Popular Articles from the CPM ICYMI Newsletter (August 2022 – October 2022)
Every week subscribers receive the ICYMI enewsletter from the NCBA Center for Practice Management. The newsletter highlights tips, tools, trends, and techniques to help your law practice. The following are a few popular links from the past issues of the newsletter.
The Next Big Security Threat Is Staring Us in The Face. Tackling It Is Going to Be Tough August 19, 2022
Deepfake videos use artificial intelligence and deep learning to produce fake images of people or events. They are showing up in video conferences, false videos that look like a real human speaking. If this becomes prevalent the mischief extends to fake job applicants seeking sensitive information, foreign influence operations, and cybercrime.
How to Recover a Microsoft Office File You Forgot to Save August 26, 2022
In a perfect world you would open a new document and immediately create a file name and save it to a folder. But this is not a perfect world. Sometimes we forget to save a document draft. If you are composing in Google or Office apps through the browser those unnamed drafts are automatically saved. If, however, you are using MS Office software (even the MS 365 versions) you may need this helpful article to find documents that you forgot to save. You can tweak where drafts are saved (and how often) by going to File – Options – Save and exploring those settings.
U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index September 2, 2022
Fair Use for copyrighted materials is very contextual. Have you ever wondered whether the use of an image, research, photograph, or other piece of intellectual property has been found as Fair Use? This searchable database of Fair Use cases may come in handy.
Contract Redlining Workarounds | 3 Helpful Tips Using MS Word September 9, 2022
An interesting and helpful article about use of tracked changes for collaboration, including unlocking a document that has tracked change locked on, reduce formatting tracking to focus on intent, and removing all comments with a click. The article’s author, Nada Alnajafi, is an in-house attorney, blogger, and author of Contract Nerds.
Why You Must Use the Microsoft Office Document Inspector September 30, 2022
This is a fascinating article. Lawyers and their support team need to be aware of the metadata that lives in documents, as well as how to remove it. Microsoft Word comes with the document inspector feature to help you remove comments, tracked changes, hidden text, macros, file properties and more with a few clicks. However, you can’t rely on the tool to remove everything that you may not want to share in a document. For instance, if you crop an image in Word the original image is still resident in the document. Or, if people add text comments or highlighting instead of the tracked changes feature, the document inspector will not remove them. This is a must read to understand the true nature of metadata.
Official NCDMV: N.C. REAL ID October 7, 2022
After a deadline extension due to the pandemic on requiring a Real ID for commercial air travel and entrance into federal buildings, including courthouses and prisons, the date has been set. If you don’t have a Real ID that shows a star on your driver’s license by May 3, 2023, be prepared to find your passport to use as identification – if it hasn’t expired.
CLIO And ABA Recent Surveys: A Tale of Two Studies October 21, 2022
Steve Embry analyzes the results of the new Clio Trends Report and the ABA Practice Forward survey looking at the “post pandemic” trends about remote work and flexibility. Bottom line? Respondents to both surveys overwhelmingly showed a desire to work remotely. He concludes “if the demand for legal services flattens out, firm management could start demanding a full return to the office and take a step backward. If that happens, the level of dissatisfaction will go through the roof, and we may see a mass exodus away from law firms and even the law.”
Data Breach Incident Response Plan Toolkit October 28, 2022
If you do not have an incident response plan, North Carolina Lawyers Mutual is providing a head start with this sample policy and procedures document. Written by Tom Widman, a pioneer in identity and data theft, this fill-in-the blank document can help you tackle documenting what your firm would do if there were a suspected data breach.