This post was written by Tom Kane: "Cold calling as a marketing tool is not one of my favorite techniques. Not to be wishy-washy, let me put this way, I am dead set against it when it comes to personal services marketing, especially for lawyers. It also raises serious ethical issues with most bar associations that have the prohibition patterned after the ABA Model Rule 7.3 (Direct Contact with Prospective Clients). Direct mail is only slightly more effective in my mind, although it certainly has its proponents.

Then comes emails... I discourage clients from using emails as a marketing tool, especially when directed toward people they do not know.

Then along comes Carolyn Elefant. The well-known (okay, actually a bona fide guru) author of MyShingle blog and Nolo's Legal Marketing Blawg has a post on the latter site talking about "The Three Es of Cold E-mails" that is worth reading.  She is not totally against their use, if they aren't "canned", but customized and tie into a legitimate connection with the recipient...

So, should cold e-mails be part of your business development arsenal? Carolyn apparently thinks they could have their place."

Full text and active links are available by clicking on the author's name.

Source: Legal Marketing Blog.com, 2 March 2010, reproduced with permission of the author

This post was written by Randall Ryder: "Given attorney's busy schedules, communicating over email is many times preferable. The ease of email, however, sometimes overshadow a number of problems with email communications. A New York Housing Court judge has developed a helpful "email etiquette guide" to alleviate the most common problems..."

Continue reading this interesting post and reach the active links by clicking on the author's name.

Source: Lawyerist.com, 8 February 2010. © 2007-2010 Lawyerist Media, LLC. Reproduced with permission of the site editor, Sam Glover.

From the site: "The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution gives us protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. But what about a search of your email - is it afforded the same protection?   Co-hosts and attorneys J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Orin S. Kerr , Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and Jason Paroff Esq.,  Director of Computer Forensics Operations with the ESI Consulting practice at Kroll Ontrack to look at the recent opinion handed down by U.S. District Judge Mosman with respect to the Fourth Amendment and email along with our experts' look at what can be retrieved and used in court when it comes to email.

Special thanks to our sponsor, Clio

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:57 -- 24.3MB)

Related Podcasts

• October 22, 2009 -- Electronic Search and Seizure, Fourth Amendment & Inadvertent Production
• September 16, 2009 -- Email Management: Part Two
• August 11, 2009 -- Email Management: Part One
• July 20, 2009 -- Email Etiquette 2.0
• February 10, 2009 -- The Globalization of E-Discovery - Live From LegalTech NY"

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Talk Network, 5 November 2009

In the news: "Can employees retain attorney-client privilege for e-mails sent to their lawyers using employer-provided e-mail and computers? Attorney Anthony E. Davis seeks to reconcile apparently inconsistent decisions, and to aid in advising clients on avoiding the risks such communications pose."

The article also includes information for:

PUBLIC POLICY ARGUMENTS

REPRESENTING EMPLOYEES

REPRESENTING EMPLOYERS

Read full text

Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 5 November 2009. Copyright 2008.  ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe  <http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw>.

In the news: "Stearns Weaver's e-mail system was hobbling their digital transition. The system did not integrate well with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and was buckling under the massive amount of messages sent between attorneys, staff and clients. Then came Azaleos' Managed Exchange Services."

Read full text

Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 4 November 2009. Copyright 2008.  ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe <http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw>.

Posted by Rick Borstein: "I took a close look at the Acrobat 9 packaging and didn't find any mention of EDD (Electronic Data Discovery). 

Despite that, I'm hearing from more and more law firms that would like to use Acrobat to capture, review and produce email as part of a case.

A great solution is an Email Portfolio. Acrobat can convert an entire folder of email in Outlook or Lotus Notes into well-organized PDF Portfolio which lets you sort, filter and search.

The Outlook integration provide by Acrobat offers the following:

1. Convert individual email messages to PDF
2. Adds attachments in their native format into the PDF of the message
3. Combines all of the converted messages into a PDF Portfolio
4. Adds a full-text index to the PDF Portfolio

Acrobat's email archiving feature is intended to be a personal email archiving tool, however with a bit of tweaking (and perhaps a plug-in like Evermap's AutoPortfolio), you may be able to use it successfully to manage small EDD productions.

New to Email Portfolios?
Learn about the basics of Email Portfolios by watching this short movie

In this article, I'll discuss:

1. How to create a new User Account for production
2. Setting up a "null user" in Outlook
3. How to load PST and MSG files into Outlook
4. How to convert email messages into an PDF Email Portfolio
5. Reviewing documents in the Email Portfolio
6. Producing Documents from the Email Portfolio
7. Converting an Email Portfolio to a PDF Binder
8. How to use Evermap's AutoPortfolio tool to move data to a litigation support product like Summation or Concordance

Read more...

