Seating is limited because we prefer a more intimate setting, as opposed to a large hotel venue. We do our seminars in the large conference room on the first floor of the IP Building at 643 Magazine St. (behind the US Fifth Circuit). The room will hold about 50 people, which is perfect for us.

Dane Ciolino and I will be doing most of the sessions, but we’ll be having some excellent outside speakers as well. Jeff Richardson of iPhoneJD fame will be doing a session on mobile lawyering that will cover the use of tablet devices such as iPads. And Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan from the Eastern District of Louisiana will participate in a panel discussion of common e-discovery issues.

We’ll be doing an email blast in a few days, which should get a lot of attention from folks that may not have typically been to our seminars. So, if the readers of this blog want to reserve a spot they should sign up soon. For more details, and to sign up, click here. If you were there last year you’ll remember we had a lot of fun with giveaways, and this year we plan to ramp up the giveaways. We’re also planning lots of other things to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.

First, get an iPhone. The new one allows you to dictate text messages and even have them read to you. But, sometimes you want to read them yourself and the text is too small. You can fix this by going to SETTINGS > GENERAL (scroll down) > ACCESSIBILITY > LARGE TEXT and then set the text size to something like 20pt (or even larger). See the screenshots below.

This will make the text larger in your Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Messages and Notes apps. Those are the ones you tend to use most, right? So the other ones you’ll still need reading glasses for, but that’s okay. You should wear them once in awhile to let people know you’re distinguished.

Turns out the problem was my email settings. I have a couple of accounts, so my problem may be more acute than for most people. Still here is the fix, which was nothing short of miraculous.

Turn off push mail: If you have a push mail account such as Yahoo!, MobileMe or Microsoft Exchange, turn off push mail. You don’t need it.

Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Fetch New Data > Advanced. There you will see a list of all of your email accounts (if you have more than one, or just one if that’s all you have). Set each email account to FETCH. then pick how often you want the phone to fetch new email. I set mine to every hour and that’s plenty of email input for me.

If you need to get emails more often you can pick 30 or 15 minutes. Bottom line: don’t use ‘push’ unless you truly need to get email immediately throughout the day. If that’s the case be prepared to suffer from poor battery performance.

For more battery saving iPhone tips click here.

Head over to the website  Onebag.com and check out the many useful tips they have to offer. The One-Page Checklist is a good place to start. Also, check out their tips on how to pack clothes.

Now, that you know what to pack and how to pack it let’s turn to something else: efficiently managing your itinerary. For this we shall make use of a free website called Tripit.com.

Tripit turns all your flight, hotel and rental car confirmation e-mails into simple, mobile travel itineraries just by hitting forward. First you have to register with Tripit and let them know what your email address is. Once they can figure out who you are by your email address, you simply forward any confirming email you get for flight, hotel, or rental car to plans@tripit.com and they build an itinerary automatically.

I have the iPhone app (free) which means that I get all of the aforementioned itinerary info pushed out to my phone, which of course is with me at all times. So when I want to know what time my connecting flight leaves I can check on the phone. When I arrive and need to know the address of my hotel to give the cab driver I have that handy too.

The paid version of Tripit sends you text alerts when your flight is delayed. It also gives you gate information for arrival and departure, which I’ve found to be pretty accurate. Tripit Pro will even send your itinerary to your family members automatically (assuming you want that to happen). You can try the Pro version for free for 30 days, and then it’s $49/year if you want to keep using it.

Internet based phone service is a good way to save money in general, and Vonage is certainly one of the top providers. That’s one reason that we no longer worry about nationwide long-distance calls, even when using a landline. Hopefully, one day soon we’ll stop worrying about international calls too.

If you have a laptop, or two, in your household, the odds are that you have more than one battery charger. So how do you know which one is yours? Okay, you probably don’t get tripped up in the home front.

But if you travel with your laptop, and if you give presentations or have opportunities to forget your laptop charger, then today’s tip will be a life saver.  When you get a new laptop, the first thing you should do is get your Dymo labeler (you do have a Dymo labeler, right?). Then you make a label for your laptop charger that has your name and cellphone number.

Once you get your Dymo labeler you’ll find lots of things that can benefit from labeling: e.g. ethernet cords and other connection cables, devices and so on. The key is to plan for the future, and to plan for things to go wrong in the future.

