The Universal Pantograph Representation is the essence of networking

• The 2008 survey observed a significant migration of respondents’ use of desktop computers to laptops.  Use of laptop computers jumped to 83% in the 2008 survey from 69% in the 2007 survey for solo respondents and to 73% from 59% for respondents from firms of 2 to 9 attorneys.

• The availability of Smartphones/BlackBerrys has increased considerably. In 2008 76% of respondents reported the availability of smartphones or BlackBerries at their firms, up from 55% in the 2007 survey and 49% in the 2006 survey. 

1. File Server availability has increased in this year’s survey to 85% from 73% in 2007.  This figure was nearly doubled for solo respondents, to 51% from 28%. Dell (59%) and HP/Compaq (17%) were the most-named brands, with 19% using custom servers. 

• Proceed with caution!  While only eight percent of respondents report that their firms have experienced a security breach, 47% report that their law firm technology has been infected with a virus, spyware or malware.  However, no significant business disruption or loss resulted from the infection for 53% perhaps due to diligent backup practices; more than four-fifths (82%) of respondents report that their firm has a backup strategy.

Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in United States v. Arnold that the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonable suspicion” requirement does not apply to the search of a laptop during an international border crossing. The court rejected Arnold’s argument that a laptop should be treated similarly to a home or office for privacy purposes, holding instead that a laptop was akin to a traveler’s luggage. George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr discusses the holding in more detail at the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Arnold presents an interesting challenge for attorneys who travel internationally: how do you safeguard the sensitive client and firm data on your laptop when a security person, sans any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, can investigate your files? The easiest and best solution is simply to avoid placing sensitive or confidential information on your laptop. Such information can be stored on secure servers at an attorney’s main office and accessed remotely via VPN, or encrypted and stored remotely with an online backup vendor. If internet access will be unavailable on your trip or you otherwise require local copies of your sensitive information, consider encrypting the data and perhaps also relocating it to a storage device such as a USB thumb drive or CD-R. While such methods won’t guarantee you privacy, they may reduce the likelihood that your client’s confidential information will be revealed in a casual search of your laptop.

It may not have quite the media cachet of the Oscars or Emmys, but the annual Webby Awards are no less prestigious for those who create or follow Internet-based technology. Now in their 12th year, the Webby Awards recognize excellence in websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobility. The awards are judged by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body that includes a range of leading Web experts, business figures, and celebrities from David Bowie to Anil Dash to Matt Groening. In addition, a People’s Voice Award is also determined for each category based on a public vote via the web.

Nominees are broken down into nearly 70 categories with websites representing the majority of nominees. Some of this year’s nominees include Eyes on Darfur (Activism Category), HowStuffWorks (Best Copy/Writing), Apple (Best Use of Video or Moving Image), Yahoo! Sports (Sports Category), and the ABA Journal website (Law Category).

The Webby Awards’ website offers a full list of nominees (as well as nominees and winners from the past 11 years). As a research and reference tool, the list of former winners and nominees offers a great directory of high quality websites by category. If you’d like to vote for your favorite Webby Award nominee, you can visit the public voting page now.

The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services is holding hearings on the use of technology to provide personal, civil legal services over the Internet and the policies that govern that use. Specifically, the Committee will examine:

- The range of providers who are using technology to provide legal services through the Internet and the scope of those services.

- The benefits and detriments that have resulted from the use of technology to provide legal services over the Internet.

- Emerging trends and possible future directions of technology providing legal services via the Internet; and 

- The policies and authorities (rules, statutes, case law, ethics opinions, etc.) that have emerged to govern the use of technology for the delivery of legal services and whether those policies are consistent with the need to balance consumer protection with access to affordable legal services and justice.

The hearings will be held as follows:

- May 9, 2008, Noon to 3:00 PM, in conjunction with the Equal Justice Conference, Hilton Minneapolis, 1001 Marquette Ave South, Minneapolis, MN 55403;

- Friday, August 8, 2008, hotel TBD, in conjunction with the ABA Annual Meeting in New York. 

- Virtual Hearing, Date to be announced.

