The Law Planet Blog

Remember VOIP from around the year 2000? It was mostly done by one computer user calling another, machine to machine. No real telephones were involved. It was useful to hobbyists and businesses with lots of remote offices and expensive leased lines. Then broadband prevalence took over and soon, for 30 bucks or so, anyone could have a fast internet connection. This enabled broadband telephone providers such as Vonage and others to market their all-you-can-eat long distance plans.

But these services really prefer higher speed lines than 1.5Mb in my experience. And once you start upgrading your Internet speeds, the providers start digging deeper into your pocket. And for a multi-line business like ours, a Vonage account won't help much. I've looked.

But here's an interesting twist. Google Maps had a functionality that enabled a user to call an establishment that displayed as a "hit." For instance, if a user searched "Dobin & Jenks" and "Jupiter, Florida", Google Maps would display a pinpoint where our office is and had a hyperlink to call the business. When the user clicked on the link, a dialog box would ask for the number to be called from and, like magic, the phone would ring. You answer the phone, say "hello" and the system says "dialing". Next thing you know, the call is ringing on the other end.

I thought this was great. Sometimes the quality was a little shaky, but we use 1.5Mb DSL in the office so I don't have tremendous expectations. It was a little cumbersome, but when I remembered, it was cool to say I was doing it and it wasn't costing a cent (or four cents, which is our current per minute long distance charge). But, alas, Google discontinued the service.

Disheartened, I looked on Google help to see what happened. A moderator of a user forum advised that Google had discontinued the service. My spirits were lifted when another user posted that Microsoft, through its Live Local service still provides phone calls. I used it twice and it seems to work better than Google's service.

I have a couple service providers that don't have toll-free customer service. But they are listed in directories like Google Maps and Live Local. So I just look them up, enter my number and let the Internet carry the call. If a lawyer, or any business, is just starting out, this may be an excellent way to keep long distance bills down. LD is not a huge item in our office, but every little bit helps.

This is just another example of how the Internet and technology has changed the way we live and do business.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Law Practice Management , Legal Technology

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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that, under the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA") domestic service employees, such as "granny nannies," are exempt from overtime rules under certain conditions. In Buckner v. Fla. Habilitation Network, Inc. held that overtime is not due to an employee of a home health care service who worked more than 40 hours in a week. The key point in this decision was that the Plaintiff was not a direct employee of a family but was paid by an agency who employed her.

The decision is a blow to home health care workers employed directly by employment agencies throughout the state of Florida. Such employees now need to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment more carefully or be required to work burdensome work weeks far in excess of 40 hours without the possibility of overtime pay.

That's the view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Labor & Employment

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OK, I try to limit the posts to once a week, so I can actually do some billable work, but I read an article about this video on YouTube and I couldn't resist.

Enjoy.

That's the twisted view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Investments , Securities Industry

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My sister, a bankruptcy lawyer in New Jersey, just called me to give me a follow-up on my prior technology blog.

She told me the following story:

She received an email from a secretary to an opposing lawyer. It had an attachment. As she was opening the attachment, someone from her office walked in to hand her a fax. The attachment and the fax WERE THE SAME LETTER!!!. To make matters worse, this luddite was also sending a hard copy of the letter.

This was not a pleading, it was correspondence. This lack of understanding is the stuff that Dilbert cartoons are made of. Did the lawyer have a tough time licking the stamp to send the email? Does he wonder how the little people get into the fax machine to read the document to the little people in the machine in the other lawyer's office? And how do telephones work anyway? Perhaps he stays awake at night wondering if the light in the refrigerator really goes off when he closes the door.

Get with the program folks. If email is not fast enough, you have a problem. If the fax confirmation states that the fax has been sent and the correct number of pages are listed, and you still don't believe it, you have a problem. When you drop a letter into a mailbox, do you open the door again to see if it really went in? If so, you have a problem. Don't make your problems someone else's.

That's the curmudgeonly view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Law Practice Management , Legal Technology

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With the announcement and release of Apple's iPhone, I got to thinking about how we got here. This is a phone, with internet and a music/video player. We now have $100 fax machines, cellular telephones with internet access and refrigerators with built-in screens and Web browsers. Now, I'm not sure why one would want to surf the net while getting a pint of cookies n' cream, but I'm not a technology designer either.

My kids have never owned a vinyl record. My son's first music device played cassettes. They both have had portable CD players and now iPods. My daughter donated her "old" iPod shuffle to me. I can play MP3s on any audio system in my house thanks to wireless music streaming on my home network. I still eat my meals the old-fashioned way, though, at a table with silverware on plates. But I'm sure Apple's working on the iMeal that will have everyone salivating.

