The Young Texas Lawyer

In an article by The American Law Journal, Tresa Baldas focuses on the ever growing importance of metadata in the context of legal discovery. The literal meaning of metadata is “data about data,” which essentially translates to data about your computer files. The most widely known uses of metadata amongst the public are within mp3 files and digital pictures. The metadata of an mp3 file tells your iTunes or iPod everything about the song file. It contains artist information, album information, album artwork, how many times you have played the song, the last time you played the song, and much more. The same goes for digital pictures. The meta data of a digital picture will tell people who took the picture, what type of camera it was taken on, what date it was taken on, who has edited the file, and which edits were made. It contains a wealth of information about the files themselves and that is why it has become a hot topic in litigation.

A federal judge in New York recently ruled that companies should be ready to produce metadata in litigation. The holding also stated that the metadata of e-mails and electronic files must be preserved, maintained and produced in the course of legal discovery, particularly when sought early. This equates to a potentially massive legal burden on corporations, but the ALJ aritcle also carries an unintended message for attorneys.

It should make you realize that you MUST keep up with technology at all costs. The legal industry has always been slow to adapt to technology and has generally been far behind the business world. There are a ton of top notch attorneys out there that have no website, use email merely as a way to forward bad jokes, and think a blog is a 1950’s horror movie character. In many law firms around the country, WordPerfect is still the word processor of choice. WORDPERFECT! Whether attorneys accept it or not, the future of the law resides in technology and the Internet; from marketing, to client contact, to electronic discovery, and the promise of more to come from social networking. The next generation of law firms must be well versed in a language that most of us are already fluent in.

Although you probably lack experience practicing law, you have a wealth of knowledge in the future of the practice. Older attorneys have the legal experience that you need to piggyback off of and you grew up with the technology that they need to learn in order to take the firm into the future. The skills they don’t have the time or patience to learn are the ones that you often take for granted. You can make a law practice more efficient, more cost effective, and help them grow. Don’t let technology pass you over. You can’t practice law in a vacuum and the outside world rests its future in technology, so keep up!

Written by Robert B. Abtahi

President Obama has requested to suspend all war crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay and today, military judges promptly accepted the request. The judges agreed to halt the cases for 120-days, leaving the President time to shut down the facility all together and have the cases tried in the United States. Obama hasn’t wasted any time leaving his constitutional law professor imprint on the presidency and this probably isn’t the first we’ve seen in the removal of Bush administration policies.

Peter Smythe recently linked to The Young Texas Lawyer from his new blog, Reversible Error. We wish him the best in his blogging endeavors and would like remind all readers that you can have a post about your own blog by simply linking to this site. Below is a description of Mr. Smythe’s practice.

Peter Smythe, P.C., is an Arlington, Texas based law firm that concentrates in federal appeals, Texas state appeals and select trials. In the federal arena, the firm handles both federal civil and criminal appeals. On the state level, the firm handles civil appeals. The firm also handles select litigation matters in both federal and state district courts.

GM says that it will run out of cash by March 31st and that paying back the taxpayers is going to be a “daunting task.” It’s still unclear how the first portion of the bailout funds were spent. The economy should be the first item in the new agenda of President Obama, and it will be very interesting to see who lines up for a hand out and who is turned away under Obama’s “government that works” pledge.

Aside from the other historical reasons that today’s inauguration was different from any other, today we witnessed the first swearing in of a President that understands the power of Internet, loves his Blackberry, regularly uses his ipod, and utilizes social networking like no other candidate in history. One of the first things that changed while Obama was taking the oath of office was the White House website and a new blog, which echoed themes of transparent government and community involvement. Hours before his swearing in, I received a mass email from the Obama team letting me know of the schedule of the historic event. He will have a weekly web address on YouTube. He has an initiative to reduce health care costs by utilizing technological advances in hospital administration and moving us toward an efficient paperless environment. For someone who lives with two Blackberries, hardly writes anything down, and immediately Googles anything and everything that people seem to be in a disagreement about, this is a very exciting time. Not only is President Obama the first African American President but, he is also the first to use technology like the rest of us do. This probably means sweeping changes to internet law, privacy law, and anything else that former Presidents didn’t know enough to take on. That excites me more about the future than anything.

