Author Archives: Neil Tyra

What’s In Your Legal App Folder?

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As this is supposed to be a blog that addresses the use of Apple products in a law firm, I thought we would do the standard end of the year app review. While I have not yet incorporated the use of these products in the courtroom, I do use them all of the time while in the office, on the road, and at home. There are some real Mac studs out there using all kinds of Apple hardware and related software products in really creative and useful ways – both inside the courtroom and the office. Guys like Finis Price and Ben Stevens have so much experience and knowledge in these areas. But for now, it’s just me here. These are the top five law apps that I have in one folder on both my iPhone 4s and iPad.

Fastcase

Fastcase is the one app that simply over delivers consistently; and, therefore is indispensable. As a free alternative to Westlaw or LexisNexis, this app gives you legal research capabilities in your pocket of comparable, and in some cases superior, value. Upon launching, you have the options for searching by case law or by statute. Under the case law search, you set the jurisdiction to be state specific, federal or to include all; date ranges; and sorting order. Searching by statute works similarly. I have found using Fastcase to be ridiculously easy when you quickly want to find the text of a case by searching on the citation or cases that cite to your case. Cases include footnotes and hyperlinked citations within for easy navigation and further research.

The same is true for searching statutes. Here, however, you can also browse the statutes in a top down manner. In the Maryland statutes, you can browse the code for each separate year 2008-2011.

You can adjust your settings to control how many results per page are displayed and the order in which they are displayed, along with other controls. One drawback is that you can not print the case or statute from your iPhone or iPad easily. There are workarounds to make this possible but for the most part, you need to go to the website version in order to print. And you must have a Fastcase account if doing so. But a lot of state bar associations have relationships with Fastcase to make it free to their members. In any case, Fastcase does more than you expect it to and for a price far cheaper than expected.

Court Days

Court Days is a fairly new addition to my legal apps folder. This handy utility allows you to calculate dates – using both calendar days and court days. In date-to-date mode, you give the app the start and stop dates and it calculates the number of court days in between and/or the number of calendar days (breaking down number of weekdays, weekend days, and holidays). Start and stop dates are easily set with the standard date wheel. In court days mode, you have even more options. You give the app a starting date and ask it to calculate the date for a given number of days before or after that date. Again, the result can be displayed in court days and/or calendar days. The app can be set to use different state holiday calendars and even use custom holiday for specific jurisdictions. And for convenience, you can set it up to give up to three sequential dates. So you can pick a mediation date thirty days out, a pre-trial date 15 days beyond that, and a trial date 60 days thereafter. It’s a really very useful app, especially so since it is free.

Nolo Plain English Law Dictionary

This app is handy for exactly what you think it mint be good for – quickly looking up legal terms and definitions. Published by the Nolo Network it is heavy on advertising but useful for its limited purpose. Users can search on a particular legal term or phrase using some limited boolean logic and have the app provide a general plain english definition along with related terms. For instance, a search on contributory negligence returned a very workable definition along with 50 other related terms such as assumption of risk, comparative negligence, last clear chance, etc. One nifty little feature, with the app open if you you shake the iPhone you get a random word of the day and its definition displayed – fun for those times when you are waiting. This app will not make people forget about the more expensive Black’s Law Dictionary app, but the price is right for what it does – yep, you guessed it, it’s free.

LawBox

Here again is a free app that does one thing pretty well – give the user a place to quickly look up a bunch of federal rules and procedures. LawBox provides access to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Bankruptcy Procedure, Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Evidence along with a copy of the Constitution and US Code title 28 Judiciary and Judicial Procedure. You can search within any of these databases or drill down from the top to find the rule that meets your need. Once found, you can double tap to bring up a side bar that allows you to email the rule citation along the text of the rule. It’s not a terribly broad app but it does its one job pretty well.

MSBA

Last, but not least, the Maryland State Bar Association (MSBA) publishes its own mobile application for a variety of mobile devices. Like LawBox, this is simply an application to look up published material. As you would expect, this app tailors its content to Maryland specific material. Thus, the Rules of Evidence are the Maryland Rules and not the Federal Rules. Along with evidence, the app presents the Rules of Professional Conduct, Ideals of Professionalism, MSBA Code of Civility, and rules regarding Attorney Trust Accounts. These are all helpful for controlling the difficult opposing counsel as well as keeping yourself from becoming that guy.

So these are the apps I have in my legal folder on both my iPhone and my iPad. All I can tell you is that they work for me – your mileage might vary. Next time, I’ll discuss other non-legal specific apps that I think most, if not all, lawyers ought to have on their mobile devices.

