Articles Posted in September, 2006

Fee-Based Legal Research Databases: Lexis and Westlaw are the leaders in online legal research, and I’m glad I have them in my law library, but there are other options that may serve your basic legal research needs, while allowing you to save Lexis and Westlaw for when you need their full-tilt service. Instead of reinventing the wheel and listing all the databases myself, link (with appreciation and thanks to Nancy McMurrer at the University of Washington Law Library) to this recent article. Contact the companies directly or through their web sites for prices for your specific situation.

Search History Privacy: There may be times when you want and need to do everything possible to keep your online searches private (relatively speaking – nothing is truly private online). No method is perfect, but the EFF has posted an article with some good advice. I found this EFF article wandering from Cornell’s InSite, to the Law Librarian’s Blog, and then on to EFF. (Now about that butterfly flapping its wings in Chili ….)

New Self-help Legal Center Blog: BoleyBlogs tells us about a new blog called shlep (I grew up spelling it “schlep,” which doesn’t work with the acronym, [s]elf [h]elp [l]aw [e]x [p]ress), but that is neither here nor there and I won’t make a big tsimmis over it :-). Take a look at shlep and we’ll watch it grow. It’s hosted by the Berkman Center, which does interesting things (an understatement if I ever wrote one).

Plutocracy vs. Plutoectomy: On a lighter but still law-worthy note, if you don’t read Blawg Review each week, you are missing something special. (Keep in mind that I grew up with great parents who somehow made us think that work, e.g. doing the dishes or washing the car or even homework, was fun, which explains a lot about me. Yeah, yeah, I’ve since read Tom Sawyer 🙂

You may, or may not, need a couple of visits to get into the swing of Blawg Review, but then you will just plain cruise with it. This week the topic is Workplace / Employment law.

Last week Blawg Review featured Ernie the Attorney, whose link to this article on Pluto and Constitutional Law by Mark Graber made me laugh because this past weekend every time I put on the radio someone was talking about Plutocracies, which can be very confusing if you’re half asleep and spent the better part of your holiday weekend awake (drinking and eating)-hours talking about Poor Pluto’s demotion. Pluto’s demotion was not unlike Poor George Washington’s demotion when he was bumped in favor of another president when someone decided to rename an airport, which to me will always be [George!] Washington National Airport no matter what anyone else says. And Pluto will always be a planet to me – but I’m not planning to lose any sleep over it so it will only be in my dreams.

Security Breaches and Your Small Legal Practice: Do you think that just because you are a small business that you are immune from security and identity theft breaches or from claims by clients who believe you didn’t take reasonable precautions to protect their personal data? I’m sure you don’t, but …

Do you have a laptop or desktop computer with client files? Is it encrypted and password protected? Do you ever carry personal files in your car – and leave them there while you walk away? Do you have any files, paper or digital, with personal data that ever leave your sight and control? Do you ever send faxes or email messages with personal data on the documents – and do you (or your legal assistants) double check, triple check the recipient phone number or the email address? Do you always confirm receipt of the document by the appropriate party? Do you take your outgoing mail to the Post Office or is your mail ever delivered to a location that others have access to? Do you spend more time and tech-staff money on filtering spam from “Nigerian” scam artists than on other equally, or more, vulnerable privacy and security weak points in your business and home? Do you dispose of your old cell phone responsibly?

You don’t have to get paranoid but just use common sense. Learn from other people’s mistakes. Keep up with identity theft and security and privacy breach news. It’s not hard. Stories about data theft are over the newspapers, blogs, and official web sites. Take basic steps to protect your clients’ data the same way you would to protect your own – and maybe even more. Remember the golden rule, i.e. do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you, so treat your clients’ personal data the way you would want them and everyone else to treat yours. And every time you read about a data security breach, your first thought should be, “that could be me and if it had been, could I have prevented it and what steps would I take to recover from it?”

Profiling and the Law Stories: Bruce Schneier had a post on behavioral profiling in his August 21st blog posting. Anecdotal and scientific information on profiling is useful for lawyers defending clients who have been profiled, for lawyers confronting / challenging eye-witness testimony, and for lawyers who work with law enforcement and security agencies trying to come up with ways to keep us all safe.

Everyone has a story about being profiled or even just “getting the sense” that someone is up to no good. We’ve all heard police officers being ridiculed for saying that they “knew by looking at the guy that he was up to no good.” But it happens to us all. The recent local story reported on KATU’s web site about the young woman who was stopped by a man who claimed to be an “undercover cop” is an example. Her instincts told her there was something wrong (that and his tee-shirt that had “Undercover Police” written on it was a dead give-away – ya think?). And she was right, but was just law-abiding enough not to pay attention to her own survival instincts.

My own notable story was back in the 80’s while working in a Philadelphia jail as a bail interviewer. The defendant’s fingerprints came back clean so it looked as if he had no record. But as I talked to him I had a funny sense that he had been there before. So I sent out his fingerprints to be rechecked. Bingo. They had read them incorrectly. The defendant was no first-timer. If he had been interviewed by someone newer than I or less willing to challenge the fingerprint readers (who were in truth quite nice and more than willing to recheck their work), less “intuitive,” or just not as confident in her intuitions and intangible observations (paying no attention to the young, clean-cut, glad-handing type guy he appeared on the surface) then this defendant would have been free as the wind, ROR (released on own recognizance).