The Estrin Report

New Concordance course worth the investment

Emerging Litigation Technologies, LLC and Spectrum Consultants are pleased to announce a joint venture in providing legal professionals with a series of E-Learning Modules on Concordance^® document management software from LexisNexis^®. Colette Perkins and Sara Youngers are certified professionals with over fifteen years of combined, hands-on experience applying and educating on nationally recognized litigation technology software applications.

Concordance Fundamentals – Module One

• Introduction: why Concordance?
• ESI: easily load all your data on one review platform
• Navigating: how to navigate your data
• Viewing: viewing your images and electronic documents
• Sorting Techniques: making viewing easier
• Searching: finding the needle in the haystack
• Integrations: integrate with many powerful products
• Editing Data: how to code, load, and edit your information
• Tagging: organizing the case facts
• Depositions: reviewing, issue coding, annotating
• Printing: extract the information you need
• Concatenation: joining your databases
• Taking your data on the road: connect to your Concordance databases from anywhere thru FYI and Replication
  
  When:  Tuesday July 26 and Thursday July 28th

Tuition

$295.00 per student (discounted rates for two or five attendees)

Includes:

• Free 30-day Application Support.
• Certificate of Completion.
• 10% Discount towards another course.
• Miss a class? Slide decks and recorded sessions will be available 24/7, on-demand, for 30 days after completion of course.

When you sign up, please check the box notification from OLP or KNOW.  The proceeds go to OLP's fund for scholarships for legal professionals who have been out of work for the long term.

Here is the link for EST classes:

Here is the link for Pacific time classes

Thanks so much!

Conspicuous Hole in [Paralegal] Ethics Training

This commentary in Law.com by an experienced paralegal surprised me. What's your reaction?

"For all the talk of the need to prevent ethics transgressions in the legal profession, a glaring education gap exists for one group: paralegals.

"Usually, it does not rise to the level of a topic to be covered -- until there is a problem. It generally crops up after an unintentional violation of the attorney-client relationship by support staff members who have received no ethics training.

"As a paralegal for more than seven years, I often get questions from colleagues asking what to do in certain situations. Those of us who have been educated in an American Bar Association-accredited program have some knowledge of ethical issues. However, some support staff are not even aware of the ethical issues to avoid, yet they are on their firms' front lines every day, in danger of unintentionally violating ethics rules.

"In a poll taken on Jan. 3 by NJParalegal, we asked our members the following: Have you ever received training or instruction by your attorney-employer on how to handle ethical issues, specifically, maintaining attorney-client relationships and the confidentiality of your clients?

"The answer: Of the 42 who responded, 80 percent said no."

Author Cindy Lopez is a paralegal in the office of Charles Byrnes in Toms River, N.J., and is founder of NJParalegal, a career resource. She's also a speaker for Estrin LegalEd Paralegal SuperConferences.

"Taking passwords to the grave"

So, yet another unexpected impact of the Internet!

"William Talcott, a prominent San Francisco poet with dual Irish citizenship, had fans all over the world. But when he died in June of bone marrow cancer, his daughter couldn't notify most of his contacts because his e-mail account--and the online address book he used--was locked up.

"Talcott, 69 [link in article], a friend of beatnik Neal Cassady, apparently took his password to the grave.

"It's a vexing, and increasingly common problem for families mourning the loss of loved ones. As more and more people move their lives, address books, calendars, financial information, online, they are taking a risk that some information formerly filed away in folders and desks might never be recovered. That is, unless they share their passwords, which poses security threats.

[snip]

"But it's not a question of privacy rights so much as property rights, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center [link in article].

"'The so-called 'Tort of Privacy' expires upon death, but property interests don't," he said. 'Private e-mails are a new category. It's not immediately clear how to treat them, but it's a form of digital property.'"

"Study finds companies snooping on employee e-mail"

Do you know about your firm or company policy?

"According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk.

