General

The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has a useful collection of cloud ethics opinions from around the U.S. For anyone researching the topic, however, you should note that the list is incomplete. My research found three states not listed on the LTRC site -- Connecticut, Florida and Virginia -- and feedback to this post has alerted me to others. At this point, I have the total number of states to have considered the issue as 19. I raise this because I happened to come across two separate blog posts this week that assumed this list is complete. The ethics of…

A lawyer may 'friend' an unrepresented adversary to obtain information for a case, provided the lawyer first discloses the client that he or she is representing, the Committee on Professional Ethics of the Massachusetts Bar Association has ruled.

A lawyer for a party may 'friend' an unrepresented adversary in order to obtain information helpful to her representation from the adversary's nonpublic website only when the lawyer has been able to send a message that discloses his or her identity as the party's lawyer.

Although the opinion used the Facebook term of "friend," the committee said that its opinion applies equally…

I have to admit I was taken aback by the premise of ClearView Social, the new app being developed by social marketing consultant Adrian Dayton. Targeted at medium and large firms, the app “helps attorneys more easily share content with their professional networks through LinkedIn, Twitter and other platforms,” according to the press…

[Correction: This post erroneously described an Alabama lawsuit against LegalZoom as active when, in fact, it had been dismissed in January 2014. See this post for a full explanation.] When LegalZoom issued a press release last month announcing that the South Carolina Supreme Court had issued a determination that the company is not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law in that state, the news was widely reported by news media and blogs. However, just two weeks later in neighboring North Carolina, a Superior Court judge handed the State Bar a partial victory…

One of the nice features of Android devices that iOS devices lack is the ability to swap keyboards. This lets you try out different keyboards with different input methods and find one that best suits your style. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different keyboard apps for Android that can be downloaded from the Google Play store. Until now, however, there has not been one specifically designed for lawyers. This week, the Scottish company KeyPoint Technologies announced an addition to its Adaptxt line of specialty keyboards created just for lawyers. The keyboard uses a…

Back in December, I wrote a post questioning whether LinkedIn had abandoned CardMunch, its business card scanning app that used actual humans to transcribe the cards you scan and then connected the contact information to LinkedIn. Well, now it’s official. This week, LinkedIn announced that CardMunch will be shut…

Starting in July 2016, prospective lawyers taking the Massachusetts bar exam will be tested not just on traditional topics such as constitutional law, torts and property, but also on access to justice. On April 25, the state's Supreme Judicial Court approved a rule adding access to justice to the exam and indicating that applicants will be expected to be familiar with the topic. The rule makes Massachusetts the first state to add this topic to the bar exam.

In March in my ABA Journal column, I reviewed PacerPro, a free service for searching the federal courts' Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. Inforuptcy is a similar sort of service, except that, whereas PacerPro searches only district court dockets and excludes bankruptcy courts, Inforuptcy does just the opposite, searching only bankruptcy courts and excluding district courts. That, however, is about to change. Later this year, Inforuptcy will be expanding to add district court dockets. Read on for more…

I do not remember ever being so conflicted in my opinion of a device as I am about the new Sony Digital Paper, which just went on sale this week exclusively through Worldox and is targeted at the legal market. I posted a brief note and video about it a week and a half ago and have been using one ever since. The DP is a remarkably thin and light tablet-like device for keeping all your digital documents and notes. A stylus enables handwriting, either to mark up and annotate documents or to take handwritten notes.…

Are you a judge or former judge with a hankering to be on TV? If so, have I got an opportunity for you. Fox Television is casting a new reality show and is looking for a judge or former judge to apply. But before you dash off your resume, be prepared to give up…

There is a trend in legal information, rapidly gaining momentum, in which visualization tools and design concepts are used to help lawyers, students, consumers and scholars make sense of the law. In the cover story of this month’s ABA Journal, I take an in-depth look at this trend.

I write about some emerging…

It has happened to all of us, I'm sure. You hit "send," only to realize autofill has provided the wrong address. Or, you "reply all" when you meant your response to be private. How many times have you said to yourself, "If only I could unsend that email"? Now you can. Two Harvard Law School students, Lindsay Lin and David S. Gobaud, have launched a free service, Pluto Mail, that allows users to unsend emails after they've been sent. It also allows users to edit emails after they've been sent (but before they've been opened), set auto-expiration dates…