Articles Posted in 2014

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. And you can teach a lawyer all about social media, but you can’t make the lawyer do anything with it.

For many law firm marketing executives, that is a frustrating fact of life. All the social media training in the world doesn’t…

In a post here May 19, LegalZoom Suffers Setback in North Carolina, I wrote about recent legal developments in South Carolina and North Carolina involving claims that LegalZoom is engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. Towards the end of that post, I wrote:

Meanwhile, LegalZoom

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I’m a bit behind in plugging my own podcast here. Here are the two most-recent episodes of Lawyer2Lawyer.

Facial Recognition Technology: Security vs. Privacy Concerns.

My cohost J. Craig Williams looks at how facial-recognition technology threatens security and privacy. His guests are Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney…

This recent edit tracked by @SCOTUS_servo was minor, but others are ‘truly substantive.’

Last month, a collective “Really!?” rolled through the U.S. legal community when Harvard Law Professor Richard J. Lazarus published his study — and Adam Liptak reported it in

Results are shown in split screen, with the summary on the left and the source document on the right.

This is a summer of legal hackathons here in the Boston area. As I’ve previously mentioned here, The  the ABA Journal and Suffolk University Law School will be cosponsoring a hackathon around the theme of access to justice in conjunction with the ABA annual meeting in Boston. Hackcess…

Recent years have brought an influx of new practice, case and matter management systems, primarily in the cloud. With so much attention paid to these newcomers, it is easy to overlook the venerable old-timers – the companies that have been at this a long time and, because of that, have learned a thing or two about what lawyers want. One such platform is LawBase, a case and matter management system first launched in 1981 by Synaptec Software Inc. Although the company is old, the software is not, says its CEO Philip Homburger. "We adapt and stay up with…

When Foxwordy launched in February, I gave it some grief for claiming to be "the first private social network for lawyers." Needless to say, it wasn't the first. It strikes me as a bad move for any company to start out by claiming to be something it isn't. On top of that, I've grown skeptical about the likelihood of success of any legal-vertical network. I was recently interviewed for a San Francisco Chronicle story about Foxwordy, and I think reporter…

The cloud practice management company Rocket Matter today rolls out a new “Evergreen Retainer” feature. The feature automatically invoices clients to replenish their retainers when their accounts fall below specified amounts.

Using this feature, the lawyer and client would agree on a minimum retainer and a replenishment point. After the client pays…

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: