Robert Ambrogi's LawSites

Joe Hodnicki

Way back in 2004, I wrote here about the launch of the Law Professor Blogs network by Paul Caron, editor of TaxProf Blog, and Joseph A. Hodnicki, co-editor of Law Librarian Blog. Over the years, the network grew to encompass 41 blogs edited by more than 100 law professors, law librarians and practitioners.

Today, the co-founders announced that Caron had bought out Hodnicki’s half-interest in the company, Law Professor Blogs LLC, and is now the sole owner. The announcement said that Hodnicki “must scale back” his involvement in the network’s affairs but would continue as co-editor of Law Librarian Blog.

Paul Caron

In 2004, the idea of even a single law professor blog was still on the cutting edge — let alone a network of law professor blogs. At that time, blogs were still largely perceived as frivolous and self-indulgent undertakings and certainly not the sort of scholarly pursuits appropriate to academia. Caron and Hodnicki deserve heaps of credit for taking a forward-thinking idea and building it into the successful network it is today.

I’m proud to say that I once shared an honor with Joe, insofar as we were both chosen in 2011 for the inaugural Fastcase 50, “honoring the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.”

I will be part of a panel this week, Social Media for the Novice, presented by the Social Law Library in Boston. The program will provide an introduction to social media, with a focus on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The other panelists are Heidi S. Alexander, an attorney and law practice management advisor at LOMAP, and Gerrit Betz, attorney with Exemplar Companies Inc.

The program is Thursday, May 30, 4:30 to 6 p.m., at the Social law Library, One Pemberton Sq., Boston. The cost is $15 for library members, CPCS staff, bar advocates and prosecutors. For everyone else, it is $30.

Register here.

Last year, I wrote here about LawZam, a website (and, later, an iPhone app) that aims to connect consumers with attorneys by facilitating free, face-t0-face consultations via live videoconferencing. Now there is another site that does something similar, only this one uses Google Hangouts for lawyers and clients to meet by video.

This new site, LawyerCams.com, is the creation of Thomas P. Finley Jr., a sole practitioner in Dallas. It is designed to facilitate face-to-face initial consultations between lawyers and potential clients using the videoconferencing capabilities of Google Hangouts.

Unlike LawZam, which allows consumers seeking consultations to connect instantly with lawyers who are online, LawyerCams.com requires users to contact the lawyer and schedule a time for the video consultation.

In fact, LawyerCams.com is primarily a lawyer-listing service, not a videoconferencing service. Lawyers can list a profile on the site without agreeing to participate in video meetings online. If they do agree to participate in video meetings, they are free to decide whether to charge an initial-consultation fee.

With regard to its lawyer listings, the site says it is different from other such sites in its emphasis on social media. It encourages lawyers to list all their social media profiles and sites — including Google+, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs — so that potential clients can better evaluate the lawyer.

The site was only recently launched and, as far as I can tell, not a single actual lawyer has listed a profile. (There are several sample profiles.) Also, I could find no information on the site about the cost of a lawyer profile. However, when I clicked on the option to buy a profile, it took me to a shopping cart that indicated the price was zero dollars.

The site has a companion blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed.

An interesting footnote is that founder Finley says he had the idea for the site long before the technology was available to implement it. He actually bought the domain name “lawyercams.com” back in 2005, along with “attorneycams.com” and “legalcams.com.” “The founder strongly believes that face to face online video consultations, cams, and chat are what the public will begin to demand to save time and money in handling their legal matters,” he writes.

Yesterday, I wrote a post here about the debut of Law Ratchet, a site that aggregates legal news and blog posts. Afterwards, a reader emailed me asking a key question my post did not address — that of whether Law Ratchet is violating the copyrights of the publishers and bloggers whose stories it is picking up.

For many of the articles Law Ratchet picks up, it is republishing them in full on its own site, complete with images. For example, yesterday Orin Kerr published a post on The Volokh Conspiracy titled, Peering Through A Window Next to A Front Door Held to Be A Fourth Amendment Search. Now compare Kerr’s post as it appeared on Law Ratchet. It is there in full text — not a snippet, not a simple link.

