 There is a growing career industry worldwide known as Virtual Assistants, they are made up of every traditional profession and career you can think of including Lawyers and Para-Legal, from people who are tired of the corporate world, to people who want to operate their business differently, to people who want to spent more time with family and still have the luxury of continuing their profession.
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Union boss in hot water after tweets |
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 Union boss Derek Simpson has just discovered the peril of Twitter - be careful what you tweet. The joint general secretary of the Unite union has found himself in hot water after sending some indiscreet messages via the micro-blogging service. Attending sensitive talks with British Airways bosses to try to prevent further strike action by the airline's cabin crews, Mr Simpson used his Twitter account to give a running commentary on the proceedings.
Read more ....
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 This is an actual letter sent to a man named Ryan DeVries regarding a pond on his property. It was sent by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Quality, State of Pennsylvania . This guy's response is hilarious, but read State's letter before you get to the response letter.
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 Anything Microsoft can do, Google can do better! Only kidding.... Just after I told the world about a great MS Word calculator feature, a very good friend of mine said "But what about the Google calculator?" to which I replied, "The desktop screenlet application? - I don't really want to promote people having to download and install anything here." "No, you fool - in the Google search field!" Well blow me over. If you open Google and type in a calculation with the recognised symbols, then hit "Enter" and it gives you the result!
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 February 9th , 2010 London: Mimecast®, a holistic email management company offering SaaS-based email archiving, continuity, security and policy control, has been recognised for Best Value and Best for Service Excellence by the legal industry at TheKnowList Awards 2010.
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Ga. Appeals Court Launches E-Filing |
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 After years of planning, the Georgia Court of Appeals has begun accepting briefs electronically, launching a piecemeal rollout of its electronic-filing project. Chief Judge M. Yvette Miller said the court expects to allow additional types of electronic filings, such as motions and requests for extensions or oral argument, by the end of this month, although other steps in developing a complete e-filing system will require further appropriations.
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Hosted Systems - Obvious Really? |
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 Some people still need convincing. Christopher Webb of IRIS puts the case that Hosted Systems are a secure, low-risk IT option for law firms, and suggests some ideas that could create some not-so-obvious benefits for users. Most people think that 'Hosted', 'ASP' and 'Software as a Service' are new IT concepts. Nope - most definitely wrong. These are just the fancy new names thought up by analysts and marketers like me to re-label a fine old wine that's been around in various forms since I started in the IT industry 25 years ago.
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Women Struggle to Hit Heady Heights of Law Firms |
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 It is clear now (it took a couple of decades) that women are equally able when it comes to doing the top jobs in the legal profession. Much has been made in recent years of gender equality and much has been done - 20% of partners in the top 100 are now female. So the stats are improving even if they have some way to go - the Magic Circle proved less inclusive on the ‘equality scale ' than smaller firms with just over 14% of partners being of the female variety last year.
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What is Google Wave exactly? |
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 What is this Google Wave thing that people are talking about? Simply put, it is a communication system, much like email but that the message remains in one spot (Google Wave servers) and grows as the discussions continue. So the message does not keep bouncing between recipients, but is one big communication source per topic.
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ADERANT Acquires StarLaw's Enterprise Content Management Applications |
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 Atlanta, GA - August 18, 2009 - ADERANT, a global provider of business and financial management software for law firms, today announced that the Company has purchased a suite of Enterprise Content Management applications developed by StarLaw. The acquisition adds integrated document management, records management, and email management solutions to ADERANT's product portfolio.
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The 10 Most Stupid Tech Company Blunders |
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 Some of the biggest high-tech deals never happened. Some of the most promising products and services never came to be. Why? Because the people and companies involved didn't realize what they were letting slip through their fingers, or they simply couldn't foresee what would happen afterward.
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Digital cigarettes - what next?! |
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 Manufacturers of an electronic cigarette claim that their product reduces the harmful risks of smoking by up to 99% while still giving users a sufficient, simulated fix.
