Legal Technology

International Legal Technology Association 2008

The International Legal Technology Association's annual meeting is underway in Grapevine, Texas, just outside of Dallas. The theme this year is "Global Perspective, Peer Advantage."

The "Peer Advantage" part of the theme carries the most weight. Out of the conferences I attend, including LegalTech, the educational value from peers working in, and responsible for, legal IT in law firm and educational environments is top notch at ILTA. In this way, it has maintained its historical roots as a Wang user group meeting.

As for the "Global Perspective," that is relevant to the firm's practice or reflective of the multinational nature of the corporation. At the least, there were numerous educational sessions aimed at globalization including "International Discovery and Handling Foreign Language Data," "Deploying, Training and Supporting Desktop and Practice Applications Globally" and "Global Planning: Cultural Differences and Other Challenges" that covered the management of a project team spanning multiple time zones.

In addition to the education from peers and sessions, vendors take the opportunity to update attendees on their products and services. For example, Aderant gave a session on reporting business analytics and Interwoven gave attendees their view of matter life cycle management with WorkSite.

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Walls have ears, lights have eyes

Walls have ears, either because they are so thin or because they have monitoring devices within. Now, lights have eyes that can pinpoint people and equipment within a facility using Talking Lights.

Talking Lights is a new ZigBee-capable indoor locator that makes it easy to track people and find equipment in facilities like hospitals, secure buildings, and storage facilities. It uses ordinary building lights as locator beacons, so there’s no need for expensive dedicated systems.

Five weird things about water

I was echoing the 10 greatest YouTube hacks from The Best Article Every Day blog and fell upon 5 really weird things about water with a bonus on ice spikes. Being a Minnesota native, I knew water does weird things at low temperatures. In fact, people do some pretty weird things at low temperatures too, but I will spare you that and avoid the lawsuits. Do check out the water weirdness though.

Blackhat Aftermath

Keith Jones and Brian Dykstra, principals at Jones Dykstra and Associates, reported a number of findings at the recent security conference: Black Hat 2008. Although they said there were not as many zero-day exploits, there were a number of presentations focused on the dangers of social networking and social engineering.

In regard to not as many zero-day exploits, I take it that security is finally becoming a forethought, rather than an afterthought, in building applications.

In regard to the dangers of social networking, hackers and phishers will hang where end users flock. This is a pretty safe bet. The more people that group in one location, the greater percentage of them that will fall for treats and get tricked into parting with their money or other assets.

Jones and Dykstra also interviewed Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive. While looking for ways to improve DNS performance, he stumbled on a DNS cache poisoning vulnerability. The good news is that the vulnerability is mostly patched. The bad news is that the ease of implementation dictated the patch strategy. So, we're likely to see an Act II for DNS vulnerability in the near future.

Open source license gets real

The New Media & Technology law blog has spotted a ruling by the Federal Circuit that lends support to the open source community to enforce and control the use of code according to the terms of the Artistic License. Jacobsen v. Katzer, No. 2008-1001 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 13, 2008).

Lawyer talk ...

is bound to improve with unified communications. Just think of the possibilities of communicating with the firm and with clients along several interfaces like e-mail, instant messaging, telephone, car phone, home phone, and in a pinch, your teenager's phone, as if it were one unified communication interface. And that includes fax too. Although the last time I looked at UM technology, fax was an afterthought.

UM give you one phone number that will bring home all of the above technologies and find you no matter where you are with the find-me-follow-me feature. I know, there are some places that you should not be found. Then, it goes to voice mail. Which of course can be retrieved from multiple interfaces.

Where am I going with this. Well, Nortel announced that they acquired Pingtel today. So Pingtel's software-based UM technology, a leader in SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), is going to meet Nortel's CallPilot communication platform. In effect, this brings Pingtel's existing original equipment manufacturer (OEM) relationship with Nortel in house and brings Nortel closer to being the software-centric company that it wants to be.

Lawyers, especially in the small- to medium-sized firm, should see some immediate benefits in the Nortel Software Communication System 500 (SCS500). In the long term, Pingtel's SIP technology will go into Nortel's research and development arm and, hopefully, produce a more unifying UM for today's legal professionals across desktops, laptops, and other handheld devices, including cell phones.

Seven is a magical number

And that's not even considering its prime characteristic. Because there were Seven Samauri and then there was the Magnificient Seven. And now, from the JD&A company Blog, there are Seven Myths about Computer Forensics that Ryan Lerminiaux debunks such as a computer forensics specialist can recover anything and metadata holds the key to life, the universe, and everything.

Linux in the life of a lawyer

Law.com regularly receives case studies and many writers share their experience with us. Rod Kovel, a New York lawyer who specializes in contracts, supplies a cautionary tale for lawyers who wish to embrace Linux, open source, and free software.

Mr. Kovel writes that Linux and free software "does not add up. Much is promised, little is given, and the disappointments are many." Kovel debunks Linux myths and discusses the true cost of free software and its operation in the law office as a Microsoft Windows replacement. Read more ...

Legal tracks at Black Hat

Most lawyers are not expert computer users, but they do have ethical duties to protect client data that is most likely stored in electronic format. These are very good reasons to keep abreast of the latest security technologies and vulnerabilities.

Brian Dykstra and Keith Jones, senior partners of Jones Dykstra & Associates, a Maryland-based consulting firm, will be writing about the latest security technologies and vulnerabilities at the 2008 Black Hat Briefings and Training on Aug. 6-7 in Las Vegas. The topics of discussion this year include: root kits; zero-day exploits; application security; bots and malware; deep knowledge; and more. Read more ...