Those interested in appearing and/or submitting materials should contact Janice Jones at 312/988-5787, janicejones@staff.abanet.org. Further details and on-going hearing archives are posted at http://www.abanet.org/legalservices/delivery/techhearings.html

Phishing is not a new term in the e-security field. It refers to an attempt - typically by email - to trick or mislead a recipient into giving up valuable personal information. Phishing attempts often come in the form of an official-looking email from a bank, credit card company, or online service like eBay, which asks you to enter your username and password for a “routine verification” or something to that effect. If the recipient falls for the trick and enters his or her information, it is transmitted to the phisher and opens the door for a multitude of abuses. These phishing attempts are usually mass-mailed in hopes that, out of the thousands of recipients, a small handful will fall for the ruse.

As phishing attempts grow more sophisticated, it is becoming difficult to distinguish between legitimate and dangerous emails. One of the latest tricks has been dubbed “spear phishing,” and it refers to phishing attempts that are carefully crafted and targeted at particular individuals or groups rather than mass-mailed to a general audience.

David Bilinsky, the Practice Management Advisor and staff lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia, recently blogged about one such spear-phishing attack involving the legal community. In that case, phishers sent emails to executives that purported to be US federal court subpoenas. When the executives clicked a link within the “subpoena,” their computers were infected with malware that gathered personal information including passwords and credit card numbers.

What can you do? Commercial anti-virus and anti-spam software may help reduce your risk to some extent, but the number one safeguard is caution. Be wary of emails from senders you don’t know. Review emails carefully for suspicious misspellings or obvious errors, and avoid clicking links or downloading files if you aren’t confident that they’re safe.

Most people are familiar with YouTube only as an entertainment tool – a place to watch everything from a skateboarding dog to fifty-year-old videos of your favorite jazz legend. But for lawyers contemplating a technology purchase, it may serve an entirely different function: a remarkable source for detailed, hands-on reviews, demonstrations, and tutorials.

For example, an attorney considering the purchase of a Tablet PC can do a simple search on YouTube for “tablet pc review” and turn up lengthy reviews for products including the Fujitsu Stylistic ST5112, the HP TC4400, or the Motion Computing LE1700. An attorney considering a new Smartphone could watch hands on reviews of the iPhone, the BlackBerry Pearl, or the HTC Kaiser. Indeed, a simple search for most any mainstream product will turn up a review – and often more than one.

Beyond product reviews, YouTube can also serve as a helpful educational tool. Lawyers can use videos such as this overview of a technologically advanced courtroom or this Cardozo Cyberlaw Society e-discovery lecture to help them grasp technology concepts that may seem overly complicated or inaccessible in print.

Know of an especially useful YouTube video we should highlight? Let us know!

Web domains are an area of technology fraught with abuse and advantage taking, as we’ve reported before. One of the newest issues relates to sub-domains -- the portion of the web address that comes before your domain name (i.e. in http://example.madeupdomain.com, the “example” portion is a sub-domain). Businesses of all types use these sub-domains to separate independent portions of their web site. In the legal world a firm might use sub-domains within their web site for different practice groups or for different office locations.

Typically, if a domain owner hasn’t set up a sub-domain, it isn’t accessible; a user trying to access a non-existent sub-domain will simply receive an error message. According to TechCrunch, however, popular domain registrar and web host NetworkSolutions is filling their customer’s unused sub-domains (that is, any sub-domain the customer hasn’t explicitly set up) with pages full of advertising links. NetworkSolutions' customers experiencing this issue may be surprised to learn that they agreed to allow NetworkSolutions to do just that via their service agreement. Schedule A, Section 11 provides:

You acknowledge and agree that any or all domain names that are (i) registered with Network Solutions, (ii) hosted on a Network Solutions domain name server, and (iii) do not otherwise resolve to an active Web site, may resolve to an "under construction" or similar temporary Web page ("Under Construction Page"), and that Network Solutions may place on any such Under Construction Page promotions and advertisements for, and links to, Network Solutions' Web site, Network Solutions product and service offerings, third-party Web sites, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines.

Thankfully, NetworkSolutions allows its customers to “opt-out” of these advertisements via a check box in their account settings. With the variety of advertising restrictions placed upon attorneys by their respective codes of professional responsibility, it is probably advisable for them to do so. Likewise, attorneys using hosts other than NetworkSolutions should check to see if their host has a similar policy – and a similar opt-out function.

The ability to dual-boot Macs in either Mac OS X or Windows as well as the robust virtualization options available, including Parallels and VMWare Fusion, have lead a number of attorneys to switch their practices over to the Mac platform. While the option of using the same old Windows software exists, many are finding that they’d rather turn to Mac-native applications that can do the same job – and sometimes do it better.

