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Ford’s Ongoing Recalls of 2019

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Ford Motor Company is in the middle of the latest in a recent string of recalls this year, this time involving its high-selling 2019 Expeditions and 2019 Lincoln Navigators. The issue is in a rear toe link fastener that, if disconnected, could increase the risk of driving the car. This is the same defective component that caused the massive recall of over 1.2 million Explorers in June. 

 

Ford also announced a recall for select 2015-17 model Transits, due to a potential drive-shaft-related issue. 

 

Other Recent Ford Recalls

Ford has implemented over half a dozen recalls in the past five months, including one in which improperly assembled seat-backs in models of the Ford Explorer, Expedition, F-Series, F-150, and Lincoln Aviator. That specific seat was being questioned for its ability to properly restrain passengers during a crash.

A different recall, largely South Carolina based, was due to Ford’s history with Takata airbags. The faulty airbags have been cited in multiple deaths due to their tendency to project metal shards at passengers during accidents.

Cars belonging to older and younger drivers tend to be at higher risk of containing a defective component, as those two demographics tend to get their cars serviced and check for recalls at a lower rate than those in early- to mid-adulthood.  

 

How Should Ford Owners Proceed

Drivers and owners of Ford’s should check their vehicle identification number and ensure that their car is safe to drive. Repairs for active recalls are free at dealerships and should never be neglected.

The Difficulties with Risk Assessment Software in Sentencing

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For many years, criminal courts throughout the United States have struggled with a critically important issue: how do you fairly determine whether a particular defendant is a good risk for bail, probation, or a light prison sentence? Many jurisdictions today turn to predictive risk assessment software to help guide such decisions. There’s a catch, however — the algorithms that translate input data into risk assessment scores are proprietary software, and neither courts nor lawyers know just how such scores are generated.

Obvious issues of fairness in sentencing and due process lurk behind the use of proprietary software in bail and sentencing decisions, but for the moment, they will remain matters for academic debate. On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for further review in Loomis v. Wisconsin, where a man who pleaded guilty to lesser charges of fleeing an officer and operating a vehicle without authorization received a six-year sentence for his role behind the wheel in a drive-by shooting that resulted in no injuries.

The prosecution alleged that Loomis drove the car during the shooting, while the defendant maintained that he only drove the vehicle afterward. Either way, the charge was dropped as part of the plea negotiation, but all five of the original charges, including weapons offenses, were in the record at the time of sentencing. Loomis also was identified as a high-risk offender through Northpointe Inc.’s COMPAS risk assessment software.

Loomis unsuccessfully challenged his sentence all the way to the Wisconsin supreme court, which upheld the trial court’s decision, even though neither the sentencing judge, the prosecution, nor the defense attorney knew just how proprietary risk assessment software processed the answers to a 137-question survey completed by corrections officers and Loomis himself.

The basis of the appeal was denial of due process through the use of a proprietary risk assessment tool that could not be examined or challenged for scientific validity, due to its guarded proprietary nature. While the Wisconsin supreme court recognized that a criminal defendant has the right to be sentenced on the basis of accurate information, the court also observed that the same sentence would have been ordered anyway. Nevertheless, both the prosecution and the court made frequent reference to the COMPAS risk assessment during the arguments in court.

Wisconsin’s high court implicitly found that the sentencing judge correctly followed the instructions that accompanied the risk assessment tool, including this caveat: “It is very important to remember that risk scores are not intended to determine the severity of the sentence or whether an offender should be incarcerated.”

The sentencing judge pointed to several factors that supported a heavy sentence apart from the high-risk scores that the COMPAS tool assigned Loomis. The state supreme court therefore held that because other information in the record was sufficient to support the sentence, the use of the proprietary software to characterize the defendant’s risk was not a violation of his due process rights.

Eric Loomis might not have been the most sympathetic felon to have challenged the use of proprietary risk assessment software in sentencing decisions. He was a registered sex offender with a long rap sheet, including four arrests while on probation. The broader point, however, that closely guarded algorithms can determine the fate of criminal defendants, continues to generate vigorous legal and public policy debate around the country.

