Mini Byte: Tech Travel Time - Eastern Shore Here We Come !!!

Just a quick mention of some wonderful travel resources put together by Pat Yevics and her staff at the Maryland State Bar Association.  Here is a link to the May 2013 Tech Talk e-newsletter that is full of useful links if you are headed to Maryland's Eastern Shore.  These links will help you year-round, whether you are going to the MSBA Bar Convention or not.

Big Law Flunks Computer Skills Test

Here is an article from the ABA Journal by Martha Neil that I will reproduce in its entirety because is short and to the point:

Frustrated by big bills for routine matters, D. Casey Flaherty, who serves corporate counsel at Kia Motors America, struck back with a computer skills test for BigLaw.

Invited to submit a senior associate of their choice for testing, the first nine firms flunked, Flaherty, a keynote speaker, told a large group attending the LegalTech West Coast conference in Los Angeles this week. One firm, he said, flunked twice, reports Law Technology News.

The issue is time, Flaherty explained in his talk on "Raising the Bar on Technological Competence—the Outside Counsel Tech Audit." Multiply a Microsoft Word or Excel task that should take seconds by minutes, especially if it is performed again and again, and it can add up to a significant amount of money at BigLaw firms' billable rates.

"The audit should take one hour," he said, "but the average pace is five hours."

Examples of tasks associates had trouble completing swiftly, because they obviously aren't being trained on such skills, included providing PDF documents for court submissions and getting documents Bates-numbered.

Although Flaherty conducted the skills audit for the nine BigLaw firms himself, he is working with an outside training firm to automate the skills audit. He then plans to provide it at no cost to general counsel at other companies.

An earlier Law Technology News video and two articles (Law Technology News, Jan. 24, 2013. and Law Technology News, Jan. 25, 2013) provide further details.

The practice of law faces many challenges today.  It would do well to learn how to use technology efficiently and to hire lawyers and staff capable of applying technology to meet client needs.  The most amazing part of the story above is that all of the law firms involved failed the test!

Corporate general counsel have long been focused on the bottom-line in hiring outside legal counsel.  When I was a summer clerk at a large law firm thirty plus years ago, the firm had lunches at which guest speakers discussed various aspects of the practice of law. Some spoke philosophically about the practice of law and client relationships.  Some told stories of great legal accomplishments.  One week the firm invited back one of its former associates who was now the corporate general counsel of one of the firm's major clients.  Somewhat shockingly, the corporate general counsel spoke bluntly about managing outside legal costs, going so far as to say that if law firms did not handle basic legal work efficiently, the law firms were likely to find that more and more of this work would be taken in-house and the corporate legal departments might cherry-pick good lawyers from large firms to work for the corporations.

The pressure for efficiency and affordability continues, even with individual clients and smaller law firms.  As lawyers, we need to step up to the challenge, particularly in using technology to accomplish work more quickly and at affordable costs.

Go to Martha's ABA Journal article to read comments submitted by readers. 

Location Services

Keeping your life private these days may be harder than you think.  You can shun social media and decline to "check-in" on Facebook or Foursquare, but you may still be carrying your cellphone around and it could be collecting information on you that your cellphone provider may be packaging and selling.  So reports the Wall Street Journal.

Your data is the big goldmine of online life.  Companies like Facebook and Google have histories on what you like and search and they use it to make money.  This is generally done by using that information to match your activity, likes, and searches with advertisers who may have a product in which you would be interested.

Those pesky ads that slip into your Facebook feed or pop up next to your Google search results are a product of  this type of data mining.  Google recently has been trying to resolve legal and public relations difficulties that resulted from its priority display of advertisers' sites ahead of other hits in its online search results.

The WSJ article points to another well-know fact of modern life.  If you have a cellphone, smart or not, the phone company (a.k.a communications Goliaths like Verizon and ATT) have data on you.  Lots of people may want that data, particularly on where go and who you call or on searches that you make through a smartphone.