In that vein, the blog MacLitigator has published a detailed report (with screenshots!) of a piece of software called Journler that provides much of the same functionality as the well-known Windows software Casemap. MacLitigator explores the benefits and the limitations of Journler, the former including its non-proprietary data files and modest ($34.95) cost and the latter including the absence of transcript management or Bates stamping.

And if you’re interested in Macs in the law office, check out some of our other recent Site-tation posts:

Mac Users: Do You Need Antivirus Software?
Downside to popularity – Mac Viruses

USB flash drives, sometimes also referred to as jump drives or thumb drives, are unquestionably useful tools in the information age. They provide an inexpensive means of backing up and sharing large files, and can even be configured to hold a mobile software suite that will allow you to get your work done on any compatible computer – a boon for any lawyer who travels regularly.

The readily available drives may, however, present a significant security threat for any firm or business whose employees regularly handle sensitive information. It isn’t difficult to imagine an attorney loading a flash drive with client files and then accidentally dropping the drive – and the client’s confidential information – on the train, nor would it be difficult at all for an unscrupulous employee or contractor to plug a flash drive into a firm computer and copy over vital, confidential data without detection.

How do you balance the usefulness of such flash drives with their potential security risk? ComputerWorld reports one solution: Washington State’s Division of Child Support banned its employees from using their own personal flash drives, and instead issued employees state-owned SanDisk Cruzer drives with built in encryption and password protection. This move not only protects sensitive information contained on the drives in the event they’re misplaced or stolen, but also helps prevent unauthorized flash drives being used to break the department’s security.

For more on flash drives, read our FYI: Computing on the Go: Thumb Drives.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2008, one of the hot topics in the new Mac track was just that question: do Mac users really need antivirus software? Opinions seemed to be split between those who felt it wasn’t a bad idea (just in case) and those who felt the lack of Mac viruses and the overall security of the Mac OS made it unnecessary. If the issue still has you scratching your head, you may want to read an aptly titled new piece by Mac security expert Rich Mogull: Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software? Mogull leads readers through a number of helpful tips for determining whether antivirus software – or some other methods – will help or hinder their Mac experience. (Note: Internet Explorer users may need to scroll down quite a bit to get to the article.)

See also: ABA Site-tation: Downside to popularity - Mac Viruses

ABA TECHSHOW 2008 has come to a close, but the discussion about the technology tools and practices demonstrated at the conference are just beginning. Here’s a sampling of some of the TECHSHOW-related blog posts from around the legal technology community:

ABA TECHSHOW BUZZ

Monica Bay's The Common Scold:
LIVE FROM CHICAGO, ABA TECHSHOW

Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips Blog:
ABA TECHSHOW 2008 Wrap Up
Law Practice Tips From ABA TECHSHOW 2008
More Law Practice Tips from ABA TECHSHOW 2008

Reid My Blog:
ABA Techshow 2008 Keynote Discusses Privacy Issues

Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs:
Back in Seattle from ABA TechShow
Other TECHSHOW Posts

Dennis Kennedy:
I am the Worst Liveblogger Ever: A Report from ABA TECHSHOW 2008

TechnoLawyer Blog:
ABA TECHSHOW 2008: Eliminating the Paper Chase: From Boxes to Bytes (Paperless Office Track)

See any other good TECHSHOW coverage that we've missed? Let us know!

ADDED:

Dominic Jaar's Wines and Information Management Blog:
Various live reports from ABA TECHSHOW 2008

Apple’s iPhone may have been a smash hit with consumers when it was released last June, but many business users – including lawyers – were kept away by the device’s lack of corporate features. All that may change, however, as Apple recently announced that it was bringing a host of enterprise features to the phone, including Exchange ActiveSync for push email, calendars, and contacts, as well as Cisco VPN and remote wiping abilities. These features may finally position the iPhone to act as a true competitor to Research in Motion’s ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphones.

Also announced was the release of the iPhone SDK – a toolkit that will allow software developers to write programs specifically for the iPhone. iPhone owners will then be able to use the iTunes App Store to load third-party software directly onto their phones, something that had previously required warranty-voiding hacks and elaborate workarounds.

Previously on ABA Site-tation:

• Up to 142,800 digital photos
• Up to 125,000 songs (MP3)
• Up to 12,500 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
• Up to 38 hours of Digital Video (DV)
• Up to 220 hours of DVD quality video
• Up to 60 hours of HD video

FYI: Data Backup

The Importance of Having Backups

10 Things You Should Know About Automated Backup Programs