Virtually in the Courtroom

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Washington Post 11/3/11

The recent Lululemon murder trial provided an opportunity to literally monitor the trial in great detail, in near real-time, from anywhere literally in the world. I followed the courtroom action via Twitter by saving the hashtag search term #lululemon. A hashtag is a way to filter the billions of tweets (Twitter messages) down to the item of interest. In this case, the reporters and courtroom observers who were live tweeting during the trial included the hashtag search term #lululemon in their 140 character messages; thereby allowing virtual observers like myself to follow the action by searching on that term. And by saving the search, I didn’t have to reenter it every time I wanted to check in to see what happened. I was able to follow the action on all of my internet devices i.e. the desktop computer, iPad, and of course iPhone. The fact that the tweets were coming literally within seconds after the events occurred in the courtroom, along with commentary from those following the hashtag, provided an extraordinary opportunity to sit in on the trial. And you got much more detail and intimacy in the reporting than you would get just by reading the next day’s news in the paper or watching the local news on TV. Since Montgomery County does not allow live TV broadcasts from the courtroom, this is literally the next best thing and in some ways better as it is more interactive. Congratulations to reporters like Neal Augenstein (@augensteinWTOP) and Erin Donaghue (@BethesdaPatch) for a job really well done. I suspect that we will see this all over again when and if Curtis Lopez comes to trial for the killing of Jane McQuain and her 11-year old son William McQuain.

Murder, Martial Arts, and Macs!

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AP PHOTO/JACQUELYN MARTIN

Seems like a couple of themes are coming together to prompt me to get back to posting. Sadly, it is the tale of a gruesome murder here in Montgomery County – the trial for which is about to wrap up. Brittany Norwood stands accused of first-degree murder in the killing of Jayna Murray inside the Lululemon Athletic store in Bethesda earlier this year. Courtroom observers are reporting on Twitter today that the prosecution is wrapping up its case and that the defense, amazingly, may not put on a case of their own. The matter could go to the jury as early Thursday.

The case has been on my mind because of the details revealed in court as to how the murder occurred. Allegedly, Murray confronted Norwood about stealing merchandise and an argument ensued in which Norwood bludgeoned Murray to death inside the store. What gets me, and many others, are two points: one, the cowardly acts of employees in the Apple store next door; and two, the fact that Murray apparently was unable to defend herself properly against her assailant.

Testimony was elicited that indicated that at least two Apple employees heard the commotion next door as they were closing up, including pleas for help and cries for mercy, and yet they did nothing. They didn’t go next door to check it out or call the police. Instead, they chalked it up to some “drama” and walked away. Their own security guard sat nearby oblivious to his surrounds listening to his iPod. Defense counsel Douglas Wood cleverly posited to the employee who works at the Genius Bar that they weren’t all geniuses, now were they? Indeed not. I can’t imagine how angry Murray’s family must be knowing that these two had it within their power to prevent their daughter’s slaying if they had only picked up the phone. And I can’t help but think that there will be some who hold it against Apple, and the Bethesda store, somehow.

Personally, though, it is understanding what happened in the physical confrontation that bothers me the most. As a martial arts teacher for close to twenty-five years, I have to believe that if Jayna Murray had just a little bit of training she might have been able to fight back enough that she could have gotten away. Trial testimony indicates that she was trapped in a narrow hallway leading to the emergency exit when she was struck down. Blood splatter analysis shows that she was first attacked while standing, then while kneeling or crouching, and finally after she lay prone on the floor. This has all the earmarks of a victim just trying to cover up and not being able to disarm her assailant and gain just a few seconds to escape. I always told my students that there are no guarantees when it comes to a physical confrontation. But had she just a little bit of training I would have liked her chances.

The defense concedes that Norwoord killed Murray. It will come down to whether or not there is a sufficient basis to establish pre-meditation which carries the potential for life without parole. The medical examiner indicated that Murray suffered 322 injuries in the attack. I think my closing argument would be that Norwood had at least 321 opportunities to rethink her behavior.

Albert: Tell Your Lawyer to Shutup!

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There are times you want your attorney to zealously advocate on your behalf and there are times you want them to just shut up! I would think that in the case of Albert Haynesworth and his attorney A. Scott Bolden that this is one of those times when you wish for the latter. Haynesworth, currently under contract (and an enormous one at that) with the Washington Redskins, was arraigned on misdemeanor charges of sex abuse for allegedly groping a waitress at the hotel in Washington, DC. His attorney, Mr. Bolden, has been all over the sports talk radio shows the last couple of days telling anyone who will listen that the alleged act simply never occurred.  And here is the problem, there is nothing to be gained by his attorney yapping with the hosts of these shows. So why is he, the lawyer, doing it?

