Information Filled Under 'GTC Law Group' Category
National Broadband Plan: Unleashing Innovation in Smart Homes and Buildings Friday, July 16th, 2010
In case you did not realize that the Broadband Plan had anything to do with energy management in homes and buildings, here are a couple of quotes from the Plan: One of the most important and cost-effective ways to meet national energy goals is to encourage energy efficiency in homes and businesses—but end-users need better information in order to maximize energy and cost savings. And A national Smart Grid policy should encourage tens of thousands of entrepreneurs to innovate—using new technologies and business models—to create a wide variety of in-building energy management and information services. Making energy data available to customers and their authorized third parties,
Be good to Mamma and Mamma (and Papa, uncle Bob and that rich aunt Sheila) will be good to you… Monday, May 24th, 2010On the topic of friends and family financing and how best to structure those agreements, I know we have written about this before, but I think that a topic this nuanced warrants revisiting. Ok, so you’re entrepreneur Joe, and your dad, mom or that rich aunt, who has always spoiled you silly and thought you were God’s gift to this earth, wants to help you and your start-up, so they give you some money to help you get that start
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Be good to Mamma and Mamma (and Papa, uncle Bob and that rich aunt Sheila) will be good to you…
Ari Kaplan is offering a free bonus webinar in his series “30-Minute Thursdays” at 2pm EDT. His series is a paid subscription-based series, but this program is a free bonus edition. He always has great info (for our other posts on Ari click here ). This program will give attendees tips on: * How to Write a White Paper Your Audience Will Read * Converting Print into Multimedia Content * Engaging Your Clients With White Papers * Selling Your Products and Services With Statistics * Thoughtfully Promoting Thought Leadership For more info and to sign up for the event click here
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Thursday, May 20th: free webinar from Ari Kaplan on “Why White Papers Work and How Your Organization Can Benefit”
In follow-up to the success of its live certification program in D.C. and NYC, Catalyst is rolling out its Catalyst CR Certified Reviewers program (CRCR) to LA next week. CRCR is the certification program for Catalyst CR (for information on the software click here ) which is gaining significant market share and being requested by many corporations and law firms due to its many options and easy programmability, and its multi-language capabilities.
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Catalyst is rolling out its reviewer certification training to L.A. next week on May 25th, 26th, 27th
18 May 2010 — Ralph Losey has designed and created an online class for law school on the subject of electronic discovery. It is a three-credit course, entirely online, named Introduction to Electronic Discovery . The students can take this course from anywhere, and can do so asynchronously. At present, the course is offered by the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, and is only open to U.F.
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Online e-Discovery Instruction in Law School Is Now a Reality
7 May 2010 — A federal judge in Los Angeles has declined a request by plaintiffs lawyers in a shareholder class action to force attorneys for Toyota Motor Corp. to turn over documents that were provided to Congress, which has been investigating vehicle recalls associated with sudden unintended acceleration defects. Instead, U.S
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Judge to parties in Toyota securities suit: “resolve the fight over discovery on your own … and you’ve got 1 week”
4 May 2010 — Very often Posse List members get so caught up in the nuts & bolts of e-discovery they don’t get an overall perspective of the trends of e-discovery and litigation. How important is e-discovery to the litigation process? Is extensive e-discovery threatened just to lead to settlement in order to avoid discovery costs? Does e-discovery every lead to the “smoking gun”? Do cases commence with e-discovery simply as an investigative tool to see whether or not facts could be developed that would justify bringing the case? This month’s issue of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel has two very good interviews that address these issues and more. First is an interview with Alan Naar, Vice Chair of the Litigation Department of Greenbaum Rowe
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The Impact Of E-Discovery On Litigation Trends
3 May 2010 — United Air Lines and Continental Airlines announced their merger today. It will create the world’s largest airline by traffic. Delta Air Lines would be unseated as the world’s largest airline. And depending on who you listen to the deal will have little trouble securing approval from the DOJ — or take forever. For those of us who worked on the first attempt by United/Continental to tie up two years ago one thing remains the same: the two airlines have relatively little overlapping routes/infrastructure; the deal will combine complementary networks rather than strip out costs. Continental is strong in South America and across the Atlantic, while United brings the west coast and routes into Asia. So that’s a big point in their favor for DOJ clearance (Continental walked away two years ago because of United’s poor financial health). Scanning the numerous blog posts and media analysis over the weekend, most antitrust lawyers (many former DOJ antitrust lawyers) fell into 2 camps: 1. The deal will be approved in fairly short order — 30 to 60 days: a. Even if the government determines that certain aspects of the transaction are anticompetitive, the parties will have the opportunity to offer a settlement to remedy any antitrust concerns. There isn’t enough route overlap between the carriers to justify killing the deal. b. The unions won’t make a fuss. The pilots (the critical constituent) at both carriers are represented by branches of the Air Line Pilots Association.
