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It probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that yet another study ranked lawyers highest among professionals when it comes to loneliness. While there is plenty of advice out there to help lawyers avoid the dreaded curse of loneliness, it’s not all good. However, below you’ll find some pragmatic tips, courtesy of Above the Law, to avoid feeling isolated, even if you are a solo practitioner. If you are your own boss, you need to plan out your own social interaction....

Remember Anthony Weiner? The former Congressman tweeted a picture of his eponymous member to his Twitter followers by accident while trying to send it to a woman he was courting over the Internet. What about the Kitchen Aid fiasco? One of their employees made a tasteless joke about President Obama’s late grandmother. Have a Filter Maturity comes with age and experience. If you wouldn’t have a college intern handle press releases, why would you have them handle social media?...

It happens every single year. You resolve to change a few bad habits and then you invariably fail to reach your goals. But, hey, if you’ve changed even one bad habit, you’ve made admirable progress. And there are a couple of recurring lawyer bad-habits that really should be dealt with, and dealt with fast. Here are some of the more troubling habits small firm lawyers and solos should tackle. This is not a particularly costly habit, but it’s a habit that has the potential to offend....

For a profession that is pretty much defined by documentation, it’s a bit mystifying to see the legal profession’s continued resistance to the digitization of legal documentation. Your can boost productivity by digitizing a large percentage of your documentation. You’ll be doing your office a favor. Wasted Time By some accounts, workers in information sectors spend approximately 11.2 hours per week managing or creating documents. This involves, pulling together information from other documents of different formats and types to create a new one....

BYOD policies, or Bring Your Own Device policies, allow employees to use and access company information on their personal devices. You can send messages to coworkers on your personal phone’s Slack app, between right swipes on Tinder. Instead of staying at the office all night, you can download corporate reports onto your home computer. For many, BYOD policies are great. They give employees a bit more freedom to work where and when they want, on the device that’s most convenient....

Today is the start of the Code the Deal Hackathon hosted by the UCLA School of Law. Code the Deal LA is the second such event produced by Legal Hackers, which brings together lawyers, developers, professionals, and geeks all around. Law and geeks. Doesn’t that sound like fun? It’s a matter of personal taste. Legal Versions More and more technology is being utilized in every aspect of life – law practice not exempted....

While the “always listening” aspect of many “smart home” devices with voice control spooks out countless users, this isn’t the first, nor will it be the last time, that law enforcement seek to obtain the data that these devices record. Unfortunately for law enforcement, while these devices maybe listening all the time, they do not record everything they hear. Basically, the devices are always listening for triggering command words, like “Alexa” or “Ok Google,” and only start recording (or sending the recording off the device) after being woken up by the command....

Do you remember the public furor and spittle that came out of the iPhone versus FBI battle just a scant few months ago? Do you also remember how momentum behind a national initiative to force phone makers into complying with law enforcement access to encrypted data reached a fever pitch? Whatever happened to that law? It’s dead, or at least effectively so, according to Fortune. And this demonstrates a very interesting point about politics, teeth gnashing and the collective memory....

Drawing straws is no way to sort out an election, but that’s what they did to break a tie for a legislative seat in Mississippi. The proper way to resolve disputes in most of America is to sue. They did that, too, in the contest between Bo Eaton and Mark Tullos. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals finally settled the matter, ruling the federal courts have no jurisdiction to intervene in such state elections....

Four current and former University of California, Berkeley students are suing Google, alleging that the tech company scanned Cal students’ university emails for more than four years – all while claiming that academic emails were not processed by Google’s advertising system. Google’s privacy violations affected millions of college students across the U.S, according to the suit. If that sounds familiar, it is. A similar class action lawsuit was rejected in 2014....

It’s impossible to say how bad Boeing’s legal troubles are, except to point out one number: 346. That’s how many people have died in two crashes aboard Boeing’s 737 Max 8 aircraft recently. One went down in Indonesia last October, and another in Ethiopia about a week ago. Nearly three dozen lawsuits have followed, but that’s only one measure of the company’s legal problems. In other ways, it may take a lifetime to sort out....

In the business world, covering for a coworker’s mistake is something that doesn’t get done unless there’s a motivating factor, like friendship, or if the team’s collective performance benefits each individual’s compensation. So, you can expect that it may happen frequently until work friendships get too strained. When lawyers co-counsel, if one attorney makes a mistake, it hurts the case. That means that co-counsel should be extra motivated to not let their co-counsel make mistakes, regardless of who is in the lead role....

One of the things they don’t mention in law school is that being an attorney sometimes requires a delicate manner – especially when it comes to telling clients that they’re wrong. Information about “the law” is everywhere, and some of it is incorrect. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it’s only a matter of time before a client comes in who thinks he “knows” exactly what the law is....

If you’ve been keeping on top of your workload and you see that you somehow, perhaps miraculously, don’t have any court appearances, or even any meetings, you may be considering taking a little impromptu summer vacation. If you’re in that boat, well, then you might as well work from a boat, or a dock, or a shore, or some other summer paradise. If you’re not convinced, below are a list of reasons why taking a working vacation is actually a really good idea....

In the future, law students will walk into a virtual reality crime scene. Instead of reading about evidence in a book, they will see it: blood, hand prints, and a dead body. They will be able to walk around the virtual world like kids playing a video game. Actually, they already did that. Not the video game, the virtual crime scene. Virtual Crime Scene At the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law last summer, law students created a virtual crime scene....

For litigators, practicing what you’re going to say is as much about practicing the presentation as it is reviewing the merit of your statement. Arguing in court and examining witnesses requires some level of theatrics, after all there is a live audience. And while speaking clearly and at a reasonable pace are two simple and obvious things that a lawyer can do to ensure the audience at very least hears the words you’re saying, there’s one thing that some lawyers simply forget to do, and that’s take a breath or brief pause at the right times while presenting....

A three-member panel of the First Circuit held that gender reassignment surgery is medically necessary for an inmate, affirming the September 2012 decision of District Court Judge Mark Wolf. This is the first time an appeals court has held that the refusal by the state to provide gender reassignment surgery rose to a violation of an inmate’s constitutional protections. Gender Identity Disorder (“GID”) is characterized by a feeling of being trapped in the body of the wrong gender....

Georgia officials are appealing a ruling for a lawsuit that alleges the state’s electronic voting system is vulnerable to hackers. In Curling v. Kemp, a federal judge said the state should implement a new, more secure electoral system. But she stopped short of ordering the state to use paper ballots to backup the system in the meantime. According to experts in the case, the state’s system is especially prone to attack because there is no paper trail to preserve votes....

Have you ever thought about using the services of a video production company – not to make a cheesy lawyer TV ad – but to create personal injury videos for use in legal proceedings? The videos, which are typically used in litigation, mediation, and arbitration, give a bird’s eye view of how an injury affects a plaintiff (or in a wrongful death suit, the victim’s loved ones) or how an accident occurred....

You’ve seen them wandering around, everyone from tweens to grandparents, their eyes stuck to their smartphones, mumbling “gotta catch ’em all.” They’re not zombies, they’re just playing Pokémon Go. The new, “augmented reality” game based on the classic 90’s Nintendo game, allows users to roam their streets, capturing and fighting Pikachus, Squirtles, Charmanders, and worthless Zubats. If it looks weird, it’s because it is. It’s also a lot of fun. But as tens of millions of Pokémon trainers look to find their next catch, Niantic, the games developer could be collecting their personal information, thanks to Pokémon Go’s downright frightful terms of service....