The Department of Homeland Security recently clarified its position to restate that if you cross the border, any of your digital information devices can be seized and searched without the government giving you any reason whatsoever. They did promise to try to return them in a more timely manner. This incldues everything from a laptop to an iPod to a USB flash drive. (Wow, wonder how many flash drives are in the pockets of my laptop bag now?)

So how many hours have you wasted trying to find a file on your computer that you knew was there? How long would it really take to search a laptop hard drive if you were a Homeland Security agent and didn't know for sure what you were looking for? The smart money is betting that in 90+% of the situations they will just make a complete image of your hard drive and then return it, retaining all of your information (and your client's information) "indefinitely."

Many, if not most, lawyers who carry laptops have some form of a "paperless" law practice and carry many client files on their laptops, hopefully encrypted or, at least, password protected. One of the nice things about having a laptop is using it as a desktop replacement to carry everything with you.

That laptop probably can no longer travel across the U.S.border with you. Whether top military grade encryption protects your information from the Department of Homeland security or just presents a professional challenge for them is for you to decide.

But, if you just need access to a few files and know you will have Internet access at your destination, you can always just e-mail them to yourself and leave them in your inbox. You could also use an online document repository or VPN or one of several other secure solutions for remote access to files.

Bottom line: These rules probably give every law firm a great justification to buy a Netbook or two for overseas travel. Cleaning up every confidential file from a laptop used as a primary workstation before traveling overseas would be too big a pain and cost more in lawyer time than a Netbook.

Did you know that mobile phone service providers typically charge around $2.00 for every 411 directory assistance call you make? The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center points out three options for services to get directory assistance for free. Two (Google and Bing) involve speech recognition so you have to speak slowly and clearly and only include business listings. The third, AT&T, has both business and residential listings and requires one listen to a brief commercial. I think you should program all three numbers into your mobile phone now and share the Permalink to this post with everyone in your office. It works for landlines, too.

Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell have a really great podcast series on technology trends called the Kennedy-Mighell Report. The latest edition caught my attention because they decided to expand on my recent post on online reputation managment. Dennnis noted: "It used to be that you were mainly concerned with getting yourself into search engines and getting the word out about you. Now we're starting to worry about what we can keep out of search engines and who can see what of our online footprints." Check out Dennis Kennedy's blog post and their new podcast on online reputation management.

I assume that readers of my blog will recognize the names of my friends Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. But, if not, Google them and see who they are and how well they are doing at online reputation management.

As readers know, I am a big fan of dual monitors and like another commentator experience an irrational pleasure when someone else discovers how greal dual monitors are for productivity. So, breaking news this morning of a prototype dual-screen laptop (and pictures) really caught my eye and inspired a round of techno-lust. Surely, they need someone in the legal community to do beta testing.

Winning Alternative book cover On Monday, August 24th, the debate about alternatives to the billiable hour got even more high profile as articles appeared about the topic in both the Wall Street Journal and Corporate Counsel. I received Corporate Counsel in the morning mail and soon thereafter my inbox received notices of the WSJ feature from a discussion group. (Note that unless you are a WSJ subscriber, the link above only gets you a small part of the front page article, but you can watch the video and read the comments to the article.)

This reminded me, first, that there is still a lot of discussion to be had and work to do in this area, and, second, that the 2008 book Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, Third Edition: Strategies that Work by Mark Robertson and me is now for sale on Amazon, at a cheaper price than at the ABA bookstore.

Bruce MacEwen on his Adam Smith, Esq. blog has a great analysis of this discussion in his post The Billable Hour Debate Is Not About the Billable Hour,  I would encourage you to read his thoughts. I'm in the camp of those who believe law firm billing is now a matter of corporate focus and it is unlikely that large law firm billing practices will return to "normal" after the economy rights itself.

Bryan Sims, who writes the Connected Lawyer blog, was interviewed by the Illinois Lawyer magazine. In the yet-to-be published article, he is quoted as saying there are four "must-have tools" for solo practitioners: a smart phone, a laptop, a scanner, and a good backup system. I really like his list! A prepublication Illinois Lawyer blog post gives some more details. The point is that this just isn't a shopping list, but an outline of how lawyers should be doing their work now. I certainly plan on quoting Bryan in our upcoming New Lawyer's Experience program.

Of course, being a lawyer myself, I could quibble and say for the forseeable future, you also still have to have a printer, no matter how well you use PDF. And, a landline phone system (for a while longer anyway.) And a second monitor. But the quibbling takes away from the essential truth of his quote.

Seth Godin has a blog post Fidelity vs. Convenience discussing the concepts in Kevin Maney's upcoming book. The book's premise is that there is a trade off "between delivering extraordinary experiences (which he calls fidelity) and doing it in a way that's cheap and easy (convenience)."

Godin says,"In the words of Bill Gross, in order to win with a new product, you need to be on one axis or another, and ten times better than what you're aiming to replace. Which means ten times more high impact or ten times cheaper and easier.

