SBM Blog

What To Do In The Event Of A Data Breach

Corporate Counsel has the ten steps to take right away.  Oops, the first step is "Develop Your Plan Before the Incident," so get cracking.  The rest of the tips are spot on, especially Step 4:

Continue to Consult with Counsel

It is imperative that the investigation and response be conducted in consultation with and at the direction of counsel (whether in-house or outside counsel). In addition to preserving the privilege of confidential communications, consulting with counsel is important to the myriad legal issues—from notice obligations to coordinating with law enforcement to managing litigation risks—that can arise when investigating and responding to a data security breach.

In The Shadow of Facebook, LegalZoom Makes A Move

While (almost) all eyes were on Facebook's IPO last week, the IPO filing by LegalZoom -- the online legal documents store that lawyers love to hate -- flew largely under the radar.  From WSJ Law Blog:

LegalZoom’s growth — the company took in revenue of $156.1 million in 2011, up 29.2% from $120.8 million in 2010, according to its S-1 filing — points to a demand for cheap legal services that many have underestimated.The company sells a self-help document service online aimed at helping customers resolve common legal matters, from wills to divorces to real-estate leases.

The company said it has served about two million customers over the past 10 years. And here’s a fun fact: In 2011, more than 20% of new California limited liability companies were formed using LegalZoom, according to the S-1.

LegalZoom has its eye on the roughly $100 billion in legal services provided to small businesses and consumers. The company said it plans to grow through building out its subscriptions plans and expanding internationally.

 The first comments to the Law Blog post pretty much capture the main lines of the debate:

Wilderness Multi-Tasking

Thank goodness.  It's so much easier to get away from it all if you're not really getting away from it all.  Set up the tent, gather the kindling, gaze at the stars, and charge your phone with the new BioLite CampStove.  What more can a lawyer ask for?

HT: Slaw

Practice Management Tip of the Week - Smart Phone Dictation

Optimize your smart phone efficiency by installing and using a smart phone dictation application. These applications do more than enable digital dictation--they also make it easy to attach your dictated file to an email or send it to an Internet storage location like Dropbox. Using either of these options, your transcription assistant has easy access to the digital file. The file can also be processed by a digital transcription application.

Some of the most popular digital transcription applications are listed here:

• Dictamus (iPhone, free and $14.95)

• Pocket Dictate (iPhone, iPod, iPad, free)

• Voxie Pro Recorder (iPhone, $4.99)

• DictaNet Mobile for iPhone ($11.99, control by tilting your phone)

• FlexT9 Speak-Trace-Write-Tap (Android, $4.99, 4 input options)

• Dictadroid (Android, free and $1.99)

Every week, the Practice Management Resource Center posts a new Tip of the Week. (Here are the archived tips.) To reach a practice management advisor, call the PMRC Helpline at (800) 341-9715 or e-mail questions to pmrcHelpline@mail.michbar.org.

Suing Siri

Or rather, suing about Siri.  You knew it had to happen -- a lawsuit alleging that Apple's iPhone personal assistant Siri just isn't living up to her billing.  And if you had to guess, you'd guess a class action suit in California, brought by a New York resident, right?  And you'd be right. Here's the complaint.

HT: Bullseye

A Handmade, One-of-a-Kind Cease and Desist Letter

For those of us who enjoy a) feeling superior in the face of truly awful legal writing; b) perusing the website Etsy in search of unique, handmade gifts; and/or c) thinking about the way in which the Internet presents new challenges and opportunities for the law and lawyers, this post from the website "Regretsy" is a must-read. A sample of the cease-and-desist letter at issue:

Were one of the statements to be true, truth would be absolute defense. Many of the people making these comments are wreck less fools but the burden of proof is on the person making the comment each of which may be sued individually requiring separate counsel or at our election in such group as we decide. Obviously jurisdiction will lie in California with venue in Los Angeles. There is a requirement under California law that a retraction filled immediately upon request may mitigate damages. So you are hereby notified, and I failure to retract under certain circumstances allows for allegations of punitive damage which will certainly be our intention.

And here's a sample from a letter sent in response to the cease-and-desist letter, from the Regretsy post, "No, You Cease and Desist":

In my seventeen years practicing criminal law, I have only seen such preposterous accusations of crime from pro se litigants and the intractably mentally ill. In addition to being ridiculous on its face, your threat is a direct violation of California Rule of Professional Conduct 5-100(A), which provides that a member of the California bar "shall not threaten to present criminal, administrative, or disciplinary charges to obtain an advantage in a civil dispute." Cease your unethical and unprofessional threats immediately.

The rest of your letter relies on vague and bumptious legal threats buried among misspellings, bizarre malapropisms, misstatements of law, and gibberish. ...

Watching TV on Your iPad

iPhone J.D. uses the $85 EyeTV One on the new iPad and says "wow."

Privacy, Content Ownership, and Google Drive

Worried about privacy and losing ownership of content you upload on Google Drive? Jack Newton at Slaw says "chill."  Just another case of the-lawyers-could-have-done-a-better-job-at-drafting:

Google would have been well-served to borrow a(nother) page from Dropbox's playbook and preemptively couched its Google Drive-related Terms of Service and Privacy Policy's in less-ambiguous (and harder to misinterpret) terms. However, in the final analysis the terms should be acceptable to most users of Google Drive.

Lawyer, Think Like A Hacker

When a hackathon comes to law school, you know that radical change in legal education isn't just an academic fantasy. The classic hackathon involves computer programmers and other tech-types getting together for a marathon session to collaborate in a problem-solving frenzy. Brooklyn Law School adapted the concept to its Incubator and Policy Clinic.  Here's the result:

 

Two Really Sensible, Simple E-Mail Tips

The New York Times has some great advice in "What To Think About Before You Hit Send," but for simplicity it's hard to beat this from Law Department Management Blog -- limit what you send and to put some effort into your subject lines:

A couple of suggestions not covered on this blog heretofore can help tame the unruly beast of e-mail. They appear in Law Practice, May/June 2012 at 63. The author leads into one practical suggestion – send fewer e-mails – with some data. “For every five emails you jettison into cyberspace, you will receive three responses.” Hence, she writes, for every message you don’t write, you will reduce the flow back by 10%. Simple, but effective.

The other tip, strengthen the subject line, has a new wrinkle. A clear subject line helps your reader, to be sure, but it can also help you make the body of your message more concise. Crystallize the gist of the e-mail in your header and you will have thought more clearly about what you write below it.