TechnoLawyer: TL Editorial

Nearly every day, the mainstream media reports that the amount of spam sent continues to increase. To which I say: So what? The amount of spam sent is irrelevant. What matters is the amount of spam received by end users like me and you. Thanks to a shift from content filters (which tend to block legitimate e-mail) to more sophisticated methods (such as sender authentication) at large ISPs, the amount of spam received has steadily declined. Thankfully, one mainstream publication — TechNewsWorld — is reporting on this important development. Read more.

Update: I may have to change the title of this Post. AdWeek has published an article about the decline of spam. According to the article, "Microsoft said Hotmail users are receiving 60 percent less spam than a year ago, and AOL said user spam complaints in March were down 85 percent from a year earlier." Read more (abstract available for free; full article requires paid subscription).

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.

Fenwick & West's San Francisco office recently went shopping for a disaster recovery system. The firm retained InMage whose fees amount to just 10% of the fees proposed by AT&T, IBM, and Sunguard. InMage has its sights set on helping a segment of the market that has traditionally not engaged in disaster recover — small and middle market businesses, including medium and large law firms. Read more.

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.

Via DennisKennedy.blog comes news of a Law.com article about how some law firms have removed associate bios from their Web sites to prevent poaching by headhunters. This development reminds me of an incident during my first year of practice at Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Although we had just started our jobs, we first years started receiving calls from a legal recruiter.

Rumor had it that the recruiter had somehow procured a copy of the firm's phone book. This being 1993, the recruiter certainly didn't get our contact information from the firm's then non-existent Web site.

Just as you cannot stop the onward march of technology, you cannot stop a determined recruiter by stripping your site of associate bios (Wayback Machine, anyone?). However, as the Law.com article suggests, you can thwart a recruiter by creating a work environment that associates wouldn't want to give up. Easier said than done, but not impossible.

Update: Monica Bay, Larry Bodine and Bruce MacEwen have also weighed in this topic..

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.

Last summer I was horrified to learn that my then girlfriend kept all of her e-mail in her inbox — a classic piler! As for me, I'm a filer. You'll never find more than 10-15 messages in my inbox — I always delete or file after reading and, if necessary, responding. LifeHacker, which we covered on February 23rd in TechnoLawyer NewsWire and which has quickly become my favorite non-legal blog, recently covered this topic. What do you think?

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.

Desktop search software is a hot topic as evidenced by all the reviews in our Fat Friday newsletter. Goebel Group, a search technology integrator, has published a handy chart comparing/contrasting all the major desktop search tools such as Google Desktop Search and X1. My one question about this emerging market — will all the free products harm traditional players such as dtSearch and Enfish that pioneered this market, or will the fee-based products be able to differentiate themselves?

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.

With all the Firefox reviews and tips in recent editions of our Topical Compilation newsletter, I thought it worth pointing out that PC Magazine has published a helpful article entitled Top 15 Firefox Extensions.  Caveat — many of the utilities reviewed are still in beta release. FoxyTunes 1.1 gets my vote as the most intriguing — it permits you to control iTunes or other music software from within Firefox.

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.

We regularly feature your monitor reviews in our Fat Friday and Topical Compilation newsletters. Thank you for sharing!  Now, it's our turn.

We just bought an NEC-Mitsubishi LCD2060NX 20.1 inch LCD monitor and hooked it up to both a Mac and PC using an ioGear KVM switch.  So far, so good — great image quality and no dead pixels — plus Amazon shipped it in two days for free.

Why this monitor?  One reason — most 19/20 inch LCD monitors have an optimal resolution of 1280x1024, but this model has an optimal resolution of 1600x1200 — that's a lot more real estate in the same footprint.  Price: $780 at Amazon.  Read the review in PC Magazine.

As always, shortly after you research and buy a monitor, you learn about another model with even better specifications.  This week's issue of PC Magazine contains a review of Samsung's SyncMaster 213T 21 inch monitor, which has a 1900x1200 resolution.  Price: $900 at Amazon.

Update: Dell periodically sells the Samsung SyncMaster 213T for as low as $827.96. Also, Samsung sometimes offers a rebate on this model. My thanks to Dennis Kennedy for this tip.

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.

An incredible 67.8% of TechnoLawyer members use Adobe Acrobat.  If you use Acrobat, listen up — tomorrow's edition of our TechnoFeature newsletter will contain an exclusive review of Acrobat 7. Here is the synopsis:

Acrobat 7's Seven Most Notable New Features
In this article, CaseSoft CEO Greg Krehel reviews the seven new features of Adobe Acrobat 7 likely to generate the greatest interest among lawyers, paralegals, and legal assistants. Additionally, Greg also explores the differences among the five different products in the Acrobat family. This article contains 1,301 words.

Incidentally, for those of you who use both Acrobat and CaseMap, Greg asked me to pass along the following: "There's a new "Send-to-CaseMap" Plug-in for Acrobat 7. You can obtain it at no-charge. The behavior of the Plug-in remains 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.

Last week at the LegalTech trade show in New York, I had the good fortune to attend a blawger dinner on January 31st and a blawger luncheon on February 1st. Needless to say, I had a great time and learned a lot.

Dennis Kennedy (look for his first TechnoFeature of 2005 later today) and Matt Homann organized the dinner with help from Bruce MacEwen who chose the restaurant (Ruby Foos). Also in attendance were blawgers Arnie Herz, Josh Fruchter, Marty Schwimmer, and Johnnie Moore.  Debbie Ausburn also joined us (look for her TechnoFeature on digital briefs this spring). Of the many dishes we sampled, I most enjoyed the Kung Pao Chicken (at least, that's what I think it was).

Robert Ambrogi and Monica Bay organized the luncheon at the Marketplace restaurant in the Hilton. Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann, and Bruce MacEwen were in attendance as well as blawgers Larry Bodine, Carolyn Elefant, Tom Mighell, and Ron Friedmann. Also in attendance were Stacey Artandi and Jennifer Collins, Lisa Solomon, Russ Curtis, and a few others whom I didn't have a chance to meet. Bob Ambrogi documented the event. You can also find headshots here thanks to Monica Bay and Russ Curtis.

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.

Blinkx, which we covered recently in TechnoLawyer NewsWire, has launched version 2.0 of its desktop and online search software.  Among its new features, Blinkx 2.0 can now search for TV clips on the Internet.  Also, a beta of Blinkx 2.0 is now available for Mac users.

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.