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.
“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.â€
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.
The New York Times reports (free registration required) on a U.S. News & World Report regarding how law school rankings are computed.
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!
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.
An interesting question: What exactly is “unauthorized” access, as far as computers are concerned? If the answer seems clear-cut to you, you may want to read this article to see how the issue quickly becomes murky. As is often the case, old legal precedents don’t quite work when applied to new technology.
PayPal has this page to help you identify “fake” emails that are actually trying to trick you into giving away personal information. I highly recommend reading it – so much so, that I’m including some of their tips right here.
Just added 2 new law blogs to our links list over on the left. Both are from Massachusetts, so be sure to check them out!
We here at TurboLaw run into similar situations all the time. TurboLaw has a lot of features that many people never use – because they don’t know it’s there. So if this article has inspired you to find the “hidden” treasures in TurboLaw, may I recommend perusing the TurboLaw User’s Manual?
Bruce Shneier had some interesting things to say today in regards to changes in the way HIPAA rules are being applied. I imagine that many of our customers will be interested in what he has to say.
Some interesting book recommendations for lawyers, from Ernie the Attorney.
If you are connected to the Internet and need to register TurboLaw, you can now do it with one click. When prompted, just click the “Register Online” button – and that’s it! You’ll receive a message that says “Thank you for registering TurboLaw.”
In version 2.42, TurboLaw has been significantly overhauled to use the visual style of Windows XP. Users will notice slightly different fonts & colors, which will make TurboLaw easier to use for those with poor eyesight.
To help people remember when their Updates & Support subscription is about to expire, we have added a reminder screen to TurboLaw which will pop up when you have less than 30 days left to your subscription. Once you renew your subscription, the warning will go away. TurboLaw checks your subscription status when it checks for updates, so be sure to check for updates after renewing!
Due to user feedback, TurboLaw’s Automatic Updates now run minimized, so that they do not inturrupt your work – although you can always “minimize” the Update Utility when it is performing updates and continue to use your computer. This improvement comes along with several other mostly cosmetic updates in version 2.38.
This is just a notice to everyone that our yearly Document Updates are done. If you have noticed that TurboLaw has been downloading lots of documents in the past 3 or 4 weeks, you’ve been seeing the effects of our yearly update. As of today, the updates are complete, so there will be no more “mass” updates, until this time next year.
Talking about blogging – and “blawgs,” or law blogs – with Keith M. Survell, the head of development and blogger at TurboLaw Software.
If you are receiving spam emails that say they are from us (@prometheancorporation.com or @turbolaw.com), please rest assured that these emails are not coming from us – they are “fake.” Unfortunately, it is very easy to “fake” the “from” address of an email!
TurboLaw’s own Keith M. Survell talks about the importance of data security in the modern law office – especially since so many files are digitized as PDFs and so forth.
Quoting an article by Bruce Schneier, a highly-regarded authority in the world of computer security & technology, on the topic of “Identity Theft” – probably the biggest crime on the Internet today, and something that many law offices may be especially susceptible to.
Here are some tips straight from Microsoft – keyboard shortcuts, which allow you to complete common tasks without taking your hands away from your keyboard – and that is often much faster and easier than using your mouse.
I know for a fact that many, many people have problems with their browser – pop ups, ads, and just general clutter that ends up in (typically) Internet Explorer. This article describes (in detail) some steps to remove all the junk, extra toolbars, and strange start-up pages that you may have.
TurboLaw’s Keith M. Survell talks about computer technology again – this time pointing out free software you can use to create PDF files, scan for ad-ware and spyware on your computer, and organize your email effectively.
You’re going to be hearing more & more about these types of things as time goes on. My advice: use caution when giving out your personal information!
Thank you to the MBA organizers for this year’s annual conference, and also to the lawyers, both customers and non-customers, who visited our booth. We had a great time in Boston meeting all of you and look forward to next year!