The key questions presented in Ethics Opinion 842 were these:

May a lawyer use an online system to store a client’s confidential information without violating the duty of confidentiality or any other duty? If so, what steps should the lawyer take to ensure that the information is sufficiently secure?

The New York opinion concludes that lawyers may use online storage provided that certain steps are taken to ensure that the information is adequately protected. First of all, the opinion repeatedly cautions that lawyers who adopt online storage methods must “periodically review security measures as technology advances over time….” In other words, you can’t just adopt an online storage system that is reasonable to use today and then stop paying attention to how technology is changing.

Paying attention to technological advances is certainly of critical importance, regardless of purely ethical considerations. But now we see, perhaps for the first time, a prominent legal group urging that the need to pay attention to technological changes is an ethical obligation. Granted, it’s an obligation that only kicks in if you use online storage (at least if you’re in New York and being guided by this opinion). But one can easily see this reasonable admonition being applied in other contexts where lawyers use technology.

So to repeat the point for emphasis: you can’t just adopt a new technology, set it up, and then stop paying attention to how advances in technology affect your ability to protect clients information.

The New York opinion offers four specific considerations that should guide lawyers who use online storage services. The opinion says that lawyers should consider the following steps:

(1) Ensuring that the online data storage provider has an enforceable obligation to preserve confidentiality and security, and that the provider will notify the lawyer if served with process requiring the production of client information;
(2) Investigating the online data storage provider’s security measures, policies, recoverability methods, and other procedures to determine if they are adequate under the circumstances;
(3) Employing available technology to guard against reasonably foreseeable attempts to infiltrate the data that is stored; and/or
(4) Investigating the storage provider’s ability to purge and wipe any copies of the data, and to move the data to a different host, if the lawyer becomes dissatisfied with the storage provider or for other reasons changes storage providers.

Let me address each of these in turn, explaining in ordinary terms what they seem to mean for using services such as SugarSync or DropBox.

First, services such as SugarSync and DropBox have as much interest as anyone in keeping your data private. As a practical matter, if their services were easily hacked into and the information stored there was easily compromised their ability business customers (and regular customers too) would immediately be impaired. Of course, you should carefully review the terms of service of such sites to make sure that you (1) understand what rights and liabilities you might have, and (2) are aware of potential perils.

You can be sure that the terms of service will be written to the benefit of the online provider for the most part.  They will not accept liability for compromised security that results from you (1) having an inherently insecure password system, (2) giving your password to someone you shouldn’t, or (3) accessing your account from an insecure location such as a WiFi hotspot at a coffee shop, where there is limited security. These three issues are the most likely way that your client’s data would be compromised and all three of these scenarios are things that you should be responsible for.

You also want to make sure that you can get your data down from the online provider if they go out of business or if you change hosts.  Both SugarSync and DropBox are easy to download your data from, so make sure you use a similar provider. With SugarSync and DropBox you can also use their services to synchronize across multiple computers. Then you essentially have your data in two or more places at all times, and so you aren’t completely dependent on them to get copies of your data if you should lose it on one computer. Those services will, of course, purge your data once you leave because they have no interest in clogging their servers with the data of former clients who aren’t paying them anymore.

A key obligation is the obligation to be informed about what the terms governing your relationship with the online provider. Lawyers are not going to get off the hook by arguing that they didn’t understand what their obligations were, and what limitations were placed upon their service by the online provider. Some lawyers will shudder at the thought that their online provider might get a subpoena and turn over confidential client information. For me this is not a likely scenario. But, according to the NY Ethics opinion, it’s my obligation to make sure I know what SugarSync or DropBox would do if they got such a request. An online storage provider such as SugarSync or DropBox should, at a minimum, notify me that such a request has been issued and not simply turn over the information without giving me an opportunity to legally challenge such the request.

The New York opinion could easily be interpreted to apply to client communications such as those that are hosted by web-based email providers such as Google. After all, web-based email is stored online.

So what’s a nervous lawyer to do? Avoid online storage altogether? I imagine that many lawyers will, until one day it becomes such an impediment to their practice that they find it too difficult to avoid. Federal appellate judge Alex Kozinski addressed this concern in the context of a criminal case where the government had obtained too much electronic information and then improperly used that information.

