The cloud will soon be as ubiquitous in legal as it is in other businesses. It's inevitable. As our reliance on the cloud grows, it's more important than ever for lawyers to understand how they connect to the cloud, the evolving risks that apply to them and what questions they need to ask to ensure confidentiality and privacy for their firms and their clients.
Law firms are metrics-driven organizations, and the need for accurate metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) will only continue to increase as law firms answer the client's demands to re-tool service delivery and organizational structure. This need for metrics-driven analysis now extends to the firms' research services, a heretofore last bastion of resistance to technology and measurement.
Today, everything seems mobile. Legal professionals have been slightly less hurried to embrace the wonders of mobility as a part of their work. Certainly, they use mobile devices and apps in their personal life just like everybody else, but because of tradition and habit, many have been hesitant to adopt these things as part of their working lives. However, this is changing ' and in some cases dramatically.
The unfortunate reality is that companies regularly involved in litigation can expect to pay service providers (a.k.a., "vendors") a substantial sum of money for e-discovery services. Estimates indicate that companies will spend nearly $10 billion annually on e-discovery in the coming years. Are companies getting their money's worth for these services? What can companies do to extract maximum value from their e-discovery service providers?
A team from Manatt, Phelps & Phillips rebuffed a would-be class action by people who got unwanted dirty text messages from a phone sex provider.
California's utility regulators last month fined Uber Technologies Inc. subsidiary Rasier-CA LLC $7.6 million for failing to submit operations records on time last year.
The lead singer of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven has filed a proposed class action against Spotify that accuses the music streaming service of an 'egregious, continuous and ongoing campaign of deliberate copyright infringement.'
In 2011, a 23-year-old student of data privacy law wondered how private his data was. Max ?Schrems of the University of Vienna asked Facebook for everything they had on him. Schrems sent two emails and got no response. A letter. No response. A phone call. No response. Then, as his lawyer, Wolfram Proksch of PFR in Austria, tells the story, ?Schrems received a mystery package in the mail with the data he had requested, perhaps from a secret privacy sympathizer at Facebook.
A casino operator's recent lawsuit against an IT security firm it hired to investigate a data breach could pave the way for similar lawsuits to be brought by clients dissatisfied with the quality of IT security contractors' work.
Cybersecurity and an increase in data breaches isn't merely a U.S. problem. On Dec. 21, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a self-regulatory organization that helps oversee the country's trading industry, released two guides to help investment dealers protect themselves and their clients against cyber attack.