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Freshfields chooses iManage Universal Search |
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 Autonomy Corporation, today announced that Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a leading international law firm with over 2,700 lawyers in 27 key business centres around the world, has chosen Autonomy iManage Universal Search (IUS) for all of its content and knowledge management requirements worldwide. IUS will provide over 6,000 users with instant access to sought-after documents, and alerts to conceptually similar content and experts in the community, while guiding professionals to relevant case matter automatically and in real-time.
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Interwoven: on the march across Europe - Legal Technology Insider |
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International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
 After a short ceasefire, the DMS war has broken out again between Open Text and Interwoven. In the latest bout of "bashing the bird" Interwoven reports that not only did it swap-out, worldwide, 49 former Hummingbird/Open Text sites last year, but is also making big inroads into the Continental market. There, 40 of Europe's 100 largest law firms now use Worksite, including 75% of the top 20.
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Is Twitter a useful tool for lawyers or just for the birds? |
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 Twittering has obviously caught on, but can it be a valuable business tool for lawyers, or should tweets remain only between friends? Consultant Gina F. Rubel discusses the basics of Twitter, shares her own and others' opinions on Twitter for lawyers, and provides some online resources for more information.
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WANTED: Conficker authors |
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 Microsoft has put a bounty out for information on the developers of the Conficker worm. The reward? $250,000.
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At LegalTech, as usual, Equivio had the chance to speak with lots of people from a broad cross-section of the e-discovery industry - service providers, law firms, corporations and software vendors. These are their distilled takeaways from the show and their conversations with all those people:
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 Top Investment bank Pacific Crest has said that Intel plans to introduce significant price cuts across its product range.
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 The Conficker/Downadup worm is slithering across the Web at an "amazing" pace, say F-Secure researchers. Calling the scope of the attack "amazing," security researchers at F-Secure Corp. said that 6.5 million Windows PCs have been infected by the "Downadup" (or "Conficker") worm in the last four days, and that nearly nine million have been compromised in just over two weeks.
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How would you like to be in technology right now? |
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International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
 If you thought the legal profession was taking a beating in the recession, spare a thought for the IT companies who are bleeding profusely. Workforces are being slashed, and some large tech companies are filing for bankruptcy.
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 LOS ANGELES, May 27, 2010 - Long-time Enterprise firm Bowman Gilfillan will be converting to the ELITE® 3E practice and financial management platform to take advantage of the 3E Workflow and 3E Metrics and Reporting capabilities.
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 A little humour on the witness stand....
ATTORNEY:
ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
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UK News - More than 40 per cent of large law firms consider external funding |
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 LSN in the United Kingdom reported that more than 40 per cent of the largest law firms are considering external funding through venture capital or private equity, a survey of 121 firms by accountants Smith & Williamson has suggested.
The survey also found that 20 per cent of firms would consider selling shares in themselves. Three quarters of the firms taking part in the survey had over 25 partners. Ten of the top 20 biggest firms took part, along with 59 of the top 100.
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eXpd8 expands into the Scottish legal market |
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 eXpd8 are delighted to announce the launch of their Case Management and Accounts software to the Scottish legal profession. eXpd8 have been recognized as a Service Provider to the Law Society of Scotland. Available from just £1 day, this solution has been extremely successful within the Irish market and very successful in South Africa, Australia and USA. eXpd8's combination of highly competitive pricing, ease of use and unique product features has placed this product at the top of the list for legal practices seeking digital file management.
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Elite receives Gold for Billing Manager and Prolaw from the 2009 Law Technology News Awards |
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Elite, a Thomson Reuters business, received two Gold awards in the seventh annual Law Technology News Awards. Elite® Billing Manager won the Gold in the Time and Billing for Large firms (100+ lawyers) category, a distinction the company has won in six out of the seven years of these awards. ProLaw® received the top spot in the Docketing & Calendar Application category.
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 Acer has discovered that certain models of the Acer Aspire range, prior to 15 September 2009, melt the casings on the left hand side of the notebook, due to a faulty mic cable. The notebook model numbers that are affected are: AS3410, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ and AS3810TZG.