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The United Airlines/Continental Airlines merger: a short or long document review?
In an effort to cut expenses, WilmerHale has decided to “in-source” its business operations to Dayton, Ohio. But other law firms could also benefit from relocating support staff and even attorneys to less costly locales beyond the urban hubs according to an article in yesterday’s Law360 . The WilmerHale facilities, which are slotted to open in September, will house the majority of the firm’s finance, human resources, information technology, document review and practice management operations, which are currently spread out between its Boston, New York and Washington offices. And WilmerHale is not alone. In 2002, Orrick Herrington opened a global operations center in Wheeling, West Virginia, a town of about 30,000 near Pittsburgh. The converted warehouse operates around the clock and holds the firm’s help desk, document and transcription production, billings and collections, payroll and other business functions.
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Law Firms Look To “In-Sourcing” To Slash Costs
After at least a year in the making and months of uncertainty, landmark health care reform legislation has been signed into law in the U.S. The new health care law makes sweeping changes to our nation’s health care system.
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The U.S. health care reform legislation: the impact on contract attorney staffing agencies
Throughout our coverage of the Georgetown University Law Center’s conference on “Law firm evolution” ( click here ), the hot topic of conversation was the recent development of entrepreneurial law firms. As discussed by Richard Susskind in his book ‘The End of Lawyers?’ and our interview with him during the conference ( click here ) , innovation is the driving force behind today’s global economy. Successful law firms advise clients on their legal options but they also have the experience and resources to assist clients with coordinating and managing a wide range of service providers such as project managers, deal brokers, accountants, linguists, strategy and management consultants, market experts and valuation experts to name a few. No firm personifies this more than the Washington, D.C
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We start a new series on the “best-of-breed” boutique law firms with Kalbian Hagerty LLP: experts on the Persian Gulf, the FCPA and more
There has been an interesting conversation going on about the recommended path for an experienced e-discovery attorney to transition from law practice into a more technical litigation support or e-discovery consultant/project manager role. It has been a discussion thread on the e-LEGAL group on LinkedIn and Paul Easton has a post about it this past week ( click here ).
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Transitioning from law practice to more technical litigation support/project management work
Updated March 20, 2010 from our original March 13, 2010 post Last week saw the release of the 2,200-page report by Anton Valukas on the Lehman Brothers collapse. Valukas was appointed examiner by the U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee probing the reasons for Lehman’s failure in September 2008. Note: Examiners in bankruptcy cases are appointed to investigate accusations of wrongdoing or misconduct.
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The Valukas Report on the Lehman Brothers collapse: the e-discovery aspects
The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is having a regional event in Columbus, Ohio on March 26, 2010. It is a demonstration of Vestigate by RenewData followed by a roundtable discussion on ediscovery plans. The details: Date: March 26, 2010 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. (Lunch will be provided, sponsored by RenewData Corp.) Location: Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP 52 E.
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ILTA event March 26th in Columbus, OH: “The E-Discovery Plan: Managing a Case from the Beginning”
Every year, millions of people who can’t afford a lawyer find themselves in court, facing the potential loss of property, money, or even their children. LawHelp Interactive is a web-based document assembly program that helps pro se litigants — or volunteer attorneys — prepare needed legal documents. Managed by New York-based Pro Bono Net , the software helps litigants, — as well as pro bono and legal aid attorneys seeking to help more people in less time — create complete, properly formatted legal documents.
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LawHelp Interactive provides online assistance for pro se litigants (managed by Pro Bono Net)
Although other legal and regulatory issues, ranging from financial reform to executive compensation, have firmly grabbed the spotlight, the stealth issue for 2010 may well be data security and privacy. Indeed, a broad class of businesses will face an array of new privacy obligations as a result of new requirements adopted on both the federal and state levels. In addition, Congress is actively considering new data privacy legislation that would, among other things, require firms to notify customers in any instance of a data breach
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The Evolving Landscape of Data Privacy
When Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer was recently asked to comment on enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 2009, he minced no words: “One can say without exaggeration that this past year was probably the most dynamic single year in the more than 30 years since the FCPA was enacted.” He’s not kidding.
