Targeted Discovery Solutions

I recently had the opportunity to review a product from Docuity which was quite impressive and worthy of mention. Some text from them describing their product is below - it looks to be a promising player in the area of E-Discovery helping companies and law firms streamline this often laborious process.

We are in an age of information overload. Up to 85% of a company’s information exists as unstructured data; neither organized nor indexed. Nevertheless, eDiscovery technology can classify and manage the volumes of unstructured data that exists, helping to single out the truly important information. Docuity’s Targeted Data Extraction is a breakthrough service, designed to make the eDiscovery process up to 85% faster and more cost efficient by utilizing advanced pattern matching, rules-based analysis, and auto-categorization technologies. This pioneering technology can uncover connections among documents that, on the surface, may appear completely unrelated.

Docuity is an industry frontrunner for Targeted Discovery Solutions designed to service law firms and in-house counsel as well as corporate business managers and IT executives. Docuity's solutions help to streamline the pretrial eDiscovery process and to efficiently organize volumes of unstructured corporate data for applications such as regulatory compliance, competitive intelligence or mergers and acquisitions. Docuity's mission is to help its clients meet both the challenges and opportunities posed by the management of unstructured data such as email, faxes, PDFs, invoices, reports, and other text-based documents, whether in paper or electronic format. Throughput is currently at over 1 million pages a week and can be easily increased as demand requires.

Why you must be careful in public places using your PC.

It sounds somewhat silly, does it not, that people would have nothing better to do while in an airport or McDonalds or hotel lobby that to try and look at your PC to see what you are doing. But, apparently, that is not the case for many hotspot users. There are numerous reports, including one on InformationWeek (click here to read), where people are literally looking over people's shoulders (dubbed, shoulder surfing) looking for ID's, passwords, etc.

Then, there is another cast of characters out there using fairly cheap package sniffing devices to look at data which is not encrypted (most public wireless sessions are not) again looking for confidential data or id/passwords. Some of these programs can even reconstruct browser sessions so people can identify the sites you visited, etc.

So, it is probably very good advice to use appropriate care and judgment when using a hotspot to conduct business and surf the web.

PC Data and Program Migration

Do you need a tool to help you move programs, data and settings when a user gets a new PC. If so, this article recently posted on law.com might be of great interest to you. It is accessible by clicking here.

Thompson / Hildebrandt Merger Press Release

The recent press release regarding this merger can be found at:

http://www.hildebrandt.com/Documents.aspx?Doc_ID=2038

Online CLE Courses - Another Source

Here is another source which is part of the law.com website offering CLE courses delivered online for your information:

http://clecenter.com/

Drafting Wills and Trusts

Are you seeking an automated tool to assist you in putting estate planning documents together? If so, you might want to take a look at the Drafting Wills and Trust Agreements (DWTA) on GhostFill™ tool. The demo looks intriging. More details can be found at the following website (click here). I hope this is helpful to you.

Summation

They announced a new version of their software, the first version which is using a common database package (SQL Server). It will be available for review at LegalTech.

SurfAid Medical Teams En Route to Form Mobile Medical Clinics in Nias

This is not technology news, but important news.

SurfAid is an organization which is offering their expertise in malaria control to support victims of the Tsunami in Indonesia. I recently received this update from the organization via email. I thought I would post it for everyone's benefit. If you would like to learn more about the organization, here is their website.

http://www.surfaidinternational.org/index.html


January 11, 2005
SurfAid Medical Teams En Route to Form Mobile Medical Clinics in Nias

Nias, West Sumatra After days of working around the clock to prepare for an emergency medical response for western and northern Nias, the second wave of the SurfAid medical team left today from Padang, West Sumatra, on the Indies Trader II carrying an additional US$500,000 worth of medical supplies and a staff of doctors and nurses specialized in a range of medical treatments, including communicable disease control. This response was made possible with seed funding from Quiksilver while overwhelming support followed from the Indies Trader company, Billabong, NZAID, AusAID and has more than quadrupled the scope and reach of the operation.
“We have designed a 30-day program with the aim to bring topnotch medical aid to isolated islands off West Sumatra which are close to the heart of surfers and tourists. This is the largest public health initiative ever undertaken in this region all because of contributions from the global surfing community, government aid, and individual contributions,” says Andrew Griffiths, SurfAid CEO.
The first team of SurfAid doctors arrived last week in Nias by boat on the Barrenjoey and have been assessing and treating people on the island since. For the last three days, they have been operating out of a hospital in the capital of Gunung Sitoli, where yesterday SurfAid’s orthopedic surgeon Sohrab Gollogly operated on a 15-year-old girl who had suffered a compound fracture to the leg after getting caught in the tsunami. He also treated two burn victims and a nine-month-old with intestinal worms. In addition, Dr. Gollogly trained local staff in the complicated surgical procedures and treatment and donated surgical supplies to the hospital.
The first port of call for the SurfAid team aboard the Indies Trader II is the Hinako Islands, where they will assess the islands for medical needs and administer emergency medical treatment. Here they will meet three other medical aid boats, including the Nusa Dewata and the Huey. The four large boats will then travel in convoy to set up mobile clinics around the western and northern coasts of Nias. The team, over 40 strong and well-equipped with supplies ranging from vaccines to mosquito nets, will visit the areas worst impacted by the tsunami.
SurfAid has planned for the majority of medical scenarios possible to treat in a mobile clinic. The clinics will contain three units: triage and treatment, immunizations and malaria control and education. However their major concern is communicable diseases. “If an epidemic breaks out, it could prove to be even more devastating than the tsunami itself which is why our focus has been to prevent this impending disaster,” says Griffiths.
After two weeks of little sleep and a lot of hard work, Griffiths reflects on the efforts so far, “I am humbled by the organizations and the individuals who have made this come together so quickly. It is far from over but it is times like these that I remember why we started SurfAid over four years ago. It is about people putting their own lives and careers on hold to respond to something much greater than their own perceived needs.”

