Author Archives

    Bryan Sims

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    Blogging About Your Trial May Not Be the Best Idea

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    My personal rule of thumb is that I try not to post anything on the internet that I would not want my grandmother to read. It appears that Dr. Robert Lindeman should have followed this advice.

    According to this news story in the Boston Globe, it appears that Dr. Lindeman was anonymously blogging about the malpractice suit that he was a defendant in. Apparently the posts on the blog were not complimentary to the proceedings, the jurors, or plaintiff’s counsel.

    During plaintiff’s examination of Dr. Lindeman, plaintiff’s counsel asked the doctor if he was the anonymous blogger known as flea. Dr. Lindeman admitted that he was. This admission was apparently sufficient to raise some concerns of the effect that the blog might have on the case. According to the Globe’s story, the morning after Dr. Lindeman admitted that he was flea, he settled the malpractice action for “what members of Boston’s tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement.”

    I see two morals to this story. First, follow my grandmother rule. Don’t say something you don’t want repeated to the world with your name attached to it. Second, just because you think you are blogging anonymously, that does not mean that your readers do not know who you are.

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    When Technology Goes Awry

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    If you do any speaking at all, this post from Michael Hyatt is a must read. He providesPowerpoint three tips to avoid a technology breakdown:

    1. Make a backup
    2. Print your notes
    3. Test your equipment

    He also provides three tips for what to do if your technology fails:

    1. Apologize once and stop apologizing
    2. Fish or cut bait
    3. Remember you are the presentation

    He goes into detail for each of his tips. My favorite is his fish or cut bait tip.

    Make a decision to “fish or cut bait.” You have to retain control. Everything feels like it is in slow motion. You want to scream. But give them a couple of minutes. You have to go with your gut. Are you confident that they know what they are doing? Or, are they clueless and just hoping they get lucky? Only you can make the call. If it is the latter, than you have to ditch the PowerPoint and get the techies off the stage. This is where you need to be direct but not rude. “Gentlemen, don’t worry about it. I will make the presentation without my slides. Thank you very much.” And then, to the audience, “Let’s give these guys a big hand for a valiant attempt.”

    Check out the post and read up on all of the tips and suggestions from Michael.

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    Legal Videos

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    The Technolawyer Blog has collected several legal related videos. My favorite is Billable Hours, a spoof depicting large firm lawyers. The below video of the iPod box if designed by Microsoft is also quite enjoyable.

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298&q[/googlevideo]

    If you are looking for a place to waste some time on the internet, this collection of videos is a good place to start.

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    Secure Your Computer

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    Jim Calloway provides a great tip for keeping your computer secure and making sure that you do not disclose privileged or confidential information. Jim explains:

    But today I want to talk about one particular keyboard shortcut that protects your privacy as well as your clients’ privacy. That is hitting the Windows key (with the Windows logo) and at the same time the L key (for lock.)  This locks the computer and no one can access it again until you hit Cntrl+Alt+Delete and enter your password.

    If you are leaving the computer to take a brief break, make a habit of locking it every time. I know you don’t allow anyone access to your office whom you do not trust. But still, maybe you don’t want your secretary to read that e-mail from your spouse or see just how far along you really are on that brief or view that open online game. This is just a good business privacy habit.

    The great thing about this tip is that it is very simple and easy to remember. Notwithstanding the fact that the tip is simple, it can keep your confidential and privileged information secure.

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    Going PaperLESS

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    Ross Kodner of Ross Ipsa Loquitur gives us six great tips about going PaperLESS. Going paperLESS was the best thing I ever did. Sitting on my laptop is a copy of every document in every case I currently have open. This means that I can work on any case, anywhere I happen to be. Plus, I can easily and quickly find any document in any case in a very short period of time, all without opening a single physical file.

    Ross’s best piece of advice is:

    3) There’s no halfway in this process – the two easiest approaches are either (a) scan nothing, or (b) scan everything. Scanning just SOME things guarantees failure. Why? Because if what is to be scanned is left to anyone’s discretion, invariably they will eventually make the wrong decision and not scan something that really should have been. If a lawyer who is told they will be able to see a “complete” client file in electronic form on their PC screen stumbles across just ONE situation where some key document wasn’t scanned and thus, a file they were expecting to be comprehensive, wasn’t . . . the process will die right there from lack of confidence. File fragmentation creeps back in when someone says, “ok, I can look at MOST of the file onscreen, but since I can’t trust that it is complete because someone might have decided not to scan something, then I have to waste otherwise billable lawyer/staff time again looking for the paper that might not have been included.” It’s really all or nothing in my experience. In-between doesn’t work.

    Jump over to Ross’s blog and read the rest of his post.

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    Make Your Own Font

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    I admit that this is totally geeky. However, PC Magazine has an article on the step by step process of making your own font (for example out of your handwriting).

    The process takes a bit of work. For example, you have to write the uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other symbols you typically use.

    However, to be able to make my own  font is something that I may not be able to resist.

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    Time to Buy Your LCD Television?

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    According to wired.com, now may be the time to buy the LCD television that you have been waiting to get. The article explains:

    Thinking of buying an LCD television set? Wait no longer: The price plunge is over. After years of accelerating decline, prices for consumer LCD TVs — especially those smaller than 32 inches — have hit bottom, industry insiders say.

