Back in May, David Whelan wrote an excellent column on the pressures law firms experience because of consumer technology products titled The Core of Legal Technology. This month, the Law Society Gazette (UK) contained an article titled Technology in law firms transformed by ‘consumerisation’. Today I found a clever way to get the alternate spelling into the keywords of this article. Clever keyword content is not what I want to write about though.

I want to share three ideas to help law firm technology departments cope with the issue of consumer (and by this I mean Partner) demand . . . [more]

E-mail’s days as a communication medium that offers a “reasonable expectation of privacy” may be numbered.

The ABA’s newly issued Formal Opinion 11-459 revisits the topic of e-mail security, and offers the following concluding paragraph:

A lawyer sending or receiving substantive communications with a client via e-mail or other electronic means ordinarily must warn the client about the risk of sending or receiving electronic communications using a computer or other device, or e-mail account, to which a third party may gain access. The risk may vary. Whenever a lawyer communicates with a client by e-mail, the lawyer must first consider

Oral cultures create knowledge, and some literate cultures produce many more publications than others. In our post-literate world, we have see the resurgence of oral communications on YouTube and elsewhere. Nonetheless, citations to the printed word remains a gold standard. Other forms of verification are needed, to address this imbalance. Enter Wikimedia’s Oral Citation Project. The project is outlined, and links are provided to a movie that looks at the problem.

For more interesting projects from the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia), see here. . . . [more]

Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and inventor of the idea for the eBook way way way back in 1971 in the pre-WWW, pre-smart phone, pre-Kindle, pre-commercialization of everything on the Internet era, died earlier this week. He was 64. Librarians (and computer geeks) thought the world of him.

The Project Gutenberg website has published an obituary:

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea

Paul Venezia of InfoWorld asks why the fax machine refuses to die. In what is a bit of a rant rather than a reasoned analysis, Venezia advises:

Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That’s just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles.

A few reasons come to mind as to . . . [more]

Symantec, the makers of Norton antivirus and anti-spyware software, released a report today containing a plethora of statistics on cybercrime.

As with any report containing statistics and poll results, we should take some of it with a grain of salt, but the stats make interesting reading. The report is set out in infographic style, so its easy to skim through it. It points out the types of online behaviour that tends to be the riskiest.

The most common – and most preventable – type of cybercrime is computer viruses.

After that comes online scams and phishing.

What is surprising is . . . [more]

1) Updates to law-related movies:

Thanks to law librarian Christina López at Pitblado LLP in Winnipeg for mentioning a 1931 movie directed by Fritz Lang called “M.”

I have added an entry for this movie to my list of law-related movies, which sort of makes a nice counterpart to the movie “Z,” earlier recommended by one of the Simons.

I haven’t seen the movie and I suspect it may be hard to rent (Christina mentioning she saw it years ago at a revival movie theatre in Montreal).

It tells the story of a child murderer in Germany and . . . [more]

This is an interesting addendum to the ABA session ““Friend” Is Now a Verb: Judicial Ethics and the New Social Media“. In the Financial Post‘s Legal Post section from August 2nd, Mitch Kowalski notes Oklahoma’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Panel released an opinion on judges and social media in that state on July 6, 2011. The Oklahoma State Courts Network (OSCN.net) has the full Judicial Ethics Opinion 2011-3.

From the opinion:

¶1 Questions: 1. May a Judge hold an internet social account, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin without violating the Code of Judicial Conduct?

¶2 2.

For the last few days this video of two robots having a conversation has been making the rounds. It is fascinating, and hilarious. The Cornell Creative Machines Lab also has other fascinating videos of robots at work. There has not been much in the way of interesting comment on the video, but Kevin Kelly actually called the grad students involved to find out a little more. It is a pretty good take on the Turing Test. . . . [more]

Profiling the behaviour of air travellers to help identify potential terrorists has been news in the United States for several years now, but there has been little public discussion of the practice in Canada. Indeed, airport authorities haven’t included profiling among their security tools here, until last year when the federal government began developing a pilot “passenger-behaviour observation program” for Canadian Air Transport Security Authority officers.

Now that the pilot program has ended, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is making her position known. Jennifer Stoddart says she’s not convinced the technique will actually help . . . [more]

Here’s a quick tip from digital inspiration (via Lifehacker). If you don’t use a password generating/saving application, you may want to turn to the computational engine Wolfram-Alpha the next time you need to come up with a “random” password. Simply enter into the search box on that site [password of n characters] where ‘n’ is the number of characters you want. Wolfram Alpha returns this (for a 7 character request):

The phonetic form may help you memorize the new password. (I’d prefer the sort of thing we do with our postal codes; thus, for this, perhaps: “Why two? Ask . . . [more]

The results of a recent survey conducted by Leger Marketing for SAS, a business analytics software and services provider, on the use of social media by companies have been published today: only 1 in 5 Canadian companies post on social media networks and monitor social media conversations on a regular basis. These two actions are considered the fundamental pillars of effectively using social media.

A lack of resources and a view that it is a waste of time and energy are cited as explanations as to why companies choose not to use social media or not to monitor mentions of . . . [more]