New Products From Apple

Wow. A $99 iPod that is smaller than a pack of gum and can hang around your neck and a $499 Mac aimed at the budget market. I think Mr. Jobs has two pretty darn good products there -- especially the iPod - all you attorneys and professionals out there that are looking for a super easy way to entertain oneself during those long, boring business trips, while in the gym, etc.. -- how can you beat an iPod for under $100 that you can wear like a necklace. I can only speculate that the biggest problem will be finding one due to the high demand.

New Critical IE security flaw - 1/11/05

Further details are at this link as well as a temporary fix relating to how you configure IE and the drag and drop functionality of the browser. Please take a note of this.

Online CLE Courses

Although this is just one of many sites in this space, the American Law Institute - American Bar Association site offers a broad range of CLE classes for those interested in satisfying a portion of educational requirement from the comfort of their own office or home.

This particular site is available by clicking here.

Just the facts, Jack!!!

Need a site with tons of links to all kinds of fact and figures. Check out http://www.refdesk.com/. What it lacks in esthetics it more than makes up for in content and completeness. It has government sites, news, newspapers, reference sites, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and tons of other stuff. It's a great place to know if you need a way to find information.

Getting rid of spyware

Are you an attorney in a small office, or responsible for the PC's within a law firm. If so, a recent article on Information Week geared to help small businesses could very well be of interest to you. I personally use AdAware and SpyBot and find them to be great products -- with other products I have seem them over-delete information and mess up internet connectivity, but these products seem to not have this problem (of course, be sure to follow their directions about how to restore systems to previous states in the event of a problem.

The article is located by clicking here.

Of course, another good way to avoid Spyware is to get off of IE and use Firefox or another leaner browser and to use a good firewall (I like Zone Alarm but there are plenty other good firewalls on the marketplace).

Hope this is helpful to you. Spyware can be a real hassle once a PC is hit with it.

Law firm websites on search engines

I found it interesting to read that many law firms seem to be paying upwards of $30 per click for certain Vioxx search terms on Google (which auctions search terms as "sponsored links" and allows them to appear on the right hand side of the search engine results. Firms must believe that paying $30 for a likely interested party seeking them out is, overall, more advantageous than using traditional print, radio, television mediums to identify themselves to clients. Perhaps the move to internet-based marketing for law firms is intensifying.

Tool to help small firms with managing court dates and deadlines

The Deadlines on Demand company recently announced an online service, providing rules-based court deadlines on a pay-per-use basis to firms using CompuLaw. The rules database covers a large number of U.S. jurisdictions. Due dates can be imported into common applications, or printed, or sent to email addresses.

Norton Internet Security 2005

Symantec now has a product available at pretty attractive pricing that offers protection against viruses, hackers and privacy threats. If you are not running a comprehensive set of protection packages for the clients in your firm you might want to consider checking this package out to provide virus protection, a firewall, and antispam protection all in one.

Passport Support

Microsoft recently announced they are pulling back on external marketing and support for this authentication product. If you are using this within your law firm for authentication for any applications you might want to read up on the recent happens with this product on Monster.com and EBay and consider how you might wish to proceed with this product.

Intrusion Prevention

If one of your goals for 2005 is protecting your law firm clients from unwanted intrusions (span, adware, spyware, etc.) this recent article published in Information Week might be of interest to you. It discusses enterprise wide approaches to inspection and prevention and some of the vendors who are active in this space. Probably worthwhile reading to get some ideas on how to prevent these insidious applications from entering your network.

The article is available by clicking here.