a California-centric collection of comments and resources about complex litigation and class action practice
If you are slightly adventurous, you moved over to Firefox as your browser. If you are a little more daring, you moved to something even lighter, Google Chrome. Pshaw. If you want to browse with the newest hotness, give Google Chrome Beta a test drive. It is stable and squeaky clean in its minimalism. If you are running Windows 7, it is the perfect compliment to a polished operating system.
A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks web site was allegedly detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference in Las Vegas. (Elinor Mills, Researcher detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks (July 31, 2010) news.cnet.com.) In other words, discover the truth at your own risk. While I believe that a sovereign nation may need to engage in covert activity for national security and national interest purposes, I don't support the almost unaccountable power used to examine those who learn about secret activities.
Today Apple held a news conference of sorts. The ostensible purpose was to respond to concerns about the antenna design in the new iPhone 4. The real purpose was to see if everyone is as stupid as Apple seems to think we are.
Consider just the following two contentions about iPhone 4:
Apple attempted to use the second contention to describe the antenna problem as an illusory issue, suggesting that the drop rate is so close to the 3GS drop rate that it is just a part of life with a cell phone, and not a design error. This is false. Apple touted the antenna in the iPhone 4, and independent testing of the phone has confirmed that, when you aren't touching the call signal zone of death, the iPhone 4 has better reception than its predecessors. This is not surprising, given the big external antennas on the iPhone 4.
But if the iPhone 4 has a substantially better antenna, it should show a noticeable improvement in the drop rate. It does not. Based on Apple's own claims, I have to conclude that the most probable explanation for these observed results is that the external antenna holds calls longer, but suffers precipitous signal failure. In other words, the design flaw slightly overwhelms the overall improvement in the antenna over the long haul. You will probably have fewer drops in high signal strength areas, but you will drop more calls in low signal strength areas if you hold the phone like any normal person would.
I have an iPhone 3GS. It is a very nice phone. I have looked appreciatively at the iPhone 4. But I don't like being called an idiot, and my intended upgrade to the iPhone 4 is going on the back burner. I will give Windows Phone 7 a very thorough examination before deciding whether to give Apple another chance. This isn't a problem with all smartphones (I also have a Blackberry Bold 9700, which has no such problem - for that matter, neither does my iPhone 3GS). This is apparently a problem with a phone that was designed first and foremost with materials and appearance in mind.
My advice to Apple: if you are going to go to the trouble to hold a news conference to address a widely-reported potential flaw in the normal use-case design of one of your flagship products, don't view that time as your chance to offer contradictory assertions as you bitterly deny that anything unusual is going on with your new phone. It is just insulting. Just admit it, say you will work on a fabrication correction to the issue, and move on. A bit of humility goes a long way with the average consumer; Apple evidently has none. Here's your free rubber bumper (you crybabies).
View videos provided from Apple. Via Engadget.
After installing iOS4 on my iPhone 3GS and using it for a day, I can confirm that it is snappy and seems stable. The new email format and folder icon features are immediately useful.
But before installing, I suggest that you do the following:
If you subscribe to the RSS feed provided by Feedburner (now Google Feedburner, actually), something seems to have gone wrong with it in the last week. I suggest changing over to the RSS feed provided by SquareSpace: http://www.thecomplexlitigator.com/post-data/rss.xml
I may need to abandon the FeedBurner feed if it doesn't correct itself soon, but I didn't want to cut off subscribers without warning about the possibility of this change.
I recently provided a method for dealing with PDFs rejected by the CM/ECF filing system (as it is implemented by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California). That method is detailed here. While that process of exporting a problematic document out to a new document format (XPS) and then back into PDF deals with a number of problems, not everyone will find it to be a comfortable solution.
Here is an alternative method for removing links from a PDF, if you have Acrobat 9:
While Apple attempts to use its clout in the mobile web marketplace to kill Flash, the potential heir to the mobile throne, Google, has opted for the open route and, thus far, has encouraged Adobe to join the party. Last week, at Google I/O, Adobe demonstrated a beta version of Flash 10.1 running on the Android mobile device operating system. But Adobe had a few more Android tricks up its sleeve.
On May 21, 2010, Adobe announced that Adobe Reader is now available in the Android application marketplace. First release features, according to Adobe, include:
Adobe Reader for Android offers multi-touch gestures, like pinch-and-zoom, as well as double-tap-zoom, flick-scrolling and panning. We've also added a "reflow" mode, which will take text-heavy documents with wide margins, and automatically wrap the content for easy viewing on smaller screens.
