When I was at the Nebraska Bar Association Solo & Small Firm Conference last week, I did a "60 Sites" presentation for their luncheon. The site SorryGottaGo.com got such a huge laugh that I decided to feature it as a Website of the Week here. I’m not going to explain what it features. Sorry, but you gotta go there to see.

The folks at the Nebraska Bar were great hosts and a great audience. This was their initial solo and small firm conference and it was a great start for them. The solo and small firm conference movement continues to grow as a greatly appreciated bar service for these members.

Identity theft is a major problem. If you do any sort of client newsletter, you should think about giving your clients some information on this important topic.

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has a lengthy set of Identity Theft Resources, including numerous Fact Sheets.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft site has good consumer information and a couple of good downloadable documents.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Office also has a collection of resources.

Educating your clients about this subject is a good client service and a good public service,

Think of all of the information contained on all of the mobile phones, flash drives, MP3 players, portable hard drives, backup tapes and other information storage devices that can be carried in a pocket or hand bag. Then think of the number of news items you have read in the last year or so about lost or stolen laptop computers. Last year I hatched a plan to write the ultimate mobile security article. But honestly, that’s not really possible to do in a short article and, as technology advances, parts of the work become dated. Still, it was an area where lawyers could use more information and I asked some talented people to pitch in for the project.

The ultimate result was "A Lawyer’s Guide to Mobile Computer Security" by Ellen Freedman, Reid Trautz and Jim Calloway. It was published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, the Pennsylvania Lawyer and Immigration Law Today, the official publications of the bar associations that have the authors on staff for practice management advisors. But interestingly, that wasn’t the end of the story. Some reprint requests starting trickling in and then the trickle became a flood. We’ve asked bloggers and e-newsletter publishers just to link to the online version of the article noted above from the OBA.

But Technolawyer asked to reprint it as a Technofeature and it will be available in the July/August issue of Legal Management, published by the Association of Legal Administrators, with a circulation of around 20,000. Certainly that is gratifying for the three of us. But the main point is that there is a need for this information. So, if you missed this article the first time around, you can read it on the OBA site as noted above or check out the nifty PDF version that Technolawyer makes available to its authors linked below.  After all, there is no doubt that we will be carrying more and more information on our mobile devices in the future.

Download Calloway-Trautz-Freedman-MobileSecurity-TF05-29-07.pdf (182.4K)

Yes, now that so many of you are thinking of summer vacations and fun in the sun, my normally cheery blog will turn to the dark side as we explore common law firm disasters and, more importantly, how to avoid them or recover from them. It is Disaster Week on Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips!

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Our first disaster is losing your important client data. So much information is located on the computers in your law office that it would be almost impossible and prohibitively expensive to replace it if you suddenly lost it all. That is why we do data backups. So when is the last time you did yours?

In just the last few weeks, I have talked with a tech smart Oklahoma lawyer working on decent hardware who through a really unusual and unique set of circumstances lost all digital copies of brief after the lawyer had invested dozens of hours preparing it. Sadly, it had never been printed. I also got an e-mail from a lawyer-friend from another state who knows all about backup. But he just got very busy and hadn’t backed up his laptop for 3 or 4 weeks when it died completely.

You need an internal backup procedure where you back up your data to another hard drive, hopefully a portable one you can remove from the office and rotate with a similar drive off-site. I no longer trust backup tapes for the solo and small firm market. If your law firm IT department assures you that they are comfortable with tape backup, I would let them do their job. (Perhaps, I would note to them that it would be a double disaster for them personally if they were wrong.)

But, in my judgment, weekly backups are no longer sufficient. I think you either need concuurent or nightly backup to protect that brief you have been working on for three days. It may be that you do not back up everything this way and depend on your other backup system for data that is a month or a year old. Online backup combines the idea of regular automated backup with the idea of offsite storage. Many lawyers are concerned about the ethics of online backup or wouldn’t know how to shop for a provider.

This is why the Oklahoma Bar Association endorsed CoreVault as a member benefit for online data backup and recovery. I wrote about online backup and Corevault in the last issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal. We invested a lot of time checking out the service. We like their system. Data is encrypted before it leaves the law firm computers and is compressed to save storage costs. Oklahoma Bar members can get more information here from the CoreVault site.