One the one hand, you should be concerned about your civil liberty.  When something goes work, government law enforcement agencies, whether federal, state or local, may want to know a lot about you was talking to whom at the time of a certain event.  Think about the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon.  Law enforcement relied very heavily on video surveillance cameras in the area of the bombing to identify suspects.  Later, a cellphone's location tracking helped police follow the suspect's movements.  There is recent story of NYC police chasing down a stolen cellphone using the tracking system, complete with a "French Connection" car chase. (Here are links to reports by UPI, The Blaze and The Times Ledger)

Here's a part of the WSJ article on the new interest that cell carriers have in cashing in on your activities:

The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

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The new offerings are also evidence of a shift in the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google and Facebook.

It is unlikely that large cellphone carriers are going to turn their backs on the money to be made here.  They also insist in the WSJ article that they are taking care not to give advertisers anything that would identify individual users.  So, until we have a stricter set of laws about what happens to your data, the corporate holders of this data are essentially asking you to trust them.

So, what are you to do if you do wish your activities to be mined? You may not be able to do this completely without getting rid of your cellphone or other mobile device --- anything that connects to a network and therefore accumulates data on your activity with whoever runs the network.  But, there are some simple things that you can do to be more careful about the data that is accumulated.  To begin, be careful what you post on social media like Facebook and Foursquare.  When you check-in, you are telling someone where you are and the network will have that information in its storage of data on your activity.

Also, with applications on smartphones (Apple or Android) remember that many of those applications ask you to let them access your location through location services setting on the phone.  Think about that before you authorize such use.  It may make some sense to let the application know where you are when you want to get directions from that location to somewhere else.  What about knowing the weather?  That seems logical, but you can always enter in applications like The Weather Channel app the location for which you want the weather information rather than let your phone tell them where you are in real time.  I have The Weather Channel app set to give me the weather in five or six different places around the world and I am not in all of them (or any of them) simultaneously.

Go to the Settings menu on your phone and go through the applications to see which ones have location services turned on.  Decide (a) whether you need the application at all (our phones are often bloated with applications that we do not use; I am slowly trying to get rid of them) and (b) does it make any sense at all for the application to know where you are?

Also, while it is comforting to know that there is an application that can find your smartphone if it is lost or stolen (or down beneath the cushions on your couch), you may want to consider turning off your smartphone completely from time to time --- for purposes of privacy and just plain old peace and quiet.

Spear Phishing

Marketplace Tech Report ran a story today about the detection of  renewed cyber attacks by the Chinese military against United States government and corporations.  These attacks resumed after a three-month lull.  Earlier this year such attacks drew much publicity, particularly after the Chinese tried to hack into not only American government computers but also major American media computers.

The Marketplace Tech story, however, focused on "spear-phishing", a hacking technique used to gather personal password and gain access to private information.  It involves targeting individuals by email.

Chester Wisniewski, a computer security expert with Sophos and a frequent contributor to Marketplace Tech reports, explained:

 When somebody singles you out as an individual to target with an attack, we call it "spear phishing". They find some way of convincing you that they are the target brand and get you to type in your password and give it to them.

You may have seen email like this, even if you have a spam filter.  I poses as a message from a legitimate website, like your bank or credit card company, saying that a security issue has arisen or a major purchase has been made.  It then directs you to click on an embedded link to obtain more information or contact the company.

This may be easy to spot if you do not have an account with the bank or credit card company, but the email is designed to play on our temptation to contact someone immediately to find out if there is a problem or if someone has used our identity to make purchases on our accounts.  It is playing on our own insecurities in the digital age and our desire to correct things immediately.

If you get an email like this, DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINK WITHIN IT.  If possible do not open the email; view it in a viewer or reader before opening or scan it with a security program.  The embedded links take you to a website that looks like a real bank or business site, but is designed to get you to enter your username and password.  If you do, YOU have been SPEARED.  The bad guys now have your username and password and can start creating real mayhem with them.

If you want to contact legitimate site for this type of email, do it by going to the site using your computer browser and typing in the URL for the site (or looking up customer service for the company online and going to the site).  Or, call the company.  Remember that the customer service contact information for credit card companies and banks is usually on the back of their credit or debit card.   Do not use the links in the email!

And to end with a final reminder:  change or otherwise secure your user names and passwords!  If you have a lot of them, try using a computer service like Last Pass to keep track of them for you and help you change them frequently.