LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Query to Blawgers: Do You Censor Reader Comments?

I'm faced with a case of first impression for my blog. This week, one of my prior posts attracted an informative and on-topic comment from someone I don't know, which in of itself is nothing out of the ordinary. However, it also had a most pejorative tone and use of questionable verbiage. I counted five such terms.

I usually get professional-sounding comments or the run-of-the-mill spam comments for drug and sex sites. Naturally I delete the latter as a matter of course, and am planning to do some upgrades to prevent them from getting through. But this one post troubled me, being in the gray area, being neither drastically foul but hardly professional-sounding either. On one hand, I'd like to encourage free and spirited feedback on everything I post here, and support freedom of speech. On the other, is it too much to expect people to articulate their ideas in a professional way, particularly on a blog devoted to furthering the development of the legal profession? It's not like this was a bar & grill blog now, is it? There is a certain level of netiquette that should be observed, at least in my humble opinion. And to put a finer point on it, it's my blog.

Since the comment was directly on topic and quite informative with a real-world experience, I don't believe that deletion is the best solution. So, would you (a) leave the comment posted as-is, (b) re-word or (c) delete the few offending words, or (d) convert them to asterisks or similar characters (e.g., **** or #@$%)? Another thought was to turn off the commenting feature X number of days after each post, which would eliminate many of the spam and questionable posts. I've noticed the most on-topic comments were posted within the first week or so after I've posted new material.

Have you encountered this, and if so, how did you approach it?

Lexis-West Merger Announced

In breaking news today, Lexis and West stunned the legal community by announcing their plans for merging the two legal publishers. Hot on the heels of their combined ABA TECHSHOW keynote, Louis Andreozzi, president and chief executive officer of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets, and Mike Wilens, president of West, jointly announced the merger in an early press conference today.

The new company will be called, appropriately enough, WestLexOne to convey that it will be the one source for all lawyers' legal research and practice needs. (I would have preferred the simpler "WestOne" myself, but it was probably shot down by the marketing folks due to the possible connotation that "West won".)

As Lou Andreozzi indicated, there has been a solid trend of consolidation within the legal community, both among law firms and their service providers. He pointed to Lexis' very recent acquisition of Time Matters and Billing Matters from DATA.TXT Corporation for practice management, and also of Applied Discovery for serving the increasing need for electronic discovery services. Likewise, West acquired ProLaw and Elite over the past several years. Mike Wilens was quick to allay concerns that any of these products or services would be cut in the merger, citing a strong demand for all of them in their respective markets.

Obviously, it is too soon to tell how this will impact the legal market, so stay tuned for updates. One thing's for certain: Another practice resource is leveraged for offering outstanding legal services.

[Just to be on the safe side, if you read this far and still believe it's true: April Fools. If you're interested in following other April 1st parodies, jokes, and hoaxes, Erik Heels is maintaining a list over at ParodyLaw.com.]

Online Presence: Considering Blogs Instead of Web Sites

I posted this today in response to a sole practitioner's query on the ABA Lawtech list. He wanted to develop a simple web presence with the ability to expand in the future. He needed easy-to-use software as he preferred to do it himself, and did not have significant time to invest. To him, the cost of the software is less significant than his time in implementing it.

I just had a number of solo and small firm attorneys ask me virtually identical questions at Techshow, so I thought I'd reproduce my response here:

Microsoft Metadata Chuckle of the Day

This one was just too good to pass up. John Lederer, a fellow Wisconsinite and friend of mine on the ABA LAWTECH list, posted this gem last evening:

"Microsoft has produced a sales document explaining why MS Office is better than OpenOffice.

OpenOffice.pdf
[Note: Link text shortened from John's original post for formatting reasons.]

Among other reasons Microsoft argues are:

'Seamless Information Exchange There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.'

And

'Office includes Publisher, which enables small businesses to create professional sales and marketing documents, Web sites and email campaigns in-house, without the need for expensive outsourcing.'

The marketing document? Oh, that is a pdf produced on a Macintosh using QuarkExpress as can be seen by looking at the last few lines of the pdf code. After all it needs to be seamlessly exchanged and look professional."

Indeed, the PDF above contains the following text near the very end, when viewed with even the simplest text editor:

/CreationDate (D:20030911160553)
/Producer (Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh)
/Author (Gravity)
/Title (competitive OpenOffice.qxd)
/Creator (QuarkXPress\(tm\) 4.11)
/ModDate (D:20030911160603-07'00')

Yep, that's why MS Office is better than OpenOffice all right.

