For attendees of the LACBA conference looking for the e-mail forensics software I mentioned...

it can be obtained through Paraben.  The product is currently known as Network Email Examiner (Nemex), version 3.0.  I under-priced it a bit.  It is listed currently as a $799 purchase.  Still cheap when you consider what it does.  The feature list is as follows:

• Supports GroupWise information stores up to 7.03
• Supports Microsoft Exchange information stores 5.0, 5.5, 2000, Exchange 2003 & 2007 (.EDB)
• Supports Lotus Notes information stores 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 8 (.NSF)
• Easy to use interface
• Advanced searching options
• View one or all individual e-mail accounts in information store
• View all meta-data within individual messages
• Complete Bookmarking
• Export data for review in Paraben's E-mail Examiner
• Summary HTML reporting
• Export to PST files
• NEW Output to MSG & EML format
• Supports Deleted--Deleted recovery with Exchange

Imagine the ability to view and export one complete e-mail account from a massive Exchange information store.  Brilliant! 

The product page lists "free one year subscription" with purchase, but this pertains to the right to receive free updates.  When the year is up, you can still use the version that you have. 

Courtroom View Network is streaming a wrongful death trial trial involving a Ford Explorer rollover accident

Courtroom View Network, with over three years of experience Webcasting high-stakes civil litigation, is streaming the trial of Moreno v. Ford.  This trial is part of the statewide coordinated judicial proceeding involving Firestone tire tread separation and Ford Explorer rollover related litigation, currently centralized in Los Angeles.  Judge Anthony Mohr is presiding over the trial.  Access to video and streaming is available here.

Courtroom View Network has covered multiple legal proceedings across the country, including such cases as “Jose Adolfo Tellez et al v. Dole Food Company Inc et al” and “Norman Turner v. Chevron Corporation” in Los Angeles Superior Court. Courtroom View Network’s target audience are members of the legal and financial community who require instant, comprehensive coverage of litigation that affects their business. Its Web site is at www.courtroomview.com.

The beauty of SquareSpace...

is that it allows for quite a bit of tinkering with site layout on the fly.  See, SquareSpace for some examples of how far you can go with their hosting platform.  This is both good and bad.  The good part is self-evident.  The bad part is that you can lose hours and hours of time creating graphics and adjusting layouts without realizing it.  So don't mind my tinkering with the layout; once I got started, I had to keep going until I was marginally satisfied with it.  I was bored, and I may tinker more.  So don't be surprised if the blog looks a little different every day.

Speaking of adjustments, the page-width header and "floating" banner required very precise pixel registration of some graphics.  Interestingly, chrome rendered part of the header 1 pixel off from how both Internet Explorer and Firefox render the same images.  I suspect that there is difference in how the browsers handle a rounding issue.  Regardless, everything now aligns in Chrome, Firefox 3.6, and Internet Explorer 8.  I can't help the rest of you.

Consumer Attorneys of California makes it to the bleeding edge: Twitter and Facebook

Consumer Attorneys of California (CAOC) is breaking into new media territory with presence on Facebook and Twitter.  You can find CAOC on Twitter by following @ConsumerAttysCA.  You can become a fan of CAOC on Facebook here.  Personally, I've almost given up on Facebook, purely because of its deplorable disregard for user privacy.  Facebook needs to keep its act clean for a while just to get back to zero with me.  The problem is, half the planet is using Facebook, so my protestations are unlikely to start a grass roots movement.

Google takes a first step at upsetting the cell phone purchase apple cart

Of interest to the gadget-loving attorneys out there, today Google announced on its blog a first step towards another attempt to change how consumers buy cell phones.  Google will offer the Nexus One "superphone" through a Google-hosted store.  The Nexus One was built by HTC and runs the Android operating system.  Google was heavily involved in the creation of the device and customized the operating system to showcase what the newest version of Android can do.  Google said that other phones on other carriers will follow.

Keep an eye on Google in this space.  As with its Google Scholar search capabilities that allow free searching for caselaw, this first step by Google into the mobile phone sales arena won't unseat the major players...yet.  In fact, the initial offering is a fairly conventional choice of a subsidized phone through T-Mobile or an unlocked Nexus One at a typical smartphone price.  The interesting part of this development is Google's ability to bring so many handset manufacturers together under the Android umbrella.  Handset makers just want to sell their hardware.  A desirable consumer experience and a solid operating system with the ability to run large numbers of third-party applications sells the hardware.  Apple proved that.  If Google gains enough traction in the cell phone space to change pricing models and, perhaps, move towards a different subsidy model, such as ad and metrics-based subsidies, could inject a new dynamic into this market.

For the mobile lawyer, this may mean a downward pressure on prices and an increase in the quality of smartphone choices as service providers compete in the one way they most easily can - offering better handsets with lower service prices.

