With the stock market gyrating and the economy sinking, many lawyers are already starting to see clients fall behind on paying their bills.  Here are a few ideas for managing fee collection through troubling times:

Comfort clients

First of all, and to put the strategies below in context, make contact with your clients, particularly the ones who have typically paid their fees. Everyone’s nervous about the economy; you are one of their trusted professionals. Call them. See how they’re doing. Find out if there is anything you can do for them. Give them your ear. Don’t bill them for the call.

Send statements

Now is not the time to let invoices sit around unsent.  Yes, your clients maybe hurting financially, but they need to know what the status of their bill with you is. A big surprise later certainly won’t help.  If the clients have many bills, you need to make sure you’re figured into the mix. If clients don’t see a bill from you, they may think they don’t owe you anything or that your bill can wait a couple of months.

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By now, everyone knows Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked a few weeks back. How? The clever interloper found her email address and used the forgotten password links plus a few well-known facts about Palin to reset her password. Piece of cake. Almost as easy as opening your physical mailbox to read your mail, in fact.

So take a lesson from Sarah Palin and change all your security questions to something less obvious. Instead of putting down your mother’s actual maiden name, use a different response you will remember. Something nobody will guess. Like the license plate number of your first car. Make a mental note of your response, and then use that same code for every security question.

(image: Huffington Post)

The Department of Homeland Security just disclosed its official policy on laptop seizures. It says it can and will take laptops of foreigners and U.S. Citizens for as long as it wants, for whatever it wants.

How can they get away with this? Because an out-of-touch judiciary says so. Border agents can search laptops without any suspicion of wrongdoing, according to the 9th Circuit, the most recent court to rule on the issue. And so the DHS policy, which they have been following for years.

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TrueCrypt 6.0 was released on the 4th, and includes some great new features, including the ability to encrypt and hide the entire operating system for Windows users. It is also optimized for multiple-core processors.

TrueCrypt 6.0 is available for Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux. Get it here.

For first-time encrypters, last year I posted a tutorial on creating encrypted file containers with TrueCrypt. It is a bit old, since I was using TrueCrypt 4 for Windows, but it appears it is still accurate for the new version.

TrueCrypt 6.0 Released | TrueCrypt.org (via Lifehacker)

Imagine any of the following scenarios:

• You returned to your office this morning to find it had burned to the ground overnight. You cannot salvage anything but a few crispy bits of your pencil sharpener.
• Someone swiped your laptop on the train this morning while you were on your way to work. Nobody seems to have seen the person who did it.
• While working on a brief, you are just putting on the finishing touches when your computer’s hard drive stutters a few times, then dies completely.
• Last night, someone broke into your office and, realizing your clients’ personal information would sell for far more than your computer hardware, rifled through your files, making off with your client information sheets.

Now, ask yourself a few questions.

• Will you ever be able to recover your physical data? Unless it was protected in a fire-proof safe, few attorneys keep spare client files.
• How long will it take to recover your electronic data, and what will you have lost? In other words, how solid is your backup system, and do you have off-site backup?
• How much will it cost to purchase credit-monitoring for all of your past and present clients? If your laptop is stolen and your data is not encrypted, or a thief makes off with part of your paper files it seems only fair.
• How will you (a) prevent, or (b) mitigate the effects of each of these scenarios?

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A fair amount of the people I talk to about backup say they forget to do it, or they can’t figure out–or never get around to setting up–the built-in backup options. If that sounds like you, check out IdleBackup, a utility for backing up your computer when it is sitting idle.

I still recommend making a daily backup of your important files. The downside to IdleBackup is that it only makes a one-to-one copy of your files. If you deleted something yesterday, it will soon disappear from your backup, as well. But if you are not backing up regularly, IdleBackup sounds like a good first step.

[via Lifehacker]

From PC World:

Vista, MacBook Out–Only Linux Left in Hacking Contest

. . .

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

More from Engadget.

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.

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.

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