Tech Topics

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:56:41 GMT

Last year, I remember thinking to myself that there were a lot of lawyers adding profiles to LinkedIn, an online professional networking website. And, that many of these same lawyers were ones that had never struck me as being particularly "tech-savvy." My conclusion was that it all came down to business. That is, the business of serving existing clients and generating new leads. Similar to the rapid adoption of Blackberry devices by the same "non-technical" lawyers, LinkedIn apparently was being seen by a tool that assisted their business objectives.

From a personal perspective, LinkedIn has helped reconnect me to a number of people I either went to school with or worked with in the past. Like myself, they have gone onto other jobs and cities across the country. From a networking perspective, I think we sometimes overlook how wide and diverse our personal networks are; mainly because we have lost touch with so many people from our past.

Then, of course, LinkedIn also offers an avenue for others to discover you, your skills and your experience. By way of example, Kevin O'Keefe, over at LexBlog, noted yesterday in his post Does LinkedIn work for networking in the legal profession? that five different people from different walks of life stopped by his LinkedIn Profile on Sunday.

I realize there are many other online networking and profile options out there beyond LinkedIn, and they may be as good or better. My own experience has simply been with LinkedIn and I have found it to meet many of my needs. Perhaps it will meet yours as well; stop by and check it out: LinkedIn

Technorati Tags: linkedin,social networking,professional networking,legal business,lead generation

e-Discovery and Antiforensics

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:03:42 GMT

I suppose this can be filed in the "you had to figure it would happen" category.

According to the post Antiforensics Practices Can Complicate E-Discovery Investigations at the E-discovery and computer forensic blog:

With the rise of e-discovery, attorneys have necessarily become acquainted with the inner workings of computer systems. File system metadata is often crucial to proving critical points at trial, and computer forensics has shown itself to be an essential tool for discovering lost files and revealing hidden metadata.

But as the lawyers and investigators grow more sophisticated in their search for information, so do the people wishing to hide their misdeeds and confuse those on their trail.
“Antiforensics” - an approach to computer hacking meant to make detection difficult and proof of detection next to impossible - stands to make life miserable for attorneys and computer forensics experts in the coming years. In practice, antiforensics can involve sophisticated software and methods, but can also include the use of simple hacks and workarounds that can hide files and even change file system metadata.

The post continues with a more detailed review of the rise of antiforensics, which I found well worth reading.

For additional information, you may also want to stop by Electronic Discovery Navigator, which is cited as a/the source for the post above.

Law Firm Websites and Video

Bill Gratsch — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:35:59 GMT

Doug Jasinki wrote a bit at Law Marketing Canada about the use of video on law firm websites yesterday in the post Video is coming to law firm websites.

[His] personal view is that you can expect to see a great deal more use of both video and audio content on law firm websites in the year(s) ahead. 5 key reasons why:

1. Video makes a law firm's core offering - it's people - the centerpiece of the marketing;
2. Video is an excellent tool to help law firms differentiate from their competitors;
3. Video is sticky, meaning that people will stay on your website longer;
4. Video is becoming more prominent both in other professional services and on the Internet generally; and
5. Video is becoming less expensive and easier to produce over time.

To read the rest of Mr. Jasinki's post, and see a recent example of video in use, stop by Video is coming to law firm websites

Knee Deep in Microsoft Sharepoint

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:45:54 GMT

My posts have been brief in recent weeks, but for a pretty good reason...I have been knee deep in Microsoft's Sharepoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), if you prefer)

Rest assured, my opinion has not changed since last Winter (Part 1. The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint - Part 2: The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint). Sharepoint, whether Services or the full blown Server version, will be the dominate internal portal product in use at mid to large size law firms, certainly in the United States, and perhaps across much of the globe. And, while last Spring this move to Sharepoint seemed a bit under the radar (Sharepoint and Stealth Mode in the Legal Space), that has clearly changed, as well. At least at larger firms and their intranet portals, all of the buzz is around Sharepoint. My own feeling is that Sharepoint's dominance is just a matter of time.

