Pittsburgh Tech Blogs

Back in June, at the launch party for Alpha Labs, I met a number of interesting new entrepreneurs and companies. At least one of them has a blog. Rather than surf around and collect URLs, I'll invite them to post in the Comments. Have a blog for your tech-oriented enterprise in the Pittsburgh region? Whether or not you're an AlphaLab or IW portfolio company, let me know; I'll add the blog to the column on the left.

First up: Sonya Labs, an Alpha Lab portfolio company that wants to produce Web 2.0 tools for legal research, for both lawyers and nonlawyers. This is a great idea. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit for a new company to pick, but the real work will take a generation to complete: There's federal and state law, cases and statutes and constitutions (plural); municipal and other local law; regulations and administrative proceedings; material from other countries; international material; centuries' worth of data to keep track of (the older the U.S. state or commonwealth, the more likely it is that relevant law includes something from the 17th or 18th centuries). FindLaw and websites runs by courts and legislatures and Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis are stabs at databases, but all of these have obvious and well-known limitations. And don't forget all of that law that lives in books. That's how I and my generation of lawyers learned legal research: Books. The original 2.0 technology.

If Sonya Labs can put together an algorithm that synthesizes what's relevant to a particular legal issue, let me know. That will put me and my colleagues out of business.

I'm not worried.