Year archives: 2010

Getting Educated at LegalTech New York 2010

Conrad J. Jacoby provides an overview of the New York LegalTech show and conference, long one of the preeminent opportunities to catch a glimpse of the future of legal technology. Conrad highlights how the conference provides a surprisingly accurate snapshot of litigation support, electronic discovery, and even the health of the legal industry as a whole.

Subjects: Case Management, E-Discovery, Information Management, Legal Profession, Legal Technology

DNA Identification Evidence in Criminal Prosecutions

In criminal cases, there have been challenges on sufficiency grounds and concerns over the use of forensic DNA evidence as the sole or primary proof of guilt. Uncorroborated DNA matching might not be enough to satisfy the burden of establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The reliability of forensic DNA testing results might be questioned for any number of reasons, e.g., laboratory error, cross-contamination, interpretive bias or fraud, etc. Ken Strutin’s essay provides an overview of nuclear DNA typing, a sampling of the kinds of discretionary decisions that analysts often confront when interpreting crime scene samples, and concludes with with remarks about current disputes in forensic DNA typing, and how recognition of its inherent subjectivity might inform and illuminate these debates.

Subjects: Court Resources, Courts & Technology, Criminal Law, Features, Legal Research

The Web Guide for the New Economy

This guide by Marcus P. Zillman showcases the latest world wide web resources for discovering new knowledge on and understanding about developments with regard to the New Economy. The rapid changes in government transparency policies have resulted in the release of large volumes of data pertinent to researchers that public, advocacy and corporate entities are publishing to the web.

Subjects: Business Research, E-Government, Features, Government Resources, Internet Resources - Web Links, Legal Research, Search Strategies

Cloud Computing for Lawyers

This is Nicole L. Black’s primer for the legal profession on an emerging technology which is defined as a “type of computing that is comparable to grid computing, [and] relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power (normally used by military and research facilities) to perform tens of trillions of computations per second.”

Subjects: Computer Security, Digital Archives, Information Management, Internet Trends, Law Firm Marketing, Open Source, Technology Trends

Social media, geolocation and privacy, oh my!

Nicole L. Black highlights how our net activities are carefully monitored and meticulously tracked by some of the biggest players, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Our individual online footprints, from the Web sites we visit, the items we purchase, the people with whom we communicate, to the locations where we access the Internet, are extremely valuable commodities that are increasingly sought after.

Subjects: E-Commerce, Email, Features, Intellectual Property, Privacy

FOIA Facts: Why the Wait?

Requesters who are new to using the FOIA statute often complain that they have filed a request within the last month but haven’t receive their documents yet. FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes explains that the congressional budgeting process does not specifically provide FOIA operations within an agency a set line item amount. Thus, FOIA Offices usually have limited resources from within their own agencies to fulfill requests.

Subjects: FOIA Facts, Freedom of Information, Government Resources

Ethics of Legal Outsourcing White Paper

The practical reality for US and UK attorneys engaging in or contemplating Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is that the outsourcing of both core legal and support services across the legal profession is nothing new. What is different today with the emergence of the LPO industry is that both core legal and legal support related services are being outsourced to lawyers, law firms and corporations located offshore in countries such as India, South Africa and the Philippines. Mark Ross analyzes how the outsourcing of legal work by a law firm or legal department to a legal outsourcing company or an entity located offshore raises specific issues pertaining to the outsourcing lawyer’s ethical obligations to his or her client.

Subjects: Features

Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials – Where to Start?

Sarah Rhodes discusses the monumental challenge of preserving our digital heritage. She argues that law libraries specifically have a critically important role to play in this undertaking as access to legal and law-related information is a core underpinning of our democratic society. Our current digital preservation strategies and systems are imperfect but tremendous strides have been made over the past decade to stave off the dreaded digital dark age, and libraries today have a number of viable tools, services, and best practices at our disposal for the preservation of digital content.

Subjects: Features, Information Management, Law Librarians, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Library Software & Technology, Technology Trends