There have been two important and encouraging developments on the ethics of cloud computing over the last month.

First, the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has issued an initial set of draft proposals addressing lawyers’ confidentiality-related obligations when using technology. The Commission’s draft report proposes:

• The development of a centralized, user-friendly website that contains continuously updated and detailed information about confidentiality-related ethics issues arising from lawyer’s use of technology, including the latest data security standards.
• Amendments to several Model Rules of Professional Conduct and their Comments to offer specific guidance and expectations relating to technology.

The amendments to the Model . . . [more]

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O’Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of “Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession,” and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach “cost-effective searching” on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples . . . [more]

For those who were fans of  the office suite: NeoOffice (for the Mac) or OpenOffice (for Windows), being free open source office productivity suites originally created by Sun Microsystems, you may be downhearted to hear that OpenOffice (and NeoOffice) are now officially dead. However, this is truly a case of "The King is Dead - Long Live the King!".  OpenOffice and NeoOffice live on - being open source software -  in a new incarnation.  LibreOffice. For one, those of us who were fans can now refer to this new suite by one name - rather than two! This new suite will run under Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, ...).  It is also is available in more than 30 languages.

Last week Amazon’s popular AWS cloud computing service suffered an unprecedented multi-day outage. The outage brought down thousands of websites, including popular websites such as Quora, Reddit and FourSquare, and generated coverage from mainstream publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

While many are quick to point to the outage as a sign that cloud computing is unreliable and not ready for mission-critical applications, the outage has simply brought a reality of both on-premise and cloud computing to light: systems fail, and mission critical applications need to be designed to expect failure.

The media . . . [more]

As those who read me will know, I’m a big fan of Apple products, the proud user of an iPhone. And I think Dropbox is a cloud with silver on the outside and on the lining. In the last couple of days I’ve learned about vulnerabilities for each that make me realize again how exposed my data are and make me more determined to learn about — and use — encryption.

About a month ago I wrote about a German politician who was alarmed at the detailed nature and the duration of the data kept by his service provider ( . . . [more]

The explosion in the tablet world combined with the movement to cloud computing is a game changer in legal technology as demonstrated at ABA TECHSHOW 2011.

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing are all the rage these days, one of basic tenets of SaaS – the pay-as-you-go, subscription-based pricing model – seems to be catching on in the traditional desktop software world.

Last week Adobe made waves by announcing $35/month subscription pricing for its flagship Photoshop product, which has traditionally retailed for over $1,000. Another giant in the traditional software market, Microsoft, has long offered subscription-based pricing for Microsoft Office, but is now also looking to bring Office to a hosted subscription-based offering via Office 365.

This shift isn’t entirely surprising – subscription-based pricing offers . . . [more]

I’m just back from a great ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week. I learned lots about legal technology and enjoyed the company of fellow technology enthusiasts. Wish you all were there, but as I know many SLAW readers were not, in lieu I offer a great collection of articles from the just released 2011 Techshow Tips issue of Law Practice magazine:

• Tablet Users Face Off: iPad versus Slate Shootout
• A Day in the Life of an iPad Lawyer
• A Look Inside the New Mac Apps Store
• Must-Have iPhone Apps
• 10 Tips for Getting Started with Open Source Software
• Google

. . . [more]

Standards for on-premise, cloud and mobile technologies used by lawyers have, to-date, been lacking. While an abundance of recommendations, best practices and other guidelines have been issues by Bar Associations and other organizations, there has not been a single, comprehensive document lawyers could look to for clear guidance on what minimal standards should be adhered for on-premise, cloud and mobile technologies.

The International Legal Technology Standards Organization (ILTSO) aims to change that. ILTSO is a non-profit organization consisting of attorneys, bar association representatives, IT professionals, and business leaders with a stated mission of “helping attorneys and clients better understand the . . . [more]

The good folk over at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog have asked readers to contribute Your Favorite PowerPoint Story:

We had a lot of traffic, comments and feedback when Toby wrote his “Don’t Use PowerPoint” post last week. We thought we’d play off of that post to ask the readers to comment on some of their PowerPoint stories (we said they could be good or bad… but, we preferred bad) and share them with us for this week’s Elephant Post. I’ve used PowerPoint for many, many years, and it is a rare occasion that everything that worked on

. . . [more]

Technical work in the library–largely done behind-the-scenes–is key to ensuring things go smoothly on the client-facing side such as reference and research. One tedious and time-consuming tech task is shelf-reading: checking each book on the shelf to ensure it has been signed back in and is in the correct place. Without doing this on a regular basis (such as once or twice a year), books that have been mis-shelved become impossible to locate.

A library shelf-reading prototype using augmented reality technology–technology that adds to an image of physical space with a computer-generated overlay–is being developed out of Miami University’s Augmented . . . [more]

Since the IPad was introduced it has commonly been acknowledged that the IPad and its brethren are transitional devices, a stepping stone to the next transformation in computing. I believe that time has come a bit sooner than expected. Forget the IPad, the Blackberry, the Android, I want a Pomegranate! The question is not, what does it do? The question is what does it not do? Have a look for yourself: Pomegranate . . . [more]