Well, it’s good publicity for the attorney. Mr. Bolden is a partner at Reed Smith who has a pretty impressive resume. So the exposure gained by going the rounds on the talk shows is of some value. But does it help his client? Well, perhaps he is trying to persuade the general public to hold off forming their opinion until such time as the trial takes place and all the evidence can be presented. But the public to be reached on the sports talk radio shows is pretty limited and has already made up their mind regarding Haynesworth – they hate him. Whatever leeway he may have received from sympathetic fans who thought he had an argument when the Redskins changed coaches, and therefore defensive direction, has long been eroded by Haynesworth’s general behavior and performance. So how is all this yakking on sports talk radio working on behalf of his client?  OK, so then perhaps Mr. Bolden is trying to influence the jury pool. Again, I point to the ratings for sports talk radio and suggest he is wasting his time as the overwhelming majority of potential jurors, while they may be Redskins fans, are not avid talk show listeners.

Here is the best reason I can think of that Mr. Bolden is presenting his case, at least some of it, on the public airwaves: his client may be insisting that he do so. Haynesworth has been trashed for the better part of two years now and this is just another saga in a long list of things for which the public finds reason to criticize him. Maybe Haynesworth told his attorney to get out there and spread his story a bit to try and blunt that criticism. That is not working out so well because Mr. Bolden is smart enough to know that he can’t put too many “facts” out there so soon without compromising his trial posture. So he is reduced to saying that the two sides see things differently and that the facts do not support the woman’s allegations. Well, no kidding?

So what are we left with? Like much of sports talk radio, which I listen to a lot, we are left with a lot of chatter and very little substance. Unless of course the publicity that the lawyer enjoys leads to more. But is that in the best interests of the client?

Is Apple Following Me?

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I don’t know who broke the story first, but Fox News and CNN both have reports out, as do others, breathlessly warning iPhone and iPad 3GS users that a “secret file” is stored on your device which allows Apple to track your whereabouts at all times. They infer that this information could fall into the wrong hands – quoting that Apple has “made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements.”

That’s not entirely correct. It seems that since the previous iOS upgrade to version 4.0 that Apple has this unencrypted file that stays on your iPhone or iPad 3GS which stores location data and time derived from cell phone tower triangulation. Why it’s there is not known. It could be that Apple is using it to test for or prepare for some future feature to be released. In any case, a couple of smart researchers found the file and wrote a quick program to display the information on a map so that the issue could be brought more urgently to the public’s attention – and to presumably get Apple to do something about it. To their credit, the researchers purposely made the application a little “fuzzy” be blurring some of the location results even though the underlying data file is much more granular.

The issue seems to be whether users should a) be made aware ahead of time that this data is being collected (certainly seems like a privacy issue) and b) be given an opportunity to opt out of such collection. I guess both are reasonable points – although I might argue that the horse has already long left that barn. But in any case, for me, the real issue is that Apple wasn’t smart enough to put this data behind a firewall of some sort. The fact that this data file was so easily recognized and exploited is not good. On a day when Apple once again announced record earnings, they have a little egg on their face for sure. And now the government wants answers – well, at least Senator Franken (D-Minn.) does.

What do you do about this? Well, practice good fundamental security in the first place. Your iPhone and/or iPad should be password protected – particularly if you are an attorney and keep client information on it as I do. You set that under Settings:General:Password Lock. Also, you should use encrypted backups when syncing your device to your desktop computer. This is done in iTunes under the Summary:Options pane when you have your device connected and selected. And lastly, your desktop computer should also be password protected. You can provide for that by setting a password on Systems Preferences:Accounts. And I suppose you could always turn off your iPhone or iPad 3GS when you don’t want to be found. But that seems to defeat the purpose of having the phone.

Does the Law School Make the Lawyer? I Hope Not!

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A recent Washington Post article detailed the sad tale of attorney, Joseph Rakofsky. D.C. Superior Court judge, William Jackson, declared a mistrial in a murder case this past Friday so that the defendant could fire his lawyer – namely, Joseph Rakofsky. The attorney was a 2009 graduate of the Touro Law School. Among other things, the trial judge was blunt in his assessment of the attorney’s level of expertise stating that he showed “numerous signs” that he “lacked knowledge of proper trial procedure.”

I’ll let others comment on the poor choices, and perhaps unethical behavior, that Rakofsky made in trying to represent his client. It appears that Rakofsky had never tried a case before, much the less a murder case. And it also seems that he tried to get his private investigator to “trick” a witness into changing their story. Perhaps he has watched too much TV. Clearly he had no business taking this case and is probably going to suffer some pretty stiff ramifications for doing so.

But what irks me almost as much is the assertion that his law school bears some brunt of the blame for his bad decisions and unethical behavior. Take a look at one example, namely Elie Mystal’s rant on his blog Above the Law, in which he goes to some length to blame this debacle on Touro Law School admitting Rokofsky and then graduating him. Last I looked, the Multistate Bar Exam was the same whether or not you graduated from Touro, or Catholic, or Harvard. I never understood the argument, often raised by law school students themselves, that a degree from one school was inherently better than a degree from a lower tiered law school. You have bad lawyers graduating from Harvard Law and great lawyers graduating from fourth tier schools. Just like you have bad engineers graduating from M.I.T. and excellent engineers coming out of your local state college. I remember a young graduate from Harvard Law who asked me incredulously if I knew the “star-spangled banner” was the actual name of the national anthem.

