The roadmap to successful information governance
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Engaging stakeholders with effective tactics – Part 1
Headlines today are frequently dominated by d(...)
AI in 2024: Should We Still Be “Moving Fast and Breaking Things”?
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Where are things headed with AI in the coming year? What trends should legal IT professionals be awa(...)
The security-related lexicon pertaining to email scams is rapidly growing. There’s phishing, spear-phishing, ransomware, whaling; and most recently, I heard of ‘smishing’. Not entirely an email scam, but these SMS-based messages have an email like format with email-specific fields in the messages and malicious links hiding behind shortened URLs.
Cybercrime is indeed a global problem, but law firms are especially susceptible due to the large volume of highly sensitive client data they hold on businesses and individuals; in addition to the fact that they are also cash rich.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner for lawyers in the U.S. For many, this time of year is a time to reflect on the positive - to take stock of your life and be thankful for the good things that have come your way. Following a tumultuous election, many are unsure what the future holds. But for me, one constant for which I am grateful is technology and all of the opportunities it provides.
In my experience, social media management is probably the main area of customer engagement where law firms fall flat. Admittedly, it’s a tough nut to crack, whichever industry you’re in, but the legal sector seems particularly bad when it comes to implementing effective social media strategies.
In recent years, I’ve come across countless profiles that have been left to stagnate, languishing in the dusty corners of the Web, deemed unworthy of due care and attention because they didn’t deliver retweets and mentions. After all, who’s going to ‘Like’ a lawyer or ‘Share’ a solicitor, right?
Attorney-client confidentiality is the very foundation of relationships between lawyers and their clients. Client trust would be eroded in the absence of this strict obligation of maintaining confidentiality. It is only because clients know that their communications with legal counsel are deemed confidential that they’re able to provide their attorneys with a full description of the underlying facts and issues that lead them to seek assistance in the first place.
In the course of only a decade, e-discovery has moved from a costly experiment pursued by only the largest law firms to a near necessity for organizations of all sizes. Today, even small and medium firms are adopting the technology, spurred on by the availability of third-party resources, lower implementation costs, the challenge of preserving digital information, and encouragement from judges. Over the last few years, the scope of e-discovery has spread to criminal proceedings, breaking free of its historical confinement to the civil realm. As e-discovery continues to mature, its capabilities and applications will only continue to expand.
ILTACON 2016 is a wrap. All in all it was an enjoyable conference, rife with lots of interesting conversation about the intersection of of law and technology. What stood out to me this year was the increasing number of cloud-based software offerings designed to facilitate better collaboration between litigation teams. I first noticed this trend in early 2015.
Having spent the first part of my career as a corporate solicitor in the magic-circle, I could see first-hand significant inefficiencies within legal practice and the opportunity for technology automation to change the legal landscape forever. It is for this reason that I co‑founded Clarilis with a view to developing and implementing its unique precedent automation platform that is proven to improve the profitability and efficiency of law firms.
I recently came back from ILTA’s fantastic LegalSEC Summit where I learned quite a bit from my colleagues at law firms of all sizes - big and small - as well as a number of amazing vendors. The IT folks in attendance were looking for tips to better influence culture and get a handle on information security. As you might expect, many firms are serious or getting serious about security. But let me tell you, some firms are very, VERY serious about security. At LegalSEC I also had the honor of speaking with Steve Boyce from Microsoft. Our topic was entitled, The Internet of Things Are Lurking. As that information was published I had a number of people reach out to me on the subject of the IoT (Internet of Things).
I’ve been writing about lawyers using cloud and mobile technologies for nearly a decade now. While lawyers have adapted to mobile technology like a fish takes to water (all things considered), cloud computing has been a bit more of an uphill battle due to ethical concerns, among other things.
In 2014, CNN ruffled quite a few feathers by publishing an article, which effectively launched what I like to call the “Robot Lawyer Revolution.” This idea - that many tasks performed by lawyers were rote and could be more cost-effectively handled by AI technology - began to steadily gain momentum.
‘What a difference a year can make,’ said iManage CEO Neil Araujo as he kicked off the company’s ‘ConnectLive’ event in London. The two-day user conference brought together CIOs and IT professionals, technical architects, administrators and many others.
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