By Jason Wilson

Hat tip to Rob Richards over at Legal Informatics Blog for directing me to Christine Kirchberger’s post “Law as an app,” which was inspired in part by my Slaw column “I am now an app™“ and continues a line of thinking about the intersection of software and law.

The ideal law app, therefore, tells a person in advance – proactively – if a legal problem is near and how to avoid it. This could be compared to a GPS navigator warning a car driver of a nearby traffic jam and suggesting alternative routes. Think about how many legal disputes could be prevented just by getting the right information/advice at the right time.

Kirchberger has some interesting ideas, and I will be curious to see what comes of her research.

[Image (CC) by brianjmatis]

By Jason Wilson

In a recent article for UX Magazine, Nathan Hendricks explores how brands can make better connections with people through desire.

Unearthing desire isn’t always easy. Freud wouldn’t have had much of a career if it were. Some desires are simply difficult to talk about in polite company (sex, power, vengeance, status). Others are too subtle and intertwined to detect (acceptance, curiosity, idealism, honor). This is why desire rarely makes an appearance at a focus group. Pleasure, however, does.

Think of pleasure as how you feel when you satisfy a desire. It tells your brain it’s on the right behavioral path. In fact, neurologists tell us that we make decisions based on predictions of pleasure. You can hear pleasure in the language people use to describe how they think and feel. It shows up in the adverbs and adjectives they use to describe things.

Detecting pleasure requires you to engage people in real conversation—something that doesn’t always naturally occur in the unnatural setting of a focus group, where people are compelled to provide rational explanations about why they do or don’t like a certain product. But if you listen closely enough when they describe how they interact with brands, categories, and experiences, you’ll detect the keywords that, when put together, begin to reveal a manifestation of pleasure. When you can get people to tell you what they need to feel in order to truly love something, you’ll be much closer to a consumer truth. The qualities of what they love are the attributes of pleasure.

When I finished the article, I wondered what is it about legal research, and the brands we associate with it, that we find pleasurable. What is the vocabulary we use to enable us, as Hendricks puts it, to “design in desire” and thus form a connection between a brand and the people?

[Image (CC) by Runs With Scissors]

By Jason Wilson

It seems like forever, but I’m pleased to be able to finally say that we (Jones McClure Publishing) will be releasing an electronic search and reading platform for our Texas content later this year (and a completely revamped website to boot). You can sign up (email address only) here to be notified of updates and release date information. We still have a ton of stuff to do, but I can guarantee that the functionality of the site will not treat different types of content (e.g., commentary, rules, statutes, forms, alerts) the same. No one-size-fits-all here.

So, I would encourage you to at least sign up. If you have any suggestions or whatever that you think we should keep in mind, you can always hit me up here. I’ll be sure to inject them into the conversations.

For those of you who are customers, I just want to give you a big thanks for helping us get to this point. Hopefully we can deliver something worthy of the name and your time and money.

Cheers!

By Jason Wilson

Continuing the trend of security lapses in law firms and corporate board rooms around the country, Threat Level reported on a NYT piece titled “Cameras May Open Up the Board Room To Hackers.”

Despite the fact that the most expensive systems offer encryption, password protection and the ability to lock down the movement of cameras, the researchers found that administrators were setting them up outside firewalls and failing to configure security features to keep out intruders. Some systems, for example, were set up to automatically accept inbound calls so that users didn’t need to press an “accept” button when a caller dialed into a videoconference, opening the way for anyone to call in and eavesdrop on a meeting.

Using a program that [HD] Moore [of Rapid7 security company] wrote, the researchers found [over 5,000] conference rooms [in two hours] by scanning the Internet for videoconference systems that were set up outside firewalls and configured to automatically answer calls.

*****

But as a result, Moore found not only that he could easily hijack systems, but he could also access systems that he otherwise couldn’t find through an internet scan. For example, after gaining access to one law firm’s system, he was able to open its address book and see dialing information for conference rooms at other companies, even if ones behind firewalls. That’s how he found the Goldman Sachs boardroom.

When was the last time you did a security review?

