COMPLAINT FOR XMAS DAMAGES

Plaintiffs, consisting of the class of all children who on or about Dec. 24, 2008 were hanging stockings by the chimney with care in the reasonable belief that St. Nicholas soon would be there, sue defendant and allege:

1.    This is an action for an accounting, damages and injunctive relief.

2.    Upon information and belief, defendant is a citizen and resident of the North Pole, where he maintains his principal place of business.  The court has subject matter jurisdiction of the amount pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1332.

Count I: Breach of Contract.

Throughout the fall of 2008, plaintiffs met with agents of defendant at various shopping malls to negotiate the delivery of certain goods on the evening of Dec. 24, for which plaintiffs paid valuable consideration in the form of exorbitant tie-in charges for photographs of the negotiating sessions.

Plaintiffs repeatedly informed defendant, through his agents, that time was of the essence in completing such deliveries.  As of this date, many of the contracted goods have not been delivered.

Other goods were nonconforming and lacked batteries, rendering them useless to plaintiffs.

Count II: Deceit.

Defendant fraudulently induced plaintiffs to improve their conduct against their will by misrepresenting that defendant knows if plaintiffs have been bad or good, when, in fact, defendant lacks sufficient knowledge upon which to form a reasonable belief regarding such matters.

In justifiable reliance upon these representations, plaintiffs invested substantial labor in not shouting, pouting or crying, and at all times relevant hereto were good for goodness sake.

Count III: Infliction of Emotional Distress. 

On the relevant night, defendant knew or should have known that plaintiffs were snug in their beds with visions of hand-held video games and name-brand athletic apparel dancing in their heads.

Despite such knowledge, defendant willfully and maliciously concealed off-brand goods and inherently worthless property such as sweaters and umbrellas in packages that misrepresented their true contents.  Plaintiffs suffered severe emotional shock and fright upon opening such packages.

Count IV: Trespass and Conversation.

Defendant?s implied license to enter plaintiffs? premises terminated upon his substantial breaches of contract.  Once on the premises, defendant exercised substantial dominion and control over an estimated 200 tons of cookies and 44,000 gallons of milk, converting such property and depriving plaintiffs of its beneficial use.

WHEREFORE, plaintiffs demand judgment for damages, injunctive relief and an accounting.

 

[Quoted from A Family Christmas, edited by Caroline Kennedy, as noted by Susan Bradley.]

Labels: humor, law

posted by bruceb at 12/24/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

ACROBAT TRAINING VIDEOS FOR LAWYERS

Click here for a list of Adobe Acrobat training videos, focusing on features for lawyers. There are related blog articles for many of the topics, and some videos are still to come - you'll have to check back.

The list covers the basics (including the differences between printing to PDF and the PDF makers in Office programs, which is more interesting than you thought), binders and portfolios, PDF comparison, OCR, security, redaction, Bates numbering, forms, and more.

Labels: Acrobat, law, software

posted by bruceb at 12/01/2008 12:58:00 AM | permalink

ACROBAT BINDERS & PORTFOLIOS

Acrobat 9 Professional builds on the features in Acrobat 8 that made it an important tool in many offices, especially law offices. There is a vastly improved document comparison routine and enhanced Bates numbering, for example, along with small improvements in transfers to Word, file splitting, and other features.

Acrobat 8 introduced PDF "packages," single PDF files that contain multiple PDFs assembled from multiple sources. Packages are particularly good at storing email folders; a single PDF can contain messages that are listed individually, stored in the PDF with their attachments, and can be sorted and searched. Here's a good explanation of Acrobat packages.

In Acrobat 9, packages have been dressed up into "Portfolios," which have some dramatically different features. In a Portfolio, many documents can be gathered together into a single file, where they will be stored in their native format - a Word file is stored as a Word file, a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, and so on - instead of being converted to PDF format. Only a few clicks are required to add a welcome page, a page with either thumbnails of the contents or a list, a logo, and more.

A well-designed wizard makes Portfolios easier to create than packages were, so the new features do not require rocket science to use. It is important to know that Portfolios can only be opened by Acrobat 8 or 9, either the full edition or the free Reader. If they're opened in Acrobat 8, a warning message appears and many of the cool display features are lost, although the contents are still listed and the files are fully usable.

Adobe included "Binders" as a way to ensure some backward compatibility. Binders take longer to assemble and don't look as interesting, but it is possible to use Binders to gather groups of PDFs into a single file that can be opened by any version of Acrobat from version 5 forward.

The good folks at Acrobat For Legal Professionals put together a lovely guide for lawyers about Portfolios and Binders, with detailed, illustrated instructions about how to create a professional looking Portfolio with all the documents normally presented on paper at the end of a real estate closing. It's well worth reading if you use Acrobat - the results are compelling.

I was drawn to the presentation by something different. I'm not convinced that many small offices will use Acrobat.com to share files; we are overloaded with new services and forced to be selective about which ones get our attention. But the widget that was used on the blog to display a thumbnail of the file and allow it to be downloaded from Acrobat.com - well, it's just super. Really, go to the blog post and look at the little thumbnail of the document, which you can use to page through it and zoom to full screen and then download the actual PDF.

