Last night I was asked why a company would want to switch from outside counsel to in-house lawyers. I've been in-house at Research in Motion (AKA BlackBerry), worked at a large Bay St. law firm and am now practising independently. Although I'm not a grizzled veteran, I have seen both sides of the practise of law.
I think there are two key advantages of in-house:
I use Gmail to manage my eleven different email accounts. I have all of my accounts set up as mail forwards (e.g. addison@cameronhuff.com forwards to myemail@gmail.com) and then SMTP for outgoing from Gmail. This set up allows me to have all of my different businesses funnelled into one account that's accessible on my phone and computer. When I reply to a message my email will be sent from the email address that it was sent to (and not the Gmail address).
Besides the incredible convenience of managing many email accounts through one, using Gmail gives me Google's anti-spam filters (they're great). Google anti-spam is also a great defence against phishing emails.
Even if you have a password to unlock your phone (and you should), the contents of your phone are not secure. All of your attachments, emails, phone call records, notes, etc. could be available to a thief, hacker or border agent. If you're not using a firm-supplied BlackBerry (where this should be enabled by default) you should enable encryption on your phone.
In order to secure your phone you'll need to enable encrypted storage. The method for doing so depends on your model and may require some help from an IT expert. Try googling the name of your phone and "storage encryption". On Android you can enable it by following these steps (may not be applicable to your version of Android).
This blog post contains a summary of practical steps to make your law practice more secure. Most of these steps require technical knowledge to execute on but there should be enough information provided for you to have a conversation with your technical staff.
The best way to secure a firm against hackers stealing money is to use "air gaps". Read more in this blog post.
My law practice is stored in an encrypted disk image. Encrypting your practice files is like locking your files in a bank vault.
How does it work? A disk image is like a directory but when it's opened it requires a password. Once opened the directory will be available until you eject it (like a CD).
Large law firms should assume that their systems have been compromised by hackers. Whether the danger is state espionage (e.g. Potash hacking of Bay St.), "Anonymous" or cybercriminals in California, firms are either currently being exploited or about to be.
Obviously guarding the front line (i.e. lawyer/assistant computers) is important but generally front line computers aren't the real target. Often the targets of hackers are wire and ACH transfer systems (viz. payroll).
Law firms often have accounting departments with access to wire transfer capabilities through online banking. There is a risk with these systems of infection with malware (i.e. keyloggers) and then unauthorized wire transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Toronto firm in 2012 had a "six figure loss" from this type of attack. These attacks are likely just the tip of the iceberg because law firms don't like to admit to having had trust funds stolen.
A good solution to the problem of attacks on accounting computers is to air gap them. The strategy is to provide a dedicated computer with a separate internet connection for wire transfers. Having a separate computer (and internet) means that any infections on the network or in an email attachments can't affect the banking computer. This method would have prevented the two attacks linked to above (and virtually any other kind of attack).
I'll be presenting on the 29th of January on the topic of "Cyber Crime and Your Practice" (professional development credit).
I'm honoured to be presenting with Alex Cameron (Faskens), Mark Hayes (Heydary Hayes) and George Takach (McCarthy Tetrault).
I was covered in an article in Queen's Law Reports, the alumni magazine for Queen's Law. Here's the relevant page and you can read the whole issue here.
The article is a bit dated because this is from an interview I did in the summer before I started my law practice. Since the article was written I opened my own practice, created AlbertaMonitor.ca, FlatLaw.ca and EUAlerts.com.
EUAlerts.com has launched! It's the culmination of a fair bit of work over the last couple months and I'm excited to see where it goes.
EUAlerts is the first keyword-based government monitoring service for the European Union. The service works by monitoring for client keywords and then when they're found in new laws the client gets an email with excerpted sections and highlighted keywords.
Uber (traditional cab competitor from San Francisco) has hired a lobbying firm in Calgary.
New West Public Affairs will be lobbying Municipal Affairs and the Justice & Solicitor General for changes to the Municipal Government Act and Traffic Safety Act. Presumably they'll be trying to deregulate the taxi industry in Edmonton & Calgary.
If you've ever had to do cross-browser testing you're probably familiar with screenshot tools like Browser Shots (it's great and free).
I highly recommend checking out BrowserStack if you have to do any kind of interactive testing (e.g. Javascript, drop-down menus, etc.). I used it a few weeks ago for a project and it was easy + free.
Ontario is considering allowing autonomous vehicle testing (as is being done in Nevada & California by Google). The regulation that's being considered will allow for a five year testing period. Although the cars will be autonomous, they'll have to have a driver ready to take over immediately.
No driving systems that are "homebuilt conversions" will be allowed.
FlatLaw.ca was written up yesterday on the blog of Canadian Lawyer Magazine/Law Times.
The mention on their site caused about 50 extra people to visit the site (although it was published late Friday afternoon).
I've created a presentation about terms of use and best practices for ensuring enforceability.
It works best in Chrome & Firefox: “Terms of Use: Best Practices for Enforceability”
Online license agreements usually have warranties that are WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. This is an anachronism from the typewriter era that should be avoided according to the 9th Circuit, a leading author on contracts drafting and the deputy GC of Wikipedia.
The reason why people use all caps is a section of the UCC, an American law that codifies sales law (similar to the Sale of Goods Acts in Canada). You can read more about it here.
Here's an easy guide for getting SSH keys set up for SSH/rsync connections to your web server: myridia.com
In order to create AlbertaMonitor.ca I had to figure out how to convert PDFs to HTML using PHP.
The trick is to use a Java program called pdfbox and run it from the shell using PHP:
Here are a few questions to ask when hiring a technology lawyer:
1. Does the lawyer have a website? I wouldn't hire one who doesn't. A decent website is quite affordable in 2013 (check Craigslist!).
A week and a half ago I attended the 17th annual IT.CAN conference. The conference was more educational than I expected (i.e. less networking). Although the IT/tech bar is a fairly small group of people the conference was still accessible and open to new people like myself.
I wish I had attended IT.CAN as a student because it would have opened my eyes to the areas of practice within tech. I strongly recommend it to anyone considering the field (and there's a very cheap student rate).