The Underappreciated World of Backups

Backups are often overlooked or taken for granted. Backups are usually just something that supposed to happen but never really thought off. Until the one day comes when a file is needed to be recovered or a server decides to crash and burn and needs to be rebuilt. Then backups become the number one priority. The truth is that backups do play an important role in an organization. An article from Law.com touches on the importance of backups especially in the legal world where e-discovery is becoming more and more popular. The link to the article can be found here. Enjoy!

Mobile Legal Research

Wikipedia defines legal research as "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication of the results of the investigation." Legal research is an important aspect of the legal field. There are many legal research sites available for attorneys to use (the two best known being Westlaw and LexisNexis). With more and more attorneys going mobile, it was only a matter of time before legal research became available on their PDAs. One such app is being introduced by FastCase. Here is a link to Robert Ambrogi’s review of the app. I’m sure that this will not be the only one available but thought this gave a good example of how others will look and how they will function. Enjoy!

Get Linked!

As mentioned in a previous post, the use of social networking sites has increased dramatically in recent years. The increased use is not limited to people’s personal life. Social networking sites are being used to promote people’s professional life as well. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are being used to market businesses and professional services. Lawyerist.com posted a brief article about law students getting a jump on job hunting and making contacts by creating and maintaining a profile on LinkedIn. The article can be found here. Enjoy!

Beware: Social Networking Sites...

Social networking has become the norm in the past few years and seems to grow by leaps and bounds every day. With the increase in popularity of social networking sites comes an increase in litigation involving these sites. I came across a post on the CT Summation blog, or blawg as their blog suggest. This post talks about 2 cases: one involving the Indiana Supreme Court and the other involving the Supreme Court of Iowa. One of the sentences at the end of the post states “Lawyers can expect courts to require expert testimony on how social networking sites work.” I’m not sure what qualifies someone as an expert on social networking sites but I found this post interesting since we are learning about how technology and people interact and how social networking sites can be used in various ways. The post can be found here. Enjoy!

E-Discovery

A couple of weeks ago I went to a seminar on E-Discovery. E-Discovery, or Electronic Discovery, is a term used to describe information that is in electronic format (such as hard drives, PDAs, voicemail, etc...) that is submitted during discovery for litigation. There were 3 presenters at the seminar, an attorney, a computer forensic analyst, and an judge. One of the questions asked of the judge was what was his thoughts on the use of e-discovery. He mentioned that use of e-discovery varies greatly between courts and states but one thing he mentioned that went into his decision was cost. Does the cost of obtaining e-discovery justify its intended use? One article I found interesting on the Electronic Discovery Blog is about how a court turned down the request for e-discovery due to cost. It can be found here. Enjoy!