pm blog

A recent Techno Lawyer response by Steven A. Loewy addressing Dennis Kennedy’s 2007 predictions prompted this cup of coffee:

Thought process? Let’s review that, each product induced commentary reflects a market condition (old news), but if these esteemed columnist(s) had any real concerns about what may or may not happen and quit treating there “illusionary” position with gospel type columns, ensuring no-one is offended an call-out the issues as they really are….

1. Decline in use of Blackberry - no brainer: show me any technical gadget that actually stays current more than 3 years or has no competition. The issue that should be addressed is “USAGE among Legal personal”. Promoting the wireless environment and the inherent lack of vision in small firms that fail to implement it. Large firms IT departments have to support how many different toys…..

2. More users of Mac - again the issue should be a calling out of Legal software vendors on not addressing the platform.

3. Electronic Discovery for small firms - again calling out both the industry and practitioners. ED like most legal packages is not geared for small firms because no-one would spend the money to buy it. The break down runs a parallel as in choosing a case - the ability to pay. Small firms/Solos are locked out of technology for that basic reason. Manufactures see no financial gain in supporting you. Unlike any other vertical, your own peers show you no competitive reason why you would adopt or use any of it. If so, would they actually tell you?

4. Yellow pages v. web pages - nothing challenging, why not address the “content” or creative approaches one can or cannot take. The machine in place (ethics/advertisement) does not allow for the creative separation among competitors. Bland imagery clouds the user’s experience; just bring up any evaluation tool that a “CLIENT” or potential Client could use in choosing representation and the dragon beast awakens. For the last couple of years a major complaint I hear among small firms/solo’s - that vendor put the screws to me. That’s just great it’s everybody else’s fault but yours. You’re still carrying that dead weight around from being sold a copy machine. And let’s face facts - you were SOLD period. Our own editor recalls his past experience. Salesperson must have been a shark. Please - if you done your homework, which includes a complete review of “your” capabilities plus a honest evaluation of the value change in your infrastructure “could” make you money or simply put “hired” an independent consultant too field through the options of any vendors abilities half of these nightmares would have been avoided. But sense your ego rules most of your decisions you will continually stay in this cycle. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for your client that’s what they pay for. It just might be what is holding your own “business” back….

Ed. Note: I belong to FaceBook, a social network that began life as a college project and has since “graduated” if you will to full social network status. As it turns out, this company’s early years were either a canny strategy or the biggest piece of dumb luck since Jerry Yang chose to call his web portal Yahoo!

The Missing Link

FaceBook just might be a bridge between “what the kids are doing” and what the adults are looking for; namely, grown up social networking. Here’s why

First, in the case of FaceBook as members of its original college-based network graduated into the “real world” they brought with them a desire to stay connected via what else: their college network. And many of those kids were students of the web, of programming, and of business and marketing. Sounds like the right combination at the right time, doesn’t it?

Second, our nation’s public and private colleges have a combined budget bigger than the Gross National Product of most South Americas nations, and could surely afford to create a much more technologically savvy network than a could a couple of college kids … right? Wrong. FaceBook filled the void overlooked by the better funded, but less nimble, bureaucracies.

Third, the “velvet rope” factor of FaceBook was too much to resist. It was the ultimate insider ticket. Plus, why should college kids get all the kicks? Pretty soon grown-ups wanted in and then the Face (as I call it) went big time. I mean b-i-g t-i-m-e. How big? How does $8 billion sound? Yeah. That’s what some investment banks have estimated it could be worth. Still think the Internet is kid stuff?

Finally, FaceBook began, and has maintained its traction, with a more open-minded and savvy audience than any would-be social network except MySpace. Thing is, MySpace is its own worst enemy, so while Ruper Murdoch is busy allaying the fears of angry soccer moms and vice squads worldwide, as well as the host of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, FaceBook has been able to concentrate on business. Say Rupert, how’s that investment looking now? Still sure you didn’t overpay?

The Best Gets Better

Despite having aced out the competition, what’s really amazing is that FaceBook took off not because it had a captive college audience but because it was truly the best platform of its kind. Why? Because it is

• easy to use
• easy to join
• fully customizable (in a meaningful way)

This last point is perhaps the most important. MySpace is customizable too … in the same sense as a crappy, rusted out old car with shiny hubcaps. That last touch can turn that rusty old car into … a crappy rusted out old car with shiny hubcaps. Not really that different than it was before.

