This review first appeared in Research Advisor, May 2002. It is reprinted here with permission.

Robert Ambrogi's The Best and Worst of Legal Sites on the Web provides commentary on the usefulness of select Websites to the legal profession. The publisher, American Lawyer Media, has put this book out with four others under the new trade book publishing arm of the company. ALM's new publishing divisions' purpose is "geared toward entrepreneurs, business professionals, practicing attorneys and law and business students,... [and] will be less technical than legal treatises, yet more sophisticated than most legal and business trade books currently on the market." This book, which grew out of a newsletter Ambrogi started in 1995 called legal.online, has an easy, conversational tone and provides a good look at how much legal information is available via the Internet. Robert J. Ambrogi, Esq. is the director of American Lawyer Media's Electronic Publishing and News Service and also authors a monthly column titled "Web Watch" in Law Technology News.

The book's first chapter, "Introduction: How We Picked and Why", is essential reading in order to understand how this work is organized and to learn its ambitions. The rating system is built on 1.)overall usefulness to legal professionals, 2.) content, 3.) design/presentation, 4.) accessibility/ease of use, and 5.) innovation. The highest ranked sites receive 5 stars - one for each rating criterion. Also in this first chapter Ambrogi explains that this work is not for Internet novices. The ability to navigate the Internet using popular browsers, such as Netscape and Internet Explorer, is assumed. Also assumed is that the reader will have an understanding of and access to browser plug-ins such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader and media players, such as Microsoft's Windows Media Player, for the purposes of using streaming audio and video.

Mr. Ambrogi chooses to rate some sites with fewer than five stars without explaining to the reader which of the five criteria are lacking. Descriptions for Websites given one or no stars often do not detail why the site ranks so poorly. The work fails in its stated goal to cover each site only once, and readers will find certain Websites, such as Findlaw.com, reviewed as a whole and also broken into topical sections and described throughout the book's chapters. Ambrogi mixes free, fee, educational, non-profit, commercial, and government sites together in this book. The user must read the prose descriptions of each site to determine authority, scope, and availability. Chapters are arranged topically and within each chapter there are subdivisions. The table of contents does not provide page number access to these subdivisions and there is no index, appendix of the Websites covered in the book, or any other finding aids.

Internet websites are often fleeting and to provide a print guide to Internet sites without the promise of frequent editions and updates is disappointing. While many libraries will be tempted to catalog this work in their "reference" section, it does not provide sufficient consistency or organization to be a successful reference work. However, the breadth of coverage and the kernels of information imparted do make this title a good read.

--Catherine Sanders Reach, MLIS