Washington, DC (February 1, 2011) — Legal publisher Fastcase and the District of Columbia Bar Association today announced a partnership that will provide all active and judicial members of the D.C. Bar with free access to the Washington, D.C. libraries in Fastcase’s comprehensive online legal research system.

Beginning February 1, 2011, more than 70,000 attorneys will receive free and unlimited access to one of the nation’s largest law libraries through the D.C. Bar website, www.dcbar.org. The service is unrestricted by time or number of transactions, and unlimited printing, reference assistance, and customer service are included for free.

The D.C. Bar is one of the nation’s largest bar associations, representing almost 10 percent of all attorneys in the United States. Its partnership with Fastcase reflects the Bar’s commitment to providing its members with outstanding services that enhance their practice.

“The D.C. Bar is excited to announce this new benefit and free resource for our members,” said Katherine Mazzaferri, Chief Executive Officer of the D.C. Bar. “Our members range from local solo and small firm attorneys to global law firm leaders, so offering free access to Fastcase is a valuable benefit that our entire membership can appreciate.”

Members will get free access to Fastcase’s D.C. law libraries, as well as the ability to subscribe individually to the Fastcase nationwide Premium subscription for $195 per member per year (the service normally costs $1,140 per year). Law firms can get even larger discounts by subscribing to Fastcase’s Enterprise Edition.

“A member benefit like this is difficult to value, but comparable services cost at least $2,000 per attorney per year, making Fastcase worth more than $140 million per year to members of the D.C. Bar,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO. “Fastcase’s approach to research harnesses the power of smarter research tools. We can provide better service at high volumes, which makes partnerships like the D.C. Bar such an effective win-win proposition.”

With the addition of the D.C. Bar partnership, Fastcase now provides free premium legal research to more than 500,000 subscribers, in dozens of AmLaw 200 law firms, 20 state bar associations and dozens of voluntary bar associations and law schools.

“That makes Fastcase by far the largest legal research service outside of Westlaw and LexisNexis,” said Phil Rosenthal, Fastcase President. “Fastcase is larger than Loislaw and Bloomberg Law combined. And those numbers are paid subscribers only — they don’t include users of Fastcase’s award-winning, free mobile apps.”

Fastcase was founded 11 years ago by two attorneys seeking to democratize the law and build smarter tools for legal research. Fastcase has gained overwhelming support from state bar associations, many of which have upgraded to Fastcase from LexisNexis, Casemaker, and Versuslaw in the last year.

“We’re excited to work with the D.C. Bar,” said Rosenthal. “We are a D.C.-based company, and have spent countless hours practicing law on the same side of the desk as many of the D.C. Bar members, so we understand the importance of saving time, keeping costs competitive, and using the right tool for the job.”

Fastcase has gained very strong momentum in the legal research market in 2010. Fastcase was voted #1 in Law Technology News’s inaugural Customer Satisfaction Survey, finishing first in 7 out of 10 categories over traditional research providers Westlaw and LexisNexis. Fastcase’s free apps for iPhone and iPad have dominated the category, winning the prestigious New Product of the Year award from the American Association of Law Libraries. And Fastcase joined Apple, Google, Twitter, and others in the prestigious EContent 100 listing of companies that matter most in the digital economy.

About Fastcase

As the smarter alternative for legal research, Fastcase democratizes the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using patented software that combines the best of legal research with the best of Web search, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast. Founded in 1999, Fastcase has more than 500,000 subscribers from around the world. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.fastcase.com.

About The District of Columbia Bar

Created by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in 1972, the District of Columbia Bar is the second largest unified bar association in the United States. The D.C. Bar’s core functions, supported by member dues, are the registration of lawyers, operation of a lawyer disciplinary system, maintenance of a Clients’ Security Fund, and certain other administrative operations. The D.C. Bar serves over 95,000 member attorneys, which represents nearly 10 percent of all attorneys in the United States. For more information, visit www.dcbar.org.

• Once again someone in government fails to understand how to properly redact a PDF, but this time it’s a federal judge. Oops!
• A reviewer for Business Insider says that you should skip Acrobat X unless you really want to spend $199 (and that’s just for the upgrade). Still, the review was mostly positive. I’ve liked Acrobat X and I think it’s got some good stuff going for it, especially the OCR improvements.
• What can pizza menus teach us lawyers about cloud storage? Well, leave it to tech-savvy and folksy pragmatist Jim Calloway to give us the answer, along with some really useful tips.

PDF for Lawyers: Friday Roundup of Acrobat Tips

Such costs can start to accrue even before a complaint is filed; and, depending on the types of systems and data involved, the costs of preservation can mount quite quickly. This is particularly true for types of ESI that are not normally subject to long-term retention and that are not easy to preserve in a manner that will withstand attack from a knowledgeable adversary.”

New York Law Journal – Preservation: E-Discovery’s Oft-Overlooked Price Driver

Cross-platform TrueCrypt led the pack by a massive landslide with a hefty 73% of the vote. Following behind the winning-so-hard-it-hurts TrueCrypt victory, Disk Utility (Mac OS X) scooped up 8% of the votes. Following close behind Disk Utility were 7-zip (Windows) and GNU Privacy Guard(Cross-Platform) with 7% of the vote.”

