If you didn’t already know about the internet archive and its ‘Way Back Machine,’ you should. It’s a gargantuan collection of old (and not so old) web sites, fully searchable and publicly accessible. Want to know what Google was like as an infant? Here ya go. How about faegre.com in 1996 asking “who owns your domain,” or  the ABA in 1997? Or Facebook when it was aboutface.com (no longer available)  the look of internet dinosaur AOL, or blogger.com when it seemed like yesterday?

While it’s is all fun and good to retro-surf the web, there is a more serious use, namely using the Way Back Machine or similar internet archives  to help prove an evidentiary issue at trial or demonstrate that a party had made representations that they now deny. For that, there’s a good PDF article on the web that discusses the options.

So, as the work to launch a new practicelaw wraps up, we hop a ride on the way back machine to see how far we’ve come. practicelaw has existed since 2001, when it started out with eight ‘files’ of substantive areas. It changed its interface in 2003, then again in 2004, still listing the eight areas of law that we supported at that time. That format stuck until now, with a redesign now overdue but about ready to launch on September 9. After that day, you may have to go way back to see what we once were.