There are lots of e-mail electronic discussion groups. Many have valuable information for lawyers. All Oklahoma Bar Sections have these lists available.
Solosez is a thriving electronic mailing list-based online community. It is for the benefit of solo and small firm lawyers and neither ABA membership or even a law degree is required to participate. But with a large and active membership, the daily message volume can be overwhelming. Are you ready for an extra hundred e-mails per day? You cannot have a high volume list like Solosez routed into your inbox. You will have trouble locating your regular business e-mail in the flood. But a list where there are only two or three messages per month has little potential value. There are techniques for dealing with a high volume e-mail list. The two most common are setting up a rule in your e-mail client to route all Solosez messages to their own folder or just setting up a new mail account just for one or more high volume mailing lists. But I've found the best one, IMHO.
I periodically take a break from Solosez and resubscribe a few months later. I mentioned to Ross Kodner that I was about to resubscribe again and he said "Why don't you just give yourself a Gmail Invite?" As most now know, Gmail is the free web-based e-mail service from Google with over two gigabytes of storage. Gmail is theoretically still in beta version and you join by getting an "invite" from a current user. (Anyone who wants one, e-mail me at jim.calloway@gmail.com. I had 50 invites left last time I looked.)
This has been great--for me anyway. When I log into my Gmail "Solosez" account, the various e-mails are displayed by threads, which makes them easier to quickly access. For example, if someone asked a question about X Software, and ten people responded, I see the subject of X Software with (11) next to it, indicating 11 total messages. Clicking on the subject line brings up all 11 in order. This is a great way to make sure I don't miss a message on a topic of interest, while allowing me to skip threads on the substantive law of other states, for example. And now I've got over 2 gigs of storage on someone else's server. That's a lot of Solosez e-mail!
For more on high volume lists, here's the classic: "How many electronic mailing list subscribers does it take to change a light bulb?"
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