Lifehacker – Best File Encryption Tool: TrueCrypt

Leor Exploration & Production LLC v. Aguiar is the name here given to a group of interrelated commercial litigation cases arising out of a multi-billion dollar oil and gas discovery. There were multiple claims and counter-claims, including fraud, breach of contract, and negligence. It also involved a bitter family rivalry. When Judges O’Sullivan and Seitz were shown clear and convincing evidence of what the individual defendant had done, they responded as they needed to do to protect the American legal system. They threw out his claims. Assuming this sanction order is upheld on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, it will stand as the largest e-discovery sanction case in history.”

E-Discovery Team – ”Win-At-All-Costs” Litigation Using Illegal e-Discovery Leads to Dismissal of a Billion Dollar Case

The WD TV Live Hub is easily Western Digital’s most feature-packed streamer yet, with a 1TB HDD within for storing who knows what locally. There’s also an Ethernet socket for pulling down content via the web or your local network, and a pair of USB ports allow for storage expansion or transfers. Naturally, it’ll handle Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, Blockbuster on Demand and UPnP / DLNA streaming to your favorite game console, but the lack of inbuilt WiFi (it’s available via an optional adapter) puts a mild damper on an otherwise fantastic sounding product.”

Engadget – Western Digital stuffs 1TB HDD into Live Hub networked media streamer

Glympse fills a much needed niche in the location sharing world. Glympse offers you the ability to share your location, including not just the location at the moment you share it but your in-progress travel, with anyone for a limited window of time. Traveling to see a friend on the other side of the state and dinner hinges on your arrival? Send him a Glympse of your travel plans and he’ll be able to keep an eye, in real time, on your trek across the interstate.”

Lifehacker – Glympse Is a Real-Time and Private Location Sharing Tool

The warning is titled a “Global Virus Alert,” shows “Your PC may be in danger!” in bright red, and urges the user to “SEE THREAT DETAILS” and “GET PROTECTION.” The prompt is very poorly designed: it looks a lot like malware masquerading as an antivirus (in fact, we would say that newer fake antimalware prompts are more believable than ZoneAlarm’s warning).”

ARS Technica – ZoneAlarm caught using fake antivirus scare tactics

Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface.”

Slashdot – Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs

But even allowing for our natural tendency towards anarchy, this statement stood right out from the other stuff in the presentation. It’s an odd statistic. How is that data measured? 90% of all documents? 90% of stored bytes? When they said “ever again” did they mean explicitly retrieved by name, or should we include free text searches in that statistic? How long an interval needs to pass before some piece of data is clearly identified as belonging to the 90%, so that steps can be taken to reflect its reduced importance? These questions are just the starting point for an issue that demands quite a lot of thinking. It’s a fascinating finding to be offered to you by a vendor of servers, given that so few of the devices they try to sell to smaller organisations actually reflect this “fact” in their hardware and software specification.”

PC Pro – Dell: 90% of data is never read again

Products Affected
iPod touch, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS
Resolution
To work around this issue, users should install a configuration profile from Apple that increases the amount of time the iOS 4 device will wait for the Exchange Server to respond to its sync requests. For best results, the profile should be installed on as many iOS 4 devices at your company as possible.

To install the profile:

Use Safari on your iOS 4 device to download the configuration profile. It may be easiest to read this article with your iPhone or iPod touch and tap the download link there, but you may also email the attachment to another email account on your iOS 4 device, and tap the attachment to open it.
Tap Install to install the profile, and enter your passcode if prompted.
A warning message will appear because the profile is not signed. Tap Install Now.
Tap Done to complete the installation, then power off your device and power it back on.
Wait for your Exchange data to finish syncing.
After installation, the profile will be listed under Settings > General > Profile.”

support.apple.com – iOS 4: Exchange Mail, Contacts, or Calendars may not sync after update

Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

If you haven’t yet tried Google Voice, we can’t wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Check out our revamped features page to learn about everything Google Voice can do…”

Google Voice Blog – Google Voice for everyone

Luckily we have discovered a lifesaver, called PrintConductor. This nifty little tool helps in batch printing multiple document types. According to the developer, it supports 16 document types, which includes, PDF, DOC, WRI, WPS, RTF, TXT, XLS, PPT, PPS, POT, VSD, DWG, DXF, SNP, HTM, and HTML. While testing, I found that it also supports the latest DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats, making the total supported file types to 19.

It uses the COM/DDE interfaces of the official applications in order to print, which means that it will first detect the installed document readers and editors before allowing user to add the documents for batch printing. This has one downside, i.e, you cannot add PDF files for printing unless you have Adobe Acrobat installed, the same problem arises with other formats where the original program must be installed.”

Addictivetips – Batch Print 19 Different Document Types Together

Hypervisor-based virtualization is commonplace in the server room, but thus far the technology has not made it to the desktop; desktop-based virtualization products like Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMware Workstation run virtual machines on top of a full OS. This makes virtualization a heavyweight solution for those wanting to use desktop virtualization to provide a consistent, easy-to-manage environment, which has limited its acceptance.

Citrix is also promoting the use of the product as a way for organizations to allow users to run securely locked-down VMs alongside less secure—but more user-friendly—environments, even to the extent of giving a “corporate desktop” on a privately-owned PC. The corporate VM can have all the security policies, virus protection, VPN software, and other corporate tools, safely protected from any damage by software that the user might run in the unrestricted VM.”

ARS Technica – Citrix shows off new XenClient desktop hypervisor