Futurelawyer

Oh, No, Mr. Bill!- Typos and Errors Lead to Slashed Fees for Attorney

Link: Law.com - Typos and Errors Lead to Slashed Fees for Attorney. One of the toughest things, in a busy law practice, is to make certain that correspondence and pleadings go out of the office free of typos and other grammatical errors. I have spoken and posted before about "computer malpractice", in which too little proofreading is done to documents that use previous computer created documents as models. I am just as guilty of this as the next lawyer; and, while the errors in this particular pleading are egregious, every lawyer must shudder and say "there, but for the grace of God, go I". Law practice is stressful; but, one thing we can control is the quality of the written work product we send out into the world. I promised myself I wouldn't post again about the amazing Rays, and their playoff run until they make it to the World Series; however, Joe Maddon's mantra of "hustle, hustle, hustle", as the one thing every player CAN control, applies here. You can't control the weather, clients, or Judges. You CAN control the quality of your pleadings. Be careful out there.

Mobile Digital Scribe - A Pen For All Of Us - IoGear Giveaway!

Link: Futurelawyer: Mobile Digital Scribe - A Pen For All Of Us Regular readers will remember this August post about the IoGear Digital Scribe, which converts normal handwriting into digital form. If you take notes (and what lawyer doesn't?), and you have ever tried to make sense of them at a later time (and who hasn't?), you know the feeling. What happened to the notebook you wrote critical details in when interviewing a witness? Have you lost a valuable piece of paper on which you jotted down important  information? In a rush and writing too fast, have you ever tried to make sense out of you chicken scratching?
Even with the advance of technology and accessibility of laptops, handwriting information from pen to paper is still a prominent, if not desired, form of documentation. The simplest form of data entry device is still the pen and pencil, as it is available, there are no worries about a battery dying, and most of us don't carry a keyboard around. Sometimes nothing beats writing notes by hand. However, papers and notebooks get easily displaced or lost. IOGEAR wants to hear your hair-pulling nightmare stories or most quirky / funny instances you lost information stored on paper, and to give you some impetus, and has offered the Futurelawyer's readers some free Digital Scribes in exchange.
The top three best anecdotes will receive a free Mobile Digital Scribe from IOGEAR. Complete with digital pen and receiver, the product captures handwritten notes and saves them to upload for easy storage and organization on a computer.
Please submit in the comments section below before October 31st to win!

Put That Big Screen On Your Desk for $799!

Following up on the big-screen monitor discussion from last week. TigerDirect and  CompUSA are selling refurbished 42 inch Vizio big screens for $799 this week. Now is the time to show your colleagues what a big screen monitor looks like. You can, with a kit, hang these puppies on the wall next to your desk, and the VGA input will make one big, honking computer monitor. If you simply must spend your workaholic life at the office, at least do it in style. I can vouch for the benefits to old eyes of a big monitor. And, the price, as they say, is right.

Microsoft Has Its Head Up In The Clouds

Link: Windows: "Windows Cloud" Operating System Release Within a Month. Will the new developer OS interface, named by Microsoft as "Windows Cloud" change anything? Will the OS of the future be accessed through a web browser? I don't know, but Microsoft is attempting to co-opt the cloud computing paradigm (I hate that word), and to get out in front of the web wave. We used to surf the web; now, we are supposed to fly among the clouds. I begin to suspect that the heads of the software companies have their collective heads somewhere else. Users need to touch, to feel, to have local control; or, at least, the illusion of local control. Do we really want a computing life controlled by the access and whims of the Internet?

Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool

Link: Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool. How do you organize and collect your legal research on the web? Thanks to Robert Ambrogi at LegalBlogWatch for this heads-up about the free Zotero tool from George Mason University. The Thomson Reuters litigation cited in the blog post notwithstanding, this add-on to Firefox 3 is a wonderful way to organize and collect the research materials for a project that you come across on-line. Just click and drag them to a folder in the bottom half of the browser screen, and they can be organized and reviewed whenever you need them. Of course, you need to download and use the best browser on the planet, Firefox 3, to use the tool. So, get going, and make your online research faster and easier.