Today, BBC World News America released an amazing video of Dr. Martin Luther King being interviewed by BBC’s Bob McKenzie in 1964. Dr. King says that he believes there will be a black president within 40 years. It’s a great clip, a remarkable prediction, and worth taking a look at.

Happy MLK Day

The New York Supreme court has ruled and the New York Times is reporting that Amazon.com and other online retailers must continue charging state sales tax for any items sold to New York residents. “The law applies to companies that don’t have offices in New York, but have at least one person in the state who works as an online agent — someone who links to a Web site and receives commissions for related sales.” This is probably the beginning of other states starting their own online retailer taxes. Tax revenues are down for every state and this could easily be a new avenue of raising funds. It probably spells the end for a specific type of online retail purchases, those like myself that buy online to avoid the tax on big ticket items.

In a recent study by CareerCast.com, mathematician was rated as the #1 profession and attorney was ranked #82, one spot below #81, telephone installer/repairer. Personally, I find the list a bit ridiculous, but to each his own. I have worked with mathematicians (#1), actuaries (#2), and statisticians (#3) and would not trade lives with them for any sum of money. Not to say the study was biased, but who do you think put together all the statistics on the top 200 professions and developed a formula to rank them? Here is a hint, it wasn’t a telephone repairer.

The Wall Street Journal article about the the study.

If you read the headlines today you’ll see the unemployment rate soared to 7.2% and everyone is talking about it getting to double digits. If you peruse Above the Law then the majority of posts are about layoffs, salary freezes, and bonus cuts. Amid all of this bad news it’s pretty hard to stay positive, but if you don’t, all you’re doing is hurting yourself.

Whether you’re trying to find a job, avoid losing your job, or find balance in your life then being negative will do nothing except hurt you. Being down will show up in your interviews and who wants to hire someone that seems to be in a bad mood or lacks confidence. When it comes time for layoffs do you think you’re employer wants to keep the guy with the smile around or the one going through the office perpetuating doom and gloom rumors. It isn’t always easy to block out all the negative vibes going out right now, but here are 15 tips from Donald Latumahina to help you:

1. Never respond when you are not calm. If you are not sure that you are calm, don’t respond. Take time to calm yourself down first.
2. Take a deep breath as a first step to calm yourself down.
3. Speak in gentle tone to reduce the tension of the situation.
4. Realize that you can find opportunities in negative situations. Albert Einstein said: “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.”
5. Look at the content of what people say to you for something positive that you can act upon to improve yourself. Don’t just reject the whole messages.
6. For the rest of the messages which is negative, simply ignore it.
7. Maintain positive view of the people. Maybe you don’t like their messages or behavior, but that doesn’t mean that you can hate them personally.
8. Realize that having negative feelings will just hurt you, not them. So there is no reason for you to have any negative feeling.
9. If you make mistakes, be open to admit it.
10. If you make mistakes, remember this quote by George Bernard Shaw: “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
11. If you can, listen to motivational audio program to feed positive thoughts into your mind.
12. Talk to a positive friend who can encourage you.
13. Remember your favorite quotes to give you inspiration and motivation. This is one reason why you should have quote of the day.
14. Look at the negative situations as your training sessions for real life. The higher you climb in life, the worse the negative situations would be, so you’d better be prepared for them.
15. Realize that you can’t please everyone. In fact, nobody can. Sometimes you need to just let some people go. Realizing this will relieve you from a lot of unnecessary burden so that you can focus on the people that you can positively interact with.

Another way of helping get yourself in the right state of mind is using daily affirmations. Many of you will think they’re useless, but just try it out and you’d be suprised to see that it really works. When you wake up say aloud, “today is going to be a good day” and repeat it a couple times throughout the day and you’ll be shocked at how much better your day will be. Good luck, because it’s not easy.

The current economic environment may make it necessary for you to rethink your career strategy and the way you go about things. Jane Genova has an interesting read on the topic of looking out for yourself. In tough times employers look out for themselves and you should too.