The same was happening with my blog — my posts were appearing in full text on Law Ratchet. As a test, I changed my settings in WordPress so that my RSS feed contained only a summary of each post, not the full text. Now, only the truncated summary appears in Law Ratchet. (Here is an example in Law Ratchet.)

In some cases, however, Law Ratchet is displaying articles in a different way. For articles from certain “mainstream” news sources, Law Ratchet displays a bifurcated page. The top half of the page shows a summary of the article. The bottom half frames the original source page containing the full story. Here is an example of a story from the ABA Journal and here is one from The AmLaw Litigation Daily.

A Grey Area of the Law

So is Law Ratchet violating copyright law by republishing these stories on its own site? Is this any different from what Google Reader does? For that matter, is Google Reader (or Google News) violating copyright law?

The answer is not as straightforward as you might expect. Just recently, in The Associated Press v. Meltwater, a federal judge in New York ruled that the Meltwater media monitoring service infringed AP’s copyright by scraping news stories from the web and providing excerpts to its subscribers. The judge rejected Meltwater’s fair use defense, finding that Meltwater was simply capturing and republishing AP’s content in order to make money from it. Law Ratchet would have an even weaker fair use defense, given that it is republishing entire articles just as they were originally published elsewhere.

But another defense to copyright infringement is that the republisher had an implied license to use the content. In the case of blogs, the argument has long been made that distributing the blog’s content through an RSS feed constitutes a license to others to do what they may with the content. Eric Goldman discussed this in a post in 2005:

In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms. So, in theory, it could be an implied license to permit aggregators to do whatever they want.

Even though Goldman wrote that way back in 2005, the issue remains unsettled in the United States. Just a few months ago, an Israeli court ruled (also via Goldman’s blog) that a blogger, by offering an RSS feed and encouraging sharing of his posts on social media, waived his intellectual property rights. (For a great overview of U.S. law, see Kimberley Isbell’s article, The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices.)

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. You will find plenty of top IP lawyers who maintain that an RSS feed does not create any sort of implied license. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and that syndication is an offering of a work for publication across multiple sources.

Law Ratchet Responds

I put the question to Law Ratchet’s founders and received a reply this morning from CEO and c0-founder Derek Chau. Chau is a 2006 Harvard Law grad and he and co-founder Will Mouat were associates together at Ropes & Gray in Boston before relocating to California. Here is what he said about the copyright issue:

On the issue of copyright law, we did invest a fair amount of time researching the matter. I would hazard to guess that you are familiar with the copyright issues given your experience with media law. We carefully analyzed the issues and suffice it to say that we believe that Law Ratchet is well-positioned on the merits of the legal issues.

Will and I embarked on this venture to create a better experience for lawyers to consume and discover legal news. In doing so, our goal has been to work with content providers and to forge mutually beneficial partnerships with authors and publishers. In fact, we believe that the only way Law Ratchet will succeed in the marketplace is with their cooperation and partnership.

We are also encouraged by the experience of other news aggregators … Google Reader, Feedly, Pulse, Zite, Flipboard to name a few. In particular, Pulse and Flipboard have been very successful in creating compelling alliances with content providers. At the end of the day, the authors saw the compelling value proposition and actively sought to be featured on the news aggregators. As you may recall, CNN even went so far as to acquire Zite in 2011.

We are particularly proud that we enable users to read legal blogs that they typically wouldn’t find; we hope our platform helps support the lesser-known (but very talented) authors out there. All the feedback we’ve gotten from these authors is positive, and we’ve been asked to include even more content and sources.

Naturally, if an author or publisher asks to be removed from our service, we will do so even if that source is still available through Google Reader (or Feedly or similar services). We don’t expect that to happen frequently because authors are generally excited about being more widely read (and having a prominent link to their site), but we wanted to err on the side of caution.

