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Are you looking to get more actively involved in your Bar Association? In this July edition of New Solo, host Attorney Kyle R. Guelcher, a solo practitioner from Springfield, MA and Chair of the Young Lawyers Division of the Massachusetts Bar Association, is joined by Scott Heidorn, an associate in the Boston office of Campbell Campbell Edwards & Conroy, to talk about how young lawyers can utilize bar associations for career advancement. Kyle and Scott discuss why a young lawyer would want to join a bar association, how to “give back” to the community through a bar association and take a look at some resources that bar associations offer to help bridge the learning gap from law school theory to actual lawyering.

Our IP Issues podcasts continue this week. Craig Smith and Thomas McNulty of Lando & Anastasi discuss recent decisions from the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Learn more at lalaw.com and law.suffolk.edu/academic/ip.

Is your law firm secure? On Digital Detectives, co-hosts Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. and John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, welcome Matt Kesner, the CIO of Fenwick & West LLP, a West Coast law firm representing high tech and bio-tech clients, to discuss securing your law firms data. Matt talks about the current state of law firm information security in comparison to the rest of the business world, the dangers of taking smartphones and laptops into China and whether there is genuinely a “fix” for information security.

The New York Times features an in-depth article on the start-up Social Intelligence which helps human resources do deep background checks on possible hires. They scour the web, looking not just at social networking sites, but all sorts of sites such as Craig’s List or Flickr, to see what sorts of things might be revealed about the applicant. The applicant is first asked if he or she consents to a background check. (Don’t be a fool! But what will it say about you if you refuse?!) Also, the individual is shown the results of the search before it is reported back to the potential employer. And apparently the searches shouldn’t cover the sorts of questions that are out of bounds for an employer to ask in an interview (Like, are you married? Do you have children?)

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Are you thinking about becoming a paralegal, or are you already working toward a paralegal degree? On this edition of The Paralegal Voice, co-hosts Lynne DeVenny and Vicki Voisin address the most frequently asked questions from people interested in becoming paralegals. They talk about the realities of the profession, including assessing the traits paralegals need to succeed, working in a legal environment, and preparing for and finding that first job. Lynne and Vicki talk about the importance of networking, education and training, and share their personal experiences and their paths to becoming paralegals.

Media giant, Rupert Murdoch and his now defunct British tabloid, News of the World, are under fire over reports that journalists allegedly hacked into individuals phones and allegedly took part in police bribery in a quest to get inside information. Hear Mike Koehler, Assistant Professor of Business Law at Butler University and Jane E. Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, talk with Lawyer2Lawyer co-host, Bob Ambrogi, about the legal issues including charges, privacy rights, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the scandals impact on journalism and the fate of the Murdoch news empire.

Professor Kindregan, who teaches Family Law at Suffolk, discusses the recent lawsuit brought by the Browns, a polygamist family who star in the reality TV show “Sister Wives,” against the state of Utah challenging the state’s statute banning polygamy.

I have loved my association for more than 20 years. I joined in 1986, as a freshly minted, eager, hopeful (not quite so young) law librarian. And I have been a member of AALL ever since, as well as a member of whichever regional chapter I lived nearest. But, this is like a lot of marriages….

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Where do lawyers stand on the issues of advertising and ethics, especially when online technology is in the picture? Hear Andrew Perlman, the Chief Reporter for the American Bar Associations Commission on Ethics 20/20 and Nathan Darling, the 2010 President of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), talk with Lawyer2Lawyer co-host, J. Craig Williams to spotlight the ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20s preliminary issue paper about restrictions on lawyers use of technology for marketing and advertising, reaction to the proposed rule changes and what this all means in reality.

National Jurist has two articles that raise some new and unpleasant questions about the rankings game. A New Low in the Rankings Arms Race, by Jack Crittenden chews over again Villanova’s February admission that it misled the ABA in reporting LSAT and GPA statistics for years. Villanova’s new dean, John Gotanda, announced last January that he found that the previous administration had been knowingly reporting false LSAT and GPA data to the ABA for some years up to 2010, in an attempt to raise its ranking with the US News and World Report. This announcement confirmed long-running rumors of smoke and mirror tricks at certain schools where the numbers just seemed too good to be true. What is surprising is that the first school stepped forward voluntarily, rather than slipping up and being caught. Villanova and Dean Gotanda deserve a round of applause for rock-ribbed morals and principled behavior. The new dean launched an immediate internal investigation, hiring Ropes & Gray for an independent audit, which found significant differences between what should have been reported and the figures which were turned in. The admissions reporting process and organizational structure will be reconfigured as part of the housecleaning.

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