Legal Technology

Phishing client trust funds

For those of you who have not seen one of the SPAM offers to take on an "easy" collection case for an out-of-state or out-of-country client looking to collect a bad debt in the state in which you are certified to practice, check it out.

The plot for this scam unfolds as such: you take the case; bogus check comes from deadbeat as a result of you taking the case; you depost check with misrouted bank numbers into your trust account; funds become available for use in near-time; you write check to client; check with misrouted bank numbers is determined NSF after your client trust is debited the amount you sent to the distant client.

The scary part about this is that the scammers know enough information on bank routing to be dangerously deceptive.

What goes out, must come in ...

does not refer to garbage. Rather, it refers to packages and parcels. Every organization that does a high-volume of shipping (read: law firms) should know that what goes out, does indeed, come in. And if they know that, they know about PS|Ship, a division of Lynch Marks, LLC.

PS|Ship provides shipping services to professional services firms that integrates all the workflow associated with preparing, tracking and billing your shipments. If you are not familiar with PS|Ship, see it in action at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.

Now PS|Ship can handle what comes into the mail room as well as what goes out. It announced PS|Receiver for inbound parcel tracking. This is an add-on module to it current "Ship" that provides full tracking for all inbound and intra-office shipments -- so now you have the wherewithall to find out where your copy of The American Lawyer went.

Software for bulls and bears

With the aftershocks of the mortgage crisis still reverberating on Wall Street, many ask: "where were the lawyers?" But what about technology and software solutions for financial services? CT stepped up to the plate.

CT Lien Solutions, formerly UCC Direct, announced some new functionality: a Mortgage Document Processing System for commercial and partial releases. MDPS is a Web-based software application that processes the time-intense tasks of mortgage releases and takes the place of current home-grown systems, which often require additional data entry and may not fully integrate into an organization’s workflow.

CT Lien Solutions and MDPS is aimed at financial service institutions, mortgage lenders and servicers of loans, who handle primarily commercial releases.

Trial technology saves last man standing

In October 2006, Gary Swanson, an executive with Hynix Semiconductor, was charged with joining a criminal conspiracy to fix prices in the dynamic random access memory industry. The right trial technology made Gary Swanson, the last man standing in this litigation, a free man.

'Paving paradise' with gTLDs

Just when you thought you knew your way around the Internet, ICANN is moving ahead with the expansion of generic Top Level Domains, or gTLDs. When this hits, driving on the Internet will be like tooling south on I-5 and then entering L.A. county. For those of you who have never had that experience for the first time, compare it to driving east on I-80 and landing in Boston without a precedent. May Google be with you.

The new gTLDs will allow organizations to turn their own brands into domains (.company) or create broad product groups in other gTLDS such as .car, .sports, or .bank. Outside of making it more difficult to find things on the Internet without a search engine, the new top-level domains will be a concern for companies out to protect their brands.

MarkMonitor has put up the dotBrand Resource Center to help brandholders develop or modify their Internet strategies. The Resource Center gathers information from a variety of sources, including ICANN, the International Trade Mark Association, the international media, and MarkMonitor with links to webinars, articles, and FAQs.

In a shrinking economy, expand your practice

And there's no easier way to get a handle on a new practice area than taking online continuing legal education courses right in the office, on your computer. But I'm not alone in this thinking. There are a record number of attorneys who see new business in a down economy.

Lawline.com, a leading provider of online CLE, is seeing more and more attorneys take courses in business and corporate law with an emphasis on bankruptcy. With the shrinking economy, business entities are winnowing in various industries with mergers, acquisitions, dissolutions, and bankruptcy proceedings. And there is new business to be had as well with new entrants coming into markets with reduced barriers.

If your practice does not include business transactions, corporate law, and bankruptcy, it's high time to add them and either brush up on your skills or acquire new skills to expand your practice.

On cliffnotes, outlines and dummies

If lawyers review their progression through post-secondary institutions and professional life, certain milestones can be marked, or mired, in publications. For example, we used cliffnotes to survive our undergraduate studies, outlines to exist in graduate school conditions and survive bar exams, and books for "dummies" to get us through our careers. Now Renew Data has a new "Dummy" book aimed at the legal profession: "“ESI Risk Management for Dummies.” This adds to their previous offering of "Electronic Discovery for Dummies."

