ABA

Last month I facilitated a panel dialogue which included ethics counsel and a federal judge. The topic was how to better manage client information in the electronic age. With the growth of e-discovery, a bright light is shining on the fact that lawyers and clients are not managing their information very well. In fact, they have a difficult time even knowing what they have until the discovery requests come in. The take-aways from the discussions were: 1) Plan ahead, and 2) Communicate with your client. Planning ahead means knowing what types of information you are creating and collecting, then making sure it is properly handled during its lifecycle. Communicate means letting your client know how their information will be handled. This includes a note in a fee agreement, along with regular communications, up through the point in time the information is ultimately destroyed. The consensus from the panel (as well as the audience) was that this issue will be difficult to address for most lawyers and firms, since the effort needed is non-billable. Additionally, the expertise for how to do this well is outside the firm. But there was also consensus that lawyers should start addressing these issues now, as the standards of care are changing everyday and it will be better to make efforts now instead of waiting for the inevitable ethics complaint or even the malpractice suit.

Despite my (not entirely deserved) reputation as a wired lawyer, I've been among the last of the ABA TECHSHOW team to bid adieu to cell phones that served only to give good phone. I shunned the Treo of knowledge and tasted not of the sweet, sweet Blackberries. Sure, I envied those lawyers who e-mailed great missives from public toilets and slipped the bonds of pedestrian face-to-face conversation in perfect devotion to their thumb keyboard rosaries. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It's been too long since my last convergence. But when my cell phone had such a great time on a recent stopover at Denver Stapleton that it jumped ship to become a permanent resident of Colorado, I finally broke down and bought one of them fancy phones. A Sprint Treo 650. It's everything I thought a convergence device would be: The perfect polygamy of a mediocre phone, a lousy camera and a clunky interface. Though it certainly comes in handy, surfing the web on a tiny screen is painful. Still, the download speed is peppier than I expected. Trading an honest-to-goodness button-depressing phone keypad for its virtual touch screen cousin is a bad deal. Too much of what makes a good cell phone a good cell phone gets lost in these convergence things, but it's not all bad news. I have to confess that I love being able to check email without firing up my inseparable laptop and hoping for Wi-Fi. The ability to download files and store them on an SD media card is great--not the ubiquitous Wi-Fi cloud that dreams are made of, but pretty wonderful. And, as the Internet is the other half of my brain, being able to get to the net anywhere, anytime using an unlimited access plan means I need never spend another fretful minute trying to remember the name of the professor on Gilligan's Island (it was Prof. Roy Hinkley, a role played by Russell Johnson). When you're in line at the airport, the web on a small screen is better than no web at all. Bluetooth is pretty cool, especially if you've got that Seven-of-Nine arrogant android thing going on. Sadly, every time I fiddle with the volume buttons of my blue-glowing bionic ear, I seem to inadvertently hang up on people. Finally, having an MP3 player with me all the time is nice. At least it would be if I ever remembered to put the earbuds in my pocket when I leave the house. There's a special place in Hell for whoever decided to make the Treo earphone jack incompatible with those found on an I-Pod, laptop or noise-cancelling headphone. Like another millimeter would have killed them? So, while I always paid little attention to the Mobile Lawyering talks at TECHSHOW, this year I'm looking forward to all the great advice I'll get about learning to live with and love my new toy. Look for me. I'll be the guy with the blue ear apologizing to the person I just hung up on.

During the past month, Sony BMG Entertainment?s digital rights management technology for CDs has caused an uproar among information security specialists and technology consumers. It is installed on PCs which play the CDs. A security researcher found that it has the characteristics of a rootkit ? a particularly dangerous form of malware which manipulates the operating system to avoid detection and is very difficult to remove. Hackers developed code which exploited the Sony BMG technology. Consumer lawsuits have been filed over it. Sony BMG has recalled the affected CDs and made an uninstaller available (which reportedly has its own problems). Learn about rootkits and other threats, as well as best practices to address them, at several information security sessions at TECHSHOW 2006.

Microsoft has announced that it will finally make its Office file formats open to everyone. They will submit the Microsoft Office Open XML Format technology for consideration as a formal standard. Ecma International, which is a Geneva-based company, will develop the documentation and provide approval of the standard. Following approval by Ecma, it will be submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), also in Geneva.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of ABA TECHSHOW. Coincidentally, November marked the 20th birthday of another technology milestone -- the debut of Windows. On Nov. 20, 1985, Microsoft released version 1.0 of the Windows operating system. It was the year that Ronald Reagan began his second term as president, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, Madonna launched her first concert tour and Kansas City won the World Series. For reminders of how far we have come (or not), take a look at these screen captures (http://internet.ls-la.net/ms-evolution/windows-1.01/) of Windows 1.01 or these Ghosts of Windows past (http://www.eweek.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=25982&a=165144,00.asp) showing versions 3.0 and forward. And what if Windows had not been invented? Writer Peter Coffee imagines If Windows Had Never Happened....(http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1884264,00.asp)