Court Filings, Decisions and Legal Articles : JD Supra : Cases, Briefs, Documents, Forms

I am running from one great event to another, here in Chicago at the ABA TechShow 2008, which is jam-packed with presentations by some of the greatest minds in legal technology today. 

I just attended the fascinating keynote address by Marc Rotenberg, entitled "Who's Watching You? A Conversation About Privacy on the Internet."  Marc is the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which is doing great work to protect our right to privacy.

Among the interesting topics discussed (and on which EPIC has often taken a stand):

• Government efforts not only to track existing information about individuals, but also to create new tracking methods such as the ability to follow an individual's movements in public spaces - through surveillance combined with face recognition technology (spooky).

• Warrantless border searches of laptops and, worse yet, "body imaging" by the TSA and Homeland Security - which, in the process of going through our airline security checkpoints, essentially captures a nude digital image of fully dressed individuals without their knowledge, that can be shown on any PC compatible device.

• The ability (or lack thereof) to remove your personal data from social networking sites. According to Marc, site operators may make it increasingly possible to remove this data - which heretofore has been difficult to achieve. But, of course, there are also sites that aggregate this data from other sources, and may not allow you to remove it. (As an aside: JD Supra's Terms give every contributor the right to remove their content from the site in the unlikely event they wish to do so and prohibit unauthorized use of the site content by third parties.)

I had an opportunity to speak with Marc after his presentation - and hopefully, EPIC will be sharing some of its great work in the law with all of us on JD Supra, soon :)

Here is a brief roundup of some of the coverage we've seen since our launch earlier in the week. Thank you, editors, writers, bloggers, for starting conversations and spreading the good word. (For a comprehensive list of related links please see JD Supra's In the News page.)

- The Wall Street Journal Law Blog: "... JD Supra is a new site that allows lawyers of all stripes to post court docs, filings, articles, client alerts — anything relevant to a case, really — for others who are doing legal research. The homepage has a cool sidebar that keeps track of who’s contributing the most docs."

- ABA Law Journal: "... JD Supra also offers a free platform for attorneys and others involved in legal matters to market themselves and identify individuals with useful expertise. A search page allows them to look for relevant material by jurisdiction, subject matter and document type."

- National Post: "JD Supra launches the YouTube of law... Let the posting begin!"

- Justia Law, Technology, and Legal Marketing Blog: "... We are encouraging all of the law firms we work with to participate and share with JDSupra's law library. By working together we can help build a great new legal research library. This is a very nice start of a new free research service!"

- WisBlawg From the UW Law Library: "... It's not only that JD Supra is facilitating the sharing of legal content - there are other sites do that, like DocStoc or Scribd - but what makes it unique is that it is able to lend some authority to those documents by tying them to author profiles. As a librarian, I'm much more likely to rely on a source when I can verify the expertise of its author. [It's] quite ingenious actually."

- MyShingle.com: "... JD Supra gives solo and small firm lawyers a way to strut their stuff.  By posting documents, other lawyers can get a sense of what your work product is like.  And by uploading a document, you gain a listing in JD Supra , which is another way to gain visibility online."

One mention that generated an interesting conversation around the JD Supra virtual water cooler comes from LawyerKM: Knowledge Management & Technology for Lawyers and Law Firms. The post - titled "Is JD Supra inter-law firm Knowledge Management?" - asks: "are any firms going to share the good stuff — the “intellectual capital” that really gives them the competitive advantage over the other firms out there?"

Two days into our launch and we're thrilled to see a question such as this one. We hope that this is not just the beginning of a worthwhile dialog about Knowledge Management but also the start of a conversation that goes to the very heart of it all: the way we value information today in the face of dramatic technological innovation (ie., web and internet and the technologies they bring forth).

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[Finally, taking a page from Tim Stanley's book (actually from the bottom of his Justia Law posting about JD Supra) here's what we're listening to today: Grateful Dead, live at Roscoe Maples Pavilion, Stanford University - Feb 9, 1973. Downloaded from the Internet Archive, streaming directly to our ears.]