It looked so nifty that I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to get the same widget embedded in this post so you could see it. I've been introduced to an interesting variety of error messages, endless hourglass, and crashed copies of Internet Explorer. Which goes back to my point about taking these services seriously! Given time, I would discover the quirk that allowed the "Embed" feature to work and I'd be able to use it going forward. We don't have much time. Don't plan to use any new technology without effort!

Labels: Acrobat, business, law, web_services

posted by bruceb at 11/07/2008 01:45:00 AM | permalink

CALIFORNIA BALLOT MEASURES

I've got something that might help you out when you face your California election ballot.

A good friend who has worked in state government and politics for most of his career has written an analysis of the twelve propositions on the California ballot. It's as close to nonpartisan as anything can be today, with solid information about the background, cost, and strengths and shortcomings of each proposition. (No position is taken or argued on Proposition 4 (parental notification of minor's abortion) or Proposition 8 (same sex marriage).)

I encourage you to take a look if you haven't researched the propositions! It's exactly what I was looking for at a time when it's hard to find an independent source of information. Whether you agree or disagree isn't the point - at the least, you'll be better informed when you make up your own mind.

You should be able to download the PDF from my public Skydrive folder by clicking the link below. If you have trouble retrieving it, drop me a note and I'll email a copy. Vote smart!

Labels: law

posted by bruceb at 10/22/2008 01:28:00 AM | permalink

REPORT ON RIAA LAWSUIT STRATEGY

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a fascinating article summarizing the history and effect of the RIAA's five-year battle against online music sharing. The conclusion is compelling: every single move made by the recording industry has backfired. The RIAA has filed more than thirty thousand lawsuits and threatened even more people, turning public opinion overwhelmingly against the RIAA and the labels, and has accomplished nothing.

"The RIAA's lawsuit campaign against individual American music fans has failed. It has failed to curtail P2P downloading. It has not persuaded music fans that sharing is equivalent to shoplifting. It has not put a penny into the pockets of artists. It has done little to drive most filesharers into the arms of authorized music services. In fact, the RIAA lawsuits may well be driving filesharers to new technologies that will be much harder for the RIAA's investigators to infiltrate and monitor."

Public respect for copyright law has plummeted and the use of peer-to-peer file sharing programs has soared in the last five years, in large part due to the unforgivable tactics used by the recording industry. Currently the RIAA is openly engaged in protection racket shakedowns: it sends "pre-litigation settlement offers" to students, offering to take a few thousand dollars in exchange for not filing a lawsuit. It has set up a web site, http://www.P2Plawsuits.com, where the payment can be made by credit card. (When one student attempted to negotiate the proposed $3,750 settlement because she was already in debt for tuition, the RIAA representative suggested that she drop out of school in order to pay off the settlement.)

The EFF article focuses on the procedural aspects of the RIAA lawsuits, with detailed information about the various tactics used over the years by the RIAA to obtain the names and addresses of alleged offenders. When you share files with a P2P program, your IP address might be visible but only your ISP can tie that IP address to your account. The RIAA exploited a loophole in the DMCA to issue thousands of subpoenas to ISPs before any lawsuit had been filed; eventually the courts rejected the industry's interpretation of the law (referred to somewhat proudly by the industry as "driftnet fishing), but not until more than 3,000 subpoenas had been issued, followed by hundreds of lawsuits and many more settlements. The RIAA then began filing massive numbers of John Doe lawsuits, and more recently has tried to intimidate colleges into voluntarily forwarding the threatening pre-litigation letters to students.

Perhaps the RIAA are not the worst and stupidest people in the world - there's a lot of competition for that title - but I think they would make it into the finals, anyway.

Labels: audio, DRM, file_sharing, law

posted by bruceb at 10/06/2008 12:05:00 AM | permalink

BLUE JEANS CABLE STRIKES BACK

This is for my lawyer friends and clients - and anyone who enjoys seeing a lawyer smack down a company that deserves it.

Monster Cable makes high-end, expensive audio and video cables. It's not obvious that Monster Cables are worth the price - recently blindfolded audio aficionados could not distinguish between audio delivered on Monster Cables, on the one hand, and coat hangers, on the other hand.

But Monster Cable just loves suing people to protect its trademarks and patents. In fact, some people have suggested that maybe, just maybe, Monster Cable uses litigation bullying tactics to intimidate competitors and browbeat them into unwarranted settlements. (It makes Monster's CEO sad.)

Monster Cable sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable, a small competitor, alleging that an audio cable made by Blue Jeans Cable infringes on various Monster design patents and trademarks. Little did they know that Kurt Denke, president of Blue Jeans, had been a litigator in his former life and that he was not only perfectly capable of pushing back but would do so in public. He gave permission for his response to be posted online and promises to make future correspondence public.

His letter to Monster is long but worth reading for entertainment - someone at Monster's law firm was soiling their pants by page three. Skip the details if you like, but don't miss the last few paragraphs! This closing comes after a detailed recitation of facts and law:

           "I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable's modus operandi in these matters.  I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.