I was talking to my new friend, Kerri, recently and told her that my first computer modem was 2400 baud, which is 2.4K for most folks. And my employer paid around $600 for it. Kerri asked me if I had to insert the phone handset into the modem for it to work. I told her that we had advanced past that technology at that point. To see an example of an acoustic coupler at work, get a copy of War Games with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

I then asked Kerri if she had ever heard of a Qwip machine. Qwip was among the first, if not the first, fax machines that I ever had an experience with. My father's firm (he is also a lawyer) had at least two. They used special silver-colored paper and a rotating drum. You could only fax or receive one page at a time. No way would opposing counsel send you that 100 page motion at 5:00 on a Friday with one of these babies. The fax wouldn't finish until Monday morning. It used an acoustic coupler. Now, a $400 laptop has a 56K fax/modem, and no need for an acoustic coupler.

These technology advances were designed, and sold to us, to make our lives easier. When was the last time you were happy that your fax machine rang? And let's not forget that people now send faxes and then send the same thing via FedEx (because it "absolutely, positively" had to get there overnight). Recently, a secretary from a large firm in New York called to confirm receipt of a fax. I asked her, "Why, did you get an error message on your end?" She said that no, she didn't, but her boss insisted that she call to make sure it was received. So this lawyer thought that his secretary and my office had nothing better to do than to verify what his technology already told him, that the fax went through. He's probably the kind of person who re-opens the mailbox to make sure his letter dropped in.

Here at The Law Planet, we try to use the technology to make us more efficient and save our clients money. It is much cheaper for our clients to have us burn a CD with 5,000 pages on it than it is to copy 5,000 pages and send them by carrier pigeon. We are supposed to rule the technology, the technology is not supposed to rule us. So please, don't call to confirm receipt of a fax. And whatever you do, don't send us a fax and then FedEx the same documents that night. One or the other will suffice, thanks.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Law Practice Management , Legal Technology

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Bear Stearns announced bankruptcy petitions for two of its hedge funds. The term "hedge fund" has been used to describe a variety of investment vehicles. Generally, these funds are designed for high net worth investors with significant investable assets. The investors in these funds have virtually no say in how the funds are invested and, generally, they pay significant management fees to the fund manager. They are usually organized as partnerships.

According to this article in Forbes magazine, these funds invested heavily in subprime mortgage instruments. This is the domestic equivalent of Third World debt. These are instruments backed by loans made to borrowers with low quality credit.

To make matters worse, at least one of these funds appears to have been using leverage to purchase these instruments. Leverage is a buzzword for borrowing money. So the leveraged fund is borrowing money to buy investments that loaned money to people with bad credit. When it is explained this way, instead of buried in some dense disclosure document, would anyone place any significant amount of money in this investment?

Subprime lending survived because of the real estate boom in most parts of the country. Now that the gloss is off of the real estate market, the subprime market has come crashing down, taking those that were profiting from the higher interest rates of subprime loans with it. Bear Stearns, as manager of the funds, had no monetary risk unless it had some of its own money in the funds, which I doubt.

The hedge fund "industry" is an area that desperately needs regulation. I'm guessing that some of the "high net worth" investors in these funds are going to be people who had no business being in the investment. Only time will tell -- and the sob stories on 60 Minutes

That's the view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Investments , Securities Industry

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The National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. recently fomalized the merger of its regulatory arm with that of the NYSE and changed its name to "FINRA." The original proposed name of the combined securities regulatory authority was to be "SIRA". The original choice could apparently be construed as offensive to Muslims. It seems that noone considered this when the name was first concocted.

It got me to thinking about other ill-fated names over the years. (Warning: this is going to go a little off-topic). In the securities industry, my former employer Prudential Securities, then-known as Prudential-Bache Securities, came out with a mutual fund whose stock symbol was PBARF. Ick.

Chevrolet, every now and again, resurrects the "Nova" nameplate. Unfortunately, for Spanish-speaking customers, Nova could be pronounced "No va" meaning that it "doesn't go."

Let's not forget "With a name like Smucker's it has to be good!" I still repeat the Saturday Night Live spoof "With a name like Painful Rectal Itch, it's got to be good" with a smile on my face.

And then there's Coca-Cola. Remember "Coke adds life"? Well, as I recall, there were news stories that translating that advertising slogan into certain Chinese dialects resulted in the literal translation of "Coke brings back your ancestors from the dead." Now, doesn't that sound thirst-quenching?

What does that have to do with The Law Planet? Very little other than to say that it is important to anticipate the unintended consequences of your actions -- and get a good translator.

That's the view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Marc S. Dobin | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Securities Industry

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