For those of you in other states, CoreVault can be your backup service as well.

If you do not have much to do the next few days, here’s one way to fill up your spare time. Check out this collection: the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT)  E-Discovery Archives. Several weeks ago the Spring, 2007 issue of the online law journal, which is focused solely on Electronic Discovery, was added to the archives.

One of the student editors informed me of the publication."Our publication is a student-run law journal housed at the University of Richmond School of Law. JOLT was first published in 1995 as the first exclusively on-line law journal and has continued to publish articles on the intersection of law and technology for over ten years. JOLT is available online, free of charge, to anyone who visits our website….Each year, we publish an issue dedicated to the emerging issues in Electronic Discovery. The most recent annual survey focuses on the recent changes in the federal rules and contains six articles from authors with various perspectives on E-Discovery."

Over 250 pages are contained in the new issue.

"Sites for Sore Eyes" is a new column by yours truly, Jim Calloway, and Courtney Kennaday, Practice Management Advisor for the South Carolina Bar. It is a part of the May 2007 Technology eReport from the ABA General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division. The first column focused on Web 2.0 applications and was brief. It was really designed for the general practitioner who was not familiar with the concept of Web 2.0. We wanted to explain this idea briefly, link to a longer explanation for those interested and highlight a few of these useful Web 2.0 sites. The Technology eReport comes out four times a year, so look for more Sites for Sore Eyes in the future as Calloway and Kennaday explore the World Wide Web.

As usual, the rest of this Technology eReport has great information. J. Anthony Vittal has a great column on how the Information Age is truly changing the world. Jeffrey Allen reviews Top-Rated Digital Dictating Equipment. jennifer j. rose notes the problems when you missend that e-mail to the worst possible person and there’s much more.

Culver City, CA attorney James Tyre referred the Solosez list to the article "A Master’s Class in Online Snooping." It was written by Mark Frauenfelder, one of the co-creators of the popular blog Boing Boing. In addition to tips on snooping, it also includes some defensive privacy techniques. DISCLAIMER: Never heard of this publication before (Radar) and it contains some content which some might find objectionable, but not on the linked article.

I’m at the Indiana Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference and just finished giving the opening keynote presentation on Increasing Client Satisfaction. The great thing about these conferences is that you always learn something, no matter how many different conferences you have attended (and I have been to quite a few of these conferences in different states.)

Mark McNeely, a trial lawyer from Shelbyville, IN, handed me one of his business cards to show off. It is thin and plastic and has the 2007 calendar on the back. We’ve all seen and referred to the business card-sized calendars you can easily carry in a wallet. It seems like a great way to make certain someone actually keeps your card with them. The interesting thing is that Mark reports that clients and former clients now show up at his office around the end/beginning of the year to "get a new calendar." What a great idea.

This reminds me of years ago when a Tulsa lawyer told me a printing a page of clear plastic labels with his home phone number, cell phone and personal e-mail address. He attached the clear labels to the back of a few business cards and gave them to a few special (likely higher-paying) clients as a sort of all-access pass. The plastic label makes it look like the card was printed with the home contact info on the back. That’s a nice way to make a few clients feel special.

Mark McNeely says the greatest moments with his calendar-backed business cards occur when the judges uses them to set the date for the next hearing. The lawyers are standing at the bench when the judge holds card up and peers at it for the date. Even if your opposing counsel knows you just gave the judge the card, there’s just something special about the judge waving your business card in the other lawyer’s face. (And if you get really lucky, someone even blogs about your business card.)

So, what’s on the back of the cards in your wallet?

The Internet brings great information and access, but it also brings dangers. We’ve seen viruses, spammers, spyware and computer hijackers. We try to cope with all of these dangers as best we can. Now a report from Google outlines a new form of threat: Web pages that can infect your computer when you merely visit them. You might want to read this online article from MSNBC. NEW NET THREAT: INFECTIOUS WEB PAGES What can one do about this? I have suggested to our bar association members that one method would be to type a web address for an unfamiliar site into Google rather than your Web browser. Then, when it shows up in the Google results you can see if it has the Google warning label discussed in the article before you decide to visit it.