Is the information you post via social media of potential governmental interest? Probably not, but still, it’s possible.
To bring home the point, Twitter just issued its first Transparency Report. That report details the number of government demands it has received for user information in the first six months of 2012.
What do the numbers reveal?
Continue reading “Twitter Transparency Reveals Government’s Social Media Demands”
Partner Sheila Raftery Wiggins was featured in an article on eDiscovery in NJBiz. Here is an excerpt:
Sheila Raftery Wiggins, a partner at Duane Morris LLP, says people communicate more from home, while traveling and over the Internet, creating more possible evidence for companies to store.
During litigation, the process of electronic discovery — reviewing and identifying what electronically stored information, out of potentially millions of documents, needs to be turned over to the opposing party — often is cumbersome and costly for companies, but a recent court ruling might lead to the more widespread acceptance of technology that could save companies money and time.
Read the rest of the article on the NJBiz website.
Lawyers should know how to protect information belonging to their firms and their clients, right? Well, perhaps they can do a better job, according to The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, it’s now more important than ever for lawyers’ cybersecurity skills to get up to speed.
According to the article, hackers intent on insider trading may target attorneys who handle merger and acquisition transactions. They could put links in text messages that, when clicked on smartphones, activate malware that could log keystrokes and record phone conversations.
Continue reading “Lawyers Must Do More To Protect Cybersecurity”
Eric Sinrod, a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP, was quoted by The Washington Post in an article about a federal email spam jury trial. Click here to access the full article.
The Internet yields all sorts of disputes. Take the nine-year-old Scottish girl who was banned from posting photographs of school meals on her blog, which caused a firestorm of criticism.
Martha Payne, who by now has had in excess of three million hits on her blog at NeverSeconds.blogspot.com, started posting photos of her Scottish primary school lunches at the end of April. BBC News report that her “food-o-meter” rated each meal in terms of healthiness and how many mouthfuls it takes to consume the meal.
Continue reading “Blog Food Fight Leaves Egg On School’s Face”
Many people use the same password for all of their accounts. Why? Because it is easy to remember just one password across all accounts.
But is that a good idea? Nope. If that password were to fall into the wrong hands, it potentially could be used more pervasively to the disadvantage of the true password holder.
And this is not a hypothetical concern. Indeed, recent press reports are rife with disclosures of major password hacks/leaks.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recently amended the Pennsylvania Rules of Civil Procedure to officially include the discovery of electronically stored information. The amended rules become effective August 1, 2012.
Changes to Rules
Amended Rule 4009.1 includes “electronically stored information” among the list of items a party may request. The person requesting electronically stored information may specify the format in which it is to be produced and the responding party may thereafter object. If no format has been requested, the responding party may produce electronically stored information in the form in which it is ordinary maintained or in a reasonably usable form.
Thermos. Yo-Yo. Escalator. Zipper.
All are examples of trademarks that have seen their legal protection disappear in the United States. These innovative terms have over time become so associated with products that the terms are deemed generic and thus not necessarily deserving of intellectual property protection.
Is Google there now?
Once upon a time, collecting music was a clunky experience, to say the least. Vinyl albums (while you might like the sound they provide) are large and take up a lot of space. And though tapes and CDs are smaller, they can add up in terms of storage needs, and none of the above are easy to navigate in terms of finding genres, artists, or songs. Moreover, of course, they cannot really be “shuffled” in a meaningful way.
Nowadays, music can be stored with hardly any storage concerns and can be searched and retrieved almost by magic. I must confess, I am a music junkie. When I open iTunes, I have tens of thousands of my songs at my fingertips. I store my songs on a 750-gigabyte external hard drive, and I can transfer and load up to 15,000 songs on my 160-gigabyte iPod. Not bad, eh?
Once upon a time, it was widely believed that electronic discovery would streamline litigation, making it faster, easier, less burdensome, and less expensive. So, now that we are some years into the e-discovery experience, has the prediction come true? Sadly, not necessarily.
While it is true that it can be easier to retrieve information electronically by using search terms, rather than sending teams of associates into warehouses to rummage through boxes of documents, that is just the tip of the iceberg when considering the overall e-discovery effort. And even if vast quantities of electronic information can be brought up based on a simple search, that information had to be harvested at the front-end, and ultimately will need to be reviewed at the back-end.
Continue reading “E-Discovery Is More Costly, Burdensome Than You Think”
