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 – and Adobe’s PDF format. Here are some news stories about this announcement.
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.
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. 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.
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
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.
A puzzling legal question regarding search & seizure of computers, and the wholesale copying of information from them that usually goes hand-in-hand with computer forensics work.