There’s a deeper web lurking in cyberspace, one few people know about and take advantage of. But, it’s not yet a replacement for established legal research tools such as Lexis and Westlaw, says Stephen Lief, a New York-based eDiscovery, Information Governance and Litigation Support consultant with decades of experience.

Consumers turn to Yelp more than any other web site when they’re looking for a lawyer. So reports the blog maintained by the self-proclaimed law-firm marketing guru Larry Bodine.

In the year 2000, when New Orleans lawyer Ernest Svenson was handling a case requiring an abundance of discovery -- meaning paper documents -- a friend offered use of his scanner. A somewhat novel piece of office equipment at the time, using the scanner allowed Svenson to organize the discovery on his laptop so he could access it easily and quickly. “It was an epiphany,” he says.

More than 1.2 million applications, or “apps,” are available at the iPhone App Store as of June 2014, according to a recent About.com article. Compare that with October 2008, when only 800 such apps existed.