I got the following information from Adobe today and think it is worth passing on to you.

Below please find the "hot-off-the-press" Adobe Acrobat Legal Resource Guide with links to free downloads, training, support, and informational resources.

Free Downloads & Trials

Acrobat 8.0 Professional Trial Download – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html

Adobe Reader 8.0 Download – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Adobe Document Center Free Trial – http://www.adobe.com/products/onlineservices/documentcenter/features.html

Acrobat Connect Free Trial – http://www.adobe.com/go/freewebconferencing_2006

Training

Acrobat 8.0 Teaching & Learning Resources – http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/acrobat.html?tab:acrostdpro=1

Acrobat 8.0 Experience Flash Demo – http://www.adobe.com/go/acrobat8exp_uk

Acrobat 8.0: What’s New for Legal Professionals OnDemand eSeminar (recording) – http://seminars.adobe.acrobat.com/p17441268/

Acrobat Online Legal Events – http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=list&loc=en_us&type=online_event&product=&interest=sol_legal

Adobe Events in Your Area
http://www.adobe.com/events

Acrobat Resources

Adobe Solutions for Legal Professionals Website – www.adobe.com/go/legal

Acrobat 8.0 Pro – New Features for Legal Professionals – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/solutions/legal/productinfo/features/index.html

Acrobat 8.0 for Legal Professionals Whitepaper – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/solutions/pdfs/Acrobat8_foLegalPros.pdf

Acrobat 8.0 Product Family Detailed Comparison Matrix – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/acrobat8_matrix.pdf

Acrobat 8.0 Professional Feature Overview – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/pdfs/acrobatpro_overview.pdf

Acrobat 8.0 Professional Datasheet – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/pdfs/acrobatpro_datasheet.pdf

Acrobat Connect Resources – http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnect/

Support

Acrobat for Legal Professionals Blog – http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/

New Adobe Annual Support Plans – http://www.adobe.com/support/programs/

Free Acrobat Support, Tutorials and Forums – http://www.adobe.com/support/products/acrobat.html

Acrobat Developer Center – http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/

Adobe Support Knowledgebase – http://www.adobe.com/support/

Licensing

Adobe License Manager – http://www.adobe.com/go/alm

Volume Software Licensing Programs – http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/openoptions/index.html

Lawyers may like the idea of more secure documents. Wouldn’t it be nice to know your password-protected documents were uncrackable? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to remotely make a document which was e-mailed by accident unreadable by the recipient?

But noted writer and pundit Cory Doctorow asks us to examine "How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In." Here’s the sub-head from his Information Week essay: "Technology called ‘Information Rights Management,’ combined with copyright law and Windows Vista, give Microsoft the tools to hold users’ data hostage in Office, says Cory Doctorow." His premise is that combination of those factors may allow Microsoft to claim in the future that it is illegal for competitors to build applications that will open protected Word or Excel files, even for authorized users with the password. Many lawyers will appreciate this short analysis of the interaction of law and technology.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things, which is consistently ranked as the most popular blog on the Internet by Technorati.

Hat tip to Tulsa lawyer Jody Nathan for the link.

I’m going to feature a non-lawyer news gathering site because it is so cool (and so Web 2.0.) I’ve wanted to write about Digg.com for a while, which features several topical news areas with links to the stories suggested and supported by Digg users. The thing that held me back was the need to do more research and exploration to do the site justice. But I have to wait no longer because I ran across the Beginner’s Guide to Digg online. The Guide is very informative. So take some time to read a little of the history of Digg and some of the interesting ways you can use it. This is a news site where the users are the editors. If the technology stuff is too high tech for you, then check out the sports.

I have not liked most of the Treo holsters I have seen and I’ve examined several belonging to others. I want to be absolutely sure it won’t accidentally fall off my belt and I want it to be easy to grab and answer. One of the posts by Grant  Griffith I referenced earlier this week had a glowing review of this Treo Rubberized Holster. Since it was on "holiday sale" for $9.95, I purchased it immediately, figuring even if I only used it part time it was worth it. (S/H was $3.95 for a total of $13.90.) I ordered it Thursday or Friday and it arrived Monday.