[Image (CC) by altemark]

By Jason Wilson

<rant>

When was the last time you pulled a bound volume off the shelf so you could make sure a legal proposition was cited on the proper page?

If your answer is “I don’t remember,” then congratulations, you’re right.

And yet, here we are, in 2012, still citing to page numbers. I write for a living, and I still have to cite to page numbers in cases because my customers expect it. Can anyone tell me why we are doing this?

If your answer is “State bar associations, lawyers, and judges are lazy and have become Wexis zombies,” then congratulations, you’re right.

For as long as I can remember (say 18 years), we’ve had the ability to actually cite at the paragraph level (for you slow learners out there, that means every paragraph in an opinion is numbered seriatim). Consider Oklahoma and Washington, for example, who require their published opinions to carry paragraph numbers and provide citation guidelines for citing to those opinions. Dollar to donuts, I bet the quality of briefs in those states are much better than any state that doesn’t do the same. And if you’ve ever been on law review, you know how much time paragraph numbering would have saved you in cite checking many of the inane articles the editors left at your carrel.

But again, lawyers and judges (except those in [see Update, below]) are lazy and like to obfuscate their legal reasoning. What better way to do it than to cite AN ENTIRE PAGE OR PAGES of an opinion to support a position. Jesus, what a ridiculous practice. And particularly in this state—Texas—where you can cite to unpublished memo opinions. Don’t even get me started on that.

Then there’s the cost to the industry of having to provide these digital page numbers. Not for Thomson Reuters mind you, but everyone else. Have you ever noticed that Google Scholar, Casemaker, Fastcast, Versuslaw, JuriSearch, and the like include page numbers? Do you think that happened by magic? Hell no.  Some Indian or Chinese company ripped West CDs, OCR’d West’s bound volumes, or both to get those page numbers. Maybe they even pulled the cases off of some poor law student’s Westlaw account. Who knows for sure unless you’ve been over there.

The point is, they’re all doing it because of our insistence on citing WEST PUBLISHING page numbers. That’s it. And that insistence increases the cost of providing those very basic services (except maybe Google, but I’m not sure what their deal is, and the cases don’t seem that up to date like the other services, and besides, they’re probably spying on you or whatever).

Now, what happens when Thomson Reuters finally says, “Yeah, screw it, let’s stop printing case reporters, advance sheets, and stamping CDs”? Well, I guess you’ll have to subscribe to WestlawNext or Lexis or Bloomberg, assuming either of them have a deal with Thomson Reuters to get the page numbers (well, Lexis does), because the Indian and Chinese companies (and by extension, the second-tier services) won’t have access to them, unless they get a Westlaw account and download the cases from there. But that would be in violation of the EULA, unless Thomson Reuters looks the other way as a matter of self-interest (read: antitrust), but that’s not guaranteed.

But wait, you could actually be a change leader. You could get your bar association on board with idea of citing to paragraph numbers. Liberate cases from past practices, join the modern age. You could actually acknowledge that no one reads cases out of books any longer and pagination is simply a relic. You could do those things, you know, for the betterment of the practice.

Or not.

</rant>

UPDATE: I should Google before I rant (but I stick by it anyway). Turns out there are 16 states that have adopted paragraph-level citation rules. Here’s the list of the enlightened: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Suck it California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas.

[Badass image (CC) by mamasuco]

By Jason Wilson

Someone wrote a post last week making me look at meetandconfer.com, which is another site dedicated to programmatic guidance for a niche area of Federal practice. I don’t have an opinion about the service, but it made me think about the rapid growth of survey-style programs designed to help lawyers along a particular process, Lexis’ Practice Advisor being one of the latest. <rant>And expect to see many more as lawyers try to monetize their “expertise” by shoving it all into decision matrix and selling it to you. Honestly, the practice is going to become this odd amalgam of programs with a little bit of thinking and creativity in the workflow gaps that abhor reduction. </rant>

But I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that no one, to my knowledge, has a guidance system for insurance coverage opinions. If you’ve ever had to do one, you know what a pain in the ass they can be, and Miller’s can only get you so far.

Anyway, if you know someone who is working in this space, drop me a line. I’d love to hear about the product.