The full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Acrobat for Legal Professionals, 1 November 2009

Posted by Bruce Carton: "Back in August, Esquire Magazine posted a series of "rules" that included this one:

Esquire's Rule #1033. If your lawyer's email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com), find a new lawyer.

This prompted a flurry of discussion in this post on the Simple Justice blog (written by SHGLaw@aol.com, aka Scott Greenfield) and ultimately here on Legal Blog Watch as to the validity of Rule #1033.

As Carolyn Elefant wrote at the time,

I suppose that Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail addresses suggest that a lawyer is too cheap or lacking in tech savvy to set up an e-mail account on his own firm's server. In addition, some have raised privacy concerns about Gmail, which would presumably apply to the other services as well. Questions about the confidentiality of a firm's e-mail might be another reason for a client to avoid a lawyer using one of these services.

This week, however, proponents of Gmail as a serious and professional business email service received a boost when the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to outsource its entire e-mail system to Google. L.A. thus becomes the largest city in the nation to make the move to Gmail, with Councilman Tony Cardenas calling it a "world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art e-mail system." Not quite as certain was Councilman Paul Koretz, who said "it's unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off."

This post on the Slaw.ca blog considers the impact on lawyers, noting that,

As lawyers, the security of our communications is critical. I can rely on the infrastructure of a large firm to make sure all the necessary security is in place. I wonder, however, when I receive e-mails from someone using yahoo or gmail for professional purposes, whether that security level has been assured. The stringent requirements that the LAPD is sure to require may generate gains for everyone relying on google for their e-mail.

A commenter on the Slaw.com post opined that using Google means more security, not less, writing that "Google is essentially a very, super large firm with a lot more resources to dedicate to security etc. whereas a law firm, even a large one, will at best have a small IT staff that operate a dedicated server for the firm."

If other government bodies and organizations follow Los Angeles' lead, then it will not be long until Gmail.com completes the leap to being a widely respected email address."

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Blog Watch, 30 October 2009

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi: "Update: Orin Kerr says he misread the opinion. Read his correction here.

The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to e-mail, a federal judge has ruled. The judge's reasoning would seem to sound a warning bell for anyone -- lawyers in particular -- not only who use Web-based e-mail accounts, but also who store documents of any kind online in "the cloud."

Orin Kerr, professor at George Washington University Law School, highlights the ruling and quotes from it at The Volokh Conspiracy, even though he says he disagrees with it.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman in Oregon addresses the question of whether the government must notify someone when it obtains a search warrant to access the person's Web-based e-mail account. This case appears to have involved Google's Gmail.

The Fourth Amendment, Mosman writes, creates a "strong privacy protection for homes and the items within them in the physical world." But e-mail, he says, resides outside a person's home..."

Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Blog Watch, 29 October 2009

 Posted by J. Benjamin Stevens: "Do you know whether your e-mail client uses POP (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)?  You should, because IMAP is vastly superior to POP, and you should consider the following reasons that you should switch today:

1. Avoid webmail outages :: Users who connected to their web-based email accounts (such as Gmail) using IMAP can continue to retrieve their mail as usual even if the web-based email platform goes down.
2. Switch clients or platforms painlessly :: You can move effortless from one program to another without having to export / import messages and risk losing messages or the metadata attached to them.
3. Read all your mail on multiple devices :: For people who must use a variety of devices or operating systems, IMAP lets you see exactly the same data - including saved, filed, and sent messages - on every device.
4. Keep an extra copy of your messages :: The fact that IMAP gives you both local and server-based copies of each message can help you avoid data loss.  

[His] Source: "Four reasons to switch to IMAP" by Joe Kissell, published at Macworld.com."

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: The Mac Lawyer, 20 October 2009

From the site: "Episode 100: October 06, 2009

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Spam: it's the bane of our inboxes, whether it's a mortgage deal, a plea from a Nigerian Senator, or a very subtle pitch for "male enhancement" drugs. The more it comes, the angrier we get until we shake our fists and say: "There ought to be a law." As it happens, there is a law. Quite a few, actually.

Back in 2003, Congress passed the infamous CAN SPAM Act, which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. I say "infamous" because the law has been much criticized for being ineffective. Indeed, some critics have dubbed it the "yes, you CAN SPAM Act." For example, the law was supposed to lead to the creation of a national do-not-spam registry similar to the do-not-call registry. In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission submitted a nifty report to Congress about creating such a registry and since then, there has been . . . silence.

Topics discussed include:

• Spam Laws
• Only Commercial Emails Are Prohibited
• What Can You Do About Spam? 

The full text of this post is available at the source site listed below

Source: Legal Lad, 6 October 2009