The Face is different: the developers have taken a cue from a company you may have heard of called Google that began inviting the public starting about 3 years ago to look under the hood of its website and create their own spin-offs. There’s that whole “give up the family secrets” thing again, this time being done by the biggest, richest, ass-kickingest Internet company of all time. So the Face did it too and guess what? The result was an explosion of mini-programs created by 3^rd parties to enhance the experience of users on FaceBook. It’s win-win. These plug-ins or applets extended the capabilities of the network (like after-market car parts) so it could evolved to fit the needs of users and not the other way around.

Radical Transparency: Shake Your Moneymaker

As for radical transparency – the practice of exposing your deepest secrets and subjecting your business practices to public scrutiny and comment with the idea that input from the crowd will result in a better end product, I can hear the lawyers and judges screaming now …

Are you suggesting that our venerable law firm, which has been advising the biggest companies and most important people in the country since 1909, make our proprietary, one of a kind, super-secret methods public? What about confidentiality? What about competitive advantage? You’re a traitor to the profession for even suggesting it. Off with your head. Begin disbarment proceedings.

.. or something like that.

So what does this tale of new age economics and business-models gone wild tell us? On that note, I give you my contribution to a recent conversation on FaceBook between your humble narrator and fellow Attorney Martin”Marty” Schwimmer. As usual, I’ve spared my conversation partner the embarrassment of being quoted and limited my mockery to my comments alone. Enjoy …

Marty asked about social networking with clients. Do I use devices like FaceBook? Even Instant Messaging a la Yahoo, MSN, AOL?

I took the liberty of answering Marty’s question with respect to not only clients, but my fellow attorneys, and here is how I put it

Marty

I have tried for years to get attorneys from my area to connect via social networks. Not easy when judges around here have come out and referred to the Internet as the province of pedophiles and are proud to say they’ve never touched their computers and never will. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues lack the conceptual tools to take advantage of the technology anyway. It isn’t merely a generational question: as a profession lawyers don’t see a need to change, so they won’t — until they are forced to do so or threatened with losing power.

As for my clients, these days they are individuals or very small businesses. I used to be outside counsel for a utility company. While there was a lot of red tape there, at least they hired open minded, progressive people — I set up an Extranet for them back in 2002 and it changed the way we did business. It also made me a bit of a star. Thinking ahead of the curve can be great as long as you’re not too far ahead and lose the pack altogether, because the leading edge is the bleeding edge.

In short, I guess the only thing that drives people is necessity; just because something can be done better, faster, and even cheaper, is apparently no reason to do it that way. It’s a shame but I guess it’s human nature.

M. Hedayat

Technorati tags: facebook, social networking, community, collaboration, great conversations, business, lawyer, law

2 noteworthy changes at Avvo recently.

First, lawyers can now use their e-mail to claim their profile using email verification rather than a credit card. More information on this change can be found here on the Avvo blog.  [ed. note: I wrestled with the use of credit cards to validate identity in connection with another lawyer-directed website I was developing. Let's just say it didn't go over well; lawyers stayed away in droves. Then again if Avvo didn't ask for proof of identity there would be an equal but opposite uproar. Welcome to the lawyer party, guys at Avvo ... are you having fun yet?]

Second, lawyers who practice in more than one state can now merge their profiles. More information can be found here.

Jul 19, 2007: a comprehensive and growing collection of articles for mobile litigators was published by Lexbe.com under the title Litilaw. Litilaw currently consists of 500+ CLE-style articles and is heralded by the company as the largest collection of free advanced litigation articles on the Internet. The articles are organized into more than 30 substantive and procedural categories including

• Antitrust
• e-Discovery
• Health Care
• Litigation Support
• Tax

The collection is also text-searchable and all articles are available as full-text PDF downloads. Each article comes with a description including a summary, the year presented, the author, and the number of pages.

About Lexbe
Lexbe provides litigation support services to practitioners nationwide through Lexbe Online and Lexbe Digitization. Lexbe Online is a web-based case analytics and document management application. A fully-functional 30-day free trial is available for new clients and can be set up online in minutes. Lexbe Digitization offers a broad array of scanning, file conversion, PDF, OCR, e-discovery, and various other kinds of document digitization services. For more information or to schedule a demonstration contact Gene Albert at media@Lexbe.com or call Lexbe toll free 1-800-401-7809.

