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Legal Tech

  • June 5, 2012 | Practice News
    Legal Tech in the Blogosphere - Social Media

    The legal community struggles to figure out how to best deal with social media evidence, such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Pinterest.  Fortunately, bloggers have posted helpful articles, such as The Four Corners of Social Media and eDiscovery, How Hard is Authenticating Social Media?, The No Fly Zone of Producing An Entire Facebook Profile and Published cases involving social media evidence.For employment lawyers is Hot Off The Press - Today's New NLRB Social Media Guidance, from the Social Media Employment Law Blog.Tort and media lawyers will find How Should We Measure Damages for Defamation Over Social Media?  from Citizen Media Law Projectthought provoking.

  • May 31, 2012 | Practice News
    Legal Tech in the Blogosphere - This week's topic: Smartphones

    Smart phones such as iPhone and Droid have become ubiquitous tools tools for lawyers; with over 80% of lawyers reporting using them for business use, according to the ABA Journal Law News Now. They have also become rich sources of evidence. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reports, Survey of Nation’s Top Attorneys Reveals Spike in Smart Phone and Text Evidence During Divorces. Forensics evidence labs are also reporting a spike in requests for retrieval of their data for discovery purposes, according to Ride the Lightning, from Sensei Enterprises.   

  • May 22, 2012 | Practice News
    Legal Tech in the Blogosphere - This week's topic: iPads

    The iPad is the coolest new tool in the lawyer’s toolbox. In fact, Reid Trautz wondered, iPad Impact: Going Where No Lawyer Has Gone Before?  However, because it is so intuitive and easy to use, few lawyers have taken the time to completely familiarize themselves with its features. Fortunately, Carol Gerber has taken the time to help busy lawyers get up to speed on their iPads by posting iPads for Lawyers: Shortcuts for Power Users in Attorney at Work. Geri Dreiling reports on one judge’s creative use of an iPad in One judge’s embrace of technology helps the court save time and taxpayer money at her blog, Lawyer Tech Review. Hopefully, our local courts will follow the example of South Carolina and revise their sites to become more iPad friendly as reported by Justin Kahn on his iPad Notebook.

  • September 1, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: What does Google consider high quality for ranking purposes?

    By Peter LaSorsa

    Months ago I wrote an article in this publication about the new Google algorithm called Panda. Google has a webpage devoted to questions about Panda and how the average person can tweak their website content to allow for better rankings. The Google article is located here. Below are a few of the more important things to consider for improving your rankings but I would suggest reading the Google article and coming up with a more robust website strategy based on the tips in the article.

    Here is a list of the top five questions the algorithm asks (chosen from my own personal preference).

