As hard as we try, we will still all make mistakes. Losing your keys is one thing, but a mistake that impacts a client matter will keep you awake at night. How do you deal with such an error? Well, the first and hardest step is to immediately contact the client and let them know. Far better for them to hear it from you than elsewhere. Patrick Lamb offers some thoughtful advice about the steps to take in his After the Mistake post on his In Search of Perfect Client Service blog.

Preserving client confidences is an important part of a lawyer’s professional life. Hopefully we all instruct our staff frequently about the importance of maintaining confidentiality. Documenting instructions about confidentiality can have at least two benefits: 1) More formality serves to impress staff even more with the significance of the discussion and 2) Documentation can aid the firm should a third party ever question the training process.

As a first step toward that goal, attached is a downloadable sample confidentiality agreement to be executed by all nonlawyer staff. You may also want a version for outside contractors such as computer consultants or couriers. There’s no magic language here. Download this file, copy the text, paste it into your word processor and customize it as you wish. If you find something missing, e-mail me your suggestions. Several Oklahoma lawyers have contributed to this document.

Download CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT.pdf (21.4K)

Earlier this year I welcomed Ben Cowgill’s Legal Ethics blog to the blogosphere. Now there has been a troubling development in Ben’s home state of Kentucky. It seems that the Kentucky Attorneys’ Advertising Commission wants to classify his blog as advertising, requiring him to do a filing and pay a $50 fee every time he does a post. As Ben notes, there’s been a whirlwind of commentary on the web about this and even BusinessWeek has covered it. Let’s hope things work out where Kentucky isn’t the only state to effectively ban lawyer blogging.

In other states, just in June alone, Rhode Island’s Annual Meeting had a program which featured a live blog posting, lawyers attending Missouri’s excellent Solo and Small Firm Conference heard from a couple of bloggers about blogs (and other things) and Oklahoma’s Solo and Small Firm Conference will feature a program "Blogs – Using Them and Building Them" from me and Tulsa County Special District Judge Charles Hogshead on June 24.

Barchives.org is "the blog for bar associations" published by Utah State Bar tech wizards, Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead. They are assembling lots of useful information to help bar staff to better do their jobs. There are also posts about law firms improving their client services. Feel free to send this link to the staff of your local bar association. I’m pleased to promote this blog from my good friends and colleagues as my Website of the Week.

The final Star Wars movie is now playing in the theaters. But how many lawyers would want their assignment to be as a "Death Star Pilot?" For an interesting tale of major league electronic discovery, read the Corporate Counsel feature "This is Spinal Tech."

From the article: "The electronic review conference room was like the back of a special operations truck, says Swain. Forensics Consulting Solutions, which had advised Jeffer, Mangels on electronic discovery, brought in seven black computers to run the Patterns software. The attorneys became known as the Death Star Pilots, and their days were regimented. From 9 a.m. until 8 p.m., they reviewed the data in 1,000-document batches. A special master delegate was always present to ensure that attorneys weren’t saving, printing, or copying files. (Medtronic had agreed to provide the data for Patterns in its original file format under the condition that it couldn’t be copied.) When the delegate needed a bathroom break, work stopped, and the data hard drives were locked up."

It worked. A dozen Death Star Pilots processed 44 million electronic pages in less than four months, an incriminating spreadsheet was located and the jury rendered a huge verdict. Plus a dozen or so lawyers have really interesting entries for their resumes should they want to use them.

Thanks to the Electronic Discovery Today Blog for the pointer.

This week Law Practice Tips features two Websites of the Week: Tom Mighell’s Inter Alia and Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites. These two sites should be in every lawyer’s RSS newsreader collection. If you’re not yet into RSS yet, you should bookmark both and visit them regularly. One a scale of 1 to 10, they are both a 12. Both of these blogs feature many, many new websites of interest to lawyers. Inter Alia features a Blawg of the Day every day and a Research Site of the Day frequently. Inter Alia is a great source of information about Internet research and you can subscribe to Mighell’s free Internet Legal Research Weekly e-newsletter there. In addition to featuring new law web sites, LawSites covers legal industry news and legal journalism related issues. I learn about much legal industry news first there. Ambrogi also produces the Media Law Blog. Keep current with new law-related online resources with these two great blogs.

I must confess a slight bias in that I know both of the authors pretty well and think they are great professionals. I’ve done presentations with both and hope to do more in the future.

Effective this week (June 1) a new Federal Trade Commission regulation requires the destruction of sensitive information dervived from consumer credit reports. This regulation specifically applies to attorneys as well as other businesses. Hopefully, most law firm procedures already comply with the new rules due to concerns of client confidentiality. But those with bankruptcy and collection practices (and many others) should review their procedures. If you have not done so already, one tip is to replace all (or most) of the waste paper baskets in the office with inexpensive small shredders available at any office supply store. Care should be taken with discarding old backup media and hard drives as well. For more information on this aspect of Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA), see the FTC press release announcing the regulation, the FTC Business alert with details and, if you are really into pain, all 36 pages of the regulation as published in the CFR. Thanks to BeSpacific and ace paralegal Celia C. Elwell for the info.

This year the prestigious Technolawyer @ Awards have added two new categories to their annual rankings of lawyer’s favorite products and services. These are Favorite Practice Management Blog and Favorite Practice Area Blog. As you can imagine, I have some interest in this poll, particularly since they have released a status report today showing I’m a contender! (Paragraph 4) Your input on the other topics of favorite software, Web sites and services is very valuable to those of us who follow such things.

You have to be a TECHNOLAWYER member to vote and it takes a few seconds to sign up here and subscribe to one or more of their valuable free newsletters.

Then the official ballot are instructions are online here. The instructions are very specific. You basically have to type an e-mail rather than filling out an online checkbox form.

Voting ends on Friday, June 10, 2005 at midnight eastern time. Your support would be greatly appreciated.