Utah and Michigan 'Do Not E-mail' Programs Take Effect
September 20, 2005
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.
Standing Near the Cliff Edge
September 06, 2005
There is a tsunami wave coming to law firms caused by an earthquake out there called value billing. Every law firm, small to large, will be affected. The wave will wipe out and suck out to sea the old guild culture, organizational structure, the products and services, and the compensation systems. Although the idea has been around since the publication of books in 1989 and 1992, titled Beyond the Billable Hour and Win-Win Billing Strategies, respectively, there has been little progress throughout the legal profession. Lawyers still expect to bill by the hour based upon the false assumption that effort equals value. Clients are changing their views of value added. We are entering a new era where law firms must change the way they must serve clients and value partner contributions.
Not All Property Rights Are Created Equal
September 01, 2005
You've been there and know the terrain: The law breaks property into two categories -- real and personal. If the object of a transaction is found to be personal property, then it is subsequently categorized as either tangible or intangible. In the realm of interconnected networked computers, however, although broadly categorized as personal property, Internet property has characteristics of tangible and intangible property. Consequently, attorneys must take the special nature of Internet property into consideration when attempting to resolve or avoid legal difficulties relating to an Internet transaction, something, of course, to which e-commerce ventures find themselves at ongoing risk and dealing in round-the-clock daily.
Losing Grasp Of Technology
September 01, 2005
Let me say one word: Internet. Now, how about a couple more: Broadband Access. It's my contention that the security problems we face today in the forms of unsolicited e-mail, virus infection, phishing scams and the dreaded identity-theft issues are the direct result of giving access to powerful computers attached to the Internet via broadband access to users who are unqualified to own, use and operate such technology.
Keeping Up With Keeping Up
September 01, 2005
Compliance -- dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in a regulated business -- has always been difficult. The slightest error can lead to fines, a business shutdown or even jail time for executives.
Solo Aims To Blog His Way To New Clients
September 01, 2005
The small town of Storrs, CT, may soon become the center of the law-blog universe. Andrew W. Ewalt, a solo practicing in the shadows of the University of Connecticut, is a guinea pig for the wildly growing technology, which to date has largely been passed over by the legal profession as a marketing tool.
Mastering And Managing Documents
September 01, 2005
The attorney's own realm is no different from any other revenue-generating quarter -- e-commerce or good old-fashioned bricks and cement -- in one truism of the Technology Age: Document management is the most daunting challenge for today's law office. Regardless of the size of the law firm, mountains of file folders and forests of paper are piling up daily in every law office as quickly, and as momentously, as in the offices of their clients. Traditionally, the answer to this challenge has been to hire more clerical staff, more paralegals, and more attorneys and then to scramble to assess and assign outsourcing contracts to help erode some of the paper mountains popping up all around the legal-office landscape.
Keeping Tabs On Internet Identity
September 01, 2005
No technology issue concerns -- or should concern -- individuals, e-commerce and government regulators more than Internet identity theft. The statistics are staggering. In the last year, LexisNexis reported that unauthorized people apparently took personal information on more than 30,000 Americans from its database -- by stealing logins and passwords of legitimate customers. Another data broker, ChoicePoint Inc., reported a possible theft of similar data from as many as 145,000 people through individuals claiming to have legitimate and legal use for the data they purchased from ChoicePoint. But those numbers look small (except, of course, to the affected individuals) when compared with the identity-theft problem acknowledged by Bank of America -- involving about 1.2 million federal employees.
Can You Keep A Secret?
September 01, 2005
When a number of blogs posted secret details and drawings of Apple Computer's new music technology -- code-named Asteroid -- Apple's lawyers did what lawyers do: They sued the Web sites to find out the posters' identities and sources.
Filtering Through Regulatory Compliance
September 01, 2005
The advantages of doing business in a digital economy -- paperless transactions, instant communication, effortless administration and reaching out across borders to far-away locations to collaborate with partners in a virtual community -- are precisely the risks of doing business in a digital economy.
