”Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Time: 1:00 PM (EST)/10:00 AM (PST)

Hon. John Facciola (U.S. Magistrate Judge in the District of Columbia) and Jonathan Redgrave (partner at Nixon Peabody LLP) will discuss their recently published law review article addressing the process for claiming and adjudicating privileges in the era of electronic discovery.

They recently appeared at the Georgetown Law Advanced E-Discovery Institute (click here).

After briefly discussing the challenges presented by the volume and complexity of discovery today, the webinar will focus primarily on potential solutions to address these challenges in a defensible and sensible manner.

For full details and to register click here.”

The Posse List – Free webinar Dec 2nd: A Call For Change — Privilege Logs in Modern Litigation

”…On the JD Hacker blog, Will Geer posted “Do You Really Need Practice Management Software?” His answer was no, but I’m not so sure – I think his post missed some of the big reasons to have practice management software.

Geer opines that most lawyers purchase practice management software for document management, but that this is a ‘ridiculous’ reason for making this purchase. He sets out a system for storing documents in your operating system, which is the default method for most solos and small law firms (and even some mid-sized firms). He goes on to describe this system, complete with folders for each client and subfolders for individual document types, as well as his naming system for those folders.

While this system sounds logical and can work for a while, as a practical matter, it has a number of pitfalls which I have, unfortunately, witnessed first-hand both in the law firms I worked in as an associate and as a partner, but also in the law firms I work with as a consultant.”

Legal Ease Blog – Do Lawyers Really Need Practice Management Software?

”Tired of fiddling with scanned pages to remove borders, correct alignment, and otherwise prettify them before storing or emailing them? Then Scan Tailor could be right up your alley.

This free app splits two-page scans into single documents, converts text to black and white without disturbing images, and cleans stray specks off pages.  Scan Tailor even gets rid of that pesky shadow down the center of a two-page scan that occurs when you lay an open book face down on a scanner.”

Lifehacker – Scan Tailor Cleans Up Scanned Pages

Scan Tailor

”Like a bad Hollywood thriller, law firm technology has a villain that’s all too easy to spot. The economic downturn has — to no one’s surprise — taken a toll on the coffers of law firm IT departments: Fully one-third of the 110 Am Law 200 firms participating in our fourteenth annual survey of technology directors reported that their capital budgets were down more than 10 percent this year. Staffing levels and salaries have taken hits, and equipment purchases and software upgrades have been put off. None of it is happy news. (Access all the charts in our survey from the links below.)

‘When I proposed a budget similar to last year, it was clearly communicated [by the firm's technology committee] that it went beyond what the firm wanted to spend on the capital side, by 30-40 percent,’ says a law firm technology director who asked not to be identified. ‘So we had to go back and ask ourselves what we could live without for another year. We might get better performance on [Microsoft] Exchange 2007, but we were going to stay on Exchange 2003. We weren’t going to spend money on new BlackBerrys. We made conscious choices not to do certain things.”’

Law.com – Am Law Tech Survey 2009

”The indexing service that powers Windows search can now perform OCR of TIFF images. Though not enabled by default (due to resource usage constraints), installing it gives full-text searching of TIFFs. Scanned documents and faxes are the main target for this capability.”

See the Microsoft TechNet page for installation info.

ARS Technica – Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows 7 (p.14 of 15)