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 Online e-books are a good way to read books while on holiday, or while catching a few spare minutes waiting for planes etc. Gavin McLachlan offers a few of the sites he uses to browse for free e-books.
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LexisNexis sells Hotdocs to Capsoft |
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 Capsoft, a leading solution provider for Hotdocs over the last 13 years has aquired HotDocs from LexisNexis. LexisNexis will still provide services to their Automated Forms devision which uses HotDocs as the document assembly engine. It will be interesting to watch how well HotDocs performs with Capsoft now giving the product their full attention. Local LexisNexis reports that business on the HotDocs product will continue as usual, as they have negotiated a new agreement with Capsoft.
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Service of UK proceedings via Twitter |
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The UK High Court's recent permission to serve an injunction via Twitter may be a first, but it has respectable antecedents and the authority of the rules.
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Search for people on the internet social channels |
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 There are so many social networking, blogs, file storage, image and video hosting or meeting spots on the web at the moment, to try and find somebody in each of these would take a great deal of time, and I would be very surprised if you remembered which ones to search. For example:
International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Myspace, Vimeo, Google Profiles, Bedo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendfeed, Netlog, Plaxo, Yelp, Wadja, LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Google Scholar, WordPress, Pipl, 123people, AnyWho, Wink, YoName, Wink to mention some. So imagine trying to search all of these. Snitch.Name is a tool that can search all of these at once, and give you a report. Thanks to Peter du Preez for the tip.
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Spam Drops 15 Percent After FTC Pricewert Takedown |
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 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's recent takedown of an Internet service provider thought to be a safe haven for spammers has reduced spam volumes, but only by a little.
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Google Wave to replace email/IM/collaborating as we know it |
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Google on Thursday publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Billed as "the e-mail of the future," Google Wave is the result of a multiyear project inside of Google to reinvent the inbox, blending e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and perhaps, with input from developers, connections to the world of social networking.
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International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
 In his blog, Seth Godin predicts that newspapers are dying - and fast. "Prediction: there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US by 2012. So, you've got two and a half years before the newspaper industry is going to be doing something else with the news and the ads, or not be there at all. Does that change what you do today if you work in this business? Insight! The newspaper industry is in trouble, but news is not going to go away, just the paper part. Those who are working hard to preserve the paper part are asking the wrong questions and are doomed to fail. Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you're doing today to be ready for that?"
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Future shock: The PC of 2019 |
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International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
 The future PC promises to put nearly everything you could need or want right in your palm.
Think of a souped-up version of today's smartphone, with a monitor that unrolls into a larger screen and a biometric security system that lets you access everything in your professional and personal life from anywhere, with all the data residing in the cloud.
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Are legal vendors not selling – or just not marketing? |
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International | News in brief | Page-41 - Tech4Law
 Latest research, published earlier this month by the InsideLegal legal IT sector marketing consultancy, raises the interesting question of whether vendors are not selling systems because there is a recession on - or because they are not doing enough to market their systems?
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Microsoft to open chain of retail stores |
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The US software group has hired a former Wal-Mart executive to open a chain of retail stores, establishing a new front with Apple in the battle for consumers.
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Autonomy to buy Interwoven for $775 million |
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 British software company Autonomy agreed to buy U.S. content management group Interwoven for $775 million to boost its access to the worldwide legal and compliance industry.
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Interwoven receives top honours in Law Technology News Awards |
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 Interwoven, Inc., a global leader in content management solutions, today announced that it has won Gold and Silver awards in Law Technology News' (LTN) sixth annual Technology Awards.
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Sony, HP, Dell, Toshiba recall thousands of faulty Lithium-Ion laptop batteries |
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 Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell are recalling as many as 100,000 laptops worldwide that used faulty Sony-made lithium-ion battery packs.
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ADERANT acquired by Vista Equity Partners |
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Vista Equity Partners today announced that it has completed the acquisition of ADERANT Holdings Inc. Vista, a private equity firm with over $2 billion in committed capital, invests in private and public software and technology-enabled companies, focusing on successful organizations committed to maintaining industry leadership.
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