One version of nonproprietary risk assessment software has been found to reduce incarceration with no cost to public safety in Virginia, where fewer defendants are being sent to prison after conviction. Elsewhere, a controversial study of the COMPAS software in Broward County, Florida was found to understate the reoffense risk of white defendants while overstating that of African-Americans, even though no racial data is used in generating the risk assessment scores. Subsequent research has challenged the findings and methods of the Florida study.

As the dependence of American society on Big Data continues to deepen, the use of proprietary software in court decisions concerning bail, incarceration, or release can be expected to increase. What remains in question is the willingness of policymakers and courts to make sure that such decisions are made without excessive reliance on computer systems that lack transparency or external validation.

Ethical Considerations in Driverless Vehicle Technology

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Many drivers at one time or another have encountered this problem: I’m going to hit someone or something, so what should I do right now? Do I hit the pedestrian? Or swerve into the truck? Do I steer to the ditch, or slam on the brakes and accept a likely rear-end collision? In the split second that a driver has to make these decisions, a whole range of ethical, tactical, legal and personal decisions must be considered and resolved. How will driverless vehicle technology address these issues?

Highly automated vehicles, or HAVs, will depend on probabilistic algorithms and artificial intelligence to make the life-or-death decisions that most drivers will confront eventually over a lifetime behind the wheel. While the assumptions and priorities that were fed into the algorithm will reflect the values of the programming team, the real-world actions taken by a driverless vehicle in an emergency will reflect its artificial intelligence capacity — its ability to sift through dozens or hundreds of factors and data inputs, all to minimize the damage of a crash. How should an HAV resolve a situation that has no ideal outcome?

Driver Opinion as to Ethical Priorities Is Mixed

A good starting point might be to find out how the general public wants autonomous vehicles to resolve the ethical dilemmas that can arise when a crash is imminent. In 2015, an academic research team surveyed American drivers about the ways they would like to see an automated vehicle behave in emergency situations, but the results were ambiguous. About 50 percent of the respondents preferred their own car to place passenger safety as its highest priority, while only 19 percent would buy a car that maximized overall safety at the possible expense of the car and its passengers. In general, respondents preferred that HAVs protect the most lives possible, but for their own cars, they wanted one that would protect themselves.

A Mercedes-Benz official told Car and Driver magazine in October 2016 that the German automaker’s driverless technology would place the highest priority on passenger safety, not the safety of other road users. A few days later, however, Mercedes-Benz backed away from this statement — the company pointed out that preferring any particular life over another’s would violate German law.

Federal Guidance on Ethical Considerations Is Vague

In the United States, there is no specific requirement that a driverless vehicle’s artificial intelligence point toward any particular outcome in an emergency. The only current direction is found in the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, issued in September 2016, which is a non-binding guidance for manufacturers and software designers that will likely undergo further refinement as HAV technology approaches commercial deployment.

For the moment, ethical considerations are just one of fifteen separate safety and performance issues that are to be addressed in a Safety Assessment Letter prepared for the review of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The Federal Policy observes that safety, mobility and legality are three broad objectives of driving in general, and these all can be satisfied easily most of the time. But what about choosing between a traffic violation or an accident? Or hitting a deer or a tree? The Policy does not require manufacturers to satisfy any particular standard with respect to ethical considerations like these. Instead, manufacturers are asked to describe how their HAV technology will resolve the occasional ethical conflicts that can arise between the sometimes conflicting driving objectives.

The Federal Policy also states rather vaguely: “Algorithms for resolving these conflicts should be developed transparently using input from federal and state regulators, drivers, passengers and vulnerable road users.” To the extent that artificial intelligence in driverless technology will eventually be covered in a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, it’s obvious that a good deal of work remains to be done before a given set of emergency priorities is codified into a regulation.

Even gathering the public input necessary to inform a manufacturer’s emergency priorities and ethical decisionmaking could prove to be difficult. As found in the survey mentioned above, drivers seem to want HAV technology to protect as many lives as possible as a general matter, but want their own cars to protect the drivers themselves.

If a given manufacturer presents its vehicles as placing the highest priority on self-preservation, it might do well in the market, but it might undermine the overall safety of an automated driving environment as other carmakers do the same. Prioritizing the safety of the general public will probably need to become the standard practice in the HAV industry, because individual carmakers and drivers will have no real incentive otherwise to adopt this value.