      "After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues.  My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle.  In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table.  I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word.  If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds.  As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

       "I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion.  Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement.  Your client then uses this collection of licensing agreements to convince others under similar threat to accede to its demands.  Let me be clear about this: there are only two ways for you to get anything out of me.  You will either need to (1) convince me that I have infringed, or (2) obtain a final judgment to that effect from a court of competent jurisdiction.  It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind.  If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish.  Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it."

Lovely! It makes me want to buy something from Blue Jeans Cable.

Labels: audio, business, law

posted by bruceb at 4/16/2008 12:55:00 AM | permalink

ONENOTE FOR LAWYERS

Here's a short article from the ABA's Law Practice magazine noting the many ways that Microsoft OneNote 2007 can be used by lawyers for everything from trial notebooks to business transaction notes. There are law-specific templates available for OneNote (as well as templates for the other Microsoft Office programs) on Microsoft's Office Templates page.

I've written about OneNote before. It was just picked as the number one favorite Windows program by readers of a popular blog. ("The word love kept reappearing in the recommendations for this hard-to-describe program.") There are video demos, as well as a brand new 40-minute introduction to the program - a free online training course that will give you a tour of the program, basic instructions, and some ideas about how to get started. If you're the kind of person who might use a program for note-taking, you really owe it to yourself to try it!

Labels: law, Office, software

posted by bruceb at 3/25/2008 03:51:00 AM | permalink

RIAA SUES USENET.COM
The first rule of Usenet is, you don't talk about Usenet.

Careful observation of that rule has allowed Internet newsgroups to avoid getting involved in the entertainment industry's freakish litigation war on its customers. Now a new lawsuit suggests that the RIAA can't stand it any more.

It's time to talk about Usenet.

Internet newsgroups predate virtually everything on the Internet. Using specialized software, you can display messages posted in "newsgroups," with each newsgroup devoted to a particular subject matter that is more or less observed by the people posting messages. Anyone can read and post messages in any newsgroup; most are unmoderated.

Some newsgroups are very active, with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of messages posted daily. Some were created years ago and remain on the list even though they are completely dormant. There is a rough organization to the groups - the "sci" (science) category contains newsgroups named "sci.math" and "sci.physics," for example. There are newsgroups for every interest, hobby, profession, religion, sport, everything you can think of and oh so many things that would never occur to you.

There are currently over 107,000 newsgroups.

The newsgroups contain text messages, and only text messages. But years ago some clever technology arrived that permits any kind of file to be converted to a text message and posted to the newsgroups; the software at your end then converts it back to a picture or a PDF or a music file or a program.

The architecture of Usenet is unlike anything else. It is global and decentralized. Servers run all over the world; basically, each one holds all the contents of Usenet and forwards new items and changes to all the other servers, in a constant flow of data in all directions.

At one time, virtually every ISP maintained its own Usenet servers and offered free access to Usenet to its subscribers. As the volume of traffic on Usenet grew, many ISPs did not want the burden of maintaining the huge servers, so they began leasing Usenet access from several large global companies - primarily UsenetServer.com, Supernews, Giganews and Usenet.com. From Wikipedia:

"A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer well because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet services such as email and web access), and a disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles that are not the ISP's fault). Some ISPs outsource news operation to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP ran the server itself. Many sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups."

Windows has built-in software for Usenet. You've heard of it; it's Outlook Express (and Windows Mail on Vista). It's terrible, but it works for text messages.

But that's not what Usenet is about.

A flood of music, movies, and pornography is posted to Internet newsgroups every day. The volume is staggering - terabytes of data arrives daily. So, for example, a subscription to Giganews, a license to use Newsleecher and its "Supersearch" service, and a fairly steep learning curve opens up access to a constantly-changing vault bursting with music and movies.

Late last week the RIAA sued Usenet.com, one of the larger Usenet services. Here's another article about the lawsuit.

Usenet.com has some intemperate language on its web site, boasting that its service "gives you access to millions of MP3 files and also enables you to post your own files the same way and share them with the whole world."

The fear is that a victory over a company making overbroad statements will lay the groundwork for pursuing the hundreds of universities, ISPs and global companies offering Usenet access. Newsgroup traffic would be difficult to control and has obvious non-infringing uses, but that doesn't mean the RIAA can't disrupt the established patterns and shut off access through some of the current providers. At this point we hardly need more evidence to realize the RIAA is clinically insane and capable of anything.

The RIAA deeply believes that the battle to protect copyrights is the most important issue facing Western civilization. Make sure you take a moment to watch this anti-piracy video, which dramatizes the depth of their commitment.

Labels: audio, DRM, file_sharing, law, video

posted by bruceb at 10/17/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

THE COST OF E-DISCOVERY
Electronic discovery - production of electronic data in litigation - is increasingly common, and often difficult and expensive. Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were intended to make electronic discovery more predictable but the effect has also been to place huge burdens on parties and their attorneys.

