Articles Posted in May, 2014

If I were to leave a document on a table entitled, "My Deepest, Darkest Secrets," under which I wrote, "Please do not read this unless you are someone I intended to read this," how securely would you think I'd protected myself? That, effectively, is all the majority of lawyers do to protect confidential documents they share with clients and colleagues, according to a LexisNexis survey published this week.

The first-ever global index of pro bono legal assistance, released yesterday by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, concludes that pro bono is thriving across the globe. Responses from 36,000 lawyers from 103 law firms in 69 countries show that they performed an average of 43 hours of pro bono each over the last 12 months. The United States is a global leader in pro bono, the index found. Firms based or headquartered in the U.S. devoted some $31 million to pro bono over the last year. U.S. lawyers do the most pro bono on average of any country,…

Document assembly and automation company TheFormTool today released version 2.0 of its document-assembly software Doxserá. First launched in January, Doxserá is a Microsoft Word plug-in that simplifies the creation of multiple or repetitive documents, such as when preparing a company formation or bankruptcy filing. Today's upgrade adds the ability for documents to "create themselves" by intelligently selecting external text or graphics from multiple external sources and incorporate them into customized final documents. Here is how the company describes it:

The Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program -- or LOMAP as the locals call it -- will host its fourth annual, day-long "super" marketing conference, Building Relationships to Build Business, June 5. Read on for information on a registration discount.

Clio CEO Jack Newton

Sometimes, commencement speeches are actually worth sitting through. Apropos of the season, NPR recently launched a website that collects some 300 of the most memorable commencement speeches dating back to 1774. I dove in searching for memorable speeches given by lawyers. All tolled, not too many lawyers made the list. Those lawyers who did, for the most part, are there for their accomplishments as politicians or business leaders, not as lawyers. Thus, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford all made the list. While all three are lawyers, they each also happened to be president of the United States.

The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has a useful collection of cloud ethics opinions from around the U.S. For anyone researching the topic, however, you should note that the list is incomplete. My research found three states not listed on the LTRC site -- Connecticut, Florida and Virginia -- and feedback to this post has alerted me to others. At this point, I have the total number of states to have considered the issue as 19. I raise this because I happened to come across two separate blog posts this week that assumed this list is complete. The ethics of…

A lawyer may 'friend' an unrepresented adversary to obtain information for a case, provided the lawyer first discloses the client that he or she is representing, the Committee on Professional Ethics of the Massachusetts Bar Association has ruled.

A lawyer for a party may 'friend' an unrepresented adversary in order to obtain information helpful to her representation from the adversary's nonpublic website only when the lawyer has been able to send a message that discloses his or her identity as the party's lawyer.

Although the opinion used the Facebook term of "friend," the committee said that its opinion applies equally…

I have to admit I was taken aback by the premise of ClearView Social, the new app being developed by social marketing consultant Adrian Dayton. Targeted at medium and large firms, the app “helps attorneys more easily share content with their professional networks through LinkedIn, Twitter and other platforms,” according to the press…

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court decided Greece v. Galloway, a landmark case about prayer in government assemblies. Both sides invoked the First Amendment to make their case, but who is right and why?

On our latest episode of Lawyer2Lawyer, we discuss the case with opposing counsels Douglas Laycock, for…

[Correction: This post erroneously described an Alabama lawsuit against LegalZoom as active when, in fact, it had been dismissed in January 2014. See this post for a full explanation.] When LegalZoom issued a press release last month announcing that the South Carolina Supreme Court had issued a determination that the company is not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law in that state, the news was widely reported by news media and blogs. However, just two weeks later in neighboring North Carolina, a Superior Court judge handed the State Bar a partial victory…

One of the nice features of Android devices that iOS devices lack is the ability to swap keyboards. This lets you try out different keyboards with different input methods and find one that best suits your style. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different keyboard apps for Android that can be downloaded from the Google Play store. Until now, however, there has not been one specifically designed for lawyers. This week, the Scottish company KeyPoint Technologies announced an addition to its Adaptxt line of specialty keyboards created just for lawyers. The keyboard uses a…

Back in December, I wrote a post questioning whether LinkedIn had abandoned CardMunch, its business card scanning app that used actual humans to transcribe the cards you scan and then connected the contact information to LinkedIn. Well, now it’s official. This week, LinkedIn announced that CardMunch will be shut…