Articles Posted in April, 2014

There is a trend in legal information, rapidly gaining momentum, in which visualization tools and design concepts are used to help lawyers, students, consumers and scholars make sense of the law. In the cover story of this month’s ABA Journal, I take an in-depth look at this trend.

I write about some emerging…

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In this week’s Lawyer2Lawyer, we consider the promise and reality of the right to counsel, 51 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Gideon v. Wainwright. Specifically, we look at public defenders in…

It has happened to all of us, I'm sure. You hit "send," only to realize autofill has provided the wrong address. Or, you "reply all" when you meant your response to be private. How many times have you said to yourself, "If only I could unsend that email"? Now you can. Two Harvard Law School students, Lindsay Lin and David S. Gobaud, have launched a free service, Pluto Mail, that allows users to unsend emails after they've been sent. It also allows users to edit emails after they've been sent (but before they've been opened), set auto-expiration dates…

Have you ever thought about whether you should back up your law firm’s cloud? If your cloud service goes down or loses files, where will that leave you? A recent report from Forrester Research cautions that businesses should back up their critical cloud data…

Just after ABA Techshow, I published a post listing my picks for the top 10 product announcements at the show. My #2 pick was Sony’s Digital Paper, a remarkably thin (.26 inches) and light (12.6 oz.) tablet-like device with a 13.3 inch, high-contrast E Ink display.…

When WordRake , the editing program for lawyers, was first released in 2012, I put it to the test against two of the most eloquent writers on the Supreme Court, Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan. If WordRake could improve on Scalia and Kagan, I reasoned, imagine what it could do for the rest of us. Now, WordRake is preparing to release version 2.0 of its software and it provided me with a beta version. This time, I decided to give Justices Scalia and…

It’s a good time to be a legal startup, it seems. Just three weeks ago, we reported here that Clio, the cloud-based practice management platform, had raised $20 million in financing. Now comes news that the lawyer directory site Avvo has closed $37.5 million in financing.

This latest round of…

You've no doubt heard about Heartbleed, the security flaw that exposed personal information at many leading websites. The flaw was in OpenSSL, an open-source version of the SSL protocol that is used to encrypt transmissions between you and a website. The flaw created a vulnerability that could have exposed sensitive information. The vulnerability affected several leading Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo and Netflix. It made me wonder how many companies that cater to the legal profession were affected. I've collected a bit of information here. If you know of others, please let me know or add a comment below. If…

Just 10 months after it launched, Estate Map is closing down. As I described in my review of it last August, Estate Map is a cloud-based tool for estate planning lawyers and their clients. For lawyers, it simplifies client intake and communications. For clients, it provides a portal where they provide information about themselves and where they store important documents and digital assets.

Do you work in BigLaw? Wish you did? Or just happen to be a junkie for news about large law firms? If so, here's your fix. The folks at TechnoLawyer have reworked and relaunched BigLaw, their free weekly email newsletter that endeavors to cover all things BigLaw. The newsletter now covers what TechnoLawyer calls the BigLaw 300 -- the nation's 300 largest law firms. Whereas it formerly contained only selected articles about large firm business, marketing and technology, the revamped version aims to be far more exhaustive.

In a post here in February, I reviewed The Firm Directory from Neudesic Pulse, a product I described as like a law firm’s private LinkedIn. The product allows firms to create a searchable, internal directory that…

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In our last episode of the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we spoke to two activists urging federal and state laws to make revenge porn a crime. This week, we follow-up with two guests who believe such laws would…