So, for the last several years I have used an iPhone as my personal smartphone. But, with developments like this, and a flood of sweet-looking devices running Android, it's hard not to consider trying the Android ecosystem. Then again, I'm also intrigued by the potential of Windows Phone 7, so I hope that Adobe has plans to support what looks to be another powerhouse smartphone OS. Decisions, decisions.
If you spend any significant amount of time handling pleadings with line numbering on the side, you've probably received a pleading that has a misalignment problem on the first page like so:
The second page aligns just fine, but you can't figure out why you can't get the first page firm name block to align correctly. This is the goal:
This problem stems from a deeply buried setting in Microsoft Word. In Word 2007, hit the Office button in the top left corner of the program. Click on the Word Options button. Then select the "Advanced" settings panel. Scroll all the way to the bottom. In the "Compatibility options" section, expand the "Layout Options" section. Find the "Don't center 'exact line height' lines" checkbox and put a check in it. Problem solved.
Why does Word do this? Pleadings typically used "Exact height" line spacing to fit the 28 lines in on one page. The spacing is set at a point size increment of somewhere around 12 points for single spacing and 24 for double spaced lines. The default behavior in Word is to put a line of text in the vertical center of the space allocated for the line. This causes 24 point spacing lines to have a larger cushion of space at the top than 12 point ("single" spaced) lines. The attorney name block uses single spaced lines. The pleading numbering on the side of the page uses 24 point spacing. This misaligns the pleading numbers from the attorney name.
On the second page, which most frequently begins with a "double" spaced line of text (24 points, for example), the cushioning is the same for the text and the pleading line numbers. By telling Word not to center "exact line height" lines, all lines of text, whether 12 pt (single) or 24 pt (double) begin at the top of the vertical line spacing allocated to that line of text. In that case, the pleading numbers and the attorney name at the top of the caption both begin at the top of their respective lines. One line just has more open space below the text.
In older version of Word, you can find this setting in the Tools > Options menu.
What amazes me the most is that I see this configuration error from big firms and small alike. I can understand this getting by a small shop, but the big firms all pay the big bucks for dedicated word processing departments.
I will consider Word training sessions if offered a sufficiently outrageous sum of cash. Say, I bet you have wondered if there is an easy way to generate Tables of Contents and Tables of Authorities. There is. I bet you have wondered if there is a way to easily align pleading text up with line numbers after a single-spaced block quote screws it all up. Yup, there sure is. Someday I will offer a seminar that shows you how to do all of these things and more.
SquareSpace rolled out some new features, one of which you will find in the right sidebar. SquareSpace now stores Twitter posts on its own servers to speed load times. The widget is also interactive, allowing you to navigate back through older Twitter posts.
While I was at it, I slightly expanded the width of the content area and then increased the font size for posts to improve readability. If these sorts of things matter to you, feel free to leave a comment.
The United States District Court for the Central District of California has a very special online document filing system. And I do mean special. If you have experienced this filing system, you may have had an attempted filing rejected by the CM/ECF system because of "code" in the PDF. This will not happen if a PDF document is generated by simple scanning. I am only discussing an issue that occurs when PDF documents are generated directly from some other application.
There are many solutions to this problem, but I want to offer one that I find to be fast and reliable. You could just print and scan the document causing problems, but for large documents, this defeats the size advantage of generating directly on your system. For a very large document the scanning solution is a poor alternative. A suitable option would digitally transform the document to eliminate the "code" in the PDF (probably some javascript) but keep the document size reasonable.
The solution: use Microsoft's XPS Document Writer. The Microsoft XPS Document Writer (MXDW) is a print-to-file driver that enables any application to create XML Paper Specification (XPS) Document files on versions of Windows staring with Windows XP SP2. If you are interested, information about the specification can be found here.
You should have an XPS Document Writer printer driver on your Windows system if you are using anything later than Windows XP SP2. If you do not, you can get it here. You will also need software capable of converting from XPS format to PDF format. Acrobat software can do this, but I don't know what other PDF creation software can do the trick. The steps to "fix" the problematic PDF are:
Fixed. I'm going to start offering tips to fix other stuff, especially in Word. If you like tips like this, watch for the "How-to" label or Tag.
The Complex Litigator reports on developments in related areas of class action and complex litigation. It is a resource for legal professionals to use as a tool for examining different viewpoints related to changing legal precedent. H. Scott Leviant is the editor-in-chief and primary author of The Complex Litigator.