Law Ratchet also has a few other options for presenting various sources that we’re happy to discuss with interested authors, and is excited about future features that allow even closer relationships with certain authors (stay tuned!).

Chau’s reply does not specifically explain why he has concluded that Law Ratchet is “well-positioned on the merits of the legal issues.” His comment that he has been working with content providers may explain why Law Ratchet treats articles from certain established news sources differently than those from blogs.

If there remains a grey area with regard to the copyright implications of RSS feeds, there is something you can do that should help protect against the wholesale copying of your posts. Do as I did above, and change your feed to include only a summary of your post, not the full text. (In WordPress, go to Settings > Reading and click the “summary” radio button next to the entry, “For each article in a feed, show …”) 

However, I would add that I did hear from one publisher who indicated that Law Ratchet was publishing full text of its articles even though its RSS feed contains only summaries. If that is the case, it would suggest that Law Ratchet is scraping some of its content directly from the original source. 

What do you think? Are you glad to have Law Ratchet pick up your posts? Does it drive traffic to your blog or draw it away? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

With Google Reader set to shut down on July 1, many of us have been scrambling to find a substitute way to keep up with news and blogs. Yesterday, a new aggregation tool was launched, Law Ratchet, designed to enable legal professionals to keep up with the top legal and business news, analysis and commentary.

Available for free both as an iPad app and on the Web, Law Ratchet is essentially an RSS reader, similar in function to Google Reader. Unlike other RSS readers, however, Law Ratchet is preconfigured with news feeds and categories. There are 40 categories to choose from, ranging from administrative law to law and technology to small and solo practice to top 25 blogs. You can add or remove any one from the list of categories you follow.

A press release yesterday described it this way:

Law Ratchet offers a fast, easy and engaging experience. Users may check the latest top stories, see what legal topics are trending on blogs and social media, or find articles in their practice areas through one of over 40 curated categories. The app also provides industry news about law firms, law schools and legal jobs, as well as lighter news, gossip and pop culture articles. For individual topics, Law Ratchet provides a powerful, flexible search function, and searches may be saved as custom news categories.

For those of us who are persnickety about our news readers, there is a downside to Law Ratchet’s approach. Because the categories and news sources are preconfigured, you cannot add blogs that you like to follow. Law Ratchet’s FAQ invites users to suggest new sites and categories by email, but that is not the same as discovering a blog you want to follow and adding it to your newsreader.

The FAQ goes on to say, “We are also testing a cool new feature to allow users to create their own custom categories, giving you even more flexibility to configure the Law Ratchet experience.” But that cool new feature is not yet available.

For that matter, I could not find any search function, as promised in the press release. Perhaps this is available only in the iPad version, which I did not try.

Law Ratchet’s design is clean and straightforward. It is easy to navigate and to add or remove categories. Articles and posts are displayed as they come via the source’s RSS feed and you can click through to the original source. Individual articles can be saved for later viewing or shared on social media or by email.

Given that you cannot add your own feeds, Law Ratchet is not a replacement for Google Reader. However, I found it to be a great way to skim current legal news items and blog posts.

Clio, the cloud-based legal practice management platform, announced today that it will host the inaugural Clio Cloud Conference Sept. 23 and 24 in Chicago. I am proud to have been invited to speak at the conference, which will feature various presentations focusing on the evolving relationship between law and technology.

According to Clio’s announcement, a focal point of the event will be an “unconference” format that will run in parallel with other conference sessions. This format will give attendees a hands-on, interactive venue to engage with other attendees as well as with Clio’s support and product teams.

I will be speaking on the security and ethics of cloud computing. Other conference sessions will cover going mobile, accounting, virtual law firms, customer service, online marketing, social media, going paperless, document automation, and branding. Several sessions will focus on specific aspects of using Clio’s practice management platform.