Ed. Note: This post is from John so I’m the subject. When I need John to give me social advice you know things are going downhill …

After reviewing a few of his recent post(s) I had to take a moment to drive down to Bolingbrook and reassure myself that Mazy hadn’t stop taking his medication and had no weapons within reach. The man needs a hug… the scathing letter he wrote to the New York Times is typical of someone yelling in a forest where even the animals don’t care. Loud, but not really effective; much like his farewell editorial in the June 2006 issue of the DCBA Bar Brief. Despite little outbursts like that … I must admit to a fondness for the guy. See, this is the time of year during which lawyers always seem to have a little extra time on their hands, which they inevitably use to read, reflect, and revisit past efforts (both good and bad). So we revisited some points of conversation yesterday such as

Monetizing a Blog: simple in principle (solicit advertisers or just use Google Adwords) but hard to execute and often of questionable value. Part of the problem is that Adwords displays any vendor – including your competitors – so it’s often not appealing to advertisers who want exclusive reign. Then there’s the problem of volume: unless your traffic is in the stratosphere (like say … porn), your payout is in pennies and hardly amounts to a hill of beans, besides which Google won’t even send a payout if it’s less than a certain threshold amount. But there is hope; often your web host will have a ready-made affiliate program in place so you can seamlessly move ads onto your blog. In the end however, since the PM blog is in the legal space the focus of the discussion should probably be legal work or technology consulting for lawyers. That is the real question … does blogging bring business? Different discussion altogether.

The Domain Name Lottery (what’s old is new): This is a blast from the past. Remember when someone paid $3,000,000 for “Alta Vista.com?” Well apparently the domain name gold rush is back on and people are buying up snappy phrases once again at a feverish clip. But wait … isn’t that cybersquatting? Isn’t that illegal? Actually no; don’t confuse domain speculation (a “legitimate” way to make money) with cybersquatting which is illegal. See, squatters will take a domain name that is “actively sought” based on the number of related search inquires and redirect those who visit the site to another site altogether (such as a porn site or what have you). Domain speculators on the other hand buy up names to either sell or use them – even if not for what you’d expect. You might say this second category of speculators is buying and selling futures of a sort – Internet domain futures if you will.

Example: Take my work with Mazy on the subject of bankruptcy. Economic conditions being what they are, bankruptcy is once again a hot issue. Take the 3 words: bankruptcy, attorney, Illinois. Those 3 words in some combination or other have grown to over 2.3 million listings. The trick is creating a name that fits into a growth sector like that.

Example: BioMedMedia.com is a name we own. We can activate a site anytime but instead of doing all the work, letting our competitors know what we’re doing, and invite new ones as well, it makes sense to first develop a business model and establish the company. It’s just common sense, and buying a domain name ahead of time is just good planning.

That said, one of the biggest problems for lawyers is not that they lack choices, but rather that their industry throttles itself (or at least threatens to squelch the younger, more tender practices) by being too restrictive. But you should still make an effort to break from the break with the institutional format, especially if you’re a small firm or solo. Take for example names such as ScottFreeMe.com or DriveThruLegal.com. Of course asking Mazy to push the edge is like watching a cat walk the fence viewing both sides, this is when I throw something and say damn it choose. Use your background, culture, professional experience hell your a lawyer for peat-sakes, buy the way my find friend you just missed another: iraniangreencard.com is taken. I was thinking Iranianlawyer.com, we’ll see how long it takes for Mazy or someone reading to purchase this…

In a recent lawsuit, Calyon, a French bank with locations in New York City, alleged that Mizuho Securities, a Japenese financal services company, convinced a group of debt traders to switch jobs and leave their positions. The complaint also named as defendants the traders whom Calyon claims resigned.

The plaintiff alleges that the traders subsequently used its confidential business information concerning debt securities for their benefit in conducting their new work responsibilities at Mizuho Securities.

Citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, amongst numerous other causes of actions against the individual defendants, Calyon was successful in reaching an agreement with the Individual Defendants to preserve the hard drives of their personal computers and computer storage devices by creating forensic images of each device in its discovery stage.

