CLEwebinars.com is hosting "The Ethics of Social Media Research" webinar on June 28th at 1:00-2:30 pm ET, presented by Carole Levitt, Esq. & Mark Rosch. (This webinar qualifies for 1.5 hours of Ethics credits.)

In this webinar, you will learn how to avoid potential ethical traps when you research social media profiles to uncover investigative/background information about parties, witnesses, experts, jurors, etc., and, in some cases, to use this information as evidence. This program reviews pertinent Ethics opinions issued by the ABA and bar associations in many jurisdictions; discusses relevant caselaw; reviews detailed Guidelines for social media research issued by the New York State Bar’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section; and ties them into the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

The program will also explore:

• Who's your friend?
• Could "friending" violate the deception or ex parte communication ethical rules?    
• Whether it is ethical to research the social media profiles of parties and witnesses during discovery or trial?
• Is it ethical to research the social media profiles of potential jurors before trial or seated jurors during trial?
• Could advising clients to delete, deactivate, or adjust privacy settings on their social networking accounts lead to an ethical violation or spoliation charge against you?
• How to configure security/privacy settings in your own profile to avoid ethical breaches.

The seminar is partially based on the speakers' fifty-five page Social Media chapter from their book, "The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet."

The post CLE Webinar Covers Ethics of Social Media Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Twitter appears to have disabled its pinpoint geographical search capability, and severely limited its other geographic search capablities. Some less precise geographic search capabilities do still remain.

Until recently, it was possible to enter the search instruction geocode (along with GPS coordinates for a specific location) into the search box at Twitter to retrieve tweets from that location or within a specified radius around that location. For example, geocode:35.0697244,-106.631294,2mi would retrieve tweets within a 2 mile radius of those GPS coordinates (Isotopes Park in Albuqueruque, NM). This search no longer reliably retrieves those results.

Until recently, it was also possible to enter a point of interest into the Near this place box on Twitter's Advanced Search page to retrieve tweets near (a limited list) of well-known geographic points of interest (e.g., Yankee Stadium, Golden Gate Bridge).
 

For most users, Twitter has converted the Near this place search to only auto-recognizing your current location (as detected using your Internet connection) after you click the Add Location button that now appears to the right of the Near this place label. (We say "most users" because the Near this place box does still appear in some Web browsers.) Clicking this button will retrieve tweets within a 15 mile radius of your detected location.

By default, there is no way to set any location other than the one automatically detected when you click this button. Luckily however, there is a way to override this default. To override the default, you can enter a location into Twitter's main search box this way:

near:"Culver City, CA" within:2mi

This search will retrieve results within a 2 mile radius of a central point within the city you define in your search. There does not appear to be a way to search more specifically than the city level.

We had no response to an email request to Twitter for comment on the status of its geographic searches.

The post Twitter Kills Search Features Useful for Background and Investigative Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Currently, Big Case Bot is following and posting documents from:

• Nat'l Inst. of Family and Life v. Becerra
• Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels v. Donald J. Trump aka David Dennison
• ACLU v. Madison County, Miss.

among other now-current trials.

In its documentation, the bot is described as follows:

The bot uses PACER RSS feeds to gather the latest filings from 74 U.S. District Courts and five federal courts of appeals and stores the docket entries in a database. It matches new filings against a preselected list of major cases, scrapes matching documents from PACER, uploads them to a DocumentCloud project and posts the results on Twitter.

Note that some federal district courts -- including those in the Eastern District of Virginia, the District of Maryland and the District of Hawaii -- have elected not to publish an RSS feed from their dockets. As a result, Big Cases can't follow cases in those districts. Most federal courts of appeal also do not pulbish [sic] RSS feeds of new docket entries.

Big Case Bot was created by USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath. In his Twitter bio, Heath descibes himself as, "covering law and justice. Data, documents and 'convoluted KGB style back-door' stuff." The bot utilizes the Python programming language.

Anyone can download and customize the code (using their own PACER and other login credentials) to download documents based on parameters they set. Note that according to the bot's documentation, the Big Case Bot code, "has only been tested on a machine running CentOS Linux 7."

The post Twitter Bot Follows Federal Cases of Note; Posts Free Case Documents appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

This free eDiscovery industry white paper walks you through the steps to retrieve this information from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Download it now for free.