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FCPA Enforcement in 2010: Prepare for Blastoff
There is a good article in today’s National Law Journal about the positioning going on by plaintiffs lawyers in the mounting litigation arising from the “sudden unintended acceleration” problems in vehicles manufactured by Toyota. For the full article click here . As we have reported, Toyota has since announced a plan to fix the problems
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Plaintiffs Lawyers Jockey for Venue in Massive Toyota Litigation
Sound project management is vital to any eDiscovery matter. Without it, data can be overlooked, budgets overrun, deadlines missed, and defensibility compromised. To ensure that your eDiscovery matter is managed properly, you need more than just a good project manager; you need a well thought-out process that incorporates quality assessment and control.
March 11th webinar: “Privilege Logs: How to create them, and how to avoid them” Thursday, March 11th, 2010On Thursday, March 11th, at 1:00pm Catalyst is sponsoring a webinar discussion exploring recent e-discovery trends regarding privileged documents, including the Facciola-Redgrave protocol for privilege analysis and best practices for creating privilege logs. This presentation will include: * Analysis of key aspects of the Facciola-Redgrave Framework for avoiding a document-by-document privilege review. * Assessment of ways to integrate enhanced privilege search and culling into your e-discovery strategy; * Review of key elements of privilege reporting and practices to document effectively. To register for the program click here
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March 11th webinar: “Privilege Logs: How to create them, and how to avoid them”
The Morgan Lewis eData team and Recommind are sponsoring what looks to be a very informative live seminar on March 18th (next Thursday) at 4:00pm in the New York offices of Morgan Lewis. The seminar will focus on successfully leveraging technology to improve early case assessment (ECA), preservation, collection, and document review.
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March 18th: live seminar in NYC — Morgan Lewis/Recommind : Using advanced technology to achieve consistent, timely, and cost-effective eDiscovery…
We all know about the paradigm shift in the legal industry. It has been well chronicled by Richard Susskind , Jordon Furlong , Ron Friedmann and many others. The legal industry melt down, the deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind), our relentless connectivity and burgeoning electronic legal marketplace — all have led to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model. But Susskind’s “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources — in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting — has had its biggest effect on contract attorneys who are a large part of our membership base. And the problem is that for the majority of contract attorneys the bulk of their work is not substantive legal advice but highly structured/repetitive functions such as document review, research tasks and processing. And while they benefit from outsourcing/subcontracting they also can suffer from it. When firms find themselves in a financial pinch they slash those that they consider most dispensable: the contract lawyers, part-time lawyers, and support staff. Note: as we have noted, most contract attorneys face two horrendous problems — the enormous debt incurred in attending law school, and the lack of opportunity. People are racking up an average $92,000 in debt because of the implied promise of a high-paying job at the end, and industry predications indicate that there are likely to be less than 30,000 legal jobs available per year — with some 45,000 people graduating from law school every year. Many blogs focus on the massive portion of law school applicants who are extremely ill-informed about the career prospects resulting from a law degree and nobody has covered these issues better than the Tom the Temp blog ( click here ) and the Third Tier Reality blog ( click here ) where both blogs provide statistics and links. But there is another side to all of this and that was recently observed by our industry colleague Gabe Acevedo, founder of Gabe’s Guide ( click here ). In addition to blogging on his site, Gabe is also legal technology contributor to Above the Law , the doyenne of online legal tabloids. Gabe has a knack for picking up on stories you’d probably miss on other sites, offers good comment, and has a large following … which is probably why ATL hired him. In his recent post for ATL entitled “BigLaw’s Status Issue” ( click here ) Gabe uses a post by Orrick partner Patricia Gillette as a jump to make the following points: 1. The wholesale termination of attorneys, based solely on their status, ignores the paradigm shift in the legal industry. 2. The rising, new demographics of the contract attorney market: ex-BigLaw associates, former trial lawyers and government lawyers, retired law professors, and even some former partners. 