Will HAV Technology Doom Private Vehicle Ownership?

It’s possible, however, that as driverless technology takes hold, people’s attitudes towards cars and driving might change. Today, people own cars as prized possessions and it makes sense for drivers to emphasize their own safety and convenience over that of others.

In the future, private ownership of cars and trucks could substantially decline. Driverless vehicles could become a quasi-public utility, with many vehicles in nearly constant use by many different people. Especially in cities, people will probably prefer to have a car available on demand rather than assume the expense and responsibility of driving, fueling, maintaining and parking a car they might only need for an hour or so a day. Under that scenario, people might be more aware of traffic as a public system rather than a personal annoyance or threat, and it might make better sense to maximize the safety of everyone involved in the system.

Truly driverless vehicle options remain at least a decade away from daily reality. It just might take that long for the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in motor vehicles to be fully considered and resolved.

About the Author
Matthew Wright began his career representing insurance companies but quickly became disillusioned with how many companies cared little about the people who suffered catastrophic or life-altering losses. He now fights aggressively on behalf of plaintiff’s that have been injured as the result of unsafe practices by trucking companies. Matt’s goal is to encourage safer practices within the industry, and ultimately arrive at a point where only safe and compliant companies remain. He has written numerous articles on the future of self-driving trucks that can be found on his website discussing Truck Injury Law.

The SOPA legal fight and the politicization of the tech community

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The cutting-edge tech community has long maintained a distance from both national and local politics. Instead, a sort of techno-libertarianism has characterized the politic leanings of those who have developed the internet culture and the programs and technologies we use it today.

But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a wide-reaching bill introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas in 2011. The bill is currently before the House Judiciary Committee, but already the online court of public opinion has weighed in. Tech Dirt has been at the fore of the movement, railing almost daily against what it sees as a major infringement on what makes the internet so great in the first place: freedom of speech and content without regard to copyright.

For the first years of its existence, the internet was a largely legilislation-free zone. Enforcement mechanism were even more sparse. As a result, it became the cultural hub of free speech, self-creation, innovation and cat videos.

Of course a new, unregulated medium presented challenges to companies that had profited from the old systems. Tower Records fought the change and lost, heavily. They didn’t lose to free content on Napster, but to a program that distributed music without having to travel to then walk around a Tower Records.

Opponents of the bill argue that copyright legislation can’t change market dynamics. People will always choose the easiest, simplest way to acquire what they want–if it’s free, all the better. That’s essentially what David Price, the piracy guru at Envisional, the research firm often used by big media companies like NBC that want to curtail piracy, said at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show.

“The content owners are really fighting the tide of the Internet,” Price said. “They’re trying to fight the flow of the Internet which is all about making content as widely available as possible, as easily as possible, as quickly as possible. They’re trying to hold back the 1.4 billon users of the Internet from doing what the Internet wants them to do.”

It’s a powerful statement. What lawmakers behind the bill don’t recognize, says Price, is that legislation is not the answer. You cannot sue your way to victory. I-tunes would have put Tower Records out of business even if Napster had never existed.

Today, Bit-Torrent allows users to download tons of content quickly and without complication. It’s simply the most efficient way on the internet to acquire content. The Torrent system harnesses the power of the internet–that a lot of people are on and want the same things– to boost speeds of acquisition and sharing. No mainstream outlet uses it effectively.

Legislation might shut a site like Bit Torrent down, at minimal cost to the host and with no action affecting the people who participating, many of whom are likely spread around the globe. It’s impossible to constrain the options of people on the internet, so all you can do is to compete by putting out a safe, legitimate, and most crucially, cutting edge technology and hoping that people decide to use it.

The SOPA issue highlights a growing tension between the tech community and congress. The essential mistrust is a belief that those on Capitol Hill just don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to tech issues, and are using their power in ignorance of well known best practices.

But this is also the fault of the tech community that has isolated itself from the concerns of real-world governance. However, this dynamic is changing. Code For America is an organization that, like Teach For America, sends smart people in to a tough situation. But instead of education, Code For America addresses the tech deficit in American cities.