The post Finding the Right Person on Social Media: An eDiscovery White Paper appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Previously, we've offered some more detailed tips for creating more effective searches via Twitter.

When you enter a search keyword preceeded by the hash symbol, Bing will suggest hashtags that have been used on the social networking site to categorize posts.

When you begin your search with the @ sign, Bing suggests popular users (mostly celebrities) that match your input.

Not every existing user is included in the suggestion list (even if you type in a complete user handle). however, any valid user name used as a search term will be retrieved in the search results.

The suggestions are presented in a drop-down box that appears beneath the search box - the same way Bing (and Google) already suggest search terms based on other popular searches that match the characters you have typed into the search box.

Based on our test searches, it appears that Bing is simply acting as a front-end to submit searches via the existing Twitter search structure. Searches for hashtags like #ABATECHSHOW yielded the same results whether we ran the search using Bing or Twitter's own search box.

Twitter's own internal search has also long been criticised for it shortcomings targetting older tweets and searching for specific date coverage.

PC World addressed these shortcomings in its coverage:

What's less clear, however, is whether or not users will be able to use Bing to plumb the murky depths of historical tweets. One of the problems with Twitter is that, while it has been easy to discover current tweets and trending topics, it's much more difficult to go back to say, the last World Cup four years ago, and re-discover what fans were talking about. And that apparently won't change.

The post Bing Launches Twitter Hashtag Search | But Is It An Improvement? appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Now, you can retrieve older tweets more easily, within a range you define, using the newly added "Dates" limiter on Twitter's Advanced Search page.

Simply add a beginning and ending date to the "Dates" limiter to define your date range.

You can also "mix and match" the search criteria on the Advanced Search page to create more targeted searches. For example, you could search for tweets "From these accounts" (searching by username), with "Any of these [key]words," and limit the date range during which the tweets were posted.

The post Twitter Makes Searches Better | Adds Date Limiter appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

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With cost-conscious clients scrutinizing legal bills, lawyers cannot afford to depend on fee-based resources the way they used to, especially if reliable free resources are available. That said, sometimes it makes sense to pay for data—especially if the pay databases have something the free ones are lacking (content or functionality) or when using the pay databases can save you time and money.

This article will highlight some of the most reliable free (or low-cost) online resources and give you some tips on how to use them. However, we don’t have the space to go into as great as detail as we’d like, so you’ll need to attend ABA TECHSHOW 2014 to hear us speak and ask us your questions or read our upcoming ABA LP book, Internet Legal Research On a Budget.

To begin with, every legal researcher should bookmark a few free legal portals. A good portal includes links arranged by topics and jurisdictions so you can quickly get to a useful site. But, a good portal should go a step further and provide “added value,” such as a full-text keyword searchable database of court cases or subject-specific articles about an area of law.

The most useful general legal portals are: Justia and FindLaw. [Note: FindLaw is undergoing some database changes and is not functioning as it should. We presume proper functioning will resume.]

For government portals, we’d choose a newer site that you might not be familiar with: the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the federal government. Another choice would be USA.gov, not only useful for retrieving federal governmental agency documents, but also state, local, territorial, and tribal government documents.

Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII) is a portal that has some unique databases such as Wex, a free legal dictionary/encyclopedia sponsored and hosted by the LII, and its version of the U.S. Code, which provides links to the rules and regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) that relate to the U.S. Code section being viewed. This feature, which saves you from having to run a separate search at the CFR, is activated by clicking on the “Authorities (CFR)” tab.

The last legal portal you should bookmark is one that will assist you with your state and local research needs. Look at each of your state’s law school law library’s portals and decide which one suits that need.

Case law research is probably what most legal researchers do more than any other kind of research. One of the most overlooked “free” places for conducting case law research is your state bar association. Forty-seven state bar associations (plus some local bars and other legal professional associations) subscribe to legal research databases on behalf of their members. In turn, they provide their members with free access as a “member benefit.” These “member benefit to lawyers” legal research databases offer more sophisticated search options and broader date coverage than most other free case law databases, including Google Scholar. Typically, these “member benefit to lawyers” legal research databases include all federal and state (and D.C.) cases, codes and regulations. And, for some jurisdictions, you might find law reviews, attorney general opinions, and more. The state bar associations of California, Delaware, and Montana do not yet offer this member benefit.  Of the 47 state bar associations that do offer this member benefit, 46 subscribe either to Casemaker or Fastcase. The other state bar association, the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA), offers access to InCite, a customized LexisNexis database created for the PBA. Be sure to visit your bar association’s website and look for a link to one of these databases.

Turning away from “traditional” websites, let’s take a look at other places where lawyers are finding useful legal research, such as blogs/blawgs, Twitter accounts, and apps.

Following the “right” blawgger or tweeter can help you keep up with your area of law without expending much of your own research time. To find a blawgger in your practice area, you can visit Justia’s BlawgSearch site, scan the list of categories, and choose one that fits your practice area or enter keywords into the search box at the top. After you review the list of blawgger results, subscribe to a few and then take some time to decide which ones are worthwhile. Another source for locating useful blawgs is The ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory, arranged by topic, author type (e.g., consultant, judge…), region (by court, state, or country), and law school.

To figure out the best people to follow on Twitter who write about your practice area, visit http://twitter.com/#!/search-home. You can conduct searches there even if you don’t have a Twitter account. Enter keywords describing your practice area (e.g., ski accidents) into the search box to locate millions of individual tweets—from (roughly) the last two weeks. You can also use Twitter’s Advanced Search page to create more sophisticated searches.

Useful legal apps range in price from free (e.g., Nolo's Plain English Law Dictionary for iOS is free but the Droid version is $16.19) to $54.99 (e.g., Black's Law Dictionary). To locate legal apps, review ones recommended in:

• UCLA Law Library’s free Mobile Applications for Law Students and Lawyers: This is an alphabetical-by-title, annotated list of law apps. You can scan the list or better yet, keyword search the list with your Find function (control F for P.C.s or command F for Apple devices) and enter your keywords (e.g., court rules) into the Find search box.
• Tom Mighell’s book, iPad Apps in One Hour for Lawyers (ABA LPD, 2012). Visit http://linkon.in/ipadappslaw for the print version and http://linkon.in/ipadappslawebook for the e-book.
• Daniel J. Siegel’s book, Android Apps in One Hour for Lawyers (ABA LPD, 2013). ). Visit http://linkon.in/androidappdan  for the print version and http://linkon.in/androidappebook for the e-book.

By taking the time to read this article, you have made a great start at learning about some of the best free and low-cost legal research sources available on the Internet. To learn about many other sites and how to become a sophisticated researcher of those sites, look for our upcoming book, Internet Legal Research on a Budget. Our book will provide you with a high level of control over your searching and lead to better and quicker results.

This article was adapted from the book, “Internet Legal Research on a Budget” by Carole Levitt and Judy Davis (ABA LPD 2014). Reprinted with permission of the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. It also originally appeared on the ABA LP Division Law Practice Today Webzine.

The post Internet Legal Research on a Budget appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

According to the Facebook report, police and other governmental agencies in the United States are, by far, the leaders in requests, asking for user data 11,000-12,000 times about 20,000-21,000  Facebook users. By comparison, the next heaviest requester was India, with 3,245 requests for data about 4,144 Facebook users. In contrast, Russia, Hong Kong (and some other countries) logged only one request each.

While other countries' numbers of requests are listed as definite numbers, the number of data requests from the United States is listed as a range. As explained by Facebook:

"We have reported the numbers for all criminal and national security requests to the maximum extent permitted by law. We continue to push the United States government to allow more transparency regarding these requests, including specific numbers and types of national security-related requests. We will publish updated information for the United States as soon as we obtain legal authorization to do so."

A Facebook account and log-in is required to access the report.

Other services such as Google and Twitter have previously released their own, similar Transparency Reports.

The post Facebook Releases First-Ever Government Request Transparency Report appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

The new Bing results display interface is broken up into three columns. The widest column, on the left-hand side displays a traditional looking list of relevant "blue link" results. The middle of the three columns, the "Snapshot," is supposed to feature "useful information related to [your] searches and compiled by Bing as a single 'snapshot' – all in one place in a separate column." However, all we have seen in this column our test searches are Ads.

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More Social

The far right-hand side of the search results page is where the most visible change to the results reside - in the collapsible "Sidebar." When you're logged in/connected to your Facebook account, the Sidebar includes "recommendations" from your Facebook friends based on your search terms and their "Likes." The Sidebar also includes signals from "experts and enthusiasts" leading to their blogs or Twitter feeds relevant to your search terms.

While conceptually similar to Google's Search Plus Your World, introduced earlier this year, Bing's implementation is different. While Google has chosen to tightly integrate the "social signals" into its main search results list, Bing has (mostly) chosen to segregate the social signals to the Sidebar. However, Bing does include social signals in the left-hand column of search results in the form of a "thumbs up" icon that indicates which of your Facebook friends has Liked a particular site on the results list. (It si unclear if these Likes are figured into where a particular site will rank on the results list. Additionally, where Google is relying heavily on its own Google+ social network for its social signals, Bing is compiling these signals from the more popular Facebook social network.

Less Search

As part of this redesign, Bing has moved the "Advanced Search" features that are available to narrow down your search results after you had conducted an initial search. Now, to access the Advanced search features you have to highlight your keywords in the search box (on the search results page) to bring up the link to the Advanced Search menu. This will also bring up a list of other suggested search terms.

Part of the rationale behind moving these features may be found in a quote from Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz. "People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from where things were a decade ago," he said in the press release announcing the changes. "And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done." While this may be true for some searches, this is not necessarily true for the types of background and investigative research lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals need to conduct via search engines. 

The post Bing Revamps Results: More Social…Less Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Most people are aware of (or at least heard of) the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. This social networking and updating site allows users to send brief messages (140 characters or less) via the service. By default, the messages are visible to anyone on the Internet - if they know where to look. Most Twitter users read tweets of other users they have chosen to "follow."  (Note that users can opt to "protect" their tweets," making them visible only to those other Twitter users pre-approved to view them.) Twitter also allows users to send "Direct Messages" (or "DM"s) to any other user who is "following" them.

Third-party application developers can also build tools to integrate their products with Twitter. Integrating these third-party applications allows you to post information from the third-party application as a Twitter update, or conversely post information from a Twitter update to the third-party application. Some of the most popular automatically post a Status Update form your Facebook account as a Twitter update or allow you to post a photo and caption at a site like TwitPic and have that appear in a tweet. You must pro-actively add any of these third-party applications to your account and grant them permission to access your Twitter account data before they can work.

While most applications are built to function as they are described, nefarious developers could build a application that's meant to surrepticiously harvest information from your account. Depending on the level of access granted to the application, this may include the ability to to read your updates and/or write updates to your account (generally acceptable as in the examples given in the previous paragraph) or to read your Direct Messages (usually less desirable). This is one reason it is very important to read the Permission screens that appear before granting access to your account to any third-party application.

Wihle most attacks on Twitter users com via shortened links to a separate malicious Web site, the risk of malicious third-party apps exists. There is not a master list of malicious third-party applications built to interact with Twitter, so we are attempting to build a list resources on the topic. Here's what we have located to date. (Bear with us. It will be a continual work in progress.)  We hope it is helpful. Don't hesitate to contact us is you find something you think would be a useful addition to this list.

Note that Twitter has made changes to its security ant permissions system to battle some of the issues noted in older articels listed below. Those older articles are included for reference.

2011

6/27 - Thinq_- Simon Pegg's Twitter Hacked, Abused

6/27 - AllTwitter.com - Do You Know Who Has Access To Your Twitter Account? Check Your Application Settings

5/23 - Technorati - Twitter Third-Party Applications Permission Model Will Minimize Hacking Attacks to Users

4/20 - CRN News - Twitter Virus Spreads 'Unfollow Me' App

3/2 - Softpedia - Rogue-App-Based Survey Scams Move to Twitter

1/12 - Blog of Adam Wulf - Stealing Passwords is Easy in Native Mobile Apps Despite OAuth

1/1 - Light Point Security - How to Remove Third-Party Apps form Your Twitter Account

2010

9/16 - oneforty Blog - Twitter Permission & Security

9/2 - ArsTechnica - Compromising Twitter's OAuth Security System

The post Avoid Malicious Apps on Twitter appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.