As of Jan. 1, 2010, Massachusetts lawyers will be required to comply with the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act, a strict new law requiring businesses to encrypt personal data and adopt written policies for data and file storage. The Massachusetts Bar Association, the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program and Catuogno…

Much is made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor was a federal district judge before she was named to the federal appeals court. After all, if confirmed to the Supreme Court, she would be the only one of the nine justices to have sat on the trial bench.

The…

Thanks for Jay Shepherd for including me on his list of top 10 Twitterers for innovative lawyers. And sorry for it taking me two months to realize I was named. How did I find out? Twitter, of course.…

This week on the legal-affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we consider the class-action lawsuit filed by college football and basketball players against EA Sports and the NCAA. The lawsuit claims that electronic games unlawfully appropriate the likenesses of these student athletes.

Our guests to discuss this issue are Peter Goplerud, dean and…

I will be speaking at two events in the next month:

On Thursday, June 11, I will be on a panel at the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Solo & Small Firm Law Practice Management Symposium. I am on the 3 p.m. panel, “45 Tips in 45 Minutes,” together with Rodney Dowell and Alan…

My cellphone pic of this 1843 newspaper is too blurry to read. But in the upper-left hand corner, it bears this notice regarding forms of payment: “Produce of all kinds taken in exchange for the paper.”

This old newspaper was on exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum as…

A former law clerk to Sonia Sotomayor, Jenny Rivera, now law professor at CUNY School of Law, and Supreme Court expert Stephen Wermiel, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and now adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law, discuss the Sotomayor nomination on this week’s…

John Kennard, one of the best photographers I know and THE best photographer of lawyer portraits, alerts me to a not-to-be-missed event this weekend for anyone in the Boston area. It is the first-ever Chelsea Art Walk. John, a principal organizer, says it is “a great opportunity…

I have all the steamy details at Legal Blog Watch.…

The document-sharing site JD Supra will formally launch a new feature tomorrow that makes finding and following information on specific topics much easier. The new addition — already available on the site — is a series of Law Centers that organize documents by topics and areas of interest. These topics are arranged…

This week on the legal affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer, we look at the impact of the recession on lawyers and the legal profession.

In the first segment of the program, we discuss the recent rash of lawyer suicides and the problem of depression among lawyers. Joining us to discuss this is

Transactional lawyers are the target users of a new Web site, TransactionSpace, that aims to make the deal-making process more efficient, intuitive and transparent. The site’s tagline sums up its purpose: “You do the lawyering. Let TransactionSpace manage the process.”

The site takes the three primary steps of a transaction — negotiation, document drafting…