The question facing Judge Steven F. Frazzini was whether the Connecticut court had jurisdiction over someone who threatened a resident using a computer in North Carolina and posting content that anyone in the world could access. Can a cyberspace threat reach across state boundaries?

The International Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show in the U.S., opens this week in Las Vegas, but the economic downturn will temper the normally dizzying extravaganza. And some attendees are wondering if the whole technology trade show business is past its peak.

What if a telecommuter is goofing off? The suspicious employer could turn to remote monitoring technology. By asking those who work from home to sign a form indicating that they know the types of monitoring in use, a company can take reasonable protections without turning Orwellian.

To unmask, or not to unmask, anonymous bloggers is an issue that many courts have grappled with as trash talk, criticism and negative comments flood chatrooms, blogs and message boards. Maryland's high court is now considering the issue in an alleged defamation of a Dunkin' Donuts store.

Your data can be stolen by hackers, lost in a system failure or exposed through metadata. What are you doing about it? Larger firms have IT specialists to protect and back up data, but for data security "do-it-yourselfers," attorney Robert J. Ambrogi identifies Web sites that can help.

The trio of smiling professionals on a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based firm's Web site -- a black male, a white male and a white female -- are paid models, not lawyers. Although the Florida Bar hasn't raised any enforcement issues over the use of models on Web sites, why do some firms do it?

With a focus on productivity, Joyce Hamel of Rusin undertook a re-evaluation of the firm's stand-alone digital dictation technology. Hamel opted for a software solution, BigHand, with a reputation as a legal workflow system designed for attorney and secretary relationships.

The green movement is one area of social responsibility where professional associations and law firms can demonstrate leadership in sustaining our natural resources. Like many associations in our legal community, the International Legal Technology Association is leading by example.

At the latest Leading Legal Innovation conference, most agreed that the influence of the Web will grow. Says Harvey Anderson, GC of Mozilla Corporation, "If you're putting yourself in a position where you're betting against the Web, you will lose." Is the legal profession doing that?

At just over 6,000 members, Paul Lippe's brainchild, Legal OnRamp, a social networking site geared primarily to in-house lawyers, has yet to take the legal profession by storm. Lippe discusses how Legal OnRamp and its select network of clients might revolutionize the practice of law.

Consultant Donna Payne decided it was high time to downsize her behemoth laptop that she named "Big Girl," which had a large screen display and two batteries that made it difficult to close the zipper on her laptop bag. After weighing the options, she chose a Dell XPS M1330.

Welcome back! We hope you all had a great Holiday break and we would like to wish you a very good 2009.

Vacancy

Today we added the following vacancy:

• Project Coordinator (Perth, Australia)

For the details, please check our vacancy section.

Column

Just in case you might have missed it during the Holiday break, a gentle reminder that Joanna Goodman posted her new column. This time she describes three ways to add value in a downturn. You can read here column here...

Legal Technology news

Today we added the following legal IT headlines:

• Lupton Fawcett now live on Pilgrim
• Shepherd and Wedderburn Creates Digital Archive with Ricoh
• Epiq Systems opens Brussels office to strengthen client support
• TechnoLawyer's 2009 Legal Industry Predictions
• 2009 eDiscovery Predictions and Trends
• Legal Market Upheaval - A One-Act Play
• Trial Solutions Announces Partnership with earlyCASE™
• KM 101: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge
• Eversheds’ clients enhance billing system
• Year in Review: Courts Unsympathetic to Electronic Discovery Ignorance or Misconduct
• More US law firms facing extinction

All the relevant links in our news section.

This month's poll is about your firm's Knowledge Management system. It's all there, your lawyers can find all the relevent knowledge, they can browse the taxonomy, and they know it's all out there.

But ... is your KM system used efficiently? Do your lawyers use it in the right way, do they add to the system themselves? Do they only 'take' or is it a 'give and take' exercise?

Go to our site and vote! If 100% is the maximum, how efficiently is your firm's Knowledge Management system being used?

UK top 250 law firm Lupton Fawcett are now live with Pilgrim’s LawSoft after successfully migrating from their legacy IRIS AIM Evolution system. The firm are live with PMS, document management, CRM, matter management and debt collection case management. Pilgrim and Lupton Fawcett are now implementing a detailed Personal Injury case management system that fully integrates with the rest of the LawSoft suite. The firm, who were running the old Classic Unix version of AIM Evolution, placed the order early last year – for first report see Insider #206 (February 2008).

Following the recent closure of four US law firms – Thelen Reid, Thacher Proffitt –which actually survived the destruction of its NYC head office in the World Trade Center on 9/11, Heller Erhman and Dreier, the American legal jobsboard LawCrossing is warning that more firms are likely to fold this year. Thelen, Thachers and Heller all blamed the financial crisis for their demise. At Dreier, the firm had to file for Chaper 11 bankruptcy protection after its founder and sole equity partner Marc Freier was arrested last month on charges of cheating hedge funds out of more than $100 million.

Closer to home, a YouGovCentaur survey conducted on behalf of The Lawyer magazine reports that only 15% of associates feel safe from redundancy, while only 34% of partners felt strongly that they were secure in their jobs. It is also being suggested that the number of legal job losses to-date, particularly among partners, has been under-reported and that the full extent will not become apparent until late 2009. The Lawyer says the total number of legal redundancies reported since the start of the recession now stands at 1259 but at Hammonds alone there are 95 posts currently subject to consultation.

Legal Technology News

This weekend we added the following legal IT news headlines to our site:

• The Mac turns 25
• Results: ABA Journal Blawg 100
• Disgruntled ex-employee takes JournalSpace offline for good
• Thirteen “Corporate Law Department Blogs” on Justia’s BlawgSearch
• Blogger Anonymity Issue Flares Up
• Seeking Data Security on the Web
• Do Model Web Faces Misrepresent Law Firms?
• 2009 is going to be filled with a lot of bad e-discovery

You can find all the details in our news section.

Electronic filing of court papers will become mandatory in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas' civil division on Jan. 5. After years of planning and six months of optional e-filing, court leaders, court employees and the bar are preparing to make the move to a mandatory computer-based system.

Today we added the following news items on our site:

• Initial Views of Twitter
• Ringing in 2009 With 30+ Predictions
• ILTA Takes the Lead on Green
• Legal Innovations: Don't Bet Against the Web
• Rusin Plays BigHand in Digital Dictation
• RPost 2008 Poll of IT Professionals and Business Executives Uncovers Risks and Misconceptions
• International SuperSessions Hosted by TRILANTIC at 2009 LegalTech New York

All the details in our news section.

I usually leave it until the last minute to frame my “binary law” predictions for the year ahead. After all, a lot can happen in a month and it’s of course helpful to have the benefit of everyone else’s predictions first! In the SCL IT & law predictions for 2009 (batch 1, batch 2, batch 3) [...]

Today we added the following news items to our site:

• KM 101: Introduction to Legal Knowledge Management
• Legal OnRamp Founder Sells Its Virtues
• Civil E-Filing in Philadelphia To Go Mandatory
• More legal links
• An Anonymous Blog With an Attitude
• Technology Puts a Dream House on Trial
• Former GC Explains Why BigLaw May Lose Business
• Eavesdropping
• Virtual Fax Services

See our news section for the details.