Legal Technology

Laptops to go

Ultraportable laptops may travel easily, but they often sacrifice key features, such as optical drives or keyboard size, necessary for long stretches of work. Alan Cohen reviews the latest models, which, despite some hits and misses, still offer advantages to the mobile lawyer.

Samsung solid-state drive no flash in the pants

A flash drive or solid-state drive in your laptop or computer is not going to be a flash in the pants. Once you experience an SSD you will want to make a long-term commitment to it.

I got to know solid-state drive technology from Samsung's MCCOE64G8MPP PS 10 (64 gigabytes) while using a Lenovo Thinkpad T Series T60p notebook. But it was not love at first sight. Although the drive was very quiet, moved very fast, and had the potential to last as long as I might own the laptop since it had no movable parts, it came with a higher price tag and greater power consumption than a conventional hard disk drive.

But with all the features that lawyers would find attractive, such as speed and reliability, I gave the Samsung drive a second look and got hooked. Read more ...

Constitutional sources

U.S. Supreme Court justices on both sides in last term's landmark gun rights case resorted to original documents in making their arguments about the meaning of the Second Amendment. But they -- as well as the lawyers in the case -- used a little-known digital resource to find them: The Constitutional Sources Project, which has digitized and made freely available online more than 11,000 historical documents relating to the Constitution and the amendments.

VMware counters Microsoft's virtual price tag

VMware counters Microsoft's pricing structure for its virtualization products and announced that ESXi, its lightweight hypervisor, is going to be given away for free.

Although the giveaway comes with bad news from VMware's second quarter earnings report and forecast, that VMware will make substantially less money than expected this year, VMware's goal in the giveaway is to extend the virtual infrastructure and products for more uses and to more users.

VMware's ESXi hypervisor is now included in Dell Poweredge servers and blade systems as well as systems from HP, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP and NEC. So look under the hood, ESXi may already be there for you.

2008 Socha-Gelbmann EDD Survey Sneak Preview

A sneak preview of the 2008 Socha-Gelbmann EDD Survey has been published on EDD Update. This year's survey queried 107 EDD services and software providers, 29 law firms, and 19 corporations and ranked EDD service and software providers using 350 qualitative and quantitative factors. No small feat. My hat is off to these gentlemen.

Ranking anything in any industry is often a contentious affair. There are winners (those ranked), losers (those not ranked), and those not on anyone's radar that are neither winners nor losers. But one thing about the survey is hard to argue with, and that's the disclaimer: "Anyone who makes buying decisions primarily on these rankings or any other generalized rankings is a fool."

The disclaimer does not say a whole lot for the folks who took their time and energy to complete the survey for Mr. Socha and Mr. Gelbmann. But really, the U.S. loves their surveys and polls. And the press releases are already rolling into my e-mail box prior to the more public release of the results that will be published in the August 2008 issue of Law Technology News.

ONSITE3 said it made a top ranking this year, for the fourth consecutive year, with the distinction of being within the top 15 of all e-Discovery service providers polled. Also, Orlando-based Wave Software, a provider of de-duplication, regeneration and export of native electronic data, announced that it has been named a top e-discovery software provider. And, IE Discovery, a provider of discovery management services in identification, preservation, collection, review, analysis, production, and presentation of e-discovery (which just about covers it all but for "creation") has been ranked a top overall provider of e-discovery services, again.

I am sure that ONSITE3, Wave Software, and IE Discovery will not be the only vendors to self-proclaim their ranking in the survey. There will be more to come. But remember the part about the "fools" and know that an e-discovery service for your company will be fact specific. Use the survey to narrow the growing field of providers and investigate further before you bet the farm.

Web-based screen reader for the blind

New software developed by the University of Washington, called WebAnywhere, lets blind and visually impaired people surf the Web from any Internet-enabled computer. The tool makes screen-reading an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with speakers or headphone connections.

The software is hosted on the Web, so it does not need to be installed on the local computer. It is ideal for situations where someone who's blind can't use their own computer, but still wants access to the Internet at libraries, public kiosks, or airports. The software processes text on an external server and then sends the audio file to play in the user's Web browser.

With WebAnywhere, any computer on the Internet with audio tools is capable of providing an accessible computer for the blind.

Google untethered

Scott Cleland, president of Precursor, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Internet Subcommittee on broadband regulations and privacy and advocated for a comprehensive approach to Internet privacy, highlighting the privacy threat posed by Internet applications like Google.

Mr. Cleland focused on the fact that broadband providers must operate within a framework of consumer and privacy laws and regulations, but Internet applications like Google operate without the same restrictions. In fact, says Cleland, Google has "more private information about more people than any other company in the world." Probably why they are so successful, eh?

