection, please feel free to contact the staff at (206) 296-0940.

Whether your firm has jumped into the social media waters with both feet, or you’re being dragged kicking and screaming to the side of pool, you need a social media policy.  And, ideally, it should be in place before the first Twitter tweet or posting of funny cats.

Your policy should be simple, to-the-point and provide employees with guidelines for appropriate online behavior and outline consequences for inappropriate behavior. 

It should include a section about creating and maintaining social media sites for the firm using company time and computers (such as a law firm Facebook page or LinkedIn profile).  Content creators on these types of sites will need guidelines regarding protecting client confidentiality, refraining from providing legal advice, how to respond to negative comments, etc.

The policy should address employees’ use of third-party online sites during company time and discuss what is acceptable conduct for posts on personal sites; keeping in mind that there is no expectation of privacy on the Internet.

Thankfully, there are many print and online resources available for help in drafting a social media policy.  Here are just a few:

Books at the Law Library:
Social media, 2011: addressing corporate risks, Practicing Law Institute.
Social media for lawyers: the next frontier, Carolyn Elefant and Nicole Black (2010).

Online Newsletter:
Socially Aware: The Social Media Law Update (Morrison & Foerster)
http://www.mofo.com/files/Uploads/Images/100722SocialMedia.pdf

Social Media Policies and Templates:
http://www.jaffepr.com/sites/default/files/Social_media_policy.pdf
http://www.bakerdstreamingvid.com/publications/Baker_Daniels_Social-Media-Policy.pdf
http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php
http://www.compliancebuilding.com/about/publications/social-media-policies/
http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleID=1024

Blog Posts:
http://abovethelaw.com/2010/07/social-media-policies-for-legal-types/
http://www.socialmediaforlawfirms.com/2010/09/social-media-policy-for-law-firms.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1668368/social-media-policies-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
http://mashable.com/2009/06/02/social-media-policy-musts/

The King County Superior Court Clerk’s Office has released the new Superior Court Local Rules effective 9/1/2011.  Copies of the rules can be downloaded directly from the Superior Court Clerk’s web site or can reviewed and purchased in hard copy from either the Seattle or MRJC courthouses.

Even if you have visited the main web site for King County Superior Court many times, you may have missed the departmental links listed on the lower left-hand corner.  In particular I’d like to highlight the Civil and Criminal Department links.

The Civil Department link leads you to information about court rules, civil calendars, court services such as arbitration, settlement conferences and weddings, our State’s civil pattern jury instructions and the Court’s Civil Department Manual.  The latter contains a variety of sample documents including an amended case schedule, order on pretrial conference and a sample trial checklist.

The Criminal Department link leads you to a link to join the Criminal Department’s listserv, links covering the Court’s major criminal calendars, links to community correction services like the Helping Hands and Work Education Release programs,  and links to our State’s criminal pattern jury instructions and Sentencing Guidelines Manual.

The Session Laws of the State of Washington from 1889 to the first two chapters of the 2011 session laws are now available free online, thanks to the Office of the Code Reviser.  This is one of the key resources for doing Washington legislative history research.

EDGAR, the SEC online database, has a new feature that allows for full-text searching of the last four years of EDGAR filings.  The full text that is searched is both the filings and all attachments to the filings.  The home page for the search notes that, “Occasionally, some recent filings are not available through the EDGAR Full-Text Search.”  There is a “FAQ” page, which I highly recommend reading — it may explain why you are or aren’t getting the results you’re looking for, and it has contact information for help with a search. 

There is an advanced search feature, where you can limit your search by form type, company name, CIK (Central Index Key; try this if the company name doesn’t work) or SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code.

Thanks to the blog beSpacific for this tip.

A few days ago, a library patron asked me if I knew where he could get forms for requesting relief from Washington state’s sex offender registration requirements.  Lo and behold, I found them on the Washington Courts website.  They were not there last time I was asked this question.  Admittedly, the last time I was asked this question was about two years ago!  Anyway, it seems they were added in June of 2010, which doesn’t actually make them *new* so to speak, but nevertheless came as a surprise to me and at least one of my peers who happened to be standing nearby when the reference transaction was taking place.  So, for those who, like me, were not aware of these *new* forms, I have provided a link to them below.

Court Forms: Relief from Offender Registration Requirements