    1 comment (Most recent September 1, 2011)
  • June 23, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: MacBook Air is a great laptop for lawyers
    [caption id="attachment_20566" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The MacBook Air comes with either an 11" or 13" display."][/caption] By Peter LaSorsa So you are in the market for a new laptop. I won’t devote much space in this article on whether to purchase a Windows-based laptop or Mac because the Mac is superior—end of discussion.  Mac’s have better technology, are pretty much virus free and are the leaders in innovation.
  • June 16, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: Get a free analysis of your web site
    By Peter LaSorsa One word most people like to hear is free. There is a program on the Internet that will give you a free analysis of your web site. The program is called Webmastercoffee and it is available at Webmastercoffee.com/en/. So why should you go to this web site and have your URL checked? Well the web site not only provides feedback on important items it also gives recommendations on how to improve your web site—read that as improve your web site for increased rankings.  It is very easy to get started; you just go to the web site and type in your URL. Here are a list of the important items this website will check and why the items are important to you. I am leaving out some of what will be checked and if you go to the website you can read additional information on what I left off. First it gives a summary of the analysis and then it provides details of the analysis. A major category it analyzes is Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) Keywords.  The keyword analysis examines the frequency of the words on a web page together with their location. This is important because when a person does a search the search engine will return search results based on many things (the algorithm) and SEO Keywords are a major piece of the algorithm. Second, it will tell you about the SEO onsite information. This is important because it gets information about the onsite structure of the web site and gives you valuable knowledge to optimize the structure of a web site to be better found by the search engines.
  • June 2, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: Microsoft to release new mobile operating system
    By Peter LaSorsa For those of you that utilize a mobile phone with a Microsoft operating system, this new release by Microsoft may be of interest to you.  Mango is Microsoft’s latest release supporting Windows Phone 7 and has a number of features not previously available — although Mango won’t come out until later this year. The features include Lync support, email enhancements, and connectivity to Office 365. The email enhancements seem to be a marked improvement and include pinnable folders. Pinnable folders allow the user to take a folder and pin it to the Windows Phone start screen.  There will also be conversation views, just like in the desktop version of Outlook.  In the mobile version the conversations will have a vertical line showing more than one email in the thread and they will be indented.  Finally, there will be a feature called server search that will allow the user to search for archived messages. Lync is a desktop application that allows, presence, instant messaging, desktop sharing and audio and video chat.   The mobile version in Mango will only bring the presence and instant messaging features.   This doesn’t seem to be too big a deal; I mean if you have a mobile phone you already have “audio” chat don’t you? The final major group of features is Office 365.  Basically, you will be able to save documents in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Notes and share them through the Office 365 online service and Windows Live SkyDrive. I don’t utilize the Microsoft operating platform on my Smartphone but for those of you that do, you may find the new release in Mango helpful. Peter LaSorsa can be reached at lasorsalaw.com.
  • May 26, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: Small Business Administration makes free iPhone app available
    By Peter LaSorsa The government comes under fire often for being slow, over bloated and the enemy of small businesses.  Well here is good news for small business owners, which would include many solo practitioners and small firms.  Now business owners may receive updates, tips and other ideas about starting their company or just improving it thanks to a new smart phone app.  The Small Business Administration (“SBA”) along with Palo Alto Software created this special free app called SBA mobile and it is available at: www.sba.gov/content/sba-mobile-app The app provides owners with business news, and features tailored for small businesses and are designed to help increase business.  App users will also have access to SBA video content, social media alerts and live updates from Twitter and YouTube.  The app has a built-in startup cost calculator—custom designed to help estimate the expenses needed to start a business (useful for yourself and clients who may hire you as part of their desire to start a business).  The app also has a feature that allows you to find any SBA office nationwide and allows direct access to SBA district office staff for easier assistance. The final feature of the app is access to the Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers and SCORE. The SCORE Association “Counselors to America’s Small Business” is a nonprofit association comprised of 11,500 volunteer business counselors throughout the U.S.
  • May 12, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal Tech: How to increase website rankings
    By Peter LaSorsa You took the plunge, did your due diligence and just launched your website. Now you need the website to show up in the first page of search listings. So how will you accomplish this? First, make sure all of the links out to other sites, a/k/a out links, are not broken and are not duplicated. If you link to the same website more than once on a page, search engines will penalize you. Second, not all links are of equal value. Linking to a website that the search engines deem inferior or unreliable will not help you and even hurt your rankings. So when attorney Bob sends you an email saying, add my link to your website and I will do the same for you and it will be great for both of us — run, don’t walk, run. If the sum total of a lawyers Internet strategy for increasing rankings is to send out emails for cross-links, linking to their website is probably going to hurt you. Third, make sure you update your website daily. What do you mean update it daily, I am a busy person and don’t have time for that!  Well make time because search engines are looking for original content and content that is updated daily. Would you purchase a newspaper that wasn’t updated daily?  You don’t have to write a book, each day add a paragraph or two to a section of your website. You will not only increase your rankings but your website over time will really be robust from the daily updates. Fourth, make sure your content is original. Avoid the marketers that offer to write content for you and update your website weekly for you. They are going to provide this same service — read this as providing the same content — for many lawyers, which means your content won’t be original.
  • May 5, 2011 | Practice News
    Legal tech: What is IPv6 and how does it affect you?
    By Peter LaSorsa I know the title of this article sounds like a germ that may overtake the country but relax it’s something less threatening but of importance nonetheless.  Before we start with IPv6 we need to discuss IPv4.  Everyone is on the Internet and logging into your computer from home or work is seamless. Behind the scenes, what really takes place is a number known as an Internet Protocol or “IP” address identifies the sender and receiver of information being sent over the Internet. Currently the industry standard for obtaining the IP address is the IPv4 protocol, however that standard will be changing in June 2011.  The reason for the change is that the IPv4 protocol is running out of IP addresses—much like with the explosion of cellular phones, the wireless wavelength bands are being overtaken. The solution to this problem is IPv6. IPv6 will give another 340 trillion IP addresses and serve to be the new standard. Why should you care and how does this affect you? Well in the future you will need to upgrade at a minimum your router or firewall or both. Now the good news is the future may be 2014 or so. There are several reasons not to run out and purchase IPv6 routers and firewalls at this time. First, many Internet Service Providers don’t have the proper technology in place to offer IPv6 services so your IPv6 router or firewall would not work. Second, even though IPv6 is rolling out in June 2011, the old IPv4 will still work and no immediate change is needed.