Blogging: alive and well and everywhere

I'm not too sure how I missed the original debate among tech and business bloggers on the future of blogging. Probably the same way I missed the PC-Mac wars while running BSD and Solaris.

On the one hand of this so-called debate, well-established bloggers not associated with media companies are complaining that blogging is increasingly becoming a team sport dominated by the big media companies, replacing blogs written by "real persons" not paid to blog. I'm not too sure of what's on the other side of the argument, but I gather it's me, or we at Law.com.

But I consider myself a real person, albeit paid to blog (sometimes), yet part of a media company. And my mission is certainly not to replace the likes of Robert Ambrogi, Brett Burney, Carolyn Elefant, Richard M. "Rick" Georges, or J. Craig Williams. That's hardly the case; they are irreplacable. What I can do is bring out their best posts and give them wide exposure in the Law.com network.

So its not that big media companies are a threat. Rather, we offer the "real people" a wider audience.

With all reservations on the fact that I still consider myself part of the "real people" network.

Follow the data

It used to be "follow the money." But with electronic data discovery in litigation, "follow the data" is more appropriate. Vendors like Renewdata are doing just that, for current and historical data with ActiveVault and Symantec's Enterprise Vault.

Renewdata's ActiveVault 4.0 was released last month. With the new version, companies can send their historical data to Renewdata's hosting service. They will aggregate the data into an active vault and make it available for clients to manipulate it with litigation holds and retention policies. In the event litigation ensues, self-service, early-case assessment tools are also available for customers to do some forecasting. When customers want the data back, Renewdata can return it on demand and per customer requirements in a variety of formats for CT Summation, LexisNexis Concordance, and Microsoft Exchange.

The self-service tools available for ActiveVault 4.0 are delivered through a Web browser interface. On the good side, there is nothing to install on the local machine to access and manipulate the archive on ActiveVault -- that also reduces training requirements. On the bad side, there are no APIs for ActiveVault to interoperate with existing applications like policy management and data retention tools. That is on the road map.

I will look forward to the APIs for interoperability. Until then, Renewdata is forging partnerships such as the the recent agreement with Symantec.

Renewdata and Symantec announced a service to migrate and consolidate historical e-mail into a Symantec Enterprise Vault. This "Data Migration Service for Symantec Enterprise Vault"  migrates and consolidates historical e-mail and creates a centralized repository for legal discovery matter.

The service aims to convert, load, and index historical data from backup tapes and direct the output to an Enterprise Vault. Data can be extracted from removable media. Then e-mail and file data are de-duplicated; static operating system and application files are also eliminated. The fully processed data is is than stored in an Enterprise Vault archive which is then returned to the customer’s Enterprise Vault system as a turn-key offering for litigation support.

When you follow the data, e-discovery providers like Renewdata are not only servicing ongoing litigation needs, but also providing proacitve litigation tools that allow companies to engage in risk managment practices with historic data, using a hosting model with self-service tools.

In search of knowledge management

"I listened to Law Technology News' "Future Tech" podcast from LegalTech West Coast today. It featured a search for KM in the law firm setting by Tom Baldwin, Reed Smith's Chief Knowledge Officer.

At Reed Smith, Mr. Baldwin finds three knowledge buckets: (1) what the firm knows; (2) what lawyers need to do to accomplish their work; and (3) who the firm knows. Number 3 is, at once, the interesting bucket and the most difficult to manage.

In bucket number 3, Mr. Baldwin finds "relationship capital." The things the law firm knows from lawyer referrals; from "match-making" services for in-house counsels and corporations; from "pitches" for new clients and services; and from experience smoothing out client conflicts.

Like the LegalTech key note speaker, Charles A. James, vice president and general counsel of Chevron, Mr. Baldwin finds KM software wanting. Whether it is in the form of CRM or e-mail, the current software routines do not fit bucket number 3.

It is hard to argue with either of these gentlemen and their findings.

The search for a KM solution can follow the Life of Brian. That is, the solutions out there can insult as many people as they inform. And of course, there are always some who find the humor in any situation. But seriously, it appears that the KM solutions themselves shape the problem, rather than the other way around. This reasoning has prevailed because we are inured and enamored with the idea that very simple solutions can solve complex problems, overnight. But that's not always the case.

Managing the knowledge contained in Mr. Baldwin's bucket no. 3 is a complex problem. The solution won't be solved overnight and it won't be solved by one software company. It will take a collective. And what better way to work in a collective than engage the social networks growing up all around us in the form of Facebook, Linked In and others. Because if we don't, we're liable to end up with an empty bucket.