The advent of fast, cheap networking has made it possible to store information at remote third-party locations, where it is intermingled with that of other users. For example, many people no longer keep their email primarily on their personal computer, and instead use a web-based email provider, which stores their messages along with billions of messages from and to millions of other people. Similar services exist for photographs, slide shows, computer code, and many other types of data. As a result, people now have personal data that are stored with that of innumerable strangers. Seizure of, for example, Google’s email servers to look for a few incriminating messages could jeopardize the privacy of millions.

It’s no answer to suggest…that people can avoid these hazards by not storing their data electronically. To begin with, the choice about how information is stored is often made by someone other than the individuals whose privacy would be invaded by the search. Most people have no idea whether their doctor, lawyer or accountant maintains records in paper or electronic format, whether they are stored on the premises or on a server farm in Rancho Cucamonga, whether they are commingled with those of many other professionals or kept entirely separate.

US v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, 579 F.3d 959, 1005 (9th Cir. 2009). (emphasis added)

Judge Kozinski’s observations should be a guidepost for lawyers who deal with electronically storaed information, and for bar associations that create ethical rules regarding online storage. The reality is that online storage is beneficial to everyone in many ways. Yes there are perils, and lawyers should be mindful of them and minimize the risks in sensible ways. But avoiding online storage altogether is not likely to be a practical or sensible option in many cases.

Here’s how it all unfolded.

Because I use Tripit Pro I was notified 24 hours before my flight via text message that I was eligible to check in. I clicked on the link TripIt sent me and was directed, via my iPhone’s mobile Safari browser, to a page where I could checkin. At the end of the process I was asked if I wanted to have the boarding pass delivered to my mobile phone, and I selected the option to do that.

A few minutes later I received the text message set forth below:

I simply clicked on the link that was contained in the text message and it opened a page in my mobile browser that looked like the image below:

I saved the mobile browser pages, figuring I’d need them when I got to the airport. I was worried that TSA might not accept the mobile ticket, but the officer who processed me was obviously used to people using their phones. He put my phone under the scanner and was immediately beeped with a confirmation that I was in their system.

Getting on the plane was just as easy. I knew what zone I was in and what seat I had been assigned (you can see it on the bar code above), so I waited until my zone was called and went up to the gate agent. She took my phone and held it under the scanner and, again, the computer beeped its acceptance and I was allowed to board.

I can’t wait until all airlines and airports adopt this. Tomorrow I have to fly to Miami and paperless ticketing is not an option (American Airlines is not as advanced as Delta). No doubt it will feel like I’m back in the Stone Age.

There are several web-based fax services such as efax, MyFax and RingCentral’s service. I use RingCentral, but have used the other two services and can vouch for their reliability and ease of use.

Recently, MyFax announced something interesting: attorneys can now receive and store all their incoming faxes on their iPhone or BlackBerry by way of an Internet faxing app. The iPhone app, for example, allows you to:

enter the recipient’s name and fax number, or look it up in your Contact Book.

take a picture of a page using your iPhone’s camera. Optimized for sending photos of text – includes a slider control to adjust the darkness threshold of the photo for maximum text clarity (best results with iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4). You can also choose photos from the Photo Album. Send up to 8 pages in a single fax, plus the cover page.

view the status of your sent faxes (Pending, Successful, or Failed), including those sent by email or from the MyFax online website. Faxes sent from the iPhone are highlighted with a colored icon.

The Blackberry app, which works in a similar fashion, can be acquired at this link. An iPad app is in the works, but it’s hard to say how helpful that will be until the iPad gets a camera. The main benefit of an app like this to be that one can take pictures of a document with a few pages and then fax straight from a smartphone.

Of course, anyone can basically do the same thing with an iPhone scanning apps such as ScannerPro ($6.99 at time of this post). ScannerPro allows you to take pictures of several pages and combine them into one PDF that you can then email. Since all of the web-based fax services allow you to initiate a fax by emailing it to a special address (e.g. 15049431234@efax.com) you can already do this trick with any smartphone that has a camera and allows you to send emails with attachments.

So if you have a web-based faxing service get ScannerPro for your smartphone and don’t be a slave to one of those Soviet era fax machines. You deserve a better life than that, don’t you?

So, if you want to help an enterprising young lawyer, at the same time that you help yourself, think about using this application.  Obviously, you can’t use it if you don’t have an iPhone or if you aren’t a Louisiana lawyer. But, regardless of where you practice law, if you have an iPhone remember to check out Jeff Richardson’s excellent website (iPhoneJD.com), which is all about using iPhones in the practice of law.