Civil

Barker-Homek v. Abu Dhabi Nat’l Energy Co. (E.D. Mich.) – Former Taka CEO claims he was forced out of the energy company after trying to stop “kickbacks, bribery, accounting fraud and corruption”

Estate of Justin M. Newman v. Squire (Ill. Cir.) – Wife, husband’s estate to pay $6M to estate for murder, conspiracy

Interval Licensing LLC v. AOL, Inc. (W.D. Wash.) – Microsoft co-founder claims AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix and others infringed upon four of his company’s patents

Criminal

U.S. v. McCluskey (D. N.M.) – Escaped convicts charged after allegedly murdering a couple so they could steal a camper

Each week, our colleagues at Westlaw feature interesting materials, documents and videos from high profile cases in the United States. The summaries of that content are available for viewing by clicking High Profile Cases, Courtroom Videos & Trial Docs.

Login is required on Westlaw.com after clicking on the links provided in the summary of each case.

An article (registration is required) written by Lee Ann Enquist, vice president of Professional Development at West LegalEdcenter, addresses the emerging relationship between lawyers and the iPhone.

In Lawyers Enjoy New Level of Productivity with iPhone Technology, several attorneys shared their views on how the iPhone impact their professional lives. All believed that the iPhone allowed them to keep up-to-date with important information when they were on the go, but they also felt the CLE Mobile app was one of the most valuable assets of having their phones.

West LegalEdcenter launched CLE Mobile in December 2009. The app lets iPhone and iPod touch users download audio courses to earn CLE credits.

Due to the increasing use of the iPhone in the legal world, law firm information technology departments have begun to rethink their mobile support strategies to ensure that mobile devices are compatible with other office technology.

In order to keep up with the growth of iPhone use among practicing attorneys, Enquist argues that the legal industry must continue to create meaningful applications that allow attorneys to be more productive.

You can read Enquist’s article by registering at the West LegalEdcenter site.

Now it’s time for the corporate world to see the benefit, too.

CLEAR is now available to the corporate market. So the same relied upon content, including access to live gateways, will now be available for corporate security and investigations professionals.

“The great thing about the last two years with Thomson Reuters is we have had the opportunity to really enhance the CLEAR product to meet any type of investigator’s needs,” said Steve Rubley, vice president and general manager, Risk, Fraud and Investigations for Thomson Reuters, Legal,

Customers agree, saying “CLEAR gave us a direct hit on the target,” and “one of our investigators was looking for an individual with a common name – he was able to locate a direct match thanks to CLEAR’s web analytics filter.”

Rubley also mentions the web analytics advantages of CLEAR over simple web searches in this audio clip.

You can watch a demo about CLEAR and read more about it.

In “The Innovation Paradox,” Lisa Rohrer explains that law firm leaders are apprehensive about innovation because of potential risks, despite their belief that innovation is extremely important to a firm’s strategic goals.

Rohrer asserts that this caution is quite common in law firms, due to the fundamental nature of the profession:

“I hear all the time from our law firm clients: ‘We do not tolerate mistakes.’ And that’s probably the right attitude when it comes to client work. Add to this that lawyers are trained to minimize legal risks and it’s understandable that law firms are more risk averse.”

She also considers whether the solution to apprehension is embracing mistakes:

“People trying new approaches to solving difficult problems are going to make mistakes. If they’re not making some mistakes, they’re probably either not being honest with themselves or they’re not trying hard enough. The prevailing view there is that you learn a lot more from failure than you do from success.”

Lisa Rohrer leads research on the changing management models and structures in law firms as Hildebrandt Baker Robbins’ director of research and is based in Washington, D.C.

You can read her full post on the LawVision blog.

Consider an alternative legal career in state or local government.

An article on AttorneyJobs.com titled “State and Local Government Careers for Attorneys,” written by Nancy Carver, discusses the many options of working as an attorney in state or local government, a career path that perhaps many have not thought of before.

Carver explains what kinds of career opportunities are available in state and local governments, as well as other important considerations, including:

-Why to work in state and local government as attorneys.

-How to find openings in state and local governments.

-Income variances based on locations.

You can find Carver’s article on the Career Resources tab at AttorneyJobs.com, part of Thomson Reuters.

Attorneys and JDs can search for alternative legal careers on AttorneyJobs.com and can now preview job search results without having to purchase a subscription to AttorneyJobs.com services.

The preview includes job title, practice area, city and state and employer type (corporation, public interest/advocacy, college/university, government).

AttorneyJobs content also is accessible through Twitter and LinkedIn.

I mean, really think about it? As in, the implications of who will read your words or see you in potentially awkward situations?

The Web’s role in our personal and professional lives is a hot topic. One that we thought was worth exploring a bit in our latest interview edition of the Legal Current podcast.

We talked about the issues of online privacy with Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University. Rosen also wrote an interesting article on the topic, “The End of Forgetting,” for The New York Times Magazine in July.

