LALawBooks Apps Now Available as PWAs. No More App Stores!

Starting in November 2020, our LALawBook apps will no longer be updated in the iOS Apple Store or on Google Play. We are providing all future updates through easily downloadable PWAs (Progressive Web Applications). This will allow us to make better and more frequent updates to the apps and save us a lot of money, time, effort.

The app store process has been a sore source of frustration for us over the years. In order to deliver our open-source, free applications, we must pay developer membership fees and go through an arduous process to convert our HTML/JS apps into Apple/Google approved formats. Indeed, app stores have been an increasing source of frustration for all developers in recent years. With PWAs, we can make our apps instantly available to our users with a minimum of friction.

What changes for you, the user? Very little. Once you install the PWA version of the app, it will appear on your home screen just like any other app. The app will be fast, regularly updated and, yes, it will still work when you don’t have an internet connection. So, how do you get started? Visit our PWA download page to install on your phone or computer.

Here’s to software freedom!

How to Break into Legal Tech as a Law Student

One main reason to consider a career in legal tech is that it offers you an opportunity to have a massive impact on the world. While a lawyer may be able to help one client or business at a time, software allows you to scale your reach. If you embed your legal knowledge in your product, there’s no limit to the number of people that you can serve. Jonathan Petts, Upsolve

Loyola Tech Clinic Graduate Named Microsoft Next-Gen Fellow

Amanda Huff Brown, 2015-2016 student practitioner in the Technology and Legal Innovation Clinic, was just selected as the American Bar Association Center for Innovation’s Microsoft Next-Gen Fellow!19224860_1281272281970793_8634095161994462636_n

Amanda will spend the next year in residence at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington leading the development of legal technology projects that aim to increase access to justice and improve the practice of law as a whole.
Congrats, Amanda!

More information about the fellowship here

The Law Can’t Keep Up with Technology, and That’s Good

Today, thanks to political gridlock in the U.S., lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. As government gets slower, tech is going the opposite way. New technologies spread instantly by cloud-based apps and social networks, and take hold with almost no legal oversight. Then, by the time government can act, it’s usually too late to wind things back to the way they were.

Article Here

HN Discussion

Convicted by Code

Today, closed, proprietary software can put you in prison or even on death row. And in most U.S. jurisdictions you still wouldn’t have the right to inspect it. In short, prosecutors have a Volkswagen problem. [Read More]

LACrimBook on Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS)

*IPFS Hash of this Article: QmRfxvy7bDqnLW9M9tDXp6gy3ZE338MGfaqZQrwyWyrNsW *

Background

I am not alone in being excited about the possibilities of a distributed, permanent file system for the web. Decentralizing the web will lessen the influence of big content aggregators and promote the free and easy exchange of ideas. There are many entrants in the distributed web field (Maidsafe and Storj, for example), but IPFS has the advantage of actually having a client I can download and use now.
Continue reading →