It's easy to understand the need for e-discovery. I've seen one estimate that more than 80% of corporate information exists as data in computers instead of on paper - email, spreadsheets, word processing documents, Web content, scanned images, databases, instant messages, electronic forms, and the like. Assembling that data for discovery responses is expensive. Here's three reasons why, from this article about the e-discovery process:

"Electronic discovery is labor-intensive. Not surprisingly, the activities associated with the collection and reviewing of documents is largely a manual process. At each stage, documents still need to be read page by page, duplicates need to be weeded out, and in some cases, portions redacted for privilege.

"Electronic discovery is often time-constrained. Most electronic discovery requests have timelines associated with them; the courts may apply sanctions if your response is not timely or unduly delays the progress of the trial. Consequently, many organizations need to resort to employing external resources to wade through the volumes of documents.

"Electronic discovery can be technologically challenging. Metadata management. Locking down files for legal holds. Scrutinizing all potential sources of data/content (network drives, desktop computers, laptops, home computers), including alternate storage devices such as backup tapes, USB drives, iPods, etc. Accessing each of these sources presents its own technological difficulties, as well as significant labor and time expenditure. Imagine having to load and review hundreds, if not thousands, of backups."

Two years ago, similar e-discovery rules were adopted in England. KPMG just released a survey of UK litigators showing widespread agreement that the rules are ambiguous; the judges and special masters are ill-equipped to make effective case management decisions; and the process is unbelievably expensive.

There have been a number of high-profile cases in the US involving e-discovery. Morgan Stanley and UBS paid huge fines for failure to adequately produce e-mail evidence; Morgan Stanley was later charged with a similar but unrelated failure to turn over millions of e-mail messages in regulatory proceedings with the NASD, as described in this article.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that 19 lawyers for Qualcomm are facing a sanction hearing this week after 300,000 pages of e-mails and documents were discovered after a trial with Broadcom Corp., including data that contradicted arguments by Qualcomm lawyers about key issues in the case. As the WSJ notes, "Failures in finding, saving and sharing emails are bedeviling large and small litigants, undermining their credibility with judges and affecting the outcome of high-stakes trials. New federal rules have reinforced companies' obligations to produce electronic evidence, which has exploded in volume as emails replace phone calls and other business communications."

The cost of production of data will be an increasingly important consideration in business litigation; e-discovery will virtually always require the retention of the specialized consulting companies that are springing up everywhere.

Labels: business, law

posted by bruceb at 10/11/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

NETWORK-ATTACHED STORAGE
As always, there's new technology that's becoming commonplace even though we hadn't really noticed it yet. Let's start with network-attached storage - "NAS."

Our appetite for storage space is voracious. Businesses and law firms are scanning documents furiously, continuing to dream of the paperless office that always seems to elude them. Law firms, in particular, are getting warehouses of paper presented on CDs and DVDs both from clients and opposing counsel during the discovery process.

Homes are more likely to have multiple computers, and these days there's always somebody downloading movies and TV shows faster than they can watch them, and filling up hard drives that seemed spacious not long ago.

For a while we were drowning in CDs with the contents identified in black Sharpie handwriting. As prices drop, we're going to find ourselves drowning in external USB hard drives.

Network-attached storage is shared storage space for a home or business network. In its simplest form, an NAS device is a hard drive that attaches to the network with a CAT6 cable instead of plugging into a computer with a USB cable - extra storage space with no fuss, just like an external USB drive. Software is included to help you get started; the drives have a built-in interface to create folders that all the computers on the network can access.

NAS devices get more interesting, though. More expensive NAS units might have two drives in a RAID 1 array where the two drives are mirrors of each other; if one fails, the other one keeps on working while you get a replacement. Or they have three or four drives in a RAID 5 array where the drives cooperate with each other to give you access to almost all the space on all drives; again, if one fails, nothing stops working while you get a replacement.

The result is that NAS devices can offer huge amounts of storage in a single box - 750Gb, 1 Terabyte, 2Tb, 3Tb - without the expense or headaches of running a complete computer.

The market for NAS devices is exploding and there are many additional features that distinguish them: ease or difficulty of replacing hard drives or adding additional drives later; inclusion of backup software or a connection to an online backup service; wireless connectivity; built-in media servers for sending media files to the living room or other computers; USB ports; built-in print servers; full integration into the Windows Server world of Active Directory; and more.

Lots of manufacturers are offering NAS units and prices are all over the map. Here's a few chosen arbitrarily: I bought a Buffalo Terastation because of the features but mostly because the lights on the front look really cool at night; Netgear is getting involved; Linksys has its own selection. Dell's lineup shows you what this turns into for bigger enterprises, where serious money is spent.

Think of an NAS device as an option when you're running out of space; or you'd like a single large space to consolidate files that are currently stored on several computers in several different places; or as part of a backup plan. In particular, this can improve the work flow in small businesses and law firms not yet ready to install a full-blown server.

Labels: computers, hardware, Home_Server, law, network

posted by bruceb at 10/01/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

ACROBAT & PDF CLONES
Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional is highly polished software for creating PDFs from scanned documents or onscreen files, and it adds the ability to use PDFs for other purposes, from e-mail archives to Bates-numbered document storage and production. Here's my first thoughts about the upgrade to version 8.

