Law Clerk Addict

As mentioned earlier this month and again in the comments to Friday's post, Law Clerk Addict will be getting an update for the 2011-12 cycle, which will likely launch within the next month or two. Things are still fluid and subject to change, but here is what we're considering, in descinding likelihood:

Extremely Likely:

1. Individual court and judge pages broken down into multiple pages to allow the site to host more information while reducing clutter and keeping page load times reasonable.

2. Classifying court and judge comments by cycle. To reduce clutter and load times, the default court and judge page will likely only list comments for the 2011-12 cycle, but users would still be able to easily access (and still post in) all comments from previous cycles on a prominently linked sub-page. Similarly, the recently discussed page would likely include links to both sets.

3. Some minor tweeks here and there (e.g. city names linking to Wikipedia pages, list of related forum threads about judges and courts).

Likely, But May Come Later:

1. Support for state and bankruptcy courts (was planned for this cycle, but we got sidetracked). Note that this isn't hard to code, but will just take a very long time to input all the data.

2. Classifications by school. For instance, when you post a comment, you may be given the option of tagging it as being related to a school in addition to being related to a judge, with those comments then aggregated on new school pages or RSS feeds (along with other potential information related to schools).

3. More detailed information for judges and courts, e.g. information applicants probably should know before applying or interviewing that might not be readily apparent from official sources, lists of notable opinions, links to external resources, etc.

Wish List:

1. User registration. Once we figure out the best way to go about doing this, a lot of other features (e.g., direct posting to forum, private messaging, user blogs, etc.) should not too much additional time to code.

2. Finding time to finish inputing the huge backlog of clerk data from past cycles.

Again, this is mostly unofficial and things can change based on user feedback (notably, school classifications isn't something we were planning to do this update until a commenter suggested it) or other issues (like coding a feature taking longer than anticipated). However, if you think there's something important missing from this list or if one believe of these proposed changes is going to ruin the site, feel free to comment about it or send us an email.