    That’s because the price of wholesale LCD flat panels — the display component of your TV set — has recently reached its lowest point and rebounded, according to numbers released by market data research firm iSuppli. When a TV’s most expensive single component starts getting more expensive, you can kiss retail price cuts goodbye.

    You can find the rest of the article here. I guess this means that a trip to Best Buy is in order.

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    Bates Stamping Your Documents

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    Anyone who is involved in litigation is familiar with the need to Bates stamp documentsBates Stamper that are produced in discovery. Ernest Svenson of PDF for Lawyers makes a compelling case for why all Bates stamping should be done electronically.

    Svenson explains:

    Let’s say you have 1,000 documents to bates-stamp. I seriously doubt that any paralegal could finish the task in less than 4 hours. It would probably take at least a day, maybe more. But to scan those documents would only take about an hour, maybe two hours if you had a really slow scanner. Once you’ve scanned the documents it takes about 30 seconds to bates-stamp them using Acrobat 8.0.

    Using a computer to bates-stamp ensures that you don’t miss any pages. And you can tell Acrobat to shrink the borders of the page and apply the bates-stamp in the resulting white area. This guarantees that the bates-number on every page is visible. Also you can add text before or after the bates number, (e.g. as “2nd Production – No. 000345”). Finally, if you realize you made a mistake and included some pages that should not have been bates-stamped, you can remove the bates-stamping and start over.

    He then concludes:

    In short, there’s a smart way to bates-stamp documents, and a really stupid way. Why anyone would want to make someone bates-stamp documents by hand is beyond me. Frankly, I think it should be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Apparently, though, it’s not all that unusual.

    And that is really sad.

    I could not agree with him more. Jump over to PDF for Lawyers to check out the rest of his post.

    Once you Bates stamp documents electronically, you will wonder how or why you ever did it manually before. Plus it is super easy to stamp documents now that the latest version of Adobe Acrobat includes the Bates Stamping ability.

    If you use CaseMap to organize your case, you can use a CaseMap plugin to stamp your documents and then automatically import the Bates stamp values into the documents portion of your CaseMap file. This makes your life doubly easy.

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    Email as a Communication Tool

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    I recently read an interesting post from Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. In his post he made two points that I thought were very important.

    First, he talked about the fact that almost all of his communications are now via email. Hyatt explained:

    I probably don’t send more than half a dozen letters a year. Even then, it’s usually because it’s a legal matter that requires this kind of documentation. It’s hard to believe that in 2007, anyone is still sending letters. Snail-mail—at least for most business correspondence—is dead.

    People just don’t have the time for an “inquiry-response cycle” that takes weeks. Even faxes are dead. In the 1990s, fax machines were cutting edge technology. Today, they are about as useless as an electric typewriter. I can’t even remember the last time I sent or received a fax. I still subscribe to eFax.com, which allows you to send and receive faxes on your computer, but even that sits idle. In today’s world, even a fax is too much hassle.

    As attorneys we often fail to recognize how other industries work. It is important to keep in mind that our clients, especially our business clients work differently than how we work as attorneys. If your business client is used to communicating with others via email, that means that he likely wants to communicate with you in that same manner.

    Hyatt also points out the necessity of handling your email in a timely and organized manner. He explains:

    If you have more than 100 e-mails in your inbox at any one-time, something is wrong with your personal management system. I get more e-mails than that every day. My goal is to empty my e-mail inbox daily. The key is to read the e-mail once, then make a decision and act. If you can’t act on it immediately, put the item on your task list and file the e-mail in another folder. Only unprocessed messages should be in your inbox.

    I can think of few pieces of advice that are better than reading an email only once. If we would all do this, our inboxes would be empty and our tasks would be on our to-do lists, where they belong.

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    A Foolproof Way to Infect Your PC with Malware

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    Bruce Schneier points us to a story from a person who decided to see how many people would click on a Google Adwords link that was designed to infect the user’s computer with malware.

    The author explains:

    Last fall, my attention got caught by a small book on Google Adwords at our local library. Turns out it’s very easy to setup an ad and manage the budget. You can start with a couple of euros per month. And that gave me an idea: this can be used with malicious intend. It’s a way to get a drive-by download site on the first page of a search result (FYI, I’ve reported on other ways to achieve this). So I started an experiment…

    1. I bought the drive-by-download.info domain. .info domains are notorious for malware hosting.
    2. I setup a web server to display a simple page saying “Thank you for your visit!” and to log each request. That’s all. I want to be absolutely clear about this: no malware or other scripts/code were ever hosted on this server. No PCs were harmed in this experiment.
    3. I started a Google Adwords campaign with several combinations of the words “drive by download” and the aforementioned ad, linking to drive-by-download.info
    4. I was patient for 6 months

    The ad that he placed appears to the right.Infect Your PC

    One would think that no one would click on an ad that actually advertised that by so doing, you would infect your machine. It turns out, however, that there are some people who will. The author explains:

    During this period, my ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times.

    Although 409 out of 259,723 is a low click through rate. On the other hand, I have to wonder why anyone (let alone 409 anyones) would click on an ad that advertised that it would infect your computer.
    Just you would not leave your car with a person wearing a sign that said “Give me your car keys: I want to steal your car,” don’t go to a website that says “Bring me your computer, I want to infect it.”

    Obviously, you cannot avoid all attempts by people to attempt to harm you, whether in real life or on the internet. However, you should exercise caution. Just as you know the parts of town you want to exercise caution when driving through in the middle of the night, know the types of websites that you want to exercise caution when clicking on an internet link.