Legal Technology

Guest editorial: turkey & technology

I am helping to prepare for a big family Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.  It strikes me that legal technology is a lot like turkey and its events like family gatherings (without the idiosyncratic relatives, of course).  It may not be very appealing to everyone right out of the package (particularly reluctant end users), but it offers lots of promise as it cooks and evolves into something more suited to your taste (and helps manage risk or fuels success).

Although it is only November, I am already thinking about LegalTech New York and the adventure of navigating through the Hilton in February and collecting a bag full of trinkets.  The schwag aside, my favorite part of LegalTech is that it symbolizes the unofficial launch of the year in our business.  New products, new versions and new entrants. 

In the same way that I like attending conferences at the beginning of the year, I also appreciate the perspective of those at its close.  For that reason, I am attending the IQPC's 6th Annual E-Discovery Conference, which runs from December 8th through the 11th.  As someone who closely monitors the legal technology industry and regularly discusses the impact of its offerings with corporate and outside counsel (e.g., Survey Shows E-Discovery Best Practices), reflection on lessons learned is as critical as hopes for the next must-have application.

The industry has grown, but the mission remains constant and, in many ways, collaborative (like preparation of this turkey).  The subject is technology, but the discussion is always about improving communication and relationships.  So, at your next 'meet and confer' bring along some turkey.  Cranberry sauce might help too.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Ari L. Kaplan, Esq.
www.arikaplanadvisors.com
(646) 641-0600

Author of "Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development" (Thomson-West, 2008).

For reviews,press and tour schedule, visit the official site of "The Opportunity Maker."

Leasing computers can maximize IT investment

Dell announced new leasing and financing options for U.S. businesses, including a fair market value lease rotation program that allows customers to pay for the use of technology and return or exchange it at the end of the lease term. Dell aims to cut the total cost of ownership in computer equipment by as much as 20.5 percent.

Many law firms do not have the budget to implement the right IT strategy to stay competitive in this economy. Even if you do purchase new technology, it has to last a period of time to get a good return on your investment: for new computers, that's about three years; for new infrastructure components like routers and switches, that's about 5-7 years. Even with those projections, technology can also become obsolete quickly, so purchasing it outright can hinder a firm’s ability to update its IT infrastructure in a cost-effective manner and stay on top of its game. So why not lease it?

By leasing computers and other equipment, firms can get the latest technology and save operating capital for more pressing needs aligned with their line-of-business: law. Leases have flexible terms and, at the end of the lease, you can renew it, start a new lease on new equipment, or even purchase the used equipment. Or, if you are not satified with the lessor and/or the equipment, find a new technology partner.

Endpoint. If you lease vehicles, take all the reasons why you do that and take a hard look at the computer equipment sitting on desks and in racks.

Tag. You're IT.

KWizCom, a Microsoft SharePoint add-on provider, announced its new tagging feature for Microsoft SharePoint: KWizCom. With tags, end users can classify and search content in SharePoint quickly and efficiently. But if you are in IT and watching your budget, you can do this yourself with SharePoint tools. SharePoint expert Mark Gerow shows you how.

Not your best-dressed list

Nor is it a list of who flopped on the red carpet. Rather, this is a list of who outflopped who in the supercomputer world to make the top 10 (below) and top 500. This November, Los Alamos' Road Runner, with energy efficient cell processors, edged out Oak Ridge's National Lab's Jaguar. But they both topped out at over a petaflop.

1. Los Alamos National Lab's Roadrunner: 12,960 Cell chips (8+1 cores) on IBM Model QS22 blade servers, 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron on LS21 blades, and 104 terabytes of main memory.

2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar: Cray XT5 HE system with over 37,500 quad-core AMD Opteron processors running at 2.3 GHz on 300 terabytes of memory.

3. NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS: Pleiades
4. Dep't of Energy: BlueGene/L
5. Argonne National Laboratory: Blue Gene/P
6. Texas Advanced Computing Center at the Univ. of Texas: Ranger
7. NERSC/LBNL: Franklin
8. Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Jaguar XT-4
9. Sandia National Laboratories: Red Storm
10. Shanghai Supercomputer Center: Dawning 5000A

Traction for redaction

In the old days, when we redacted paper with permanent, magic markers, the magic stayed in the redaction. Although the digital world made it more difficult to definitively redact documents, digital tools to accomplish the job keep getting better.

Recently, Informative Graphics announced the latest developments in its redaction technology in the Brava! suite, a multi-format viewing, annotation, and secure content delivery platform.

Brava! now includes the ability to intelligently and automatically redact privacy information, to verify or review redactions before finalizing them for final distribution, and to perform ‘peek through’ redaction. 'Peek through' redaction blacks out a large area, e.g., a page, and leaves a small area un-redacted.

Users can output redacted files to TIF, PDF or Informative Graphics’ secure Content Sealed Format (CSF) with Visual Rights. Visual Rights allow users to add additional file security like password protection and expiration date as well as restrictions for print, copy, markup, and other features.

Old habits persist in virtual security

With new tools that easily transform a physical computer into virtual machines with minimal human involvement, virtualization is becoming a reality. As the technology becomes further entrenched in IT infrastructures, it warrants close scrutiny by the computer security community.

Going 3D with Adobe Acrobat

When an expert witness in a personal injury case asked consultant Pen Volkman if her team could create a PDF version of their 3D model of a water treatment facility -- and make it interactive. The surprising answer was yes, using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended. Put on your glasses.

A solution that became a problem looking for a solution

Yes. That lead is a bit circular, and confusing. But the answer is metadata. A topic that is, in itself, a solution to classifying and finding documents in a large data store. But a solution that becomes a problem in e-discovery and the GRC context that tends to get corporations, law firms, and lawyers in trouble with disciplinary rules and clients.

Individuals can use metadata cleaners to manually remove metadata before publishing. These manual tools, however, are not functional for Web site publishers where content is loaded and published in mass. For that, you need to look at products with automatic metadata removal that can be inserted into the publishing workflow from the likes of 3BView.

Amber Road is really a parking lot

Sun announced its first storage appliance, which can be used in a small IT system or, using a larger former factor, in a large data center. Code-named Amber Road, the rack-mounted Sun Storage 7000 line consists of three products: the Sun Storage 7110 (2 terabyte maximum capacity), the Sun Storage 7210 and the Sun Storage 7410 (up to 288 terabytes).

All of the appliances use the open-source Solaris operating system, ZFS (Zetabyte File System), and the DTrace system analysis tool. And, they use a combination of SSD (solid state drive) and HDD (hard disk drive) memory, with the faster SSD handling boot and disk cache. Sun claims that the system can be set up and running in about 5 minutes.

Amber Road pricing starts at about $11,000 for the 2 terabyte version, so small IT system translates to medium-sized law firm.

The end of lawyers?

Hardly. But it is closer to reality than the end of history. Legal technology specialist and futurist Richard Susskind's "The End of Lawyers?", sequel to the "Future of Law," looks at many factors coming together to accelerate change in law, including the pervasive development and uptake of information technology.