Founder Jennifer Pahlka sees people migrating from the tech community to public service. The goal: equip the government with the tools to react as efficiently as the internet does. “It’s something that needs levers and inputs far deeper than just voting for a candidate,” says Pahlka. “In 2000s, people wanted government to look more like businesses. Now people say to us ‘so you want the government to work like an internet startup.’ And we say ‘we want it to look like the internet itself. Anybody can participate, you can create in a permissionless way to create the world you want to live in.”

This is, of course, the tack that national lawmakers should take as well. Collaborate with the experts in the field and find out what works and what doesn’t, then legislate around that. The internet is a frontier, but it isn’t lawless, only self-policing. The quickest gun isn’t some rugged law man, but a collective impulse to find the easiest way of doing things.

In legislating the internet, Congressmen like Lamar Smith would do well to observe that a lack of government regulation is not the same thing as lawlessness.

Attorneys Discuss Legal Ethics of Social Media Evidence

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But before the hegemonic rise of social media, lawyers couldn’t use all evidence available to them simply because it existed. There are ethical rules that attorneys must abide by, and that doesn’t change simply because social media marks new and untested territory. Writing for the New York Law Journal, Christopher Boehning and Daniel Toal point to three recent ethics decisions that may shed a light on the future of social media use for lawyers. These ethical quandaries include the debate over social media use among jurors, propriety issues surrounding social media, and the prospect of “friending” potential witnesses.

On the topic of juror monitoring, for example, the New York County Lawyers’ Association wrote an opinion affirming that “passive monitoring of jurors, such as viewing a publicly available blog or Facebook page,” is ethical conduct, as long as the lawyer doesn’t extend this reach to direct or even indirect social contact, meaning likely that lawyers cannot friend or follow current or potential jurors on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The New York City Bar is more accepting when it comes to the prospect of contacting potential witnesses via social networks. An attorney can, they ruled, “use her real name and profile to send a ‘friend request’ to obtain information from an unrepresented person’s social networking website without also disclosing the reasons for making the request.” NYC attorneys cannot, however, contact witnesses under a false name or create a profile “tailed to the background and interests” of the witness in order to gain information.

There’s another important social media and law dilemma that goes unmentioned in Boehning and Toal’s article: the question of whether lawyers should be permitted to connect with judges through social media. So far, this question has been monitored on a state-by-state basis, with little input from the American Bar Association (although, the ABA says it is weighing the issue carefully). Here in California, judges and lawyers don’t have much to work with, aside from a 2010 California Judges Association opinion, which warns judges to be careful. “In short, notwithstanding the explosion of participation in online social networking sites, judges should carefully weigh whether the benefit of their participation is worth all the attendant risks,” the opinion concludes.

Of course, that doesn’t mean lawyers have ceased debating the subject. “It’s a poor idea for judges to participate in social media because you don’t know who’s reading what you post,” says San Jose federal Judge Jeremy Fogel. Northern District Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal takes the opposite approach, and accepts social media as mostly harmless. “It allows you to personalize yourself and reveal facets of your life and personality to a broader range of people,” he says. “Judges, I think, are at an unfortunate disadvantage because we are somewhat constrained in taking advantage of reasons to be on a social network.”

Investigation into the defendant or plaintiff’s social networking profiles has notoriously become a part of divorce law and employment law. In the past, lawyers have been caught trolling a spouse’s profile for an indication of adultery, and employers have caught employees betraying their false use of sick days. Everyone should be careful when using social networks like Facebook and Twitter, understanding that nothing you post online is ever fully private. But that doesn’t mean that lawyers have full reign to collect evidence without regulations.

Photo Credit: GJELblogger

Role of Technology Debated in Distracted Driving Accidents

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If you drive, it’s likely that you’ve talked, texted, or typed on your smart phone while behind the wheel, and it’s even more likely that you’ve seen others drive distracted. But despite the overwhelming prevalence of technology, a new report by GMAC Insurance suggests that people are starting to get the message about the dangers of distracted driving. In fact, nearly 75 percent of teenagers, the demographic most likely to text and drive, have said they have stopped using their cell phones in the car altogether. The report credits awareness programs, state laws prohibiting distracted driving, and technology that have made cell phones safer.