In addition to myself, others who are scheduled to speak at the conference include:

• Jack Newton, Clio’s co-founder and CEO. 
• Andy Daws, vice president North America – Riverview Law. 
• Ed Walters, CEO and co-founder of Fastcase. 
• Chad Burton, founding attorney of Burton Law, a virtual law firm. 
• Doug Edmonds, assistant dean for IT at UNC School of Law. 
• Matt Homann, founder of LexThink. 
• Joshua Lenon, Clio’s director of communications and outreach. 
• Gwynne Monahan, Clio’s communications manager and community manager for Small Firm Innovation. 

Early bird registration for the two-day conference is $299. After July 1, the regular registration rate will be $399. Registration includes access to all sessions and events, all meals and snacks (including dinner), networking events and conference materials.

To learn more about the 2013 Clio Cloud Conference, visit www.cliocloudconference.com or follow on Twitter using the hashtag #ClioCloud9.

This week on our legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we look at the debate over the growing use of private prisons. Joining us to discuss the issue are Susan Herman, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Adrian Moore, vice president of the Reason Foundation, a non-profit in support of libertarian principles and privatization.

• Susan Herman was elected president of the ACLU in October 2008. As Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, she teaches courses in the area of criminal law and procedure and constitutional law. The ACLU has been studying and protesting against private prisons as a for-profit business for decades.

• Dr. Adrian Moore is vice president of policy at the Reason Foundation. He has conducted studies, written publications and scholarly articles on the privatization of prisons and how they yield quality corrections at a lower cost. He has served on boards and commissions developing or overseeing privatization at the federal, state, and local level.

Tune in to hear Herman and Moore debate and discuss the colossal incarceration rate, the profit motives of private prisons, the politics behind it all, and the impact on prisoners’ rights. You can stream or download the show from the Legal Talk Network.

An update from LinkedIn this morning indicated that a connection of mine had endorsed me as being skilled in litigation. The person who endorsed me is someone I know only through the Internet. We have never met or spoken, that I can recall. That means that the person has no first-hand knowledge of my skill in litigation. I do sometimes write about litigation-related topics, here and elsewhere, and arguably that could provide some basis for this person to decide that I am skilled in this area. But, frankly, it happens with some frequency that I receive an endorsement from someone I have never met.

That got me wondering about the ethics of these LinkedIn endorsements. Under ABA Model Rule 7.1, a lawyer is not to make any false or misleading claims about his or her services. If a lawyer permits an endorsement to remain on the lawyer’s LinkedIn profile that the lawyer knows to be misleading, even if someone else posted the endorsement, that would seem to be a problem under Rule 7.1.

Turning to Google in search of an answer, I discovered that smarter people than I had already considered this question. Their answers, however, are not in agreement.

LinkedIn introduced endorsements in September 2012. Now, users’ profiles include a “Skills & Expertise” section where you see all the rows of tiny faces representing the people who have endorsed you for various skills.

Last January, Andrew Perlman wrote a thoughtful post about this at Legal Ethics Forum. In addition to teaching professional responsibility at Suffolk University Law School and directing its Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation, Perlman was chief reporter for the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20. Here is what he says about the scenario I described above:

[L]et’s imagine that someone offers to endorse me who has no basis for assessing my skills in a particular area. Perhaps the endorser is a friend who has never worked with me. Or imagine that someone offers to endorse my skills or knowledge in an area I know very little about. For example, one of my contacts offered to endorse me in the area of “International Law,” even though I know very little about the subject. If I accept endorsements of this sort (i.e., endorsements from people who have not worked with me or endorsements of skills/knowledge I don’t have), it seems to me that my acceptance of the endorsement and making it visible to my contacts would be misleading and violate Rule 7.1.

Perlman goes on to say that it would be OK for a lawyer to accept an endorsement from someone who actually knows the lawyer’s skills and abilities and assuming the lawyer actually has those skills and abilities. (Some states, however, prohibit testimonials of any kind.) One other issue to be wary of, he adds, is the reciprocal endorsement (or the quid pro quo endorsement), which could violated Model Rule 7.2(b).

