TechnoLawyer: Backup/Media/Storage

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a utility for managing, merging, and synchronizing multiple calendars, a business productivity suite, and a backup utility with versioning and open database capabilities. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Your Nine Lives Each Deserve Their Own Calendar
By Dennis Kennedy
It's hard enough to keep up your calendar and contact list at work, but we all live double, triple, or even quadruple lives, each with its own calendars and contacts. For example, most lawyers do not place doctor's appointments, soccer games, and other family events on their work calendars. Yet synchronizing these other calendars can be a major chore.

Tanner Research's ClearSync gives you a way to manage calendars and contacts for all of your lives — "groups" to use the company's vernacular. Using ClearSync, you can set up multiple calendars and contact lists, and share, protect, and synchronize them as you need.

ClearSync works with PCs and Palm devices, including Palm OS wireless devices like Treos. Using a browser, Macintosh and Linux users can also view calendars and contacts.

The result: Wherever you are — work, home, school, sporting events — you can access contact information, dates, and times for everything going on in your life, thus reducing your chances of missing school plays and birthday parties, or finding, to your surprise, that your kids don't have school on the day of an important work meeting.

ClearSync supports bi-directional synchronization so you can enter or make changes to contacts or appointments on your PC or your Palm device. You can also synchronize your Outlook contacts and calendar.

On both your PC and your Palm device, you can keep multiple calendars, color-code them, and display them one at a time, side-by-side, or as merged calendars. If you use the merged view to show your full agenda, ClearSync maintains the separate underlying calendars, and lets you share each of them — or not — in accordance with the rules you establish.

ClearSync comes in three versions — ClearSync Free, ClearSync Silver, and, ClearSync Gold versions. ClearSync Free enables you to view shared calendars in your browser.

With ClearSync Silver ($19.95 plus $9.95 for each subsequent user), you get the more functional desktop application as well as the ability to create your own calendars, view them side by side or merged, synchronize them with your Palm  and over the Internet, and share them with others.

ClearSync Gold ($59.95 plus $29.95 for each subsequent user) provides wireless synchronization, encrypted online synchronization, and telephone support.  Learn more about ClearSync.

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Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an online repository with Google-like search speed, PDF creation software for thrifty law firms, and a plug-and-play Microsoft Exchange appliance that promises 99.99% uptime for your firm's e-mail. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Finding Needles in E-Discovery Haystacks Very Quickly
By Dennis Kennedy
As electronic discovery becomes a fixture in complex litigation, both law firms and clients seek better ways to handle large volumes of documents. Increasingly, they seem to choose online repositories. Security, features, and other factors play important roles in the selection process. However, speed may be the biggest consideration. Do you really want to enter a complex search through millions of documents and wait minutes rather than milliseconds for your results?

Catalyst Secure's Catalyst CR 6.0 (Grid Edition) attacks the issue of speed directly. The first grid-based document review and litigation support platform, CR 6.0 delivers sub-second response times for complex searches. In audited benchmark testing, CR brought back search results in less than a second in the vast majority of queries even for queries with 750 search terms and 15 million documents.

CR 6.0 uses an innovative grid-based computing system that efficiently uses a large number of servers to generate fast results. The grid runs the well-known FAST search engine, optimized for the types of searches used in electronic discovery.

You can locate the documents you want swiftly using keyword, full-text, date-range, proximity, concept and even bates-number searches. CR 6.0 supports native review of Office documents, e-mail, and hundreds of other file formats, and has been optimized for PDF files. CR 6.0 uses a simple interface for searching designed to give you both flexibility and power. You can save searches, tag results, and manage workflow.

Once you locate documents, you and your team can review, redact, and prepare them for production, especially under tight deadlines. Every party in a case can securely use the CR 6.0 repository.

CR 6.0 provides a secure platform that can scale as your repository grows, but the speed will likely impress you and your team the most.

Contact Catalyst Secure for information about pricing, which depends on the size of the repository.  Learn more about Catalyst CR 6.0.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming December 12, 2006 to TechnoFeature: Someone hacks into your network and destroys all your case files. A Katrina-like hurricane devastates your area. Your office building burns down. The chances may seem slim, but these things can and do happen. Will you be ready? In this article, legal coach and consultant Edward Poll shares his top ten tips for securing your law firm's network before disaster strikes. Learn how to prepare so that if something goes wrong, you won't miss a beat.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming December 8, 2006 to Fat Friday: Harold Burstyn discusses his law career and his experience with age discrimination, Nicholas Bettinger reviews his multiple monitor setup and two utilities that can make such an arrangement even slicker, Channing Strother discusses GPS in the car and the advantages/disadvantages of using your laptop, a portable device, or a built-in unit, Dean Birch explains why his firm's file naming convention does not include dates, and D. Paul Dalton discusses online data storage versus local media. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers three sweet suites — an e-discovery suite designed to expedite the review process, an e-mail archiving suite for securely storing and searching your e-mail, and a suite of online services to help you manage your firm's Web site. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

The Truth Is in Here
By Dennis Kennedy
The new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have lawyers working feverishly to assemble their electronic discovery tool kits. Many have found an overwhelming number of different electronic discovery tools and that electronic discovery involves much more than just searching.

MetaLINCS claims to integrate the core electronic discovery tool sets of search and document review with extensive guided analysis, giving those involved in electronic discovery a powerful, efficient, and complete approach to today's electronic discovery projects. The software addresses multiple phases of the electronic discovery process, from data acquisition to production.