Despite the reduction in distracted driving rates, though, about 50 percent of total drivers admit to using their cell phones behind the wheel. And as distracted driving causes nearly 6,000 car accident deaths and 500,000 injuries each year, it’s clear that state and national officials will need to get much tougher on distracted drivers in order to make a serious dent in the dangerous practice.

A new report by the Governors Highway Safety Administration notes that distracted driving is a leading cause in 25 percent of total car accidents nationwide, but questions whether state cell phone bans have contributed to a reduction in these accidents. That’s likely because many state laws against distracted driving list it as a secondary offense, meaning the driver must be pulled over for another infraction in order to get a citation for texting while driving. Many states have also implemented laws that only target the use of hand held phones. That means that drivers can continue to carry on conversations with their cell phones, which the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has deemed nearly as dangerous as texting and driving.

To address this problem, safety advocates have said that police must get stricter on with multi-tasking drivers, and state laws should make it more difficult, not easier, to drive distracted. One example of an appropriate technology solution is a smart phone application that blocks incoming calls and text messages while the car is in motion, and sends an auto-reply that the driver will respond when he or she reaches the destination safely. Instead, many car companies and cell phone providers have jumped out ahead of the issue with dangerous distracted driving technologies that actually make it easier to talk or text while zooming down the highway.

OnStar has developed a clear example of technology that should be avoided: a voice-activated system that would update the driver’s Facebook status while in transit. And Ford has been an advocate for distracted driving laws as long as they include a loophole that allows hand-free tech devices – like their Ford Focus My Ford Touch system, which New York Times Personal Technology Editor Sam Grobart deemed even more distracting. Though they appear safe, tech-based distracted driving solutions should so far be avoided. “Studies show hands-free devices provide no safety benefit,” writes the anti-distracted driving group Focus Driven on its webpage. “It’s the conversation, not the device, that creates the danger.”

So while it’s incredibly tempting to text a friend, check email, or even talk on the phone while driving on city streets or highways, remember that you’re likely unaware of how distracting these innocent actions can be. No one thinks that they will become an accident statistic, but everyone can take steps to assure that their actions don’t lead to dangerous driving decisions. So instead of relying on technology to keep you safe in your car, putting down the phone is the best way to stay safe.

Visit Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s Faces of Distracted Driving webpage for some true, tragic stories about the impact of distracted driving on real families across the country.

Photo credit: Lord Jim

Google Plus Advice For Lawyers

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Just weeks ago, Google launched its response to social media giant Facebook, and speculation has already soared. Some have predicted that the Google Plus Project could be a “Facebook killer,” while others say it’ll fail like the search giant’s past social flops, Buzz and Wave. It’s most likely that Google+ will fall somewhere between those two fates, but what’s certain is that lawyers who have embraced other social media platforms are sure to join. To help out with the move to Google+ some of the best legal blogs out there have offered best practices advice. Take a look, and let me know what you’ve noticed in the comments section.

Lawyerist: Google Plus Offers Better Sharing

For Lawyerist.com, legal marketing consultant Karin Conroy writes that Google+ should benefit from a strong connection to accounts users already have with Google owned products like YouTube, Gmail, and Picassa, creating endless sharing possibilities. In addition to making sharing easier, Google has figured out how to enable users to limit what information they want to share with specific groups of friends, with the “Circles” function. “Whereas with Facebook and Twitter all connections and content are equal, here your content will be targeted and then filtered to the appropriate audience,” writes Conroy. “That way you can post about your Saturday night activities without your boss seeing all the details.”

After discussing the benefits of Google Plus for professionals, Conroy tackles the two major obstacles the social media newcomer will have to address in order to succeed: being “different enough” from Facebook, and being the anti-Wave, Google’s past failed social experiment. Despite a profile page that “bears a striking resemblance to Facebook,” Conroy writes that Google+ has developed a full interface that passes the originality test. As for Wave, which “none of us could ever wrap our heads around how to make it work, Google+ has clear benefits and obvious functionality,” writes Conroy.

Adrian Lurssen: Professional+?