[Also posted to illustrate another hard lesson in the dangers of metadata. If this content is accurate, not only was the document not created using MS Office, but it wasn't even done on Windows.]

TECHSHOW Highlights

It's been a busy couple of days at TECHSHOW. There have been many exceptional presentations, and I've met some very interesting people along with catching up with friends and colleagues. While it was impossible to attend all concurrent sessions, here are some highlights from this year's show that I attended:

Off to TECHSHOW!

I'm off to the ABA TECHSHOW this week, and am looking forward to it. You can always tell it's TECHSHOW week by the electricity in the air. I get supercharged because it's like a retreat for me -- a chance to get away for a few days, take a deep breath, and look around. It's a great way to track new developments and legal tech trends, and to think seriously and creatively about new approaches. Perhaps most of all, I enjoy meeting and collaborating with some truly savvy and impressive people, who are also some of the nicest folks I've ever met. One can't help but come back with a host of useful ideas and contacts, and a fresh outlook to boot.

On that note, I'll be speaking on Remote Access issues on Thursday with Bill Coplin of NetTech Inc. and Managing Clients' Technology Expectations on Friday with Adriana Linares, who recently took the plunge and formed LawTech Partners, Inc. I'm also particularly looking forward to seeing everyone at the blogger dinner tonight as well as at the Consultants & Technologists Dinner (a/k/a "The Dinner") on Thursday. If you're going to TECHSHOW, look me up this week.

Is Your Network A Legal Minefield?

Art Jahnke at CIO.com has this to say about peer-to-peer file sharing performed over company networks:

"A survey released two weeks ago by security provider Blue Coat Systems found that many employees continue to download files at work, using applications like Gnutella and Kazaa. According to Blue Coat, 38.6 percent of 300 respondents said they do their file sharing on company networks. The survey also revealed that 60 percent of respondents were unconcerned about the possibility that the Recording Industry Association of America could sue their employers.

Is that scary? Whose responsibility is it to keep a company’s networks from becoming a legal minefield? Isn’t that your job? What is your company doing to keep its networks clean? Nothing?"

Must-See Legal PDA Resources

Have you visited JurisPDA lately? I was corresponding with Grace Lee (Electronic Services Librarian extraordinaire of the New York Law School, which operates the site) regarding web-based news aggregrators and she mentioned the site. JurisPDA is pretty much a one-stop shop for PDA-toting legal professionals. Particularly useful are the PDA software links which are aptly categorized for quick reference. Highly recommended Palm programs are marked with an asterisk, and are many of the programs that I've often recommended in my legal PDA presentations. There are also many tips and suggestions for using your Palm-based PDA.

Under Legal Content, you'll find links to a number of statutes, cases, procedural rules, governmental content and more. Particularly useful is the link to LawPDA, which sells updated resources such as the 2004 versions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Rules of Evidence (updated through December 31, 2003, which is pretty darn current). LawPDA publishes many of these in the popular PalmReader, iSilo, and Microsoft Reader formats.

Thus if you're a legal professional and really want to get the most and best use of your PDA, or just want to pick up a new trick or two, I highly recommend checking them out.

But Does Your Sports Car Have a Cheat Code?

The BMW M3 is apparently the first car with a cheat code, sometimes referred to as an easter egg. Given the car's completely electronic transmission, it was only a matter of time until other aspects of computer programming crept into automobiles. Basically, the M3's normal operation doesn't allow neutral drops, to the disappointment of some of its drivers. Popular Science lists the undocumented details to enable the rocket launch. (And kids, don't try this at home!)

Of course, the next question is whether the M3 also comes with its own "black box", which would verify what one was doing right before that sudden "accident". Head on over to Vetronix for information regarding their $2,500 Crash Data Retrieval System, which can recover the logs from a number of these automotive black boxes.

Erasable, Editable, Recallable E-mail?

E-mail is a big problem for businesses and individuals alike. Say something in person without a recording device, and the hard evidence evaporates almost immediately, devolving into the wiggle room arena of "he said, she said".

Not so with most e-mail messages -- which can linger like bad fish left in someone else's kitchen. The sender suspects it's still out there, becoming more pungent with age, but generally can't do much to reach out and toss the spoiled thing away before it's discovered and used against him or her. Thus a number of developers have attempted to re-engineer the e-mail process into something often touted as completely controllable by the sender. Frankly, the false sense of security generated by these attempted solutions scares the dickens out of me. Let me tell you why: