In October of last year google released its Social Search experiment in an effort to personalize search with content from the searcher’s online contacts. Social Search is now available to everyone in beta:

In order to see “social search” results, you must be logged into your Google profile.

For example, when i perform a search for lawyer internet marketing on google, two social search results are displayed. One is from a blog to which I subscribe through Google Reader, and the other is my good buddy (and business partner) Jeff Berman:

While social search is still in its infancy, it is likely to play a huge role in the future of search. With the introduction of real-time results, custom web history results, and social search, it’s clear that Google is committed to making search results very specific to its users.

Search is More Social is a post from: Lawyerist

Google explains why it wants your data, how it protects your data, and what it does to make sure you can get your data out of Google when you want to:

Someone should tell Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Google Renews Its Privacy Vows | TechCrunch

Google’s Privacy Promises is a post from: Lawyerist

There are plenty of posts about how Facebook can be part of your social media campaign. But that does mean you necessarily want everything on Facebook to be available to everyone. Take five minutes and make sure your Facebook privacy settings are right for you.

Items you share. Depending on your settings, your photos, status updates, and videos may be available to everyone on the web. There are plenty of people who essentially lock their profile, but forget to make their photos private. Are most photos a big deal? Probably not. But I do not have any interest in some stranger finding my pictures.

Personal info. Things like your religious views, political views, and relationship status might be set to either “everyone” or “friends of friends.” Again, some people might not care if that information is available. For others, that is a big deal.

What Google can see. If your information is available to “everyone” there is a setting that allows Google to index all of that information. You might not want to share everything you posted on Facebook with every member of the internet.

For more information on how to change your settings, head over to this article at the New York Times.

(photo: splorp)

Keeping Facebook Info Private is a post from: Lawyerist

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, just said something that makes me seriously reconsider whether I should be trusting his company with my clients’ information.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Here is the video:

Bruce Schneier had the obvious rejoinder, and JWZ points out that Google once blacklisted CNET for publishing Eric Schmidt’s personal info. How ironic. BoingBoing has the snarky summary.

But the real question is whether lawyers should trust Google with their clients’ confidential information if this is the attitude of Google’s CEO. His muttering about the Patriot Act makes me wonder if Google is going to act like Yahoo! and Sprint and give it up to anyone with a badge, search warrant or not.

I am not jumping to move all my information just yet, but I am watching carefully to see whether and how Google responds.

Google CEO: Secrets Are for Filthy People | Valleywag

Is Google Getting Ready to Sell Lawyers Out? is a post from: Lawyerist

Cloud computing, or software as a service (SaaS), means moving your applications from your computer to the “cloud.” It is the difference between Microsoft Word (locally-hosted, since it is on your computer) and Google Docs (remotely-hosted, since it is on Google’s computers).

The most-common objection to using SaaS is the fear of waiving the attorney-client privilege, usually because “free” e-mail services like Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail scan users’ e-mail for keywords to target advertising. But SaaS is an attractive alternative for many lawyers, who would rather not deal with IT themselves or maintain an expensive IT consultant. As a result, many lawyers and law firms are looking at Google Apps, hosted Exchange, and Zimbra as less-expensive alternatives to having a local server.

I use Google Apps, and I am not worried about security, privacy, or waiving the attorney-client privilege. Here is why:

You and your clients are already using SaaS

If you use e-mail, you are probably using SaaS, even though you may not realize it.

First, many—perhaps most—of your clients are already using cloud services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail. These are SaaS providers that scan your clients’ messages—including the ones from you—to provide relevant advertising. Whether or not you use SaaS yourself, if the attorney-client privilege was so easily waived, you would probably have waived it already for many of your communications.

Second, you are also probably using SaaS yourself. Have a Blackberry, iPhone, or any other mobile messaging device? That information is going through the servers of RIM, Apple, or whoever, where third parties have access to it. If you are like most law firms, you have a hosted e-mail provider like Comcast, A2, or GoDaddy, where third parties also have access to your e-mail. They may not scan it for advertising, but their computers store it, just like Google’s.

But don’t worry . . .

The clouds are not reading your e-mail

Read the privacy policy of any cloud-based service you do business with. If you are using a free service, their computers may scan e-mail for the purpose of inserting ads. This does not mean anyone is reading your e-mail.

Instead, you will find that most SaaS providers go to great lengths to ensure your data remains private and secure. Google’s privacy policy for Gmail is a good example.

The difference between free services and paid services is usually advertising. If you buy a premium Google Apps account or you pay for a hosted Exchange server, your provider will not scan your e-mail to insert advertising. They probably will still scan your e-mail and (calendar and other items) so you can search for things, later.

Inadvertent disclosure does not waive the attorney-client privilege

Only the client can waive the attorney-client privilege, although they can do so through carelessness. If using a cloud-based e-mail service is enough to waive the privilege, then many clients have already done so. But at least one New Jersey court did not bring up this possibility when finding that the attorney-client privilege protected a client’s Yahoo! Mail account, even when she accessed it on her employer’s computer.

It seems unlikely that a data breach at your SaaS provider would mean your attorney-client communications must be revealed to opposing counsel.

Although suspicion prevails, talk to your IT provider and your local ethics board before deciding whether or not you are comfortable using the cloud for your client-related data.

(photo: akakumo)

Can You Trust Google Apps (And Other SaaS)? is a post from: Lawyerist

A few months ago, I posted a warning to lawyers about emailing clients at work. My concern was based in large part on a NJ district court decision that found an employee had waived the attorney-client privilege for emails that she sent to her attorney while using her work computer. Although the emails had been sent using a Yahoo! account, the employer found images of the emails on the employee’s hard drive.

Well, the New Jersey Court of Appeals has quickly reversed the decision. Although the opinion starts off as a criticism of the district court for not properly evaluating the factual dispute over whether the employer had properly adopted its computer usage policy, the appellate court went on to proclaim the preeminence of the attorney-client privilege over employers’ computer usage policies.

The opinion contains quite a few quotables regarding the extent of an employee’s privacy interest in the information on their work computer. For example:

“A computer in this setting constitutes little more than a file cabinet for personal communications. Property rights are no less offended when an employer examines documents stored on a computer as when an employer rifles through a folder containing an employee’s private papers or reaches in and examines the contents of an employee’s pockets.” The court also compares reviewing an employee’s emails with “the highly impermissible conduct of electronically eavesdropping on a conversation between plaintiff and her attorney while she was on a lunch break . . . .

“We thus reject the philosophy buttressing the trial judge’s ruling that, because the employer buys the employee’s energies and talents during a certain portion of each workday, anything that the employee does during those hours becomes company property.”

Privilege and privacy trump the employer’s computer usage policy, concludes the NJ Court of Appeals.

But the Court was not quite done with the issue. Next it turned to the employer’s attorneys, who viewed images of the allegedly privileged emails that had been stored on the hard drive of the employee’s computer. The Court invoked a relatively new Rule of Professional Conduct, Rule 4.4(b), which reads (in NJ and many other states) “[a] lawyer who receives a document and has reasonable cause to believe that the document was inadvertently sent shall not read the document or, if he or she has begun to do so, shall stop reading the document, promptly notify the sender, and return the document to the sender.” The Court says the defense attorneys violated this rule when they failed to notify the employee’s lawyers that they had found images of the emails on the hard drive.

The Court is kind of stretching here to tag the attorneys for conduct that offends the spirit, but perhaps not the letter, of the rule. The defense attorneys viewed the hard drive images of the emails after the plaintiff filed her lawsuit. Seems like a stretch to call those images “inadvertently sent” documents. The defense attorneys’ conduct seems more akin to searching for metadata in documents, the ethics of which are still in dispute (and about which NJ has not taken a particular position). A prudent lawyer, however, reviewing paper documents clean out of a fired employee’s office, should probably not read letters that appear on their face to have been sent from the employee to his or her attorney. The NJ Court apparently applies the same reasoning to electronic information.

In NJ at least, the pendulum has swung back in favor of protecting the attorney-client privilege in emails sent through a work computer. Until, perhaps, the NJ Supreme Court takes its swipe at the issue.

Emailing clients at work: privilege trumps employer policy is a post from: Lawyerist

My favorite encryption software, TrueCrypt, released a major update today. There are two major new features:

• TrueCrypt now allows encryption of the entire system partition in Windows. TrueCrypt has enabled encryption of non-system partitions before, but this features allows you to encrypt your entire drive.
• The long-awaited graphical interface for GNU/Linux!

TrueCrypt is a free and open-source software for encrypting files and disks. For a tutorial on getting started with TrueCrypt, see this post from last April. If and when I experiment with full-system encryption, I will post a new tutorial and review.

[via Slashdot]

Edit: I had to see the GNU/Linux graphical interface. Click the thumbnail to see the larger version. It works so well I could cry for joy. No more command line! It is missing some of the nice features of Windows interface. For example, it will not automatically mount your encrypted volumes on startup, and will not automatically dismount them on shutdown. But it does automatically detect and enable NTFS, which is a great feature. Thanks you, TrueCrypt team! Definitely a project worth supporting.

TrueCrypt 5.0 released with major new features, Linux GUI is a post from: Lawyerist

By now, most attorneys are at least thinking about marketing their practice online, if not doing it in some fashion already. But “online marketing” is a concept so vague it is completely unhelpful. Online marketing encompasses everything from websites to social networking sites to chat rooms. Much online marketing is similar to offline marketing, but some of it is very different.
LinkedIn
But whatever your comfort level–both with privacy and with technology–you can find a way to market your practice online. In this series of three posts, I will talk about privacy issues, the necessary technical know-how, and the major ways to market yourself and your practice online: websites, paid advertising, blogs, and social networks.