UPDATE: Toby Brown over at Three Geeks was kind enough to point me to Neota Logic, which doesn’t have a guidance system specifically for coverage opinions, but there’s no reason to think that system couldn’t do it. Jordan Furlong highlighted Neota last year in “Here come the robo-lawyers”:

Neota Logic is among the first of what looks to be the future of automated systems in the law: an “expert application.” Neota is essentially an applied knowledge management system: it automates lawyers’ knowledge and expertise to create step-by-step processes for solving low- and medium-grade regulatory, compliance and advisory problems. [¶] Neota users log in to the system and enter the relevant data on the specific regulatory or compliance issue facing them; the system prompts them to answer a sequence of questions based on the data it’s receiving. Based on those responses and drawing from a deep collection of expert knowledge acquired from both lawyers and databases, Neota chooses the correct paths through the thicket of possible choices and arrives at the same result that an expert lawyer would have reached.

Sounds interesting.

[Image (CC) by alancleaver_2000]

By Jason Wilson

I was at a doctor’s office a couple of weeks ago and watched the nurses move in and out of rooms carrying laptops from room to room. It was, in my parlance, completely fucking ludicrous watching these people move around with 7.5 pound Dell laptops with one arm around the office. I kept thinking, “how many laptops do they drop a year,” and “what is the rate of occupational injury associated with bent arms carrying laptops?” And if you were unfortunate enough to meet one (the nurses always had their back turned to you while asking questions and busily entering data into the computer), you’d understand how ridiculous doctors can be when trying to implement an electronic health record (EHR) system. Who sells them on this shit? And as far as this particular office was concerned, I thought they had reached the height of stupidity, that is, elevating data entry over patient well-being. (Full disclosure here: I’m working with a physician who has a pretty amazing system that incorporates EHRs and beside manner in a way that makes you feel respected.)

But enough of that. The point of this post is based on another I read today—Are EHRs safe?—from Fred Trotter over at O’Reilly who is a new “health IT” writer for the platform:

[L]et’s replace “EHRs” with “cars.”

Are cars safe?

No.

Cars are not safe. They are fundamentally and irreparably dangerous even during normal use.

Cars will kill people.

Lots of people.

Cars have been killing people for years. They will kill even more people as they become more popular and available.

All of a sudden, the same kind of dramatic talk sounds pretty tame. We also know that cars, on balance, save more lives than they kill (just the ambulances alone …).

EHRs are a fundamental technology, one that will become a pervasive part of our own healthcare, and therefore, our lives. Saying that they will “kill people” is both true and irrelevant. It’s like saying “hospitals kill people” or “dogs kill people” or “doctors kill people.” So what? On balance, we need hospitals, dogs, doctors, cars, and you guessed it … EHRs.

Of course, we need to do everything we can to make EHRs safer. EHR safety will improve with time, just like cars. Safety in the auto industry is a pretty good analogy for the health IT industry. You can look forward to further posts that extend, explain and abuse the analogy.

And as we all know, the law has found ways of making billions on making our cars safer. I wonder what it might do for EHRs?

[Image (CC) by TunnelBug]

By Jason Wilson

From David Worlock,

The key trends of 2011 will always be, for me, the landmark strides made towards really incorporating content into the workflow of professionals, and the progress made in associating previously unthinkable data collections (not linked by metadata, structure and/or location) in ways that allowed us draw out fresh analytical conclusions not otherwise available to us. These are the beginnings of very long processes, but already I think that they have redefined “digital publishing” or whatever it is that we name the post-format (book, chapter, article, database, file) world we have been living in now for a few years and are at last beginning to recognize.

Emphasis mine.

{Image (CC) by bupowski}

By Jason Wilson

In October 2010, Eric Butler released a small Firefox extension—Firesheep (a “man in the middle” program)—to show how session hijacking (or “sidejacking”) can work over public wifi. At the time, it garnered quite a lot of mainstream press resulting in several local news stories demonstrating the ease with which one could steal someone’s Facebook or Gmail session at the local Starbucks. And in the legal press, the talk seemed to be less about the obvious security implications and more (surprise, surprise) about the ethics or legality of hijacking sessions.