JD Supra co-founder Adrian Lurssen asks whether Google+ is an appropriate professional setting for lawyers, separating the litmus test into three standards: connections, communication, and reputation. Lurssen notes that there’s no doubt that Google+ will be teeming with connections once the word gets out, and points to an early study suggesting that it may be the fastest growing online platform ever, with 20 million users expected by the end of the week. Lurssen gives Google+ an anemic 7 of 10 rating for connections, likely because there just aren’t too many lawyers on there yet.

Lurssen is much more optimistic about Google+’s communication potential, which he rates 11 out of 10. “The stream of updates is so spectacularly real-time that in the early days I equated it to freebasing lab-grade cocaine,” he writes. “Might feel amazing at the time, but you aren’t sure your body is going to survive.” Lurssen adds that in the midst of commenting on updates, he’s been bumped by a deluge of activity, knocking him off the stream. So in this sense, the communication success of Google+ could end up as a negative.

Lurssen concludes that when it comes to professional development, LinkedIn will likely remain the community standard. But Google+ is clearly a player, and the outreach potential alone is sure to attract lawyers as the word continues to spread.

Kevin O’Keefe: Be Patient

In his blog post for Real Lawyers Have Blogs, Kevin O’Keefe writes that Google+ is clearly here to stay, but that “Facebook is unlikely to go the way of MySpace.” O’Keefe notes that over time, social media platforms have a way of evolving and becoming something unique for specific groups of people. So the Google+ benefits O’Keefe mentions, like its incredibly intuitive usability, will help the social media newcomer remain popular and attract new users until the main utility of Google+ becomes more clear in the coming months and years.

O’Keefe also notes that lawyers may be reluctant to dive in to Google+ as opposed to Twitter and Facebook because their base of potential clients has not yet immigrated. But he adds that “incluencers and amplifiers,” a group that “may be more important than networking with clients/prospective clients/referral sources” are already on Google+, and there’s a clear benefit to building your profile and making connections early. “Though there is a heavy population of Tech/Media/Mar-com people now on Google Plus,” he writes, “you can expect early adopters in every vertical and profession on Google Plus very soon, if they are not already.”

FutureLawyer: Mind the Googleverse

Over at FutureLawyer, “Future Technology for the Lawyer of Today,” the choice boils down to applications, and the blog states that Google+ simply does more than Facebook. “Those of us who live in the Googleverse have used Facebook like a separate part of our computing lives, a diversion from our Google computing,” Future Lawyer writes. “Now, we can integrate that social and professional contact experience and conversation into the Googleverse.”

In another post, FutureLawyer notes that Google+ gives the user far more options so that everyone can use their profile differently, but with equal success. This starts with privacy options, one reason that Google+ has been dubbed “the Anti-Facebook.” Google+ “allows you to decide what should be shared, and with whom; it gives you control over the third parties who have access to your data, and so on and so on.” It’s also important to note that Google’s privacy policy has promoted an “Opt-in security system, rather than the Facebook Opt-out (if you can figure out how) system.”

For the reasons described above (and more), FutureLawyer says opening a Google+ account is smart for lawyers, once they can get an invite. But there’s no question that Facebook, with 750 million users, continues to dominate the social media universe. So even if you’re going to open a Google+ account, writes FutureLawyer, keep your Facebook identity active… at least for now.

Legal Practice Pro: Network Effect

Over at Legal Practice Pro, Jay Fleischman has collected a set of resources explaining the many functions of Google+. As for his own take, Fleishman notes that whether Google+ is truly a “Facebook Killer,” or whether it flops, “it is likely to have an impact on the future of how we interact on the web.” That said, Fleischman isolates a key obstacle for Google+, which he calls the Network Effect. “If enough people join Plus and start using it then it could be fantastic, what with the ability to silo your contact groups and direct conversations to the right people.” This is a great point and gets to the heart of why I think Wave failed so spectacularly. A party is only as fun as the people who show up, and since no one could figure Wave out, no one showed up to the party. For this reason, Google may benefit from lifting its invitation-only status in order to get more people on Google+ and making connections.

Don’t Worry, No Hurry

Many individual lawyers are already hopping on Google+ as an alternative to Facebook. It’s important to note that Google has said that while Plus is developing a platform for businesses, the current product is designed for individuals only. “How users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands,” said Google+ Product Manager Christian Oestlien. “The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.”

