The December issue of the e-zine Law Practice Today has been posted. There is always good content in this publication. The feature article is Law Practice Today Roundtable: Looking Back and Looking Forward. Eight of us with an interest in technology were given a series of tech-related questions to discuss. It’s a fun article, asking us what technology we really use now as well as asking for some predictions. In addition to me, there are some other names that readers of this blog will find familiar.

I hope I am not giving any any trade secrets when I mention that we did this project with Writely, an online collaboration tool, now in beta.

"Managing Clients’ Funds and Avoiding Ethical Problems" by Jayne B. Tyrrell and Stephen M. Casey is our Website of the Week this week. Admittedly this is a little different type of Website. It’s really just a hypertext-linked CLE paper on trust accounting. But, considering that a number of lawyers get into trouble with trust accounting each year, it is a good primer for every lawyer opening a practice to read. This is a part of the Massachusetts Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts Program Website and some of the information is specific to Massachusetts. There are simple, but very useful, forms attached to the paper. If you follow the procedures outlined and use those forms, you should always have a properly balanced and documented trust account.

OK, here’s your scary discovery in online technology of the month. Well, at least it was a discovery for me.

Go to http://www.friendlycanadian.com/applications/clipboard.htm

(I’m assuming you will have already used copy and paste or cut and paste today. If not, copy something to your clipboard and then refresh the page.)

Yes, by the default settings, Internet Explorer can be made to paste the the contents of your clipboard into a web page. That’s really special if you ever copy credit card numbers or passwords to your clipboard.

I would recommend changing your default settings in Internet Explorer:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Internet -> Custom Level -> Scripting -> Allow paste operations via script:   set to Prompt or to Disable

Thanks to Dan Pinnington for passing along this tip from Rocky Stefano.

UPDATE: You probably want to choose Prompt rather than Disable above, if for no other reason than I have now discovered that the TinyURL application (that I love and use frequently) uses this as a part of its process. So better to be prompted for this, or something else, than to have it suddenly stop working.

Freivogel on Conflicts is not  a Website that will be of interest to many non-lawyers. In fact Mr. Freivogel states in his "Ground Rules for Using This Site," that "[t]his site is not designed for non-lawyers. Indeed, lawyers who have not studied or dealt with conflicts of interest rules for lawyers on a regular basis will find this site a bit of a challenge. It is designed for lawyers who have a basic knowledge of the conflicts rules." William Freivogel is an insurance industry executive who has been working with lawyers on risk management and malpractice prevention issues since 1987. If you’ve ever done legal research on ethical conflicts, then you know that once you get past the easy and obvious rules, the law becomes complex rather quickly. To get an idea of the value of this site, click on What’s New and look at the number of items posted within the last 30 days. Then go to the Table of Contents and pick an interesting looking topic at random. You’ll find a clear statement of the issue and a set of citations that will save you a great deal of research time if you need to delve deeper. Clearly this is a "must bookmark" site and it is my Website of the Week.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland decided to use a blog as an easy way to post press releases to the Web and do an RSS newsfeed at the same time.

So if you did a lot of federal criminal defense in Maryland, don’t you think you’d be setting up an RSS newsreader to automatically receive all of their press releases? Fast forward over the next few years as we insert Oklahoma Insurance Commission, Oklahoma Corportation Commission and many other agencies there and don’t limit it to press releases, but also include a PDF of agency rules and regs sent once a year, notices of hearings and dockets, decisions and so forth. The blog’s fine, but the big deal is all agencies doing RSS Newsfeeeds so interested parties can receive all of the infromation instantly- where it is the core items noted above or a notice of closing early and cancellation of hearings due to inclimate weather. Start lobbying the agencies that you think need an RSS feed now.

Thanks to Securities Litigation Watch blog and the White Collar Crime Prof Blog for the pointer.

I’m still primarily using Internet Explorer. and one of the tools I seem to use a lot that others may not is the links toolbar. If you’ve never customized your links toolbar, it is probably hidden and/or you have the default sites of Customize links, Free Hotmail, Windows Media and so forth. Just go to a favorite site, grab the IE icon in front of the URL in the address bar and drop it onto the Links to customize. Couldn’t be easier. Right click on the name if it is long to rename it something shorter.

I shortened a few names and now have the TinyURL applet on it. I blogged about that applet here and so won’t repeat that. But one thing I am doing a lot more with it being more visible now is answering e-mails questions by doing a search that find the answer and then hitting TinyURL to create a link that reflects the same search engine, query and results as I presently view. I figure the person who receives it benefits because when they click on it, they see how I got the answer and also have a lot of related search results there as well.

Another site I have on my links toolbar is one I have called Time that goes to here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ When I have a conference call, I don’t have to figure out whether the watch, computer or phone display is the absolutely correct time. I just click on that link. It also has a nice feature to help with picking a time for conference calls in several different time zones.  My premise is that most of us have a relatively few sites we frequently visit.  By using short names I have 13 visible on my links bar and can get to those sites very quickly. Try customizing your links toolbar and see if it works for you.

I am told that when I switch over to FireFox, I’ll love the tabbed browsing feature as a better way of doing this. Maybe I should take FireFox Hacks home for the holidays.

Mylinksbar_1

From the great team at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute comes Wex. They label it "everyone’s resource for law learning." Wex attempts to harness the collaborative power of wiki technology into an authoritative online legal disctionary and encyclopedia. If you are not familiar with wikis, you should check out Wikipedia as an extremely useful example. It is "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" online. That description probably sends shivers down that backs of lawyers who want authoritation and correct information, not the last poster-editor’s biased opinion. But Wikipedia has turned out to be a great resource, particularly with acronyms and new concepts that may not have made the printed encyclopedias yet. It is self-correcting. Someone may edit it to say the Allies lost WW II or something equally stupid, but someone else will repair it in minutes. The LLI folks are trying to evolve and improve this model by assembling a team of approved expert contributors with editing privileges. This approach makes a lot of sense to me. We’ll see how the project goes. There is the potential for this to become the Black’s Law Dictionary of the Web.