MetaLINCS uses its patent-pending search algorithms to move you beyond plain old search with a unique set of visual tools. These tools combine leading capabilities of social network analysis, thread analysis, related concepts, and dynamic directory. You can sort results by topics, threads, people, and concepts.

In addition to advanced search, MetaLINCS offers you a collaborative platform on which your team can review documents efficiently and less expensively. You can prioritize review, highlight high value data, de-duplicate documents, review and flag key documents, and generate useful statistics on the process.

MetaLINCS also guides users through the review process with a set of visual automated analysis features. You might find relevant information before manual review starts or spot key communications and other patterns, helping you make better strategic decisions.

Because you can organize content by topic, conversation, timeframes and other categories, you can review discovery materials more efficiently, reduce mistakes, and manage workflow by matching materials with reviewers who have the appropriate experience and expertise.

You can use MetaLINCS either as a stand-alone Windows application or through a Web interface. The Web interface uses AJAX technology, which powers much of today's Web 2.0 applications. This technology makes Web applications behave like more like a desktop application. Learn more about MetaLINCS.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming September 19, 2006 to TechnoFeature: Think you can do without the latest and greatest in technology? Got everything you need to get by and keep your practice running smoothly? Attorney Joe Hartley thought so too. In this article, Joe shares his eye-opening experience with a recent hardware malfunction in his law firm. Although he still staunchly believes that lawyers should use technology in moderation, Joe has made some important changes to ensure his firm can sail through future meltdowns without incident. Can your firm say the same?

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Today, most Americans will think for at least a moment about 9-11. Those of us who work in New York's financial district think about it more often thanks to constant reminders — most notably Ground Zero and the security checkpoints. Rather than wait for the official memorial in 2012, I encourage those of you who visit New York to take a look at Ground Zero as well as the temporary memorial in Battery Park.

This being TechnoLawyer, did 9-11 teach us any managerial or technology lessons? Yes. These five in particular:

• When telephone networks get jammed, don't panic. Instead, use e-mail, instant messaging, and the Web to communicate. On 9-11, we published a brief newsletter suggesting that TechnoLawyer members experiencing telephone problems try using the Internet. Many TechnoLawyer members thanked us, admitting that they had not considered the Internet. Nowadays, perhaps no one would need such a reminder, but people still have an inclination to reach for the phone during emergencies, which ties up the lines.

• At the very least, keep a radio with batteries and several flashlights at the office. It also couldn't hurt to have a spare battery for your laptop. A cell phone with e-mail capabilities would enable you communicate on the go with a large group of people — provided your network stays up.

• Store your firm's e-mail, computer files, and other electronic data offsite on at least a weekly basis. Replacing computers and even software is relatively easy. Not so data. For data, many solutions exist — from dedicated online backup services to using your own hosted FTP server. For e-mail, you can choose from a growing number of providers. TechnoLawyer sponsor NTT America recently published a white paper about e-mail archiving entitled Hosted Archiving for Peace of Mind.

• Create an emergency plan for your firm. Even a simple one is better than none at all. For example, set up an e-mail list using an easy-to-remember address (everyone@yourdomain.com) so that employees can easily reach everyone at the firm. Maintain a firmwide address book, including contact information for a spouse or other family member to contact in the event you cannot reach a colleague.

• Educate your staff about where they work. On 9-11, the subways stopped running. Those who knew about alternative forms of egress from the financial district (back streets, bridges, ferries, etc.) had an advantage.

Let's hope none of us will ever need to put our emergency plans into motion.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming August 25, 2006 to Fat Friday: Kurt Schoettler, a technology trainer, adds his two cents to the software training debate, Jerry Sullenberger discusses the risks of solely relying on RAID technology as a backup solution, and Robert Browning explains how his unique eyesight works with multiple monitors. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a service that can prove the sending, receipt, and content of an e-mail message, an online backup and document management tool, and an e-mail add-on that can convert attachments into secure PDF files. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Proving You Sent that E-Mail Message
By Dennis Kennedy
"But I never got your e-mail!" "That's not what your e-mail said!" "You never gave me that advice!" With today's overly-aggressive spam filters — not to mention less than honest adversaries and even clients — you need a simple and secure way to confirm and archive legal advice and other information sent via e-mail.

In technical terms, law firms realize they may need to show proof of sending, proof of delivery, and even proof of content (it's easy to edit an e-mail message after receipt) for important e-mail messages to prevent disputes.

The Registered E-mail® System available from BlumbergExcelsior offers a solution to protect senders of email, and it works whether or not the recipient has enrolled in the System. The service generates and returns a "Registered Receipt™" to the sender. All information necessary to verify the Registered Receipt™ and to reconstruct its original content is embedded within the receipt itself.

Each receipt contains an audit trail of information, including recipients and their email addresses as well as their e-mail servers and client programs. Receipts also contain a "digital fingerprint" — the time delivered, received, and opened, a copy of the original message with any attachments, and other information about the transmittal. These Registered Receipts conform to statutory requirements and prove both delivery and content. The Registered E-mail® System does not store any e-mail with a third party, making it truly secure.

You buy the service on a per use basis (starting at 79 cents per use) with stamp-like package plans available in which you can pre-pay for a pack of Registered E-mail® units for use by anyone within your firm. A free trial enables you to send 10 e-mail messages at no charge.

Learn more about the Registered E-mail® System.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 30, 2006 to Fat Friday: Nerino Petro reviews his experience using the Hitachi Travelstar notebook upgrade kit, James Sayre reviews outlining tools Treepad and Keynote, and Rick Cloud discusses his method for keeping track of file creation dates. In addition, this issue features links to 10 additional Posts in the TechnoLawyer Archive. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.