"More than a third of U.S. companies surveyed also said their business was hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past 12 months, according to the annual study from a company specializing in protecting corporate e-mail at large businesses.

"'What folks are concerned about is confidential or sensitive information that is going out,' said Gary Steele, chief executive of Cupertino, California-based Proofpoint Inc., which conducted the study along with Forrester Research.

"The top concern was protecting the financial privacy and identity of customers followed by compliance issues and a bid to prevent confidential leaks. Businesses ranked monitoring for inappropriate content and attachments as less important."

"Redacted Brief Leaks Sensitive Information"

Brief leaks into through bad redaction -- will people ever learn?

"Lawyers for AT&T accidentally released sensitive information while defending a lawsuit that accuses the company of facilitating a government wiretapping program, CNET News.com has learned.

"AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable.

"But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11."

Is Your E-Mail a Pain in the Net?

Conference addresses dangers lurking in cyberspace:

"Confidentiality breaches, identity theft, and loss of proprietary data online are among the biggest security threats today to law firms and their clients.

"According to Patricia Eyres, a Phoenix and Los Angeles based attorney, law firms suffer losses of intellectual property, privacy, and piracy through lack of consistently enforceable policies to protect client information, preserve firm assets, and safeguard sensitive employee records.

"'Every business -- including law offices -- must secure network integrity. Security is everybody's business,' she says. Eyres is a featured speaker at The Paralegal SuperConference in Houston sponsored by Estrin LegalEd on June 15-16th at The Houstonian Hotel."

"Electronic Redaction Doesn't Always Hide What It's Supposed To"

Do paralegals & attorneys in this electronic document age need more instruction about keeping info confidential?

"With the issue of intentional government leaks of classified information frequently in the news, the problem of unintentional leaks of classified and sensitive information is frequently overlooked. The examples are numerous and startling.

"Last year, U.S. military commanders in Iraq released a long-awaited report of the American investigation into the fatal shooting of an Italian agent escorting a freed hostage through a security checkpoint. In order to give the classified report the widest possible distribution, officials posted the document on the military's 'Multinational Force-Iraq' Web site in Adobe's portable document format, or PDF. The report was heavily redacted, with sections obscured by black boxes.

"Within hours, however, readers in the blogosphere had discovered that the classified information would appear if the text was copied and pasted into Microsoft Word or any other word-processing program. Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper, noted that the classified sections of the report covered 'the securing of checkpoints, as well as specifics concerning how soldiers manned the checkpoint where the Italian intelligence officer was killed. In the past, Pentagon officials have repeatedly refused to discuss such details, citing security concerns.' Soon after, the report was removed from the Web site.

"Copies of the improperly redacted report, however, live on. We at the consulting firm of Stroz Friedberg, too, were able to remove the redaction and save the clear text in a Word document. Forensic examiners in our office found that the document had been produced directly from Microsoft Word using Adobe Acrobat 6.0's PDFMaker. The redacted text simply had been highlighted in black. As a result, to reveal the classified information, the steps are simple: Highlight the text with the 'select text' button on the PDF toolbar, copy the text by typing 'control C,' open a new document in a word-processing program and paste the text into the new document.

[snip]

"Paralegals, attorneys and anyone else who works with privileged and classified information, must understand the technology that they are using before it is deployed. Thus, law firms, corporations, government agencies and the military all must implement best practices for redacting sensitive data from electronic documents. This is not a matter of simply purchasing software designed for redaction, installing it on some machines and training a few people.

"A law firm's managers must understand what tradeoffs they are making in terms of the wider dissemination of information at the cost of security. The firm's IT group must ensure that the proper checks are in place and that they work to protect sensitive information. Finally, paralegals and other professionals who review and redact information must understand the steps they must take to protect the information in the appropriate forms.

"Until then, law firms and other organizations that deal with the redaction of sensitive information should strongly consider returning to the days of the black marker [PDF link]and the TIFF. The TIFF is certainly not as consumer friendly as Adobe's format, and it is not the latest technology, but at least it is secure."