Now fast-forward one-year later and it would seem that most folks (including lawyers) are no wiser about such security vulnerabilities. This past weekend I was talking to a programmer whose company specializes in intrusion detection systems, and we spoke about Firesheep and other code that facilitates sidejacking (e.g., Hamster and Ferret), and he said that very few people protect their connections. He was amazed at how few of them use HTTPS/SSL for the most common programs such as Facebook or Gmail, and those are just two of the most popular programs. We also spoke about cloud vulnerabilities and when encryption goes bad, for example when a website deploys SSL incorrectly (leaving the user susceptible to sidejacking).

Please note that this is about public wifi, not just Starbucks. It’s your hotel when you’re at a conference, the airport when you’re waiting for a flight (or on the plane itself), on a bus when you’re commuting to work, etc. If you’re jumping on public wifi, you need to wear protection. And it isn’t just about you, it’s about your client as well. You should be talking to your client about all of this too.

For a profession that has a bevy of communications privileges at its core, I find it surprising that there isn’t more chatter about these vulnerabilities, particularly as everyone starts jumping on the cloud. Yes, there are innumerable posts on secure email and the dangers of Facebook, but sidejacking isn’t necessarily about stealing data. It’s about serendipitous discovery. And well, maybe about fucking with you too. Either way, you need to get the knowledge, or hire someone with it. You also need to be testing your services to make sure they work (you can use Firesheep for that as well).

Oh, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, turn in whatever mobile device you’re using and get off the internet.

[Image (CC) by opacity]

By Jason Wilson

{I’m republishing this post from 2009 because two years later, nothing. I’m still waiting on someone to do this. Honestly, what good is all of our technology if we can’t take simple HTML and show historical versions of statutes? I swear to God if I ever get my hands on a primary law database I am going to make this happen.}

Today’s idea for now is “threaded statutes.”

I do a lot of writing that involves understanding the origins of a statute. If a statute has been around for any length of time (e.g., California’s Code of Civil Procedure hailing back to the late 1800s), it usually has seen its fair share of changes, such as having been renumbered, relettered, codified from an older revised statutes system, amended, etc. All along the way, decisional authority has been written interpreting those various versions of the statute, and secondary source material (e.g., law reviews, treatises) may have been written to explain each or a particular version in further detail. But if you’re a lawyer, and you research, this isn’t really news to you. In fact, in a post by Robert Richards surveying recent literature on law-related information behavior studies, he noted that one study revealed “history tracking” is a behavior unique to the legal profession.

So, in thinking about what would make my life easier as a researcher, I decided I wanted something I’m calling “CALR Threads.” Please note, I’m using “CALR” to refer to any computer-assisted legal research program, whether it’s Westlaw, Lexis, Loislaw, etc.

Ideally, CALR Threads provides me with a time line of a statute, identifies the date each version of that statute came into existence, allows me to read any of those versions, and for each version, links, line-by-line, all of the relevant primary and secondary source material. Simply put, for each sentence of a particular version of a statute, I will be given the universe of relevant interpretative data telling me how it has been applied. I won’t have to query a database for specific language, date limit my search results, perform exhausting legislative research to track amendments down, etc. It’s all threaded for me already.

One of the important aspects to CALR Threads is the emphasis on preserving older secondary source material. CALR systems emphasize, and rightly so, new editions. But Threads recognizes the need to make available and preserve older, out-of-date editions because the analysis, while frozen in time, could still be relevant to your research. I usually have to find these earlier versions in the library stacks, which is a time consuming process, and one I would like to avoid.

To sort of get an idea of what I’m talking about, I want to point out a Threads-like project I stumbled onto years ago. Monica Ortale, a librarian with South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas, created the online Texas Rules Project. The Project allows you to see every version of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure dating back to 1941, with relevant material from old advisory opinions that used to be printed in the Texas Bar Journal, and a bibliography of law reviews and other secondary sources organized by year. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone writing about or trying to understand Texas civil procedure.

[Image (CC) by Geoff S.]