Dragon Dictation is now available in the iPhone app store

Dragon Dictation, which is a simplified version of the PC software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, is now available in the iTunes App store.  And, for some limited amount of time, it is FREE.

What You See:

This application is simple, but very nice.  At launch, all you see is a button, with text that reads, "Tap here and dictate."  Go on, tap!  The application immediately begins recording what you say.  When you are finished, press another button, and the speech-to-text conversion occurs.  Once you have text, you can either edit the text or export it to e-mail on your phone, text messaging, or the clipboard.  If you don't like the virtual keyboard, this program offers a way to write a significant amount of text in a hurry.

It Works:

In my testing, it was shockingly accurate.  Admitedly, I tested the application is a quiet room, with no significant background noise.  Dragon Dictation recognized punctuation and "new line" commands.  I'm still amazed at the quality of the recognition from a phone.  A phone.

Update on 2009-12-08 23:04 by The Complex Litigator

I have spent some more time working with dragon dictation, and I continue to be impressed with the accuracy of the voice recognition. I have tried using the application in environments where there is background conversation, and the microphone on the iPhone is able to isolate my voice from remote background sounds. While the recognition is not perfect, and no application of this type promises perfection, it is still a valuable tool for dictation when typing is not a reasonable alternative. This update to my post was drafted entirely with dragon dictation. It required only one correction. I had to change the word protection to perfection.

Courtroom View Network is providing live coverage of eBay v. Craigslist

The Delaware Court of Chancery, in Georgetown, Delaware, is playing host to a wild one.  Courtroom View Network is now providing live coverage of eBay v. Craigslist, otherwise known as eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Craig Newmark.  California online mainstays eBay and Craiglist are involved in a bi-coastal battle over director voting rights and the alleged theft of confidential information.  In a nutshell, eBay claims that Craiglist's directors unfairly diluted eBay's 28.4 percent minority shareholder stake in Craigslist and eliminated eBay's right to appoint a director.  In another lawsuit filed in San Francisco, Craigslist claimed that eBay used its shareholder position to obtain confidential competitive information to gain an unfair commercial advantage in developing eBay's own competing online classified ad business, kijiji.com.

Courtroom View Network is providing free access to a sample clip of cross-examination of Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay.  Other media outlets have more coverage of the opening day of trial.  See, e.g., Shannon P. Duffy, Craigslist, eBay Face Off in Closely Watched Trial (December 8, 2009) www.law.com.

True, it's not a class action, but this is complex litigation at its best.  Two cyber-goliaths trying to strangle each other on opposite sides of the country is too good to pass up.  I just don't know who to root for.

Adobe rolls out significant upgrades to Acrobat.com, improving both the user experience and the "under the hood" machinery

On November 21, 2009, Adobe® released a substantial update to Acrobat.com.  I spent some time poking around my Acrobat.com accounts to see the updates in person, and some new features will be of interest to legal professionals.

Before commenting on the updates, I want to take a moment to recap the basic of what is offered at Acrobat.com.  Acrobat.com contains aspects of what the digerati would call "cloud computing."  The files you create and/or store on Acrobat.com are "in the cloud," not on your computer.  If hearing "cloud computing" makes you ill, then just refer to Acrobat.com as a collection of services hosted online.  Users can create basic word processing documents (Adobe Buzzword®), presentations (Acrobat.com Presentations), basic spreadsheets (Acrobat.com Tables), upload a variety of file formats and quickly convert them to PDF, store files, easily share files with others or launch an Adobe ConnectNow online meeting and collaborate on documents in real time.  The experience presented in your browser is based on the Adobe Flash® Platform.

Before the most recent Acrobat.com update, I was already using the file sharing tools right on this site to embed a flash-based PDF viewer that shows visitors documents stored on Acrobat.com.  I have also used the storage and sharing functions to deliver large documents to others.  These services almost always worked for me exactly as promised (in the early days of Acrobat.com, there were times when files would get stuck in some sort of an anti-virus scan queue for hours or never show up; that issue was resolved quite a while ago).

Now I want to mention some of the key improvements to the Acrobat.com suite of hosted tools that might interest lawyers.  First, Acrobat.com now offers a unified interface as the starting point for most Acrobat.com applications.  Previously, the interface was somewhat disjointed.  Now, users see file organizer with a much-improved interface:

From this launch point, a user can share files, upload files, create "collections" to organize files, and so on.  One very imporant feature set that has been added here is the ability to export to a variety of file types, depending upon whether you are working with a word processing document, a presentation, or a spreadsheet.  Presentations now includes support for importing PPT/PPTX files.  In other words, you can build a presentation on Acrobat.com and then convert it to PowerPoint if you want to use that tool in a setting where online connectivity is an issue.  Similarly, users can export their tables to PDF, XLS or CSV for sharing data in whatever format is best suited for the situation.  Buzzword supports export in DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, ODT, ZIP, PDF, and now EPUB, the electronic book publishing format for eBook readers such as Stanza on the iPhone, Sony Reader, and others.