Acrobat is an expensive piece of software - $160/computer for an upgrade version of Acrobat 8 Professional, $450 for the full version if you don't have a license code to qualify for an upgrade. There are competing products that claim to be able to produce PDFs for $29, but there are some good reasons to pay the price for the real thing.

Here's a blog that briefly describes the open nature of the PDF format, which allows competitors to sell cheap software for creating PDF files, as well as allowing software to be sold with built-in PDF converters. (Microsoft offers a PDF add-in for Office 2007; Quickbooks is set up to print invoices as PDFs; WordPerfect has a built-in PDF print driver.)

The article goes on to highlight some of the shortcomings of the third party products. Some of it misses the point - the blog is sponsored by Adobe, after all. In my mind there are two important reasons to spend the money for the full version of Acrobat 8:

• There are differences between the PDF files produced by different versions of the PDF format. The clone makers either work from an old PDF format that is not completely compatible, or they do a cruddy job of designing their software. One of the comments below the blog points out that when you use the clone products, you're much more likely to deal with the "inability to open a file, discrepancies between on screen image and printing output, unpredictable results when using the clipboard, problems with text fields, or problems editing content."
• Acrobat 8 is successful in large part because its elegant and economical design makes it easy to use, and it adds features that are meaningful. Example: when a document is scanned with Acrobat 8, the program automatically does OCR and saves the text invisibly as part of the PDF file. Indexing programs (Windows Vista, or Windows Desktop Search for Windows XP) then allow you to search instantly for text inside the PDFs.

Many small offices spend surprisingly little on the software that they rely on to get their work done. We have long accepted the cost of Microsoft Office as a basic price of running a computer in a business. Acrobat 8 belongs on that list as well.

Labels: Acrobat, law

posted by bruceb at 9/13/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

PCLAW UPDATE
LexisNexis has updated some of its software for law firm accounting, but the upgrades only make it harder to figure out the LexisNexis product line.

PCLaw had been a stand-alone law firm accounting program for many years when LexisNexis acquired it in 2005. Over the years PCLaw had begun to accumulate features for timekeeping and case management, although they were underdeveloped compared to the competition in those niches. LexisNexis introduced new versions of PCLaw and pushed those features a bit, but PCLaw began to look like an abandoned stepchild compared to Time Matters, also acquired by LexisNexis and given a major push. When LexisNexis introduced Billing Matters, full-featured accounting software, it became even harder to figure out how PCLaw fit into the company's product lineup, since the two programs almost completely overlap each other.

PCLaw has now gotten a major overhaul, including a name change. A big welcome for "Lexis® Back Office Powered by PCLaw™"! (The name is so clumsy that it has to have been chosen by a committee.) Here's the new web site (the old PCLaw web site has been turned off). The updated program integrates credit card processing and a payroll service, and there's an overall impression that LexisNexis will integrate it with all of its other programs and services except Billing Matters. So which is the stepchild? Billing Matters was originally conceived to steal market share from Timeslips but I'm not sure it ever caught on; perhaps it's the product that will be allowed to languish.

UPDATE 09/06/07: Ah! It's not just PCLaw. LexisNexis has re-branded all three of its case management and law firm accounting products and rolled out updated versions of each one - so although it still looks like a confusing, overlapping collection of software, at least the names are consistent. Congratulations to the committee that named Lexis® Front Office powered by Time Matters®, Lexis® Back Office powered by Billing Matters®, and Lexis® Back Office Powered by PCLaw™!

Labels: law, software

posted by bruceb at 9/06/2007 12:01:00 AM | permalink

MORE COPYRIGHT CRAZINESS
The world of copyright protection is a mess, and each day brings new craziness.

• A Federal District Court judge granted a ruling for summary judgment against a family that had run Kazaa on a computer with copyrighted material in a shared folder - with no evidence that anyone had ever downloaded those files. “It is no defense that a Kazaa user did not directly oversee the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material,” the judge wrote, citing a case concluding that “the mere presence of copyrighted works in a shared folder is enough to trigger liability.” Here's a news item with more details. This is truly breathtaking - a family is potentially going to have a huge judgment entered against them for things they might have done, without any proof that improper acts ever happened. (If you saw Steven Spielberg's movie Minority Report, you'll recognize the reference in the headline to the Department of Pre-Crime.)
• Another federal judge just issued a bizarre discovery order in a motion picture industry lawsuit against TorrentSpy, a Netherlands BitTorrent tracker. (Like all torrent trackers, TorrentSpy does not host any copyrighted material; it helps people search for torrents running on other computers.) TorrentSpy had not been logging any information about computers connecting to it, so recording industry attempts to obtain logs had been unsuccessful. TorrentSpy argued that any information about the IP address of a computer connecting thru the site was transient information in the server's RAM, not subject to a discovery request. The judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all information passing through the server RAM, on the basis that the storage of data in RAM — even if not permanently archived — makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules. Can you imagine the ramifications if that meant what it said? When you type a letter, change your mind and backspace, then type something different - those first keystrokes were in RAM for a moment and would have to be produced by that definition. That's absurd, of course - but so is this ruling. (TorrentSpy in the meantime turned off access to its site by US residents, so the order is moot for now.) Here's more information about the ruling.
• Russian web site allofmp3.com, which sold high-quality audio files for pennies, was finally forced to close a few months ago after years of heavy US pressure on Russian authorities, courtesy of the well-heeled lobbying arm of the recording and movie industries. Recently, though, a Russian court ruled that the site was not guilty of copyright violations under Russian law and the site will reportedly reappear soon.

