RANDOM NOTES . . . Some random notes for a Wednesday morning--

--Bilingual weblogs, multilingual firms. Is this the first bilingual law-related weblog: Boston Immigration and Nationality Law? At the weblog, immigration lawyer Joshua Paulin posts both in English and Portuguese, owing in part to the large Brazilian population in the Boston area. The weblog notes, "Besides his native English, Attorney Paulin speaks Spanish and Portuguese; his staff speaks Italian and French besides the languages mentioned."

Good marketing for an immigration firm!

--Get your ediscovery with some tort reform thrown in for free. Cataphora, Inc., an "industry leader in evidence analytics and review software," announced in a press release last week that it "lauds the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform’s call to curb lawsuit abuse." According to Cataphora's CEO, "“Efforts to reform the system are laudable and we support the ILR’s campaign to generate awareness about the toll frivolous litigation takes on everyone. Cataphora has been focused on bringing software solutions to market that help reduce the cost of litigation through faster evidence review and analysis."

Strange marketing for an ediscovery firm.

--Is metadata always bad? Only lawyers start from the premise that metadata is designed to be hidden, almost never to be disclosed. That's the idea behind a new Alabama opinion that concludes that looking at metadata is unethical. It's called Alabama Office of the General Counsel Formal Opinion RO-2007-02: Ethical Propriety of Mining Metadata. If you want some examples of the more generally accepted view that metadata isn't inherently evil, take a look at the work by the Library of Congress or Creative Commons, which demonstrate that metadata doesn't have to be "mined" to be seen. Or read my column with Dennis Kennedy, "Metadata Revisited: Recent Developments, Correcting Common Misconceptions and Analyzing the Florida Approach."

--"Wait until you're 21." Maybe that's what I should have said to my daughter Lydia, who turned 18 the other day and showed up the next morning with a stud in her nose. She reminded me that she's been wanting to do it for years, and that I always answered, "Wait until you're 18." I guess I never thought it would happen. Well, it did. After complimenting Lydia on her new look, I told her the story of my dad's teasing reaction when I turned up at 18 with an earring in my left ear. "Looks like you lost the one on the right," he said.

Comments

[Joshua Paulin]

Thanks again for the kind comments, Evan!