A side comment:  The addition of EPUB support is smart on Adobe's part.  With Flash and Acrobat.com, Adobe is right in the thick of a brewing battle for control over the format in which various types of content will be delivered to you in the future.  It's probably not to extreme to say that Apple despises Flash.  It won't support it on the iPhone, and Apple is hoping that the html 5 specification will marginalize Flash.  Google is probably no huge fan of Flash either and would likely prefer html 5 to do in Flash as well.  But Flash is everywhere.  It is ubiquitous on the web.  By supporting EBUB, Adobe is offering support for an open ebook format (and sticking Apple and Amazon's Kindle in the eye at the same time).  By demonstrating that data stored on Acrobat.com will not remain hostage to a single proprietary document format, Adobe may woo more users.

Presenations receive some added features as well.  You can browse through color sets created by designers in Adobe Kuler.  Instead of using the same color schemes, these sets let you appear to be a bit more color coordinated when you design a Presentation.  You can also now search Google and Flickr for images in include in Presentations:

These improvements make Presentation a credible tool for assembling a basic presentation.  With the ability to incorporate FLV video, Presentation is now an interesting option.  The ability to export to Powerpoint formats adds the peace of mind that you won't have to wing it when the wifi hotspot you were counting on isn't working.

Acrobat.com is also planning on the ability to integrate with a mobile applications.  The Acrobat.com mobile application by scanR® will allow users to upload document images from a supported mobile phone and have them automatically stored as searchable PDF files in Acrobat.com. In addition, users can read their files stored in Acrobat.com, share files with others and fax documents from their Acrobat.com organizer or directly from their smartphone. Users of the free service will be able to send two outbound faxes and upload up to five documents from a mobile phone. An upgrade is available for users that need to fax or upload more documents.  I'd love to say that I've used the Acrobat.com mobile application on the iPhone and tell you about my experiences, but the Apple application review process is so broken that they still don't have Adobe's application available.  I was told by Adobe that they submitted it quite some time ago, but since some developers have been waiting for months just to get a bug fix pushed out, who knows when Apple will get around to approving an application for its good buddies at Adobe.

One benefit of using the Acrobat.com tools is the ability for multiple authors to work on documents at the same time.  Multiple authors can contribute to slides in a Presenations, enter data in a Table or draft content and comments in a Buzzword document.  This enables true collaborative document creation.  Lawyers in different locations could work on an agreement together, rather than playing document tennis with e-mail.

My comments about Acrobat.com do not cover the full set of features enabled for each of the applications on Acrobat.com.  I'm just hitting some of the interesting highlights.  I am interested to see whether users will embrace Acrobat.com or one of the other 800 pound gorillas in the room that are moving into the "cloud computing" space (i.e., Microsoft, which is moving Office tools online, and Google, with its hodgepodge of online services).  I don't believe Google's "do no evil" schtick.  I am not comfortable with Google ending up as the company that knows about everything I search for and everthing I store.  I want multiple competitors in this space so I have options when one goliath or another is naughty with my bits.  Adobe still suffers from a bit of closed format-itis, but Adobe may be adjusting to the times with the EPUB move.

You can follow Acrobat.com on twitter: www.twitter.com/acrobatdotcom

As a final note, I don't receive any premium access to Acrobat.com.  I just get the services I am willing to pay for right now, which is the free service.

Google gets in on the legal research game

To Westlaw and Lexis:

You have a big head start, but the world's largest search monster just left the land of nightmares and placed itself squarely in your rearview mirrors.  Google has surfaced search functionality that will return full-text opinions from state and federal courts.  Google Scholar, still in "beta," allows searches by case name, topic, or key words.  Advanced filters allow for creative search construction.  The November 17, 2009 announcement on Google's blog is here.

I did some test searches, and the results are good, but not quite as current as Westlaw or Lexis would provide.  Each case, when viewed, includes a "how cited" tab that, rather than explaining the correct citation syntax, provides a list of other cases citing to that case and an interesting list of case quotes showing how the case is cited in context.  Testing with Tobacco II, I was able to find that Cohen v. DirecTV cites Tobacco II, but Cohen isn't yet returned as a result when searching for it by name.  Either Google is waiting for finality before providing access to opinions, or its data source is slow to update.  As another plus, the cases include pagination information.

Setting all else aside, it's free and it's simple.  At this point, Westlaw and Lexis should stock up on clean underwear.

Apple gets off its proverbial and finally releases SquareSpace iPhone application

Back on September 11, 2009, I announced the long-anticpated release of an iPhone application for SquareSpace in a blog post that must have excited almost no reader of this blog.  Unfortunately, what Apple did was inadvertently release and then pull a beta version.  It had the final version, but Apple sat on its...hands and didn't fix its own mistake.

For that person in the back who was excited, I want you to know that your wait is over.  Today Apple finally got around to releasing the final version of the Application.