Training Opportunities Calendar

Attorneys need training opportunities, but finding them can be difficult. Even with so many groups offering fantastic CLEs and webinars to Houston’s legal community, it can be time consuming to track them all down. The Training Opportunities Calendar from the Harris County Law Library can help with that.

The Training Opportunities Calendar is an aggregate collection of training session announcements from local providers, like the Houston Bar Association, and names you know, like Westlaw. With a combination of local CLEs and online webinars, there are options to fit all schedules. Event listings are available in calendar format to help you find opportunities by date. You can also limit listings by whether they are local events, online webinars, or offer CLE credit. All events listed are free and links to registration information appear at the bottom of each entry.

Find new training opportunities each month on the Law Library website.

Digitized Historical Texas Statutes from the Texas State Law Library

Earlier this month, the Texas State Law Library announced a new collection of digitized historical Texas statutes available on its website. The collection now includes all Texas statutes from 1879 to 1960. The newest content includes works with copyrighted material published between 1928 and 1960, which is now available under an agreement with the copyright holder Thomson Reuters and in collaboration with the Austin Bar Foundation, which provided a grant to fund digitization. Visit the Historical Texas Statutes page on the Texas State Law Library website to learn more and to download copies of these newly-digitized, searchable documents.

Minding the Gap

Despite the Texas State Law Library’s giant leap forward in making historical Texas statutes available online, there is still a gap practitioners must keep in mind. Thomson Reuter’s Westlaw provides access to historical statutes back to 1987, which is likely to cover most researcher’s needs. However, a criminal defense attorney might need to know the language of a 1985 DWI statute to determine its effect on a client's sentence, or a real estate attorney may need to read a probate statute from the 1970s to see how it will impact a title in a pending sale. When research falls into the gap, the Harris County Law Library is here to help. We have historical statutes and legislative history materials to help you reconstruct historical Texas statutes and we provide free access to Westlaw on our legal research computers for your 1987-to-present research needs. Visit the Law Library any time we can assist with your historical Texas statutory research.

Texas Law Blogs from Texas Bar Today

Blogs make it easier than ever to get news tailored to your professional interests delivered to you every day. For lawyers in Texas, the question isn’t “where do I find Texas legal news?” It’s “how can I parse through so many Texas law blogs to find news for my practice area?” Texas Bar Today comes to the rescue!

Blog List

Texas Bar Today is a service of the State Bar of Texas that organizes a list of over 160 blogs focusing on Texas law and curates top posts on its website. The list has categories ranging from specific practice areas to “Hobbies & Humor” to help you find blogs tailored to your current-awareness needs. Staff at Texas Bar Today read posts from all the blogs daily to bring you the best from around the state and post the top posts to the TBT homepage.

Get Your News Delivered

You have several options for getting the best blog posts from Texas’ legal community delivered to you each day. The usual options include an RSS feed and the ability to follow on various forms of social media. However, the best option for doing as little work as possible to have the best in Texas legal news delivered to you daily is to submit an email address to receive a daily digest of the top blog posts in your inbox. Visit the Texas Bar Today homepage for more on available delivery options.

Latest and Greatest - American Law Institute Library on HeinOnline

We are proud to announce our most recent addition to the HeinOnline family: the American Law Institute Library. This collection features ALI’s most well-known publications, including:

  • Restatements & Principles of the Law
  • Uniform Commercial Code
  • ALI Annual Reports
  • Proceedings of ALI Annual Meetings
  • ALI Reporter

Plus, you can find model penal codes, other ALI-CLE Publications, and links to other scholarly articles found on HeinOnline.

Searching the ALI materials couldn't be easier. Simply connect to HeinOnline in the Law Library and choose the American Law Institute Library from Hein’s database home page. From there, you can browse through the alphabetized title lists or do a simple keyword search. Another option is to select the Advanced Search option and refine and limit your search to section titles, text, document type, and date. On the Results page, search terms are highlighted in yellow for easy viewing. In addition, all highlighted citations to the Restatements and cases are actually hyperlinks so all you have to do is click. How easy is that? Also, HeinOnline features a ScholarCheck tool that keeps track of the number of times a Restatement section has been cited.

So, come on over to the Library and be sure to take a look at the American Law Institute Library.

The Elusive Section Symbol

Ah, the elusive section symbol. Whether you’re a litigator who uses it in case captions or you do transactional work and often cite to statutory law, this symbol is a mainstay of your legal writing. But you may notice it’s not standard on your QWERTY keyboard. Here are two methods for getting the section symbol where it needs to go when using Word.

Method 1 – The quick way

The fastest method to insert a section symbol is to use the default hotkey sequence.

  • Step 1: place the cursor where you want to insert the symbol.
  • Step 2: press and hold the “Alt” key.
  • Step 3: press and release the “2” key in the number pad.
  • Step 4: press and release the “1” key in the number pad.

A section symbol should now appear where you placed the cursor and you can release the “Alt” key. From here, you can copy and paste or simply follow the steps above to place the symbol where you need it.

Method 2 – The slow way

Why would you want to go the slow way? Well, this is the way to insert any available symbol into a Word document and to discover new hotkeys…so…there’s that…

  • Step 1: place the cursor where you want to insert the symbol.
  • Step 2: click the “Insert” tab (note: this should be at the top of the window depending on your version of Word).
  • Step 3: click the “Symbol” option and select “More Symbols.”
  • Step 4: scroll to find the section symbol (hint: it’s usually near the top) and click it.

Tip: when you select a symbol, a “Shortcut key” appears near the bottom of the window. If you press and hold the “Alt” button and then type the sequence of numbers appearing in the “Shortcut key” section using the number pad, you can insert the corresponding symbol into your Word document. While it would be silly to memorize them all, you may find it useful to remember the shortcut for commonly-used symbols.

  • Step 5: click the “Insert” button in the symbol window.