Somehow, I don't take offense at books for dummies. In fact, they are written for busy people who just want the facts. I have more dummy books than I would admit, but less than I really seem to need. 

LexisNexis and Clickable forge a partnership

At one time, domain names and web site design ruled the day to advertise legal services on the Internet. The same indicators for brick-and-motor success in "location, location, location," translated to the Internet, more or less, with a domain name.

Like I said, at one time; back when the Net was less complex and crowded. One could say those were the good old days. Back when a typo in a URL did not send you to a porn site in a distant land and your e-mail inbox was not a phishing expedition. But so too, those good old days were confusing old days where you had to know where you were going -- sort of like driving in Boston.

Today one needs a search engine like Ask.com, Google, or Yahoo! to find something on the web. Search engines make the complexity of finding pages on the Internet as easy as finding fast food in a city. And instead of "location, location, location" being the keys to success, today it is "advertise, advertise, advertise."

There are two ways lawyers can use search engines to advertise their services and generate leads. One way is to optimize your web site so that it is search-engine friendly, aka search engine optimization or SEO. Another way is to use search engine marketing efforts and buy words used by end-users in searches that make links to your web site display in search results, aka adwords.

As lawyers, we can certainly dig into the workings of how searches operate and optimize our sites. And we can analyze our practice and purchase keywords in searches that will drive users to our sites. But our time is better spent servicing our clients. Toward that end, LexisNexis and Clickable, a search engine marketing service, have entered into a partnership to help market your practice using search engines.

LexisNexis' and Clickable hope to make a potent combination for lawyers in building effective websites, marketing, and optimizing them. The partnership aims at making search marketing simple, instant, and profitable. But there's one more thing, search marketing for lead generation is measurable, unlike those midnight commercials you have been recording.

Findlaw mounts a nonsuit defense in the trial by blog

In the post "trial by blog with Google as law," Findlaw has motioned for summary judgment in that it does not sell links to law firms. For a backgrounder on other events in this trial, see the post below.

Less than comprehensive reporting

No matter how much time I allot to view exhibits at technology shows, it never seems to be enough to be comprehensive. As a result, covering the exhibitors at ILTA in scheduled briefings and from the exhibit hall resulted in reports that were less than comprehensive (Report 1, Report 2). I need to spend more time on the exhibit floor in the future. That way, I would not miss as much as I did.

For example, I talked about voice and its potential to be the next killer application for the Internet. And, that the legal profession can drive it with their experience in dictation and desire for mobility. I also discussed BigHand and Winscribe. But I missed the fact that U.S.-based Verdatum was at the show looking forward its next big upgrade later this year.

And in the EDD space, I neglected both Attenex and Kazeon. Attenex came out with version 5.0 to their Patterns Suite, incorporating Workbench for collection and Document Mapper for review. The new version makes Attenex's application programming interfaces available in their software development kit so customers can customize their workflows and streamline their e-discovery procedures to create efficiencies and reduce costs. In addition, Patterns has improved performance in processing and handling foreign documents in their native languages.

Kazeon's eDiscovery came to the show supporting the latest craze in the datacenter: virtualization. Kazeon's version 3.1 of its Information Server IS1200-ECS views into VMware instances and images aiming to give customers access to unknown or hidden virtual instances on servers, laptops and desktops to discover them for collection, processing, analysis and review. And speaking of laptops, Kazeon makes it easy for administrators to hunt them down to implement KazHold, a legal- or litigation-hold policy, and discover them; that goes for desktops too.

Version 3.1 introduced an agentless process to discover, collect, and enforce legal holds on laptops and desktop computers. In effect, it is a zero-footprint agent in the form of a spider or robot. And note that data does not have to be moved into a vault or an archive for Kazeon to implement the legal hold. It can implement the hold on data where it resides, on the laptop or desktop, as well as in an archive. Now, once that can be done for BlackBerrys and other handheld devices, IT administrators will get more sleep at the on set of litigation.