I got to tell you. It’s tough being on the same posting day as Mitch and Yosie these days. The bar can sit pretty high when my coastal time zone mind wakes up to see what they’ve posted each Thursday. Such is the evolving quality of Slaw, I suppose — which, of course, makes for great reading.

Case in point, Mitch’s post below shares a wonderful vision for how KM can evolve to be more effective, more business-centric and drive new innovation. Simply fantastic. Please don’t take the rest of this post as a critique of Mitch’s ideas.

One difference . . . [more]

I missed the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, which wraps up today in Washington D.C. So my thoughts are turning not only to envy, but also to some of my own KM thoughts mixed with those emanating from conference tweets.

Too often Canadian law firms see KM as nothing more than a repository of documents and clauses: Matthew Parson’s so-called “information landfill.” And because KM is seen as nothing more than a landfill site, firms see KM as nothing more than a software solution to assist lawyers sift through the debris.

What a terrible waste!

But, what if . . . [more]

Having effective passwords for the myriad of sites that we need them for is getting harder. The best passwords are: long, not words, no pattern, include numbers, symbols and caps. We shouldn’t use the same one, or similar ones, twice, in case 1 gets compromised. And we should change them often.

Password cracking is getting easier all the time. This arstechnica article entitled Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger goes into great detail, but the essence of it is:

The ancient art of password cracking has advanced further in the past five years than it . . . [more]

The International Legal Technology Association conference is happening right now in Washington, D.C. In addition to the conference blog, Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM is sharing reports of the conference on her blog. Mary’s recent posts include:

• Compass and Cloud: Autonomy’s New Direction #ILTA12
• #SharePoint Innovator Award #ILTA12
• Extranets:The Client Disconnect? #ILTA12
• JAG Connect:Army Lawyers go Social #ILTA12
• Frans Johansson Keynote #ILTA12
• Overcoming Law Firm Irrationality [#ILTA12]
• The Alternative Side of #ILTA12

As you can infer from Mary’s post titles, you can also follow the conference by its Twitter hashtag #ILTA12

You can follow the conference by . . . [more]

Dropbox is still the most popular cloud-based file sharing and storage system, so its success and failures will inevitably signal how quickly the legal community warms up to the cloud.

Dropbox has recently come under scrutiny for a number of security failures. In response to breaches discovered earlier this summer, they have just introduced a new two-step verification on their accounts.

The two-step verification will be optional for users, and allows them to impose a new security code on top of passwords. The code is sent directly to a cell phone, and can be used whenever the account . . . [more]

A nice little infographic, challenging us to take account of our online personae.

Has your cellphone number leaked out by accident? Are your eHarmony details jangling cacophonously with your LinkedIn resume? Do your Dad’s Facebook updates invite snark from your hipster webdev team?

Some may be surprised to learn that they can control some of this info. Others may be surprised to learn how little of it can be controlled. For instance, deep web data is now being exploited by US political fundraisers, in ways similar to established marketing practices. This data, scooped from banking transactions and the . . . [more]

Has anyone had any experience with the use of the voice as a legal signature (presumably by way of a recording)? Is there any case law on the topic, one way or the other?

When we did the UECA in 1999, we had in mind that a voice mail message might be an electronic document and the association of the content with the speaker could well constitute a signature.

There is some law that a signature must be an intentional act, and whether just saying ‘Hello, it’s John, I accept your offer to sell me your house’ would constitute an . . . [more]

You might have read about LawMeets: It was profiled this week in an ABA Journal news item as the subject of a $500,000 US National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to its developer, entrepreneur and corporate and securities law Professor Karl Okamoto of Drexel University.

Professor Okamoto is also Director of the Business and Entrepreneurship Law Program at Drexel and founder of ApprenNet, which operates the LawMeets venture. The new LawMeets is an online experiential learning initiative, the virtual evolution of Prof. Okamoto’s live National Transactional LawMeet program, which – live or online – might . . . [more]

Now when you search Google Patents you’ll be querying a database that includes European patents. Even more useful perhaps is Google’s just-introduced attempt to find “prior art”. Here’s a description of the process from the Google Inside Search blog:

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

A prior art search produces Google’s pick of the . . . [more]

Last week news broke of the epic hacking of Gizmodo’s Mat Honan. By exploiting security flaws in both Amazon’s and Apple’s account verification and reset procedures, a hacker was able to obtain access to a wide variety of Honan’s accounts, including his iCloud account. Once they’d gained control of Honan’s iCloud account, the hackers were able to remotely wipe his iPhone, iPad, and his Macbook, destroying his personal data, including irreplaceable pictures of his one-year-old daughter:

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my

ABA’s Law Practice Management section has launched an App version of their Law Practice Magazine in both the iTunes App Store and on . Here’s a screen shot:

This new digital rendition will be available as both a member benefit (free) and to non-member subscribers for a $20 per year. For current LPM section members, gaining access was as simple as typing in your email address registered with the ABA. The interface has a simple page-by-page finger slide to navigate, and is built on the Texterity platform.

Count me as impressed. The look and feel of the App’s execution seems . . . [more]

One of the many highlights for me at last month’s American Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference was the opportunity to meet Priya Rai of the National Law University in Delhi and to observe her presentation, Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law.

Ms Rai is an accomplished law librarian and legal research instructor trained in law. One of her accomplishments is participation in the Information Institute of India Project. She attended and presented at AALL 2012 as the recipient of the FCIL Schaffer Grant . . . [more]