The news media tends to report that the recording industry "wins" some of these cases, but that's not true in anything but a technical sense. The recording industry has not won anything but hollow victories for many years. It is despised by almost everyone, its music in increasingly ignored, and its business is caught in a spiraling decline that is entirely its own fault.

My favorite item doesn't involve copyrights but it does concern the difficulty of locking down information. The Australian government proudly unveiled its $84 million porn filter - software to be downloaded and installed by nervous parents. Oops! A 16-year-old defeated the filter in about thirty minutes. In a nice touch, the student was able to leave the icon by the clock as if the filter was still running. The embarrassed government added a second filter to its web site; it took the student almost forty minutes to bypass that one. Here's an article about that debacle.

Labels: audio, DRM, file_sharing, law, video

posted by bruceb at 8/29/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

THE QUEST FOR FREE ONLINE COURT RULINGS
Another attempt is being made to bypass West and Lexis-Nexis and make court rulings available online for free - and it's coming from Sebastopol.

Carl Malamud is an Internet activist whose offices are in the Sebastopol complex owned by publisher Tim O'Reilly. For more than ten years he has been battling companies and institutions to put documents online that were "public" but not readily available. He has already tangled with the Smithsonian Institution, the House of Representatives and the Commerce Department. It is because of his efforts that the Securities & Exchange Commission's Edgar database is online (he ran the online version for two years until the SEC took it over), and he was the moving force to get information online from the Patent & Trademark Office. His current web site is the rudimentary Public.Resource.org.

West Thomson and Lexis-Nexis control the five billion dollar legal publishing market, built on publishing laws and court decisions that are public information. The publishers have gone to great lengths to prevent others from making this public information available to the public. Both companies claim that they add elements to the cases and laws and thereby obtain copyright protection for the materials - West with its key number system and headnotes, for example, and even the pagination assigned by the publishers and required by the courts for citations. There were challenges to the copyright claims in the 80s and 90s, but even a successful challenge in the 90s led nowhere when the successful litigant subsequently ran out of money.

The result is that our laws are inaccessible to the public, one of the few things that you cannot search for on Google. Malamud has approached the publishers and described his vision of the law as a public resource. West and Lexis don't have to stop adding value and selling their expensive subscriptions, and in fact their permission is not required - this is public domain information which Malamud is free to place online if he can acquire it from a non-protected source. But his effort is more likely to be successful if the publishers are not actively hostile, and they have been defensive and quick to attack in the past.

There's more information in this reprint of a New York Times article, and a blog entry by Tim O'Reilly.

Labels: business, law

posted by bruceb at 8/21/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

AMICUS V SUPPORT ENDING
Law office alert: According to this blog, Gavel & Gown will be ending technical support for Amicus Attorney version V on June 1, 2007.

That creates a business-critical problem for law offices using Amicus - the simple reality is that database-driven programs develop problems that require the support of the manufacturer. Continuing to use an unsupported program guarantees that the program will fail at the worst possible moment, with no recourse.

Amicus version 7 was released more than a year ago. It was reportedly so buggy that it was essentially unusable when it was first released; since then a blizzard of service packs and patches have been issued, and recently the version number was bumped up to version 7.1. Here's my comments in December about the Amicus 7 mess.

I have no hands-on experience with Amicus 7 and there are virtually no reviews written by people actually using the program rather than repeating press release copy. I'm forced to interpret the comments on Gavel & Gown's customer forum (registration required). In December, one comment summarized almost everyone's feelings about Amicus 7: "Horrible horrible horrible!"

As recently as a few days ago, the comments were still overwhelmingly negative. Here's a thread with a representative sample of recent comments. Support forums always have a high percentage of complainers and a few people report that the program works well for them, but it's hard to argue with the overall impression that the program is deeply flawed.

I have clients using Amicus V. I have no idea what to do.

Labels: law, software

posted by bruceb at 4/04/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

TIMESLIPS & VISTA FOLLOWUP
Timeslips has updated its web site with information about Vista compatibility - or more accurately, lack of compatibility. Other vendors are working out their Vista issues; Timeslips is beginning to stand out like a sore thumb.

The company reports firmly that Timeslips 2006 and earlier versions won't work with Vista. Okay, lots of software makers are in that position. (Is it true, or is it an inducement to upgrade? Hmm.)

But some good news: "The Timeslips 2007 products will install and run on Microsoft Vista." Great!

There are just a few, teensy, insignificant qualifications to that.

• There's a list of twenty-eight identified issues, including some apocryphal items like "Text on buttons and checkboxes may disappear." At the bottom the company notes that it has no intention of fixing any of these problems.
• The company will not provide any support for anyone using the program on Vista.

