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While smart tech may make life that much more convenient, convenience comes at a cost. Siegeware is basically the evolution of ransomware. Instead of locking down a business or individual’s systems and demanding a bitcoin payment to unlock it, hackers are locking down whole buildings that are equipped with Building Automation Systems (BAS) and demanding payments to end the siege. What’s worse is that the more automation and smart tech a building is equipped with, the more opportunities hackers will have to exert pressure....

Are you a lobbyist? More than 12,000 people are, according to a tally of registered lobbyists by the Center for Responsive Politics – but there may be thousands more unregistered influence-peddlers, thanks to the language of the law. In fact, as many as 90,000 people may be engaged in lobbying, one political expert told Reuters. “It’s a much bigger industry than the federal registry of lobbyists shows,” he said. The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, amended in 2007, sets forth a three-prong test to determine whether you must register as a lobbyist....

I just missed a call. By typing the phone number into Google, I was able to find out that it was almost certainly a spam call relating to some get rich quick scheme. Awesome. Thanks for wasting thirty-five seconds of my day. In early 2014, Google may have a solution to this particular problem. They will be rolling out Caller ID by Google, which sounds both brilliant and invasive. For local businesses, Google will match their own data to the phone number to display the business’s information on soon-to-be-released Android 4....

If you wanted to transfer real property in England a thousand years ago, you would have to publicly present the buyer with a clod of dirt from the land, symbolizing the transfer of title, and record the exchange in the local shire-book or church-book. One thousand years later and the clod is gone, but the rest of the process is very much the same: transfers of real property are still recorded with the local county’s recorder of deeds, the modern equivalent of the shire-book....

This is an important case to check out if you work in the debt collection industry, or you work against the debt collection industry. Two plaintiffs, with nearly identical back-stories, had outstanding medical bills. Neither paid their bills. Both accounts were referred to Franklin Collection Service, Inc., after the original healthcare providers tacked on a “collection fee” of 30 to 33.3 percent. Franklin had agreements with both providers that awarded it 30 percent of whatever it collected....

Medieval scholars, or fans of A Confederacy of Dunces, may be familiar with the concept of the rota Fortunae, the wheel of fortune which raises men up to prosperity and rapidly back down again, over and over. Amir Bajoghli should be familiar with the concept, in experience if not in name. A dermatologist, Bajoghli allegedly made millions off healthcare benefit programs – the wheel spins up towards fortune! – only to be indicted for fraud – and down again!...

A cryptocurrency founder suddenly died, and didn’t leave the password to $137 million in assets. Now people are racing to figure out the password, especially since another $53 million is tied up in legal disputes. If there were any more twists, it would be a movie. Wait, didn’t we see this movie? And why did that guy try to open “The Shining” elevator?! No Password?!? If you didn’t see “Ready Player One,” it’s about people competing for a fortune left by a tech founder....

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the Internet. People frequently use Snapchat to send messages back and forth with the understanding that those messages will disappear after a designated expiration time. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation and asserted charges that Snapchat messages actually do not vanish as promised. In the wake of those charges, Snapchat and the FTC have settled, according to a recent FTC press release....

Who added the document to the repository or who last accessed the files? Whether metadata is accessible for filtering on certain file types, file or record classes, or date ranges. The capabilities or limitations of performing metadata and keyword queries in the repositories. Whether the content is reliably indexed for conducting keyword filtering, including indexing the text from embedded objects within files, attachments to e-mail or files within compressed files....

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: cybersecurity should be on the top of any GC’s agenda. Not only is cybersecurity one of the main areas C-suite executives want their legal department to master, the costs of losing sensitive data can be massive, resulting in expensive litigation, loss of proprietary information, and reputation damage. But how do you protect the data that’s in the hand of suppliers, contractors, and the like?...

Let’s talk about the Anti-Injunction Act and the healthcare reform act (PPACA or also, ACA). While the Anti-Injunction Act argument has been dropped by the parties in the latest round of 4th Circuit Court of Appeals healthcare litigation, there are probably still many lawyers out there asking “what is the Anti-Injunction Act?” So, let’s try to make tax law as painless as we possibly can. The federal Anti-Injunction Act, however, is somewhat different....

On Monday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Julie Carnes to a position on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Atlanta. Judge Carnes graduated magna cum laude from the University of Georgia School of Law. She clerked for Judge Lewis R. Morgan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia from 1978 to 1990. She also served as Commissioner of the U....

You may want to keep an eye on a new wave of lawsuits arising out of the foreclosure crisis that is rocking the industry. When mortgages are bought and sold, the purchaser is supposed to register the purchase. A company by the name of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, was created by the industry and specialized in electronic registration. The company was designed to save the time and inconvenience of making a trip to the courthouse and paying filing fees....

In an action by a union claiming that city ordinances, pursuant to which the city denied the union a permit to conduct a rally in support of a strike, violated the First Amendment, partial summary judgment for defendants is affirmed in part where: 1) the city’s noise ordinance made reasonable distinctions among categories in the level of disruption caused by noise that required a permit and noises that came from exempted sources; and 2) the enforcement of Houston’s parade ordinance did not turn on whether paraders were protesting as opposed to celebrating....

Today is Constitution Day, and even though the Bill of Rights isn’t technically part of the original Constitution, the two have become inseparable. It all started with Olmstead v. United States in 1928. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld federal wiretapping on the ground that Olmstead didn’t have a property right in the wire the government tapped, which was located outside on the telephone pole. For the next 40 or so years, archaic notions of property rights were integral to understanding when a search was reasonable....

Some defense attorneys dream of winning an acquittal for their clients just by the sheer force of brilliant lawyering. Perhaps attorney Shannon Sexton is one such attorney, because his planned defense in the murder trial of his client, Woody Will Smith, appears to be not guilty by reason of caffeine insanity. Of course the ‘Platonic Ideal’ of a provocative and creative defense tactic has got to be the famous “Twinkie defense” used by the defense team at the trial of Dan White for the murder of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, in 1979....

Gavin Grimm, the transgender teen at the heart of the bathroom controversy in North Carolina, successfully convinced the Fourth Circuit that his case should be heard in court. Human rights groups have reacted approvingly to the decision, but North Carolina appears not to have moved and House Bill 2 in North Carolina appears to be moving forward despite some calls to repeal it. School Bathroom Controversy Gavin Grimm was born anatomically a female but gender identifies as male....

US v. Troy, 09-2121, concerned a challenge to a conviction of defendant for solicitation to commit a crime of violence and attempted arson, in connection with defendant’s scheme to burn down her nightclub and bar. In affirming, the court held that the district court acted appropriately in denying defendant’s end-of-case motion for a judgment of acquittal as the evidence is sufficient to support a finding that, on the dates of the described arson, the defendant was taking meaningful, definite, and ongoing steps to return the building to the stream of commerce....

Even in an Uber world, everything cannot be done with an app. In Cullinane v. Uber Technologies, Inc., that especially applies to arbitration clauses. The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals said Uber’s arbitration terms were not readily accessible to its app users. The appeals court reversed and remanded the case, which began after riders complained about toll charges. Those allegedly weren’t spelled out in the app, either. No Arbitration Rachel Cullinane, and others named in the class-action suit, sued Uber four years ago....

The Second Circuit broke ground in July, creating a new standard for determining when interns are actually employees entitled to the benefits of employment, like a minimum wage. In that case, the Second Circuit rejected the six part test put forward by the Department of Labor in favor of a “primary beneficiary test” where employment status is determined by whether the intern or employer is the primary beneficiary. Now, the Eleventh Circuit has adopted the same standard the Second Circuit announced in Glatt v....