First, privacy and technical know-how.

Online privacy

There is a delicate tension between online privacy and online marketing. If you market yourself online, you are voluntarily putting a lot of information out on the web. But that does not have to mean that you will put personal information out on the web. In fact, one of the best ways to bury personal information that may be available already is to cover it up with the information you decide to put out there.

So safeguarding privacy boils down to this: don’t reveal anything you don’t want anyone to know. If you publish your home address, there is no getting it back. (Since most of us probably enter our home address only when shopping online, this should not be a big problem. Shopping sites are mostly well-secured, although it never hurts to check their credentials.)

Instead, publish–far and wide–the information you want potential clients to know: your office address, phone number, website(s), and e-mail address. While you can probably find my home address with a public records search, you can find my business contact information just about anywhere. Hopefully, that makes potential clients more likely to contact me.

You can hide behind an alias online, but if you do, you defeat the purpose of using the internet to market your practice.

Also, be sure to use a secure browser like Firefox, and keep spyware, adware, and viruses off your computer.

The geek stuff: technological know-how

Computers are no longer a geek’s domain. Thanks to the internet, they are now primarily entertainment and communication devices, not just overpowered word processors (although they still do that). The days of needing to know rudimentary programming skills just to get a computer working are long gone. Open it up and head into the Wild, Wild, Web.

That said, if you want to engage in online marketing, a basic level of comfort with your computer is necessary. For example, you will want to be able to turn on your computer, type, and browse the internet. Seriously, there is not much more to it than that. If you do not know how to turn on your computer, type, or browse the internet, look into beginning computer classes through a local community education program, or try nearby libraries. It does not take long to get up and running.

In order to move beyond a static website, however, you will need to get familiar with some other common features of the online landscape. But if you can handle getting and using an e-mail account like Hotmail or Gmail, you can start a blog or join a forum or social network. It is nearly the same process. Piece of cake. So start a “dummy” blog on Blogger or Wordpress just to get the feel for it. Do the same on MySpace or Facebook–or better yet, the MSBA’s mypractice–and make a profile on a social network. You can use Plaxo or LinkedIn, instead, if you want to try a more “highbrow” social network.

A level of familiarity with things like RSS feeds, blogs, internet forums, and some other things is very helpful. Those are the backbone of Web 2.0, the online world in which we now move. Know what they are, and start exploring a few.

Finally, as you interact on forums, blogs, and social networks, you may want to learn some basic HTML like making a hyperlink.

(Here’s how: <a href=”http://website.com“>text you want to link</a>

This sort of thing is a bit more advanced, and therefore optional, and you can get along just fine without it. But it will make your online interaction a bit more fluid if you do decide to learn just a bit. If you do start blogging (or commenting on blogs) regularly, you will probably just pick it up gradually as you go along.

The good news is that once you have this basic level of comfort and familiarity, you are ready to think about how you want to market online, and to do it!

Stay tuned for part 2: websites and advertising . . .

Online marketing 101: privacy and technical know-how (part 1 of 3) is a post from: Lawyerist

My office was burglarized over the weekend, a valuable reminder of the need to backup and secure your files, both paper and digital.

All the jerks stole was a few rolls of stamps and my video camera. Expensive for me, to be sure, but nothing particularly disturbing. They didn’t touch my external hard drive that I use for backup (and to store movies for lazy Friday afternoons). Apparently stamps are hot items. The building management may have been negligent, and I hope they will buy me a shiny new video camera before my next depositions.

I was irritated, but largely unfazed due to the fact that my files are well-protected and I have multiple backups. I back up my files daily to my external drive, and my laptop comes with me every night. I backup weekly (or so) to a second, portable external hard drive, so I had a backup just a few days old. All my backups are encrypted, so I wasn’t worried about losing client information.

The only paper files in my office are public information like original pleadings. So although I am quite irritated at having to blow a few hundred dollars on a new video camera when the one I had was perfectly good, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

But it is a reminder to back up diligently and make sure your client files are protected, whether paper or digital. You don’t want to have to send a letter to your clients notifying them to look out for identity theft, since you never encrypted your files.

A valuable reminder—keep your files secure is a post from: Lawyerist

This is why you need to encrypt your client files.

If the data on that hard drive was encrypted, rather than sitting out there for anyone to see, the headline might have been entirely different. All the thief would be able to see would be a file, partition, or drive full of gobbledygook (that’s a technical term). Encrypt your law firm data.

At the same time, reconsider carefully the data you do hold onto. Do you really need your client’s social security number or driver’s license number? If you do, you had better encrypt that information and keep any paper copies under lock and key. It will take more than a simple log-in password to escape liability in a case like this, I think.

Laptop with personal data of all 64,000 Ohio State employees stolen is a post from: Lawyerist