Where the disputes over discovery started to arise was when Calyon asserted that their forensic expert should be permitted to inspect the entirety of the forensic images to determine the details of when and by what means the Individual Defendants misappropriated documents from Calyon on their personal computers, and the subsequent actions in copying or deleting same. The Individual Defendants objected to Calyons expert conducting the forensic examination citing invasion of the privacy rights of themselves and their non-party family members who had also used these same computers. The Individual Defendants offered as an alternative, that their forensic expert could perform an identical search and examination for all relevant, non-privileged electronic information (ESI) or, that a third-party expert be appointed by the court and who would confer with Calyon on the ESI it was seeking.

Calyons assertions that only its expertas opposed to the Individual Defendants expert or independent third-party expert would possess the requisite incentive to search exhaustively for evidence, and that only Calyons expert would be able to confer with Calyons counsel on an on-gong basis to refine such methods, was insufficient to convince the court. Despite the submission of Calyons experts declaration, which outlined a list of specific items of interest that would be searched for beyond routine word searches, the court concluded that the Defendants expert could perform the same inspection.

What complicated the Plaintiffs ability to conduct its own inspection of the Individual Defendants computers from the start was that these devices were their personal property, not their new employers computers. Personally owned computers always pose a challenge when it comes to forensic inspections. The storage of private information belonging to non-party family members on the computers became a major stumbling block for the Plaintiff.

In similar civil disputes, CyberControls forensic experts will often be searching for artifacts on evidence hard drives that help identify any external storage devices (i.e. USB flash drives) commonly used to copy and transfer large amounts of data from one computer to another. Other artifacts of interest in these situations would be any indication of a wiping utility software used on the subject computer to permanently erase specific data files and e-mails. Another common method of transmitting misappropriated IP is by using ones own Internet e-mail account (AOL, Hotmail etc.) over the employers Internet access and attaching documents to send to a third-party or ones self. These transmissions can only be recovered through vigorous forensic examinations of a hard drive.

Fortunately, Judge Freeman stipulated in her ruling that the Defendants forensic expert must consult fully and in good faith with Calyons expert in order to develop an appropriate search protocol. This stipulation by the court should provide Calyons expert with the ability to orchestrate a comprehensive search for all relevant ESI and artifacts on these evidence drives. Otherwise, Judge Freeman has provided Calyon with an opportunity to demonstrate that in the event that Defendants expert has failed to follow these instructions, Calyon may renew its application for direct access to the forensic images.

Conducting forensic computer examinations often requires an intensive collaboration between the expert and legal counsel to identify as many potential elements of electronic evidence that might exist on an opponents computer in order to sufficiently craft the most effective discovery plan possible. CyberControls expertise in computer forensics and investigative experience has proven to be an invaluable resource to hundreds of legal professionals across the country.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss any specific issues that you may be facing as a respondent or requesting party in a commercial litigation matter at 847-756-4890 or visit our cyber site at www.cybercontrols.net.

I’ve already written about how a fast-talking huckster from search vendor Autonomy tried to oversell the hell out of my legal website startup in the late 90’s. That salesman lied through his teeth. By some miracle, I avoided that bullet — which is amazing because I fell for every other dot.com lie that the industry had to offer. But I digress … back to software vendor Autonomy (then a relative unknown) pushing its technology via shuck and jive men like the one that called on me and nearly cleaned me out ($100,000 for the software as I recall - not including development and installation). Uh … yeah … whatever. But hey, what’s past is past, right? I mean, its nearly 10 years later and Autonomy appears to have overcome its slimy beginnings to position itself as a genuine e-discovery contender, if not a powerhouse. At least that’s what you’d conclude if you read about the acquisition by Autonomy of Zantaz, a content archiving, e-discovery software vendor. Zantaz, they say, makes software to retain and retrieve unstructured digital information, while Autonomy sells the platform for accessing the information via a smart search. And the acquisition is the largest since Autonomy bought data retrieval software maker Verity. Let’s hope the combined company is slightly less slimy than its predecessor (but how likely is that?). In the end, if it achieves its goals Autonomy will take its place alongside vendors such as Kroll Ontrack and Lexis-Nexis … or will it be acquired by those companies? Autonomous no more, it seems.