Here's a quick tech tip I came across yesterday that might come in handy for some people. If you're using a modern browser (and why wouldn't you be?) you can turn it into a text editor by putting what follows into the location bar and then clicking in the window:

We remember Robert Wilkins who died in Lexington, South Carolina last week.
Bob was a pioneer in the application of technology to the practice of law. In 1979 (that is not a typo), he published “Word Processing for a Law Office”. He was the editor of the Lawyer’s Micro-Computer, The Lawyers PC, The Perfect Lawyer and Shepard’s Elder Care Law newsletter. When I started going to ABA Tech Show almost 30 years ago, Bob Wilkins was a legend, since he had designed his entire Trusts and Estate practice around his technology.

Without pioneers like Bob, today’s practice is almost unimaginable. . . . [more]

At New York Legal Tech this week, Thomson Reuters will unveil an interesting basket of software products for the legal market. While a lot of hard innovative work has gone into the products to be released at the start of February, the most notable feature is the elements that they share in common.

The most significant development was not the suite of products that were unveiled but the change in strategic direction that they embody. I’ve commented before on how Thomson Reuters acquisitions appear somewhat disjointed. But this was evidence that the central vision of products like Serengeti has . . . [more]

While reading about Newegg’s victory over patent troll Soverain Software over the weekend, I was reminded of the Three Billy Goats Gruff fairy tale I read to my children just a week ago.

Soverain claimed three patents it owns gave it intellectual property rights over the “shopping cart” technology that virtually every e-commerce site depends upon. Sorverain filed lawsuits against Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Home Depot, Victoria’s Secret, Avon and even e-retailing giant Amazon.com.

While Soverain successfully extorted millions of dollars from these e-commerce companies, it picked one last fight that would prove to be the patent’s troll’s undoing. That fight was . . . [more]

2012 has not been a good year for RIM. The company became a favorite punching bag for technology pundits as it continued to delay products and fail in everything from marketing to developer relations. RIM’s co-CEO’s lost their job, and the company’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, promised the company’s new operating system, BlackBerry 10, would catalyze a turnaround for the company, something many tech experts thought was delusionally optimistic.

The company has finally pinned a release date on BlackBerry 10: January 30th. Rogers and other carries are taking pre-orders today, and RIM is sending out preview hardware and software to . . . [more]

Imagine a tool that would round out the existing built-in spell- and grammar-checking tools in Microsoft Word, but instead of simply correcting errors, this tool would make your writing more concise. This tool exists, and it’s called WordRake.

You can think of WordRake as an automated editor. Gary Kinder, a lawyer and writing expert, codified many of the patterns he saw while editing documents into a set of rules that WordRake utilizes while processing a document.

Here is example of WordRake’s automated editing in action:

WordRake is a powerful add-on to Word, and is one of the only . . . [more]

My post Why Can’t You Just Make it Work Like Google? last week surprised me by going viral. Well, as viral as a blog post about information management can go. It certainly seems to have struck a nerve with people from all across the legal industry. It turns out that making search work effectively inside the organization is something a lot of people are attempting to tackle. After posting it, however, I realized there is also a reason why you would not even want to use Google as it functions out on the Internet for use inside the organization.

Allow . . . [more]

How many knowledge management and IT professionals have heard this refrain? Why can’t we just use Google (or something like Google) to find documents inside our organization? Why do we need to spend time and money organizing documents and adding indexing or classification or a taxonomy?

The problem lies with a significant difference between web pages on the Internet and internal documents: Google uses links from other websites as recommendations as to what is good content. It uses links plus a number of other things together in its secret algorithm–which gets changed periodically–to help its system figure out which web . . . [more]

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) which many law firms belong to jointly produced a white paper in October 2012 entitled The New Librarian. 

According to Steven Lastres via the On Firmer Ground blog:

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) recently released a joint white paper that acknowledges the strategic alliance that has developed between law librarians and technologists in driving efficient and effective legal information management.

Kate Hagan, Executive Director of AALL says, “As legal professionals retool and reskill through innovation and

. . . [more]

Clio’s third annual Apple in Law Offices Survey is a wrap with over 1,200 respondents. The survey’s results show Apple products, ranging from the iPad to MacBooks, are rapidly increasing in popularity among lawyers.

iPad

The iPad continues to be a game-changing device for lawyers: over 57% of respondents indicated they currently use an iPad in their law office. Of those that don’t, nearly 60% planned on purchasing an iPad in the next year:

Enthusiasm for the recently-announced iPad mini was also high: 23% of respondents indicated they plan to purchase an iPad mini in the next twelve months.

Mobile . . . [more]

Sharing a WiFi access point among too many devices can shut down access for everyone. At some point, the high congestion levels overload the WiFi router, making it in effectively useless. This isn’t a common problem for home networks, but it does occur (frequently?) for events such as legal conferences or when you stay at a hotel.

An interesting software solution from NC State Engineers looks to be on the horizon. It’s called WiFox and based on tests of 45 concurrent connecting devices, reported a 700% speed improvement, and a 30-40% reduction in network latency. The performance increase comes from . . . [more]

The use of Apple devices in law offices is clearly on the rise. Rising from virtual obscurity just five years ago, Apple devices such as iPads, iPhones and MacBooks have become integral parts of many law practices. An ever-increasing number of Apple logos glow at me at the CLE seminars I deliver across the country.

Clio has launched its third annual Apple in Law Offices Survey in an attempt to take a more quantitative pulse of what’s happening with Apple, PCs and the cloud in law offices. Take the survey, and you’ll have a chance of winning one of . . . [more]