Timeslips' reputation has suffered on several occasions when it released buggy upgrades and let customer support slip. Now it's thumbing its nose at anyone buying a new computer for the next six or eight months, which seems like an open invitation to Lexis/Nexis to keep pushing its Time Matters/Billing Matters software and taking over even more of the market.

Labels: law, software, Vista

posted by bruceb at 3/22/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

TIMESLIPS & VISTA COMPATIBILITY
Vista compatibility will be hit or miss for the next year. Some business-critical software won't run on Windows Vista; I'll be doing what I can to help businesses learn that before they buy new computers.

It will be a moving target. There will be many lists of compatible and incompatible products but I'm not sure we'll ever find one that's authoritative and continually up to date. We know previous Quickbooks versions are a mess, for example, but at least a compatible version, Quickbooks 2007, is available now.

Timeslips is the most widely used billing system in small law offices; the current version, Timeslips 2007, was released a few months ago. As of today, the web site says nothing whatsoever about Windows Vista. A tech support rep advised one of my clients today that Timeslips 2007 has not been tested with Vista, compatibility is not assured, and he should wait for Timeslips 2008 before he buys a Vista computer.

Which to my mind raises the question: What? Were you taken by surprise when Microsoft introduced Vista on Tuesday? Your business plan is to have no product available for anyone buying a computer for the next nine months - unless they order a previous generation operating system from Dell's Small Business division, the only place where Windows XP will be readily available?

What?

Labels: law, software, Vista

posted by bruceb at 2/02/2007 12:05:00 AM | permalink

ADOBE ACROBAT 8 PROFESSIONAL
PDFs have become the common language for shared documents in most businesses and law offices, but the frequent upgrades to Acrobat have been uncompelling, with a confusing interface and puzzling features.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is the upgrade we've been waiting for. Law offices should elevate it to the rank of a basic tool, as necessary and unavoidable as Word and Outlook. The interface has been simplified and features have been added or - just as important - brought forward into the light.

There are many ways to use the program now that go beyond simple PDF creation, especially in law offices. Here's an article that summarizes many of the features that will be most appealing to lawyers. There are a few that stand out:

• For scanning, Acrobat can now take over from Paperport 9, which is aging badly and appears to have no future. Acrobat can talk directly to most scanners (no intervening stop at the dialog box provided by the scanner manufacturer), scan multiple page documents into a single file, and does an extra invaluable trick: it immediately and transparently does OCR on the scanned image and stores the text inside the PDF file, where it can be indexed by a desktop search program.
• Acrobat can add Bates numbers to a collection of PDF files - a couple of clicks replaces the endless process with the stamper and the copy machine.
• Acrobat has gotten far better at creating a PDF of an e-mail message from Outlook that can be stored with other documents. There's also an interesting trick where it creates a "PDF package" from an entire Outlook folder or set of folders - capable of being sorted by date/sender/subject/etc., but stored with other documents in the file system. And again, Windows Desktop Search with the Acrobat add-in will index the text in those files and include them in search results.
• The functions for forms have been significantly enhanced. It's now drop-dead easy to create fillable forms, replacing the rudimentary "FormTyper" in Paperport.

All this comes at a significant price - $159 if you have a serial number from an earlier version so you can qualify for an "upgrade," and $459 (!) for the full version. (Make a note that there are two upgrade versions, depending on which prior versions you own - the same price but different SKUs. I don't know why - just make sure you get the right one.) This looks so good that it moves into the "necessity" column for many offices, on some if not all desktops. [Originally posted 12/31/06, bumped 01/11/07]

Labels: Acrobat, law

posted by bruceb at 1/11/2007 10:00:00 PM | permalink

THE SAD TALE OF AMICUS ATTORNEY
At one time, Amicus Attorney was the premier program for law office case management. In version 5, it had a quirky but easy to understand interface, and a lot of power to link information together and present a unified view of a case - contacts, calendar, time sheets, and phone records.

The world marches on and law offices began to demand features that Amicus wasn't ready to offer. Amicus 5 has almost no document management features; its integration with Microsoft Outlook is terribly broken; it has a rudimentary ability to sync with Palm-based handhelds and nothing for Windows Mobile; it's difficult to install under Terminal Services for remote users, and its non-standard display mucks up Windows Remote Desktop; there's no web access; it's built on old database technology. It's robust and solid as long as a law firm doesn't expect more from it than it delivered when it was introduced in 2001, almost six years ago.

Gavel & Gown, the parent company, rewrote Amicus from scratch to address some of those shortcomings, and released Amicus Attorney X in 2004. It was a disaster, a bug-ridden mess that was eventually - embarrassingly - withdrawn from the market. The company went back to the drawing board and started from scratch.

Amicus Attorney 7 was released early in 2006, based on an industry-standard SQL database structure and with a feature list that answered just about every request.

Sadly, it was a disaster, a bug-ridden mess.

So far six patches and two service packs have been released in an attempt to make it usable. This comment last week on the Amicus forums is a fair representation of the flavor of the last nine months of feedback:

"For the user who is still using Amicus Attorney 5 - I envy you! I would be so happy to go back. Amicus Attorney 7 (upgrade) has been devastating to my business (and life!). Horrible horrible horrible!"