I’m quite pleased. It comes out of the holster easily and faces inward to avoid accidental damage to the Treo. The J shape on the bottom of the spring loaded clip makes it virtually impossible that it will accidentally fall off. In fact some may not like the fact that it doesn’t easy come off of a wide belt when you want to remove it, but that’s just what I wanted for security. Two thumbs up.

I think almost every lawyer should carry a smart phone. There is a huge benefit in synchronizing  this device with your office calendar and contacts and having them with you at all times. The smart phone you wish to use is up to you, as is to what extent you want to send and receive e-mail and surf the Web from your phone. But I’ve been quite happy to be able to check my calendar and schedule appointments and to-do tasks on weekends and evenings. I’ve not used Blackberries, but many lawyers swear by them. I have a Treo 650, as do quite a few of my fellow OBA staff and OBA officers.

A recent post about the benefits of a Treo 650 was published on The Practice blog by guest Grant Griffiths. Virginia attorney Ben Glass replied with a comment that his firm had experienced a lot of performance issues and rebooting. Some others on Solosez have made the same obserDead_phone_smallvations. I have to reboot my Treo about once a month and have never lost any data. 

My first Treo flunked an unintentional stress test, but the failure didn’t really offend or surprise me. I thought about trying to tell the story that it saved my life.

Grant has started the PDA Lawyer blog and I direct your attention to his post about the utility programs he uses on his Treo 650. I’d guess I am an average Treo user. I just never seem to find the time to learn the more advanced Treo features. But even at that level, it is a great tool for me and I do learn new things to do with it all the time. If you are a novice level Treo user, I’d say a great "beginner" customization is to add several Favorites on the phone interface view. I find that having many of those is a real time saver.

It is the season of giving thanks in the U.S. While I have many things to be thankful for, including great friends and my family, none of those make for a good Law Practice Tips blog post.

So let me pick an unlikely candidate for my thanks and choose an application you may have already cursed at least once this week. Yes, let’s give thanks for e-mail. (I can hear the rumblings now from those dealing with overflowing inboxes, balky spam filters and clients who are calling saying "Why didn’t you return my e-mail from half an hour ago?")

Let’s give thanks for universal e-mail. You youngsters may not remember the days when AOL e-mail meant only to other AOL users and you could not e-mail those on CompuServ. Just remain quiet while we old-timers raise a toast to FidoNet.

I am thankful that e-mail lets me easily stay in contact with good friends in places like Toronto, Canada or Washington, D.C. or Montgomery, AL at essentially no cost. It may be difficult to build a relationship just with e-mail, but you can nourish one with it.

I am thankful I no longer have to deal with envelopes, postage and, sometimes, Federal Express to send a paper or presentation materials across the country.

I am thankful that people who are inclined to share their wisdom with me can easily do so, by clicking "attach file" and send, instead of having to decide if it is worth the trouble to mail me a copy.

I am thankful for electronic mailing lists that allow me to tap the collective wisdom of many others. (And I’m really thankful for my GMail account to manage my electronic mailing lists.)

So, even though we hate spam, mysterious attachments we can’t or shouldn’t open, e-mail from people who obviously have too much time on their hands and getting a joke for the 5th time via e-mail, we can even be thankful for this simple business tool.

Well, something really nice happened several days ago. I was shocked and surprised to learn that my name had been included on the Global Tech Top 100 Leaders list for 2006. This list was compiled by a London publication CityTech, which focuses on technology in the legal industry. I’m certainly honored to be on a list that includes Bill and Melinda Gates, Dennis Kennedy, Dan Pinnington, Ross Kodner. Monica Bay, Tom O’Connor, Neil Squillante and others I know and respect. So thank you, CityTech and if anyone wants to see the names, you can find the entire list here. (Warning: It is a large PDF and may take a while to load.)