Can lower tier law schools do a better job of preparing their students for life after the bar exam? Of course. But as a graduate of one of those lower tier schools who watched while some wrung their hands over their school’s ranking, we all know that the rankings have almost nothing to do with the quality of the attorneys the schools are turning out. There are many things that go into the flawed ranking system, and even a Harvard Law graduate like Mr. Mystal ought to know that one can not link the ranking to the attorney’s competence.

1Password Is The Way to Go!

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1Password LogoAs I mentioned, one of my longstanding and only recently realized New Year’s resolutions was to get a handle on my password security. If you are like me, you have literally dozens, if not hundreds, of login/password combinations to try and manage. Email accounts, websites, bank accounts, etc. And like most people, it is easy to fall into the trap of just using one password for everything. And therein lies the problem. If the bad guys get hold of that one password, you have a big problem on your hands.

This is the issue that 1Password by Agile Web Solutions, Inc. solves – and does so darn near perfectly. The application is both a password management program and a password generator. So you can use the program to create incredibly complex random character/letter/number combination passwords that NSA might have trouble cracking. And once generated, you can have the program remember them so you don’t have to.

Here’s what you do. The application walks you through the setup process pretty easily. There are only two tricky points. One, you will have to come up with a master password. This is the key to unlocking 1Password (so that others can not get into it and discover all your secret password stuff). This is the only password you will then have to remember. Then, you tell 1Password where you want it to store your passwords. Here is where it gets interesting. There are 1Password applications that you can purchase for your iPhone and iPad as well as your mac computers. If you want all your passwords to be synced so that the protection features are shared across all the platforms you use, you have to store the 1Password keychain in a common space that all have access to. The suggested methodology is to use the popular DropBox application. Dropbox is free and very popular. Once you set up a DropBox account and place a special DropBox folder on each of your platforms, anything you put in it is shared across all platforms through the magic of the “cloud”. So storing your 1Password keychain in your DropBox folder makes it accessible to each platform that uses 1Password.

Once installed, 1Password looks over your shoulder and anytime you log into an account of some sort, it asks you if you want to remember that login information in 1Password. At this point you can save the login info, and better yet, use 1Password to change your password to a more secure one and replace the old. When you next go to that site or login, you can ask 1Password to fill in the pertinent password. And voila!

I think the cool thing is you can ask 1Password to remember logins (on websites that ask you for userid and password), accounts (such as email), identities (for all the information such as name, address, phone numbers, etc. that many sites ask for), software licenses, and wallets (bank accounts and credit cards). Given that I can sync all of my password data across my iMac, my PowerBook, my iPhone, and my iPad – I think this program is indispensable. I’m totally on board with it now and can’t for the life of me understand why it took me so long to start using it.

Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Back in the Saddle Again (and secure)!

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So I have been offline for months now. I would like the say that most of that time off was due to circumstances beyond my control. Well, I would like to say that and it’s partially, although not entirely, true. Many months ago I was informed by my internet service provider (ISP) that my blog had been corrupted and taken off line. As it turns out, the bad guy hackers had somehow managed to hijack my blog site and were using it to do who know what nefarious things. So Google discovers that, because Google knows everything, and shortly thereafter the site is taken down. The only remedy seemed to be to delete the site and re-upload it. Sounds easy enough, right?
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I Can’t Afford a Divorce!

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A fascinating article in the Washington Post confirmed what family law practitioners in Montgomery County have known for some time now – that many people simply can not afford to get a divorce as a result of the current economic recession. For many couples, the downturn in the economy and in particular the fall in housing prices makes it almost impossible to afford to end an unhappy marriage. For most people, their home is their single largest financial holding. When there is no equity in the marital home, most couples have little or nothing available to them to start anew after the divorce. In the past, the home has been one of the items most fought over and now it is the debt owed on that home that is most troublesome.
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Litigating a Personal Injury Case – New Client Call (First in a Series)

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TelephoneThis is the first in a series of posts designed to discuss litigating a personal injury claim. It is intended primarily for other attorneys but will hopefully also prove valuable to those who might be contemplating a personal injury claim.

After the accident, and hopefully after the person involved has begun treatment for their medical injuries, a call comes into the attorney’s office asking whether or not the person has the grounds necessary to raise a personal injury claim. This is the first contact with the potential client and is therefore the first opportunity to market your firm and services. Screw this up and you most assuredly will not get a new client. Do well, and even if the client or you decides not to go forward with the claim, you have created a potential referral source that could pay dividends in the future.
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