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Is There Really a “Free” Credit Report?

Yes, believe it or not. You’ve probably seen the commercials for LifeLock, the company where the president was publishing his own social security number to show how safe their $100/year identity theft program could be.  Sounded great until they had to settle with the FTC for $12 million for alleged …

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Lawyers: Foursquare & Yelp May Be New Discovery and Marketing Tools

Lawyers were fairly quick to catch onto the trend of Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook.  It is now common for lawyers to ask deponents about email addresses, Internet usage, and social networking activities. A new Internet trend is afoot and savvy lawyers may want to at least be …

Defamation

Does Your Company Need a Lawyer to Handle Social Media, Twitter and Facebook?

At least one company, Clorox, is looking for a full time, in house lawyer to clean up their social media policies and presence.  Is that necessary? A marketing person (or even an astute college student) could likely develop and monitor Twitter feeds and a Facebook fan page.  But is that …

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“Blogging for Lawyers” at Palm Beach Bar Association

We recently offered a lunch-time seminar for lawyers interested in learning about blogging at the Palm Beach Bar Association.  This was one in a series of lawyer-technology seminars, much like our prior Tweet Meet and Eat. Thanks to Matt Kakuk of Webmanagement.us who jumped in with some technical help on …

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Florida Paralegal Association & Internet Social Networking

Thank you to the Paralegal Association of Florida – Boca Raton Chapter for the very kind invitation to speak about “Social Networking Websites for Fun and Research” at their January 14, 2010 meeting. This presentation grew out of the Spring 2009 article, “Internet Social Networking Sites for Lawyers,” which was …

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Google Scholar’s Legal Search and Fast Flip

The ABA Journal Daily alerted us to “Google Offers Legal Research for Average Citizen… and Lawyers Too” so we had to take Google Scholar out for a test drive.  Along the way, we also stumbled across another Google product, Fast Flip.  Both are free. Apparently Google wants to dip a …

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Palm Beach County Bar Association Hosts “Tweet, Meet & Eat”

What does $30 buy you these days?  How about a 90-minute session learning to use Twitter and Facebook, a free lunch, and 1 hour of Florida Bar CLE credit! Come join us on Friday, September 25, 2009 at the Palm Beach County Bar Association offices for the Tweet Meet & …

Ethics

Can a Lawyer Get a Copy of a Transcript Without Paying Court Reporter? (The Debate Continues)

There is often an unspoken understanding that lawyers who attend hearings which are transcribed need to pay the court reporter to get a copy. Thus, if there are 10 parties to a lawsuit and everyone wants a copy of a 15-minute hearing transcript, court reporters often take the position that …

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Lawyer & Law Firm Blogs: Advice from Palm Beach County Attorneys

Considering writing a law blog?  Interested in seeing what other firms are doing?  Take a peek at the September 2009 Palm Beach Bar Bulletin article, Lawyer Blogs: Overview and Advice from Palm Beach County Bloggers.  It’s also included in the column to the right under “Articles.” Note the interesting statistics: …

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Better Searching on Facebook

We’ve written about how to use social networking websites for jury selection and marketing (see right column under Articles) and Facebook has now made it even easier to hunt down its members and their posts. Conceptually, Facebook has been a “closed circuit” social networking site where users limit who can …

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California Supreme Court OK’s Employer Videotaping Employee’s Office – and no one cares?

The California Supreme Court issued an August 3 opinion holding that an employer could secretly videotape an employee’s closed office without invading workplace privacy rights — and only a few news agencies mentioned the case by name (about 50 outlets referenced the case generally).  To give you an idea of …

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Why Lawyers Should Be @ Twitter

Chances are if you are reading this, you likely do not need a primer on how to use web applications like Twitter.  But, in case you need a refresher or are looking for some Palm Beach legal related tweet material, check out the July/August 2009 Palm Beach Bar Bulletin for …

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Lawyers Continue to Be Focused on Twitter (Let it Go..!)

While lawyers are typically slow to adopt any new technology, there is a peculiar love affair between lawyers and Twitter.  “New” by the way is a relative term.  Twitter’s been around since 2006.  How many people had heard of it before 2008?  Hmm? Even on this site, we’ve found ourselves …

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One Lawyer’s Advice on Twitter

The ABA Journal Mobile ran an interesting piece on lawyers-using-Twitter, Think of Twitter as ‘Megatexting,’ But Proceed With Caution.  Law-tech commentator Jim Calloway offered that lawyers should not over-Tweet (suggests you don’t have enough to do), don’t tweet outside of your practice/target area, and… don’t ever think your tweets are private.

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Lawyer Tells Client NOT to Use Social Network Sites in Hiring Process?

With the increase in social networking websites, there has been a corresponding increase in the “learning curve” as to how to properly use them.  The mainstream media and legal profession have shown us that Tweeting jurors, incriminating evidence on MySpace, and Facebook posts about personal misadventures is a bad idea …