LJN Newsletters

Many of our specialist readers are so involved in financial intricacies that it may be difficult for them to answer questions on investment basics from non-initiates. Jim Berliner's clear explanations should be useful not only in advising professionals who earn a large fee but also for any firm member or client who is faced with a major investment decision.

Considering how much damage can result from something as innocuous as a faulty sprinkler system, it may be understandable that many law firm disaster planners previously gave their first attention to common threats, and then never got around to considering large-scale disasters.
Some firms were convinced as a result of 9/11 that such a patchwork of miscellaneous point solutions was inadequate. For other firms, Hurricane Katrina should drive that point home. While we can't expect disaster plans to protect our firms from all possible risks, we should expand our planning perspective to include more catastrophic scenarios.

Key developments in the e-commerce industry.

With the advent of e-discovery, it's impossible to combine today's state of the art e-discovery solutions with yesterday's analog-dictation technology. Having a foot in both worlds is at best inefficient, and at worst can lead to misplaced data or work.
But the dawn of digital dictation has eliminated lawyers' worst frustrations of dictating to tape cassettes. With this new technology, lawyers can treat spoken words like any other digital data, inputting it to a desktop or other computer via a microphone and manipulating it in a digital voice-software file. Lawyers can then move spoken text around, and insert spoken or printed text as well as charts, spreadsheets, photographs and videos and, when they're done, transmit their work to a typist or save it to an audio file for clear and accurate translation into a printed document, or an e-document to be shared digitally or projected for viewing in the appropriate settings.

It is of concern to and important for e-commerce ventures to note that two states ' Michigan and Utah ' now prohibit the sending of certain kinds of e-mail messages to destinations listed on state-maintained registries. The new laws are directly at variance with the policy of the federal government, which so far has declined to adopt a do-not e-mail list.
But unless, and until, the Michigan and Utah registries are declared to be pre-empted by federal law, affected businesses should obtain and comply with those states' registries.

Two courts in the last 8 weeks have overturned the convictions of people accused of using the Internet to solicit sex from minors because the victims were actually law enforcement agents ' not true minors.

Recent cases in e-commerce law and in the e-commerce industry

If the Internet is nongovernmental, then it may generate terms-of-use agreements to prohibit political speech. But if the Internet is governmentally controlled, then Internet users have a First Amendment right to use the Internet for public speech.
The give-and-take of who has the ability and vested authority to control constitutional matters is one in frequent debate, but the principle commonly known as the state action doctrine clearly sets forth the concept that only government actors are subject to certain constitutional limitations. Most important, the state action doctrine is a preliminary test for determining which cases are worthy to proceed on their merits with respect to whether constitutional rules apply.