It's sad to discover that a couple of months ago Gavel & Gown was forced to repackage its aging version 5 and put it back on sale as "Amicus Small Firm."

It's a shame - I go back a long way with Amicus, but this looks like a company in a death spiral.

Labels: law, software

posted by bruceb at 12/15/2006 12:07:00 AM | permalink

E-MAIL RETENTION AND THE NEW FEDERAL RULES
Changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have imposed new requirements for retention and production of electronic records in federal court litigation, especially e-mail. Here's my notes when the changes first came to my attention.

A quick reading of some of the articles about the new FRCP revisions gives the impression that businesses should drastically change their practices to ensure long-term retention of e-mail and backup tapes, but that's not quite correct. Here's some quick thoughts on a more nuanced reading of the new rules:

"As long as in the normal course of your business you routinely make backups over the top of the same data, routinely delete emails, routinely... etc etc..... there are no issues whatsoever and no changes you need to make. Once you are involved in a federal court case, that's when you need to reevaluate your process. But for now, it's business as usual."

Labels: backup, law, mail

posted by bruceb at 12/12/2006 10:24:00 AM | permalink

E-DISCOVERY AND FRCP
Lawyer alert: amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure take effect on December 1 governing electronic discovery. Here's an article from a technology news site about the upcoming changes, and here's a legal blog with a few more details.

Lawsuits in federal court have always required massive document productions at the beginning of the proceedings. Those rules are now expanded to include the burden of searching, retrieving, and producing electronic evidence that might be relevant to the litigation, with dire consequences for undisclosed evidence. In theory this will reduce litigation costs by preventing squabbling later in the case about discoverable information. It's difficult to evaluate the intangible savings later in the litigation; the tangible effect is that companies involved in litigation in federal court have a huge burden to gather information that will now expand to invade every part of their data stores, from servers to backups to laptops to PDAs to instant messaging logs. It increases the pressure on all companies to have data retention policies.

Labels: law

posted by bruceb at 10/25/2006 10:05:00 AM | permalink

WORD REDACTION TOOL
There have been several embarrassing incidents recently in which information was learned from electronic documents because they were not adequately secured. In some cases, the editing history of a Word document was revealing; in others, text was still readable despite attempts to black it out.

Microsoft has released a tool intended to prevent redaction errors in Word 2003. You can mark text and create a new redacted version of a document in which the marked text is replaced with a black bar that cannot be converted back into text. Here's the site where you can read about and download the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in.

Don't forget the companion add-in that removes hidden data and collaboration data from Office documents, available here. If your office uses Word's features to track changes or exchange comments, this should be routinely run before a document is sent outside the office.

Labels: law, Office, security

posted by bruceb at 4/02/2006 04:15:00 PM | permalink

BLACKBERRY: DEATH BY PATENT
Here's a fascinating article about the sequence of events leading up to Blackberry's precarious position - the possibility that the entire Blackberry system will be shut down next month. It's a "twisted tale of bold inventions, hubris, pride, backroom lobbying and one colossal legal blunder."

Lawyers will shiver at one story from the trial between RIM (Blackberry's parent company) and NTP, owners of an arguably prior patent on the Blackberry technology. The lawyers for RIM put on a demonstration of "prior art," purportedly wireless messaging technology that predated the patent granted to NTP. They were caught faking the demonstration, secretly swapping in newer software to make the demonstration work.

Even at this late date, there's likely to be a settlement that will prevent a Blackberry shutdown - but watch for hundreds of millions of dollars to change hands.

Labels: business, law

posted by bruceb at 1/29/2006 11:42:00 AM | permalink

BE ANNOYING, GO TO JAIL
Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

Last week President Bush signed a law authorizing stiff fines and two years in prison for posting "annoying" Web messages or sending "annoying" anonymous e-mail messages. Here's an article about the new law.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republian, slipped the provision into an unrelated bill to fund the Department of Justice.

I cannot express my feelings because they might annoy Sen. Specter.

Labels: law

posted by bruceb at 1/09/2006 11:21:00 AM | permalink

INTEL ANSWERS AMD
Intel filed its answer to AMD's complaint for unfair competition. An answer is always more dry than a complaint, but the first seven pages are interesting reading, as Intel lovingly alleges that AMD's market failures are the result of poor planning and bad decisions instead of some nefarious conduct by Intel.

Labels: hardware, law

posted by bruceb at 9/06/2005 10:43:00 AM | permalink

AMD vs. INTEL
Litigators (and some normal people) should browse through the complaint filed by AMD against Intel for unfair competition, monopolistic bullying, name-calling, and child abuse. (I'm not sure all of those are in the complaint, but it's something like that.)

It's written more as a showpiece than a serious complaint, so it's surprisingly good reading. It gives a skewed but interesting look at the history of microprocessor development, and has some fascinating details about Intel's deals with manufacturers and retailers - the "first dollar rebate" is a work of genius. Possibly evil or illegal, but genius nonetheless.

Besides, I'd wager it's the only unfair competition complaint containing the word "guacamole." Twice. Fun reading!

Labels: hardware, law

posted by bruceb at 7/22/2005 10:41:00 PM | permalink