In an article in the Illinois Bar Journal, lawyer Adam W. Lasker interviews Michael P. Downey, the former chair of the Illinois State Bar Association Standing Committee on Professional Conduct, on the ethics of LinkedIn endorsements. Endorsements are OK, Downey says, provided they contain no false statements and are not given as a quid pro quo. Just because the endorser does not know you directly does not make it a false statement, he argues.

[H]e feels justified accepting some endorsements from strangers who may have indirectly come to honestly appreciate his abilities and integrity as a lawyer.

“I’ve written about 60 or 70 articles on legal ethics, so maybe they’ve endorsed me because they’ve read my articles,” he said.

In comments posted to Andrew Perlman’s post, Joshua M. King, general counsel for Avvo, takes a somewhat contrary view. He argues, first, that lawyers cannot be held liable for endorsements posted by third parties, because any ethics restrictions would be preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He further argues that the endorser’s actual familiarity with the lawyer’s skills does not matter, provided the lawyer actually has the skill. He also notes that if someone endorses you for a skill you do not have, it will not appear on your profile unless you allow it to.

At High Tech Intellectual Property Legal Blog, California lawyer Judith Szepesi takes the position that these endorsements do not violate Model Rule 7.1 because they are not statements by the lawyer about his or her own skills. She adds, however, that under California’s rules, these endorsements may constitute testimonials and require the lawyer’s LinkedIn profile to carry a disclaimer.

I am no ethics expert. However, I think it is significant that LinkedIn provides the ability to “hide” endorsements others have given you. (You can hide any single endorsement or choose to hide all endorsements by default.) If someone gives you an endorsement that you believe is false or misleading, and if you do not remove it, then you are effectively accepting it and allowing it to be communicated to anyone who views your LinkedIn profile. To my mind, that brings it within the purview of Model Rule 7.1.

Paul F. Kenney is a well-known Boston-area personal-injury lawyer and a partner in the law firm Kenney & Conley in Braintree, Mass. Now, he is also a published novelist. This week, Kenney published his new book, Paths Along the Way, which tells a story that he says was inspired by his own life experiences as a criminal defense and trial lawyer.

I will confess that I have not yet read the book. However, I know Paul and I can attest to the fact that he can spin a story with the best of them. According to the book’s description, the story starts in 1967 with two white brothers, Christopher and Michael, living in a Boston housing project. Christopher’s evening out with his black girlfriend ends in a shooting that changes the course of his life.

Years later, the two brothers — Christopher now a prominent Boston trial lawyer and Michael a State Police detective — are reunited when the nephew of Christopher’s long-ago girlfriend is framed for the murder of a Boston cop. Christopher takes on his defense and enlists Michael as his investigator. Along the way, he risks all that he has built and hoped for.

The paperback book is 280 pages. The list price is $11, but it is currently listed on Amazon for $9.16. A Kindle version is said to be coming soon. The book also has a website and a Facebook page.

Below is a screenshot I grabbed from the ABA Journal Blawg Directory. At first glance, it looks like a typical screenshot. But something is different — the hyperlinks are all live. Go ahead, click on one. Do you want to use the same screenshot? Click on the kwout name beneath the screenshot and you’ll go to a page that gives you the embed code (or lets you post it to Twitter or email it).

This is done via a tool called kwout (pronounced like “quote.”)  It operates via a bookmarklet you add to your browser’s toolbar. Better than the bookmarklet are kwout’s Firefox add-on or Google Chrome extension. These let you grab (or “quote”) any part of a web page quickly and easily. You choose the portion of the page you want by dragging your mouse.

After you’ve grabbed the part of a page you want, you’re taken back to a kwout page (see below) that lets you set the embed size, add a border or shadow, and change the background color. Rather than embed the screenshot, you can also choose to email it or post it to to Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, and various other sites. You can also add an annotation or add a video or audio comment.

Blawg Directory – ABA Journal via kwout via kwout

There are plenty of other screen capture tools out there, of course. But while most capture only a static image, Kwout creates an image map, retaining the active hyperlinks. This makes it a great tool for embedding screenshots on blogs and web pages.