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In real estate and on the Internet today, the key is location, location, location. Facebook Places, Google Latitude and Foursquare have opened our eyes to the potential benefits and concerns of geolocation services and features. Why are we voluntarily and publicly disclosing so much personal location information today? In this episode, co-hosts Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell discuss the growing role of geolocation services, how you might participate in and benefit from them, and how to make good choices about opting in and opting out of this brave new world. 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 Chronicle of Higher Education dated August 30, 2010 has an article by Paul Basken reporting that Judge Paul M. Peatross, Jr. ruled against Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli’s two Civil Investigative Demands against the University of Virginia. Cuccinelli wanted reams of documents in connection with about six years of work by former Assistant Professor Michael E. Mann (at Virginia 1999 - 2005, now a full professor of meteorology at Penn State), who is known for developing a graph, the “hockey stick graph” which has been validated over and over to show a marked rise in global temperatures in the last few decades, after a rising trend over the last thousand years. Cuccinelli, a climate skeptic, claims that Mann committed fraud after receiving grants for research at the University of Virginia. He appears to be using his position as Attorney General to press conservative interests, such as pressuring climate researchers.

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The 2010 Civil Litigation Conference at Duke Law School inspired a lot of chatter on the e-discovery wires. On this edition of Digital Detectives, co-hosts Sharon D. Nelson, Esq.,President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. and John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, welcome Magistrate Judge David J. Waxse from Kansas, to reflect on the conference. They look at conference highlights including: the future of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, clarifying the standards regarding governing the preservation of electronically stored information and next steps for the Federal Rules Advisory Committee.

It is likely that the next edition of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED), will not be published in print. No date is scheduled for the release of the third edition, which is only about one quarter finished, but it will probably take a decade or more. The future of the OED is discussed in this article, and is also the subject of an article in The Sunday Times, which is a fee-based site and available only to subscribers. I was interested to learn that the OED “now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers.” It is a bargain compared to many other online reference works–only $295 per year.

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Should former MLB pitcher, Roger Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee take polygraph tests? That’s just one of the topics discussed on this edition of Lawyer2Lawyer. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J.Craig Williams, welcome legendary defense counsel, Attorney F. Lee Bailey and Michael S. Schmidt, reporter for The New York Times, to discuss the Clemens indictment on charges that he allegedly lied to Congress back in 2008, when he testified that he never used performance-enhancing drugs. They explore legal strategy, the use of physical evidence, the credibility of testimonies and the future of Roger Clemens.

August 26 is Women’s Equality Day, to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This is the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. After more than 70 years of ceaseless campaigning, our grandmothers (and a few of our grandfathers who supported them!) finally won for us the right to vote in public elections. The League of Women Voters has a very nice website with a brief history of the struggle. Here is the way they “bookend” the effort: Read the rest of this entry »

On this edition of The Un-Billable Hour, host Attorney Rodney Dowell, Director of the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program, welcomes JoAnna Forshee, CEO of InsideLegal and Jobst Elster, Head of Content for InsideLegal.com, to take an inside look at the 2010 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Conference and findings from the 2010 InsideLegal/ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey. JoAnna and Jobst discuss the collaboration between ILTA and InsideLegal, the strategy and marketing sessions offered at the ILTA conference and what these survey results mean to vendors.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a heart-wrenching article, “The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books,” by Jennifer Howard. It appears on the front page of the print version of July 16, 2010, vol. LVI, no. 40, but the link above will take you to the digital version if you have a subscription. The article focuses largely on R. Carter Hailey, an analytic bibliographer whose painstaking scholarship into the physicality of books and manuscripts allows him to do detective work on early publishing. For instance, he has been able to authoritatively assign a date to the publication of Hamlet, which had never been done before. The marks left on the paper from the wires in the Renaissance papermaking molds, minute variations in watermarks, these are the fingerprints that allow him to track the evidence.

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Professor Janda discusses Suffolk Law’s Peer Mentoring and Bar Prep Programs. Further information is online at http://www.law.suffolk.edu/offices/deanofstu/disability/resources/

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article from August 8, 2010, by Dalton Conley, Dean of Social Sciences at NYU. “Linkrights and Wrongs,” proposes something that Jim Milles discussed here some years ago as a model to compensate the originator of ideas and words on the Internet fairly. Linkrights would share with the creator of a website, any revenue generated by ads on websites that aggregate or link to the material. So that search engines, aggregator sites, and any blogs that run ads would share whatever money they generate from ads at the page where the link exists to the page, or material aggregated from this other site. When a reader clicks on the link to read the original material, it would send a share of the ad revenue to the author of the linked webpage.

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