Now recognize that Sharepoint itself is pretty vanilla, and Microsoft is not going to be spending a heck of lot of time or money) in research and development for a relatively tiny niche market like legal. They will leave that to their third party partners, of which there are a small, but growing number. These third parties will take that vanilla flavor of Sharepoint, and make it taste like legal. That is, custom tailor it to work specifically for lawyers and law firms.

My first impressions are generally positive. I do think that if you are planning on integrating your back office applications into Sharepoint, you should either hire the appropriate staff and give them the necessary time and money to succeed or look closely at the third parties which have already developed the hooks and toolkits needed to connect up many of the standard law firm applications. Third parties such as Handshake Software, XMLaw, SV Technology, eSentio Technologies, and Thomson-West's Hubbard One are among the companies to whom you might wish to speak.

My early takeaway on Sharepoint and the larger picture for legal is simply wondering what a dominate marketshare in the mid to large size law firm segment means for all of the other legal software companies out there? Within three years, we may see most of the AmLaw 200 standardized on Sharepoint (much as the AmLaw 200 has standardized in so many other product categories). And, I wonder if this standardization will mean that if a software product from other product categories does not seamlessly integrate into Sharepoint, it will it receive less consideration? Also, will Microsoft start introducing other "vanilla" software products (in a variety of categories) that just so happen to work really well in Sharepoint, and then let their third party partners move the products down the verticals, including legal? CRM, ERP, Litigation Support? Microsoft just provides the platform, the tools and the opportunities; the third parties create the solutions.

As an aside, I have not yet analyzed in depth Sharepoint as an extranet solution and my feelings there are that this space is currently wide open. But, on the lawyer's desktop, Sharepoint is going to be the big gorilla and just what that means is a very interesting question.

O'Keefe's ILTA Weblog, WIKI Panel Presentation

Bill Gratsch — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:42:45 GMT

Kevin O'Keefe is down at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Conference in Orlando this week, during which he took part in a panel discussion on weblogs, wikis, etcetera.

If you would like to check it out, he has posted his powerpoint presentation from the panel here: ILTA PowerPoint

Apple Keynote vs. Microsoft Powerpoint

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:41:32 GMT

Attorney David Sparks who writes about Apple and the Mac at MacSparky.com, penned a review of Apple's Keynote '08 presentation software recently, see Review - Keynote ‘08. In comparison to Microsoft's Powerpoint, it is not difficult to see which product he prefers:

Presentations and word processing are my bread and butter. That is, I earn my living writing and presenting. I have been writing Power Point presentations for years. I’m actually very good at them and occasionally freelance for my geek challenged colleagues. It is with those years of experience in mind that I was initially skeptical about using Apple’s presentation software, Keynote. That was, at least, until the first time I saw a Keynote presentation.

I think Keynote (even before this recent update) is superior to PowerPoint in both ease of use and final product. With the release of Keynote ‘08, the gap has just grown larger. For the purpose of this review, I’m going to skip over a lot of the features that already existed in Keynote and focus on the new additions. If you are not familiar with Keynote, even before the upgrade it was full of stellar templates, transitions, and text effects that made producing convincing presentations a breeze. Indeed there are even more new transitions and effects but that is just the start of some fantastic changes and additional features.

Mr. Sparks' post continues, and is quite detailed, for those who wish to explore Keynote '08 in more depth; just click Another Lawyer's Review of Keynote '08.

Attorney Ben Stevens, writing at The Mac Lawyer, also apparently loves the product: Another Lawyer's Review of Keynote '08

You can also catch this podcast Surfbits MacReview Cast Episode 121 for even more on the subject.

Technology and Law Firms, Revisited

Bill Gratsch — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:40:40 GMT

Something to chew on for a Monday morning...

Bruce MacEwen, writing at Adam Smith, Esq., offered an intriguing post recently entitled "IT Commoditizes Everything." Discuss.

The post, which covers a lot of ground, was full of interesting observations and a lot of food for thought.

Some highlights from the post:

Sometimes we take our IT infrastructure for granted—too much so. In the last few weeks I've encountered a succession of stories where client relationships were strongly reinforced by astute deployment of IT assets. Call it the intersection of marketing and IT.