The November issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal was a special Management and Technology-themed issue and I was the guest editor. As events unfolded, I ended up writing a lot of it myself.

A Lawyer’s Guide to Mobile Computer Security was co-authored by Ellen Freedman, Reid Trautz and myself. Did you know that a personal computer is lost or stolen every 12 seconds? We cover some important points about protecting sensitive client information in these days when so many lawyers are carrying laptop computers or USB flash drives containing client information. This article will also be published (maybe with some additions) in the Pennsylvania Lawyer and American Immigration Lawyers Association magazine. I regret that we didn’t have time to review some interesting security tools that I received. Maybe we will do a follow up or update in the future. But for the present, feel free to pass along this link (or the permalink to this blog post) to laptop-packing lawyers you know.

E-Discovery: The New Federal Rules by Jerry Green and Susan K. Carns covers the all of the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronically stored information (ESI) that go into effective December 1, 2006. Even lawyers who never handle litigation or venture inside a courtroom should be aware of these changes. It is critical information for those who advise businesses.

Maximizing Your E-Potential is by Jacob Williams. I believe this is his first article published in the Bar Journal and I predict you will hear more from him. He notes, "Three of the Internet’s resources offered for free that I adopted were RSS feeds, electronic monitoring (e-monitoring) and electronic alerts (e-alerts). They have now established themselves as the wave of the future. If you do not employ them in your practice, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage."

He outlines how Oklahoma lawyers whose case dockets are online with the OCIS docketing system can set up a system so that they are immediately notified every time a document is filed or a docket entry made. This only costs $20 a year by using WatchThatPage.com. He does note a needed tweak to do for each of these pages so that you don’t get a notice every day as the date changes.

My article, Conflict Checking Systems from A to Z, turned out to be much longer and more comprehensive than I originally anticipated. Although I think the time for paper-based conflict check systems has passed us by, outlining implementation of a paper-based system seemed to be the best way to go through all of the requirements before moving on to software applications. So I’ll immodestly suggest that every lawyer should read this one, whether they use computers or file cards and ledgers.

Motivating Law Firm Staff is a brief Top Ten List from me for small firm lawyers who have to serve as their own Director of Human Relations. But lawyers who work in larger firms can read it, too.

Websites Worth a Visit was the title of my regular Law Practice Tips column in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. I think that is self-explanatory. Some of you will be familiar with most of these. (By now, my colleagues may have figured out why I was complaining about being so overloaded this fall.)

Addiction and the Law: How Dependency Issues Continue to Affect the Legal Profession is a condensed version of an article By Cliff Collins which was originally published in the August/September 2006 issue of the Oregon State Bar Bulletin. We don’t normally do reprints, but this is an important issue.

You can download the entire copy of this Bar Journal in PDF format from this link. That might be a better option if you want to print several of these articles to stick in your briefcase. The above link is for the current Oklahoma Bar Journal issue. When the December Bar Journal is posted, this issue will be archived here, which is not a valid link until then.

No, it’s not my review, but I think you will find this review from C|Net of the version of Windows Vista sent to hardware manufacturers useful and there is even a fun little online video version.

The conclusion: "Overall, we find this Windows Vista RTM build very stable and feature rich, and we look forward to reviewing the final release on January 30, 2007. Given the way the installation process checks for program updates, Microsoft has the opportunity to roll out the operating system with a few known bugs. So long as Microsoft is able to fix these bugs by its self-imposed general availability date, we think Vista could be a worthy upgrade for most PC users."

While I’ve heard from several IT types who planning on waiting until at least mid-year to deploy the new Operating System, I still think many end users will be rushing to take advantage of the new features. Watch the video at the link above to see them. It’s just too bad Microsoft couldn’t get it done by year’s end as many firms would like to buy new computers (and deduct the cost) this year. Buying a new computer with the OS pre-installed is my favorite way to upgrade the OS. Hat tip to Oklahoma City attorney John Brewer for the link.