ISBA Director of Legislative Affairs Jim Covington reviews legislation in Springfield of interest to ISBA members. This week he covers IMDMA Rewrite (Senate Bill 57), The Parentage Act (House Bill 1531), Mortgage Foreclosure (Senate Bill 735), Decriminalization of cannabis (House Bill 218), Mechanics Lien Act (House Bill 2635), Disabled adults (Senate Bill 90), Guilty pleas (House Bill 2569), New criminal law procedures (House Bill 1121), Health Care Power of Attorney (Senate Bill 159) and Lifetime revocation issue (House Bill 1446). More information on each bill is available below the video.

When it comes to sharing digital files -- whether documents, music, or almost anything else -- the ubiquitous Dropbox is sure to come to mind. But lawyers have to meet a high security standard, and "[a]lthough Dropbox encrypts the files on its server, Dropbox has had at least one security incident in the past, and Dropbox maintains a master key to the files," writes Chicago lawyer and tech expert Todd Flaming in the latest ISBA Standing Committee on Legal Technology newsletter.What if you want more security for the files you're sharing on Dropbox? "[C]onsider using an add-on product called Boxcryptor," Flaming writes. "It creates a virtual drive on your computer that allows you to encrypt your files locally before uploading them to the cloud."How? "Boxcryptor uses your own personal encryption key to encrypt every file before the file is saved into Dropbox and decrypt the file before you open it," Flaming writes "Thus, when the file is uploaded to Dropbox, it is already encrypted, and no one has the key."Find out more in Flaming's article, where he also discusses the pros and cons of Boxcryptor and gives a remarkably short but clear explanation of cloud computing and how it works.

Asked and AnsweredBy John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMCQ. I am the sole owner of a debtor bankruptcy practice. I have one other attorney and three staff members. Last year we spent $50,000 of advertising. Our fees collected were $550,000 and Net Income was around $160,000. Are we spending too much?A. You are spending 9% of fee revenue. I believe that in a consumer practice such as personal injury and debtor bankruptcy you have to spend around 10% of fee revenue to get the business you need to sustain the practice. I have some practices spending 19% of revenue. So, I don't think you are necessarily spending too much if the advertising is working for you. You have to constantly measure the ROI on your advertising and fine tune it when needed.Also, insure that the business is actually coming from the advertising - in other words don't advertise to get business you would have had anyway or in a market that you have saturated and more advertising will not yield any additional business.Click here for our blog on marketingClick here for articles on other topics

Justices of the Illinois Supreme Court administered the attorney’s oath to 600 new attorneys on Thursday, May 7 at five separate locations across the state.