...IT increasingly participates in new business pitches. According to [Neville] Eisenberg, senior IT staff have helped BLP win some critical assignments, while Morley makes the same point in the obverse, noting that law firms are increasingly expected by clients and staff to be at the cutting edge of technology. “If you are not at the leading edge, clients will begin to melt away from you...”

...For all the copious amounts of ink that have been spilled on the topic, it remains true that there's a generational shift underway as each new crop of lawyers arrives more and more familiar with technology...

...it's not just a better or deeper facility with current law firm technology—it's pushing the frontiers into technology that's novel (certainly for law firms). For example, I've been talking about the intrinsic fit between what lawyers do (collaborate on written materials) and wikis for a few years now, but at last it's actually being embraced...

...The increasing embrace of IT, and its true embedding within the essence of what firms do, comes, I hasten to add, with one enormous challenge which no one to my knowledge has yet answered in a satisfactory way that might yield a long-term equilibrium solution: That challenge is commoditization...

...My view is more sanguine, primarily because I believe the phrase "commoditization" is flung around far too loosely and generates free-floating fear divorced from real-world implications. I'm closer to the position articulated by David Jabbari, Allen & Overy's head of knowledge management, who believes that “Clearly, any information that can be commoditised is going to be, and will be free,” but who also pointed out that we've known for a hundred years, since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, how to efficiently build a car, and yet the auto industry is one of the most hotly competitive and least "commoditized" around...

...The most forward-thinking proponents of Knowledge Management within firms are beginning to move the function from support of the firm's practice to support of the firm's strategy. The first—practice support—involves hygienic expertise in such things as sophisticated document management, "enterprise" (firm-wide) search, and cutting edge technological tools. But the latter—strategic business support—can bolster client-company and industry awareness, business development efforts, and client relations. It turns KM from inward and lawyer-facing to outward and client-facing....

...One powerful way to open up your firm's KM function to clients is to introduce internally accessible and (carefully selected) client-accessible blogs and wikis, as is being done at Allen & Overy...

...Ultimately, the goal is to unlock the expertise, both tacit and explicit, within your firm in transparent ways that clients will come to see as defining your true competitive distinction.

...This is not your father's IT. And it's not a "commodity...."

Will Search be the Portal?

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 24 May 2007 10:32:28 GMT

So, being a fan of the NBC show The Office, I was bouncing around the web the other night looking for a Dwight Schrute bobblehead or something (actually a video clip highlight from a past episode). I started with a Google search and noticed that in the list of results was a video clip of one of the actors on the David Letterman show.

Here's the thing...I watched the video without ever leaving the search results page (I took a picture of what I saw as I watched the video).

There was no click-through. That is, I did not click-through the '"hit" on the results page to view the video; I just watched it on Google results page itself. The page didn't even reload. The video simply appeared when I clicked a little plus (+) symbol and then I clicked once more to start it playing. In effect, the search results became "sticky," which is a more a goal I see associated with portal websites. I realize this is just one example, but...

Is this the future? Looking at the legal slice of the world, will lawyers someday submit their multimedia content to sites like YouTube and similar such that it can be found and consumed right from a Google search page? No doubt some lawyers will raise intellectual property issues and cry foul. Yet, Google has a huge audience (55% of all search traffic by the last report I saw), and is hard to ignore. Especially for lawyers using multimedia for marketing purposes, intellectual property concerns may take a backseat when they consider how much smaller their potential audience will be if they don't embrace Google. Moreover, I don't doubt that Google will ultimately have revenue-sharing models in place to help ease such concerns.

Looking long-term, I am now wondering if Search itself will be the Portal? Instead of a portal with search features, might not a search with portal features be the dominate web traffic model?

Many of us have long thought of Google (and other search engines) as a portal perhaps, but more as a portal we visit briefly on the way to some other website. But, is that the model of the future?

What if we search, but never leave?

Something to chew on, that is for sure...