"A refrigerator is ten times more convenient than an icebox. A cell phone is ten times more convenient than a pay phone. A private jet is ten times more joyful/fidelity than first class for the executive that can afford it. A backstage pass at a Cat Power concert is ten times higher fidelity than a ripped MP3."

That idea both intrigued and bothered me as I attempted to apply it to legal services. Setting aside business-related law matters, is there really much way to make most consumer legal matters a "high fidelity experience?" With things like family law, criminal defense, bankruptcy, it seems unlikely and, if you accept the premise that you can only "win" on one axis or the other, that leaves convenience.

If convenience and usability are the hallmarks of success for the future lawyer helping people with their problems, this may manifest itself in lots of ways: clear predictable fixed fees, evening or weekend office hours, online client document repositories during representation with a big PDF of everything provided when the matter closes, avoiding unneeded "legalese" in client communications, online payment systems or other innovative ideas. Lower pricing is another aspect, but experienced lawyers tend to feel competing on fees alone is a losing proposition for both the lawyer and the services the client receives.

With the school year beginning, I'm hearing more people talk about netbooks, those low cost laptops that are gaining in popularity. In fact the OBA Executive Director just bought one for his home use. But can a netbook work for a practicing lawyer and what are its limits? I'm not really set up to do hardware reviews here and was glad to see a blog post today by Ross Kodner on "Debunking Netbook Myths and Misconceptions."

A lot of people are concerned about online reputation management. They are worried about things posted online about them or their families. Lawyers in particular worry that unhappy former clients will post untrue things about the lawyer online that are difficult or impossible to refute.

Our Rules of Professional Conduct say a lawyer may reveal information relating to representation of a client "to establish a claim or defense on behalf of the lawyer in a controversy between the lawyer and the client" or " to respond to allegations in any proceeding concerning the lawyer's representation of the client." ORPC 1.6(b)(5)

OK, who thinks that applies because you didn't like something a former client said on Twitter or Facebook? Yeah. Me neither. Well, maybe if it libels the lawyer. But proving the fact of libel as a defense to an ethics complaint is not a road most of us would choose to travel.

So to me, the key to online reputation management is to put lots of positive information about you online and to tell your story. Just overwhelm any critics.

As we have seen with many well-documented Facebook and Twitter stories, the biggest potential danger area for damage to your online reputation is you. We saw it happen with flame e-mailing when angry and now you can post your anger or missteps online for the entire world to see with social networking.

Today's example is from a lawyer who uses Twitter. This lawyer is one of those who tweets many times a day and certainly has more followers than I do. I'm not going to identify that lawyer because I do understand if you do that many tweets a day not all will be award-winners.

But here's what he posted on Twitter as a "rule," not just an offhand remark: "If your lawyer's email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com), find a new lawyer." Now don't bother searching. His identity is not the point. And the rule was apparently reprinted from a national publication.

But that jewel coming from a lawyer insulted a lot of people and made a lot of them angry. He's already had one blogger today react negatively. When I read those words, even now hours later, my reaction is "You judgmental self-important jerk. How dare you tell people to fire their lawyers because of the e-mail service they use?" I recognized this person's name as a lawyer whose Twitter posts I had read before. I had a neutral, leaning positive opinion of him. But now for a long time, this is what I will think of when I see his name.

The ironic thing is I don't disagree with his general thinking. Lawyers in private practice representing clients should use an e-mail address that includes the law firm domain name in most cases. But failure to do so is not a firing offense. So the point gets obscured by the message. A few minutes ago a very, very techno-savvy sent several of us an e-mail using his Gmail account because of temporary problems with his primary e-mail account. (That's OK, Erik. None of us can fire you.) One of the most techno-savvy lawyers I know uses a Yahoo address and has for well over a decade. Right, Dan?

In fact, every techno-savvy lawyer I know has a GMail account!

Still somewhere, some person will search Twitter for "find a new lawyer" and learn that someone thinks they should fire their lawyer because of his or her e-mail address. If they are searching for that, they obviously aren't happy and maybe that will be the tipping point to fire their lawyer. Maybe they will even file a bar complaint.

So why am i going on about this? Because it is an unneeded, serious self-inflicted wound. It would be one thing entirely if this person sold e-mail services or was writing a paper on e-mail services. I have heard lawyers make the case that Gmail should not be used for confidential client e-mails because of Google's Terms of Service. That's a defensible opinion. But even the most jealous advocate of that theory knows it wouldn't be smart to insult the audience.

We've all been there. I have one rather infamous e-mail in my past I'd still like to have back. If you tweet multiple times per day, you are going to hit a few foul balls. I'll probably anger some people with this post. But, I think I am trying to make a point, which is let's all be careful out there on the Internet, OK?

By the way, three people subscribed to my blog e-mail alert service today. One used Hotmail and one used Gmail.