3. Part-time lawyers, contract lawyers, and lawyers who don’t want to be partners but have a wealth of experience can provide an alternative, cost-effective way of accomplishing a lot of traditional legal work, echoing the thoughts of Richard Susskind and the other members of the “paradigm shift” mob. 4. The growing power of litigation support managers, many of whom are attorneys and — in fact — former contract attorneys. As Ron Friedmann has noted, one of consequences of the paradigm shift in the legal industry is that “what is bad news for law firms could be good news for legal technology managers and legal technology professionals.” Law departments must act to reduce legal spend. If GCs don’t, CFOs and CEOs will step in. Law firm partners like Patricia Gillette “get it”: firms have lost pricing power and face a battle for market share. Winning that battle will require that firms offer clients more value. To do so, firms will get serious about process improvement, project management, outsourcing, and alternative fees. As Gabe mentions in his post and as he has noted several times on his blog, law firms must deploy new technology and new expertise but also use old technology more effectively. This will require more business and technology professionals, in temporary/contract capacities. And the existing contract attorney base — and its newest members — provide that. We can support Gabe’s observations. In the last year we have seen a spike in our membership coming from ex-BigLaw associates, former trial lawyers, government lawyers, forensics consultants, and others. And more contract attorneys moved into project management roles. And it is the reason that our job posts for substantive temporary legal work has increased dramatically. For those on our job lists, you know that the legal recruitment industry is characterized by an enormous surge in demand for temporary legal professionals. This was recently highlighted by Adecco ( click here ). Some of the most sought after temporary legal positions require candidates to have the experience of having worked in a corporate legal division or law firm. We have also seen it in straight document review projects where law firms and corporations have asked for the requisite substantive experience to work on a project. Our job lists have greatly expanded in both geographic range and subject areas (for our job lists click here ). And one thing Gabe and I agree on: in spite of all the challenges we face we are working in a part of the legal industry that is unusual because it is open to sharing and collaboration, through publications, quality conferences, and trade shows, and peer networking organizations. Use these resources. We profile them constantly on our various pages.
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Contract attorneys, “status” and a paradigm shift in their favor … with some observations by Gabe Acevedo
Despite all the talk in the legal world about forms, and there is a lot of it, and despite the great success of the NVCA Series A documents project originally inspired by Sarah Reed, it took Fred Wilson’s recent blog post to create some interesting back and forth commentary on seed forms. Good forms are a wonderful thing. They can save tons of time and cost – each of which is in short supply for early stage entrepreneurs
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Forms for angel and seed investments
Having recently had a pretty bad skiing accident that required surgery and will require a long recovery (while chasing my son down the lift line at Ninety Nine 90 in the Canyons), I have not been able to write many posts, but now that I am past the initial stages of recovery, I have had some time to think about the tech world again. Here is one of the somewhat intractable issues that have troubled me. I know, from internal research at our firm, that the average life of a venture financed client (from the time the company becomes a client until exit) is about 10 years.
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Grand Visions and the VC Model
As a general proposition, with respect to dividends in venture capital style preferred stock, there are two main choices and a third that is rarely; but not never, seen, that is easy to comprehend and then there is a fourth choice that is rarely, seen and is hard to understand, but occurs with some frequency.
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Dividends pay dividends – or do they?
The January issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has an article by Herb Roitblat, Anne Kershaw, and Patrick Oot describing a study that compared computer classification of e-discovery documents with manual review. It found that computer classification was at least as consistent as human review was at distinguishing responsive from nonresponsive documents. Anne Kershaw discussed many of these issues at the Georgetown University Advanced E-Discovery Institute last year ( click here ) and Patrick Oot presented some preliminary findings from the aticle at the IQPC eDiscovery Conference in December. We will have an interview with both in the run-up to LegalTech ( click here ). The documents used in the study were collected in response to a “Second Request” concerning Verizon’s acquisition of MCI. The documents were collected from 83 employees in 10 US states. Together they consisted of 1.3 terabytes of electronic files in the form of 2,319,346 documents. For an overview of the study click here . For a full copy of the study click here
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Computer aided document review has arrived
Student Debt Relief-Income-Based Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness January 20 at 6:00 pm in the offices of Arnold & Porter at 555 12th Street NW Washington, DC The Washington Council of Lawyers is pleased to host this presentation on the most significant law affecting public service in a generation: the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRAA). Whether you are interested in lowering your monthly student loan payments or learning how you can afford a career in public service, this presentation shows you how to do it. From this presentation, you will learn: –how the new income-based repayment plan works, including amendments and revisions –how to qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and –the answers to all your questions about student loans About the Presenter: Heather Jarvis is an attorney specializing in student debt and the nation’s leading expert on the College Cost Reduction and Access Act
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On January 20th: Student Debt Relief-Income-Based Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness