General

I received an email yesterday alerting me to a new app for converting Microsoft Office documents to PDF on an Apple or Android mobile device. In researching it, I discovered that the company also has an app for converting PDF to Office. Either of the two apps — both of which are free — make…

An innovative experiment that turned working Massachusetts courtrooms into test labs for social media in the courts has quietly closed down operations as its operating funds have dried up. Called OpenCourt and operated by WBUR, an NPR news station in Boston, the project used digital technology to make Quincy…

Across the United States, men, women and children — both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals — are subjected to forced labor, debt bondage, involuntary servitude and sex trafficking. “Make no mistake,” Attorney General Eric Holder said last year, “human trafficking is not just a global problem. It is a national crisis.”

In response to this…

An app introduced this week enables legal consumers to engage in free consultations with lawyers via an iPhone.

The new app, LawZam, was developed by the company of the same name, LawZam. As I wrote about…

In what is getting to be an increasingly crowded field, another cloud-based practice management platform launched this week. The latest entrant, Velawsity, joins the ranks of Clio, Rocket Matter, MyCase, LexisNexis Firm Manager, Thomson Reuters Firm Central, and others.

So why does a crowded field need…

Can an iPhone app improve your legal writing? Kathleen Vinson thinks so. A professor of legal writing at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Vinson has developed iWrite Legal, a free iPhone app designed to help legal writers improve their…

The legal directory and Q&A site Avvo this week added a new feature, the Avvo Legal Marketplace, through which consumers can obtain proposals from lawyers interested in handling their case. Initially, this will be available for two practice areas,

This is a presentation I gave on Oct. 14, 2011, to the American Bar Association Law Practice Management Section fall meeting on Cape Cod. I was reminded of it during a conversation today about SEO and thought it was still timely.

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In a post earlier this week, I wrote that the first of what are now a number of cloud-based practice management platforms was Clio, which launched about five years ago. No sooner had the ink dried on that post than I…

When it comes to law practice management technology, recent years have seen the launch of a bevy of cloud-based platforms. Clio was the first of these, followed by a number of products that include Rocket Matter, MyCase,…

Florida has become the latest state to opine on the legal ethics of cloud computing. The proposed opinion follows other states that have addressed the issue in concluding that lawyers may ethically use cloud computing, provided they exercise due diligence to ensure that the cloud provider maintains adequate safeguards to protect the confidentiality and security…

[Another in a series of mini-reports on what I saw at the annual LegalTech conference in New York last week.]

Just after the 2012 LegalTech, I wrote about the new direction taken by Onit, a developer of process-management applications for legal and business…