Archive for 2005

Treating Machines like People

There is a very interesting discussion going on over at The Volokh Conspiracy regarding whether legal doctrines, when applied to machines or computers, should treat the machines/computers as people.

Daire and Smith are interesting cases, I think, because the outcome apparently hinges on how to apply legal doctrines designed for people in the case of automated machines. The question is, do you treat the machine as a stand-in for a person, or do you treat it as something else? On one hand, the instinct to anthropomorphize computers seems natural; computers are designed to perform tasks on their user’s behalf, and it’s easy to model them as mechanical servants. On the other hand, computers are just machines, and pretending that they are people seems inappropriate in a wide range of cases.

Definitely check it out, and especially the comments – it’s quite an interesting question!

TurboLaw Criminal Released

Here at Promethean, we’ve been thinking of doing a Criminal Law section for TurboLaw for a long time. And some people have been waiting for us to come out with Criminal for an equally long time.

Well, the wait is over. TurboLaw – Criminal Law (for Massachusetts) is now available. If you have our General Practitioner’s Suite (which almost everyone does), the next time you check for updates in TurboLaw, you’ll automatically receive Criminal Law. If you can’t check for updates, or if you don’t have TurboLaw at all, give us a call at (800) 518-8726 and we’ll be happy to help you.

Since the Criminal section will ultimately contain over 500 documents (making it the largest section of TurboLaw to date), we decided to initially release it with less than all of those documents. As of the date of this posting, there are about 130 documents available for TurboLaw’s Criminal section – and more documents are being slowly added all the time. (Current TurboLaw users with slower dial-up connections will be thanking us for taking this approach to the release of Criminal.)

So if you’ve been holding off on getting TurboLaw – wait no longer! Give us a call at (800) 518-8726 or email sales@prometheancorporation.com for more information.

Lawyers like to Blog

The New York Times has this article about how popular law blogs (sometimes called “blawgs”) are becomming with lawyers. From the article:

“It’s all words, that’s all the law is,” Scott Turow, a lawyer and the author of “Presumed Innocent” and other novels, said when asked to speculate on reasons for the proliferation of law-related blogs, sometimes called blawgs. When people think of law, he continued, “You think of jails and marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is, that’s what it is – it’s all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the written stuff and the spoken stuff.”

Open-Source Massachusetts

Recently, Massachusetts announced that all documents “created and saved” by state employees from the beginning of next year “would have to be based on open formats.” These open formats include OpenDocument, which is used by OpenOffice – the open-source competitor to Microsoft Office – and Adobe’s PDF format.

Here are some news stories about this announcement:

Legal worries led Massachusetts to open standards – ZD Net
US state embraces open standards – ZD Net
Massachusetts Mandates Open-Format Documents, Edges Towards Linux – eWeek

Although TurboLaw does not (yet) work with OpenOffice, there is a free program available to let you save any document in PDF format, thus complying with the above-mentioned rule. The program, called “PDF Creator,” is available for download by clicking here. PDF creator is easy to install and works perfectly alongside TurboLaw.

Wi-Fi in Traffic Court

Ernie The Attorney has an interesting story about how a laptop, a Wi-Fi wireless signal, and some quick thinking saved one person from a traffic violation.

Law School Rankings

The New York Times reports (free registration required) on a U.S. News & World Report regarding how law school rankings are computed.

Better Conflict of Interest Check

When we added the Conflict of Interest check to TurboLaw, we never imagined that people would come to depend on it as much as they have.

Of course, once we learned how much people were using it, we immediately set out to make it better!

The new Conflict of Interest check in TurboLaw can show you exactly which case (or cases) may contain the conflict, as well as the individual person who caused the conflict. You can even print the report for later!

However, that’s not the only improvement. We’ve added a Consultation List to the “View” menu, so that you can add arbitrary people to TurboLaw, so that it can check them for conflicts of interest.

As always, if you have a suggestion about how we can make TurboLaw better, please let us know!

Finding Confidential Information Online – By Mistake

From Bruce Schneier’s blog and Boston.com:

Tax liens, mortgage papers, deeds, and other real estate-related documents are publicly available in on-line databases run by registries of deeds across the state. The Globe found documents in free databases of all but three Massachusetts counties containing the names and Social Security numbers of Massachusetts residents….

It’s easy to say “we haven’t seen any cases of fraud using our information,” because there’s rarely a way to tell where information comes from. The recent epidemic of public leaks comes from people noticing the leak process, not the effects of the leaks. So everyone thinks their data practices are good because there have never been any documented abuses stemming from leaks of their data and everyone is fooling themselves.

It can only be a matter of time before a lawsuit is filed because of this type of data leak. I wonder what the repercussions of that would be?

What is E-Discovery?

Ernie The Attorney has a very interesting and informative write-up on what all the hubbub is regarding e-discovery. If you’re not sure what e-discovery really is, and why it might be a “hot topic” these days, you should definitely read this article.

LegalTech

Ernie The Attorney reports on his experiences at the LegalTech conference in Los Angeles. He has some interesting observations:

It’s too bad that more lawyers don’t attend conferences like this one: there were several great programs that required no special tech-awareness. In fact, the session about ‘Coping with E-Mail Overload’ was one of the most useful programs I’ve seen recently. Obviously, you don’t have to be a techie to understand that E-Mail is something that needs to be carefully managed.

Some of the other things he talks about are E-Discovery, software training (a touchy subject for many law firms, as we ourselves have seen), and the e-mail problem (too many e-mails, too little time).

All in all, it’s a very worthwhile read.

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