Sharepoint and Stealth Mode in the Legal Space

Bill Gratsch — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:00:59 GMT

As I mentioned back in December ( Part 1. The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint, Part 2: The Law Firm DMS of the Future? Sharepoint ), it seems more likely than not that the document management system (DMS) piece of Microsoft's Sharepoint products will become a major player in legal, whether it is ready for primetime today or not. Legal is too small a business vertical for Microsoft to directly address it, but its partners will do so in force. As we have seen with the host of third party add-ons for other Microsoft products like Word, smaller companies will deliver add-ons for Sharepoint, including its document management system, that will be specific to legal. Handshake Software and XMLAW are two small companies that already come to mind, and I am sure there are others.

In any case, Brad Feld wrote something a couple weeks ago that I have meaning to mention related to the "stealthy" growth of Sharepoint. In his post, SharePoint - Microsoft's Sleeper Cell, Mr. Feld mentioned a Wall Street Journal article, Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software sub req'd, that reported [t]o date, largely unheralded, Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies.

Also telling was another quote from the article:

Hawaiian Airlines wants to add collaboration features to its Web site to allow, say, frequent-flier customers to share travel tips and stories, says David Osborne, chief information officer at the airline. Already standardized on Microsoft products, the airline decided to license the enhanced SharePoint software, which it has been using since last month. "It wasn't particularly difficult," Mr. Osborne says. "The thing was already part of your infrastructure."

Both quotes go to the heart of what I believe we are going to see in legal. Yes, there has been significant buzz in the last year, especially among mid-size to large law firms, about Sharepoint. But, this buzz may actually understate the reach of Sharepoint (especially Sharepoint Services). Many firms may have Sharepoint Services sitting in their office, available for little to no extra cost as part of their existing licensing agreement, and simply have not realized it yet. I think this goes to part of the "stealth" and "sleeper" tags being affixed to Sharepoint's growth.

As it stands now, I firmly believe that Sharepoint portal will be the thousand pound gorilla on the lawyer's desktop. Third parties will have to work through, around and with Sharepoint. Because, as the two quotes above point out, not only is the installed (and waiting to be installed) base already very large (giving the product credibility), decisionmakers will increasingly face the choice of a Sharepoint that is largely "already part of your Microsoft infrastructure" versus buying a non-Microsoft product to install and make work within their Microsoft infrastructure. In general, lawyers and law firms are not big risk takers when it comes to technology. There is a reason you see the same two or three products installed for each product category at law firm after law firm. The perception is that there is less risk in following the lead of the majority of other firms. And, of course, the oft-stated addage, "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft," plays a bigger role in decisionmaking than anyone will ever admit.

If anyone sees a different future for the lawyer's desktop, I would love to hear some more opinion on the subject. Perhaps I am totally missing something. I just don't see another portal product for legal that is positioned to be dominate like Sharepoint. And, for a product that is making such inroads into legal, with such significant ramifications for any legal technology providers wanting access to the lawyer's desktop in the future, it is doing so relatively quietly.

YouTube, the NFL, a Professor and the DMCA

Bill Gratsch — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 09:48:09 GMT

In the post Law Professor Wendy Seltzer Takes on the NFL , The Wall Street Journal Law Blog pointed out an interesting storyline involving YouTube, the National Football League and Wendy Seltzer, a visting professor at Brooklyn Law School, [who] wanted to illustrate to her students the clumsiness of the DMCA and the problems inherent in what she calls 'the DMCA dance.'

DMCA, being the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the illustration, being the validity of the application of the DMCA online at YouTube. Fortunately for us, Professor Seltzer also has a weblog, and as she noted in her February 8th post, My First YouTube: Super Bowl Highlights or Lowlights she specified her fact scenario:

I snipped the copyright warning out of the weekend's Super Bowl broadcast as an example for my copyright class of how far copyright claimants exaggerate their rights.

This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited.
Let's see whether the video, clear fair use, gets flagged by a copyright bot.

What followed has been a blow-by-blow account of the back-and-forth between the various parties involved. See My First DMCA Takedown, DMCA Saga Act II: Counter-Notification, We Have Put-Back: Super Bowl Warnings Back Online and NFL Clip Down Again, among others, for details.

If you are at all interested in the DMCA, it is worth catching up with Professor Seltzer and her posts at Wendy's Blog.