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11 December 2009
The big news is how someone at the Transportation Safety Administration published the entire contents of a confidential security manual (supposedly redacted), and how a blogger spotted the error.
Here are instructions from Adobe Systems on how to redact (permanently erase) text and images from a PDF file.
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6 July 2009
Lawyers in Scranton, PA might want to steer clear of Scranton Lawyers, a new site that looks like the precursor of a referral service for Scranton lawyers.
This recent post indicates why:
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29 May 2009
I’ve got three recommendations.
The first is a list of blog posts you must read. The list is published by the three intrepid law geeks who run3 Geeks and a Law Blog.
Here’s an excerpt from the #1 post, written by Chuck Newton, the man who first claimed that, “information becomes the main material for workers, each of which are only loosely affiliated”:
By these measurements, traditional law firms are designed (intentionally or by happenstance) to handle a certain degree of capacity. In other words, it can handle so many cases or clients with the infrastructure it has. If the cases and clients are increasing, a law firm can find itself running to catch up. This would represent undercapacity. You see this a lot in Big Law on the grow.
The second and third were authored by Honorable Gerald Lebovits; both appeared in the journal of the New York State Bar Association.
In these two articles, Judge Lebovits advises attorneys on the basics of typesetting and page design. He likens the importance of looking good in print, to the importance of looking sharp in court.
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14 May 2009
You’re a small associate in the IP department of a great big law firm. While you’re so thankful that you still have a job, you’re not satisfied. You’re not doing the work you really want to be doing, and some of the partners are just . . . well . . . acting like overgrown children with needs you can’t meet.
You’re thinking you’d rather be in corporate law than big law, and you’d rather work for a high-tech firm than a big-ego firm.
And guess what? I’ve got a plan to help you get your way. Here it is, just for you, and free for the taking.
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The experts say the recession is likely to end this Fall. High-tech firms will be back in gear, and they’ll be looking for in-house counselors to handle, among others, their IP matters. And you want them to find you once they start looking.
Then get to work on your article, the one that’s going to appear in the Managing Intellectual Property, or Capitalism Magazine. Heck, do a bang-up job of it, and your article could wind up in the Wall Street Journal in six months.
What article? Why, the one that’s going to so impress your next boss that he calls, asks you to lunch, and then offers you what you want — a position handling IP matters for a young, high-tech company with great products and even greater prospects.
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What’s the article about? I’m not quite sure, but it’s inspired by the feud between Apple and certain developers of iPhone apps. And the timing of it all couldn’t be better for you.
Consider this article that appeared in yesterday’s paper. It tells the story of how the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the U.S. Copyright Office for an exemption to 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) so people can install whatever applications they like on their iPhones. Apple responded by filing a brief that describes just how terrible such an exemption would be for it and its customers. The Copyright Office is expected to rule on the issue this October.
And that’s when your article will appear, because editors just love it when someone brings them a thoughtful, well written piece that complements the news. They just can’t get enough of that.
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So, what are you waiting for? Start doing your research. Interview those who attended hearings on the issue in Washington last week, or at Stanford the week before.
Get both sides of the story. Find some good contacts at EFF and Apple to talk to.
Talk to developers of iPhone applications, and people who use iPhones. Talk to the digerati at Wired and at engadget who are following this.
Then put on your big thinking cap.
What’s going to be the focus of your article? What’s going to set it apart from so many other submissions? What’s going to get an editor to select your article instead of another, written by another hopeful associate reading this post?
Get to work! Make your escape, and cause that handshake to happen.
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31 March 2009
Kevin O’Keefe, the founder and driving force behind LexBlog — a firm that offers lawyers a “turn-key, professional blog service” — and a pioneer in making the Internet useful for marketing legal servicecs, recently wrote an article titled “Law firm websites : Do all lawyers need them?”
The article says a Web site is essential, but that you need more than a good site to effectively promote a practice — you also need to participate in social networking; i.e., you need a blog, you need to tweet and twitter, and you need an account on LinkedIn (or Facebook, etc.).
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25 March 2009
Check out the heading to this article* published by a law firm in Phoenix, Arizona:
It’s a small firm, run by one attorney — a solo prone to errors in grammar and spelling and punctuation and formatting, etc.
Her writing is probably doing her more harm than good: after all, who wants an attorney who can’t do what’s expected of a high school student?
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3 March 2009
It was just a month ago when we considered Hayman & Kirshenbaum, a small, personal injury firm in Chicago.
Now we’re prompted to revisit the firm’s Web site because of this recent article from the New York Times which claims:
Copyright infringement lawsuits directed at bloggers and other online publishers seem to be on the rise.
H & K made some significant changes to its site since we last visited and discovered the firm was presenting previously published, copyrighted works — as if they were original.
They still do that, but they copy protect the copy. That’s right. They’ll republish an article from the New York Post, but — unlike the original — you can’t select the copy, and then paste it elsewhere.
Note: Very few Web sites protect their copy from being copied.
The consequence of protecting the copy is this — search engines can’t read it. So copy protecting a Web site is like hiding it from most everyone. That’s not a great approach to promotion.
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17 February 2009
Ogletree Deakins, a firm that focuses on employment law, issued this alert titled “President Signs Stimulus Bill With Significant COBRA Changes for Employers” just minutes after the president signed the bill.
A good way to connect to current events? I say so.
People want news when it’s fresh, not when it’s old.
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4 February 2009
FindLaw has an idea for enhancing your on-line reputation — Go Google Yourself!
FindLaw has some other great ideas:
So . . . what are you waiting for?
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29 January 2009
Let’s see — well established newspapers are having a tough go of it right now, and so are some great big law firms. Perhaps they should get together.
Why? Well, just the other day, I noted how some personal injury lawyers completely ignore the rights of others — in particular their copyrights. And this morning, I stumbled on another instance of it.
In this morning’s instance, I find that the Texas Personal Injury Law blog published an article belonging to the Houston Chronicle. Here’s the article as published by the Chronicle on 17 December 2008, and here it is again as published by the O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath, the firm that publishes the blog. The copy’s identical.