LexisNexis Launches Evolution e-Discovery Program

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Since Google announced the launch of its social media platform Google+ only weeks ago, the internet has been abuzz with discussion of whether the search giant can overtake Facebook as the web’s most popular social hangout. Early July has also seen a major development in the realm of legal technology, which will surely receive less (much less, in fact) media attention. Legal research services company LexisNexis has announced the launch of its new e-discovery program for large projects, dubbed Confordance Evolution 1.0.

Evolution, which is based on Microsoft server databases, updates LexisNexis’ Concordance Classic e-discovery programs by including features like concept searching and clustering, and providing search alerts, reports Law Technology News. It also adds to features already present in some form in the older Classic versions, like e-mail threading and auditing. “People really want to do very different things,” said LexisNexis vice president of litigation tools Deborah Jillson. “We build a basic application…Everybody wants to review documents and get to relevancy, but they also want to do other things.”

Jillson added that the Evolution program will undergo additional changes in the coming years, as the company works out the kinks usually present with first editions. What’s certain is that LexisNexis Evolution will have a serious impact on the world of e-discovery for law firms that don’ have time to spend on technology training. Most lawyers didn’t have computer training in law school or in their early career, said e-discovery expert Diane Barry in an interview about ethics and e-discovery. “Many legal practicioners were not interested in technology and aren’t now,” she said. “But you must either have minimal competency or associate with someone who does.”

For lawyers and law firms without the technological competency to master e-discovery, LexisNexis Evolution could become one of the central resources for pre-trial data collection. And although it may not shake the web to the extent of the Google+ vs. Facebook war, it will no doubt have an impact.

Photo credit: Rutger de Moddertukker

Social Media For Lawyers Still a Hot Topic in California

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There’s no doubt that the stunning rise of social media has left an indelible impact on most professional industries. But few industries have been as troubled by ethical questions following the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as the legal industry. Many lawyers embraced social media in their personal lives, but professional conduct has proven to be a completely different story, especially when it comes to connecting with other lawyers, or even judges. While the American Bar Association has not yet set clear guidelines for ethical social media use among lawyers, the issue has sparked a spirited debate here in California and throughout the country.

“Whereas before I was much more free to post about my family, my kids’ baseball games, where I was,” San Jose Federal Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal told the San Francisco Recorder, “as a judge you have to be a bit more restrained in sharing those types of personal events.” This closely follows the advice of the California Judges Association, which ruled in 2010 that judges should always be cautious online. “In short, notwithstanding the explosion of participation in online social networking sites,” the advisory reads, “judges should carefully weigh whether the benefit of their participation is worth all the attendant risks.”

Many judges, like San Jose Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel, think that even Grewal’s relatively modest approach to social media leads to ethical questions. “It’s a poor idea for judges to participate in social media because you don’t know who’s reading what you post,” he told the Recorder. “And even if you’re just a passive viewer, you’re probably hearing and seeing things that you shouldn’t.”

Over the past year, the ABA has been reviewing its client development guidelines for lawyers, and this week released a report which stopped short of implementing clear rules, but seemed to suggest that Judge Fogel’s concerns are unlikely. The report’s cover letter states that “the commission concluded that no new restrictions are necessary in this area, but that lawyers would benefit from more guidance on how to use new client development tools in a manner that is consistent with the profession’s core values.”

Still, many observers agree that preventing lawyers and judges from using social media could raise first amendment issues. “The social media platforms are stretching the ethical ideas way beyond what has been thought about before,” said legal ethics expert Diane Karpman in an interview. But, she adds, “Putting regulations on social media is a violation of freedom of speech.” Karpman’s first amendment concern is likely a primary reason why the ABA would steer of blocking lawyers from social media. And this is a good thing. If a lawyer wants to act unethically, he or she will find a way with or without the help of Facebook. So when it comes down to it, the main impact that social media will have on the legal profession will be to increase transparency and make it easier for consumers to interact more directly with their attorney.

So if you’re a lawyer or judge, don’t seat the online stuff. If you’re careful not to betray your clients by leaking confidential information or harm an ongoing lawsuit, then the chances are that you can navigate social media without accidentally acting unethically.

Photo Credit: GJELblogger