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Seeing the people of Haiti suffer from the effects of a devastating earthquake is heart-wrenching. On Lawyer2Lawyer, co-host Attorney J. Craig Williams welcomes Attorney Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and Ben Hemingway, Deputy Director of Operations for International Medical Corps, to discuss the enormous response by the medical profession and what lawyers are doing or can do to help. At the top of the show, Craig chats with Dan Rea, host of the radio talk show, NightSide on WBZ 1030 radio in Boston, about the historic election in Massachusetts.

In this edition of The Un-Billable Hour, host Attorney Rodney Dowell, Director of the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program, welcomes Reid Trautz, Director of the American Immigration Lawyers Associations Practice and Professionalism Center and Dan Pinnington, Director of practicePro at the Lawyers Professional Indemnity Company, to provide essential tips for lawyers to run a successful practice. Later in the program, special guest, founder of AbacusLaw and author, Attorney Judd Kessler will discuss the advantages of using a case management software program in your law office.

Lawyers are often considered “late adopters” of technology. While there is plenty of good evidence to support that view, you can find lawyers all across the adoption range, from early adopters to late adopters and everywhere in between. In this episode, co-hosts Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell take a look at the technology adoption continuum, the advantages and disadvantages of each category, and how you can make the best use of your technology adopter style. After you listen, be sure to check out Tom & Dennis co-blog and book by the same name, The Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies.

The Connecticut Superior Court Libraries continue to close! If you are a citizen of Connecticut, please consider signing the petitions! It does not help, alas, if non-citizens sign, so don’t clog up the petitions. Here is the latest from our Connecticut colleagues: Read the rest of this entry »

The sport of golf serves not only as a social outing for many in the legal community, but also is a way to make business connections and to network with clients on the course. But what we don’t often think about is some pesticides used on golf courses may be causing potential health and environmental hazards. On this edition of Ringler Radio, host Larry Cohen welcomes Jay Feldman, Executive Director of Beyond Pesticides, to take a look at the issues, the data and the goal to find a safer alternative for those who love the sport of golf.

In 2007, The New York Times dropped a pay wall after failing to realize expected revenues. Many online readers breathed a sigh of relief, and continued to enjoy the free online content. Now, however, The Times is planning to “announce the introduction of a so-called ‘pay wall’ before the much-rumoured launch of Apple’s new tablet computer, which is thought to be specially designed for easy newspaper reading, on January 27.” This report comes from an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The Telegraph reports that Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times Company chairman, favors “a metered use policy similar to The Financial Times, which allows readers to access some articles for free before they are forced to subscribe.” The Financial Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, as is The Wall Street Journal, which also charges for content. In fact, News Corporation is planning to “introduce charging for all the company’s newspaper websites, including The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World. My colleague Vicky Gannon, who sent me the link to the Telegraph article, says it’s one thing to charge for The Times, but quite another to charge for The Sun and News of the World, which do not exactly qualify as high-quality content. It looks as if paid access to online newspapers is the wave of the future, and in fact newspapers have to make money from their content if they are survive. Advertising revenues are not enough to sustain a major news-gathering operation. “More than 1,200 news organisations worldwide have signed up with Journalism Online, a new media payment firm whose clients are expected to start rolling out fees soon.” It’s hard to imagine that most people are going to pay for subscriptions to more than one or two newspapers, making it inevitable that some newspapers will simply not be competitive in the online environment. Read the rest of this entry »

A new year is upon us and the American Bar Association is carving out a new agenda with a new President. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome President-elect of the American Bar Association, Attorney Stephen N. Zack, to discuss his new role as President, the importance of civic education, inspiring our students through law and his fight for Hispanic rights.

Yesterday, I visited the Morgan Library in New York City and spent a couple of pleasant hours viewing the exhibit on Jane Austen, my favorite author. The exhibit contained a number of treasures, such as the letter describing Jane’s death written by Cassandra Austen to a niece. On display were a number of Jane’s letters, including one written backwards (shades of Leonardo da Vinci) and another written in “cross hatching,” a method used to save precious paper. I did not know this, but the Morgan has the world’s largest collection of Jane’s letters, most of which were destroyed after her death by Cassandra. The exhibit showcased a collection of first editions of the novels, and also displayed contemporary engravings that were in keeping with the themes of the exhibit. I always enjoy going into Mr. Morgan’s study and seeing the three stunning paintings by Hans Memling, and into Mr. Morgan’s library, with its sixteenth-century lindenwood statue of Saint Elizabeth holding a book and its Gutenberg Bible. The Morgan actually has three Gutenberg Bibles, only one of which, a copy printed on paper, is on display. There is another copy printed on paper, and a third printed on vellum. The legend that accompanied the Gutenberg Bible read that it was the “book that inaugurated a new era in the history of visual communication.”

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The Boston Globe yesterday had an article about Boston police using a Massachusetts privacy law (Mass. Gen. Law 272 section 99) that requires both parties’ consent to audio or video-recording. The statute, similar to those in eleven other states, makes it illegal to record another without their consent. This meant that when Simon Glik, a lawyer in Boston, felt that he was seeing undue police violence in an arrest and began to record it with his cell phone, the police felt justified in confronting Glik, cuffing him and seizing his cell phone. And it meant that when Jon Surmacz saw police being too rough breaking up a party and began recording it with his cell phone, the same thing happened to him, charged with illegal surveillance. The Globe article is notable as being actually the product of a student co-op project at Boston University, though it covered many column inches of the front page of the paper and inside the front section as well. It’s an important topic.

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Intro To Persuasive Writing