“There are just so many examples of the inability to escape our past, people being held accountable for stuff that they posted online to one audience and are being discomfited or embarrassed when it’s exposed to a very different audience,” said Rosen. “The right to privacy tends to cover only the outrageous or the untrue postings, things that are highly offensive to a reasonable person. But when you’re talking about embarrassing or truthful information, there’s not a clear legal right to escape it or to have people take it down.”

Please take a moment to listen to our podcast with Rosen in the player below, and offer your comments to this post:

You also can access the Legal Current podcast on iTunes or grab the RSS feed.

If you have suggestions for podcast topics for us to focus on, or people to interview within the practice and business of law, send us an email to contact@legalcurrent.com.

Congratulations on the milestone, Bob and Craig.

They’ve got a good discussion in their latest episode, where they interviewed renowned criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey – known for his defense in cases such as O.J. Simpson, Patti Hearst and the Boston Strangler.

Bailey, along with New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, gave some perspective on the case of former major league baseball pitcher Roger Clemens, who was recently indicted on charges for allegedly lying to Congress in 2008 when he testified he never used steroids.

In the podcast, Schmidt and Bailey talk about the legal strategy in the case.

“I think it is inevitable that this case will go to trial because there is no room for a plea,” said Bailey. “Bear in mind, when the Feds indict you, they use a shotgun. They put in a bunch of charges and all they really want is a conviction on one. So in order to win the case you have to win every single count… He has very little to lose by going to trial except the possibility of doing a few months in a minimum security prison as against walking out with the stigma of the guilty plea hanging around his neck forever.”

Bailey argues that Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, who has accused the former pitcher of using performance enhancing drugs, should take polygraphs.

To hear the entire conversation, click here.

The Lawyer2Lawyer podcast is eligible for continuing legal education credit through West LegalEdcenter.

A session at the conference yesterday titled “Technologies to Support the Virtual Practice” was led by Sally Gonzalez, a senior director at Hildebrandt Baker Robbins.

It set out to define the parameters of virtual practice and examine what technologies and management strategies best support the virtual practice and whether different collaboration and security strategies in such a setting are necessary.

“You’re now going to have project teams consisting of internal and external resources that are highly dynamic that need to exchange and work on information collaboratively across those boundaries and its going to require a completely different technology infrastructure in order to support that,” said Gonzalez.

Legal Current did a video interview with Gonzalez before her session, in which she explains what she wanted to get across to the attendees:

You can get the slides from the presentation here.

Enterprise 2.0, collaborative-based applications, solve inefficiencies caused by the inability to locate accurate information. This session at ILTA discussed why intranets do not suffice, single silo search is dying, and what is necessary to advance the firm’s productivity.

Across the board, law firms are realizing that an increase in transparency nets far greater productivity, and in-turn, profit. This knowledge sharing facilitates collaboration and reduces the time that attorneys spend searching for content. Enterprise 2.0 is at the very center of this movement.

Enterprise 2.0 tools:

-At the firm level for the portal you can create public feeds and flows. This would include internal and external RSS feeds based on subject, person, group or even specific search criteria

-Users can create, share, and tag information. Allowing others to vote on information as helpful or not can be a major boon

-Blogging can raise awareness of issues in a more formalistic view and others can comment on this material

-Group collaboration is another great tool for organizing information. This can be done via a Wiki and other group systems

-Lastly, at the user level Enterprise 2.0 tools allow the individual to organize your information by tags, subject area, and even manage personal RSS feeds

Suggestions from Enterprise 2.0 implementers:

-Structure your tools so that it is easy to understand and learn

-Keep it well organized and as hierarchical as possible, yet “searchably flat”

-Learn how your users work. Understand their workflow and the tools will adjust and fit into that stream

-Do not be afraid of testing new simple to implement applications like Yammer. The immediate impact can be very beneficial, if it does not work, they can be removed with little expense.

-Make use of “Webjams” which are places where the firm can ask questions, like how can people be more efficient and work better?

Enable easy authoring and information sharing

-Work towards an enterprise search so that everything across every silo is available

-Leverage early adopters. With critical mass typically 70% of the firm’s users can be brought on board.

-Lastly, take the tools we have in our “outside of work lives” and leverage them in the firm. Typically the tools we use in our personal lives make sense to users and can be adapted to a firm use.

Enterprise 2.0 is a major and powerful arena leveraging all the firms data and users creating transparencies which ultimately increase efficiencies and make for a more profitable firm.

(Slides from this session are available here)

Joe Raczynski
Applications Integrator
Thomson Reuters, Legal

It’s about communication and taking action on types of technologies that address the varied needs of clients.

Tim Corcoran, vice president of Global Sales for Hubbard One, talks about that trend in this video interview that we did with him at the 2010 ILTA Conference: