When signing up for online services or newsletters, most of us feel some level of anxiety about handing over our closely-guarded e-mail address to an unknown and potentially untrustworthy third party. To work around this problem, some create “throw-away” e-mail addresses that can given out indiscriminately, but having to deal with multiple e-mail addresses can be a significant headache.

Gmail (and Google Apps) offers support for a more convenient solution to this problem: an instant “throwaway” e-mail address can be created by appending a “+” sign, followed by any combination of words or numbers, to your e-mail address. E-mails sent . . . [more]

There’s a series of three articles over on Law.com’s Law Technology News that you might find interesting. D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel for Kia Motors America, came to the realization that the billable hour was often spent in . . . well, unnecessary ways. Particularly:

[T]echnological incompetence is endemic to the [legal] profession; and the quantity of resources wasted on busywork is shameful.

As a consequence he devised a test, an audit, of potential outside counsel for Kia, and has run it nine times. His articles (The Origin of the Outside Counsel Tech Audit, Kia Motors Tests Outside . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Most months I spend at least a few days the air, traveling from Vancouver to one of the many destinations Clio’s business brings me. Surprisingly, I find the time on the plane to be some of my most productive, as I’m without the myriad distractions of the office . . . [more]

The methods for producing the results of research have been on the top of my to-do list. Perhaps my knowledge management hat is shading my outlook. I believe that an efficient, sustainable and reusable work product is a very important aspect of legal research.

My staff and I create memos to document our research output – not memos analyzing legal issues as that is a lawyer task, memos that contain a report of what information we find, how we found it, and often permanent links to that information. One problem that has evaded solution is the ability to link to . . . [more]

Chris Dale, a lawyer-turned-eDisclosure-consultant based in the UK, has taken my two-post series from December on search inside the legal organization (see here and here) and applied the thinking specifically to eDiscovery. In his post Why Don’t We Just Use Google for eDiscovery? he suggests that the complexity of using litigation support tools–with concept searching, de-duplication, e-mail threading, clustering and predictive coding–has lawyers asking why not just use Google, or something like Google?

He gets to to the crux of the problem in this notion:

If the primary point is that Google does not purport to give you everything

. . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the second in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

We’ve all done the favour of making an introduction over e-mail. What often follows is a string of e-mails that bear no relevance to the introducer:

Jim: Bob, please meet Alice. You should definitely get to know each other; please take it from here!
Bob: Alice, . . . [more]

David and I both touched on Google Glass in April of last year, the company’s new project to push computing technology into our eyewear. A new video, released yesterday, offers some additional insight into what it might be like to wear such a product. [embedded below]

These video clips are obviously targeting the capture of lifestyle moments, but with respect to lawyers, I’ve been wondering if there could be any value in the courtroom? In particular, whether enhanced “team communication” could be had when larger teams are involved. We sometimes see the second chair role using laptops, exchanging email, . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the first in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

First up is creating a “Robots” folder. This is a nearly foolproof system for easily separating e-mails sent from real humans from machine-generated e-mails sent by automated systems (including newsletters, alerts from software systems, Twitter notifications, etc.)

To determine which e-mails should be sent to your “Robots” . . . [more]

We always assume that the digital transformation will be lead by the youth. Or at least Mitch does.

Kevin O’Keefe came across a recent study which indicates that older readers needed less brain activity when reading on a tablet than on paper or e-Readers. The authors used EEG devices to monitor (theta band) brain activity and tracked eye movement. In fact, the older readers, aged 66-77 years, were actually able to use the tablets better than younger participants.

The point here is that the readers’ subjective preference of print over tablet was irrelevant, for all age groups. Most of the . . . [more]

As you are no doubt aware, RIM Blackberry finally brought its new operating system and a new phone to market this week. The first phone, the Z10 does not have a keyboard – a first for Blackberry. 

So will this save Blackberry? My take on early reviews is that Blackberry fans will like the new phones, and they will probably result in fewer people trading for iPhones, Android phones or Windows phones when their Blackberry terms expire. But it probably won’t result in a mass of people giving up their iPhones, Android phones or Windows phones for a Blackberry.

The . . . [more]

Here’s a question raised on a US legal technology list that seems relevant to Canadian law too.

What’s the duty of care of mobile devices as pertains to patches/updates provided by the vendor and/or provider?

Example:

I bought an Android phone in June 2012, which received an over-the-air OS upgrade in late July to Android 4.0.4. This release was provided to me well after the version was released to the public. Also, since that time, 2 other versions of Android (4.1 and 4.2) have been made available. There are known security vulnerabilities in the 4.0.4 release.

Yet I’ve certainly not

. . . [more]

Don Tapscott, author, speaker and advisor on new technologies and media, was interviewed by McKinsey Quarterly back in September 2012, and a video excerpt plus transcript of the interview was released last month. See: Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott. This interview has been raising questions around the web, and thought it would be useful to look at it here on SLAW.