Many people don’t seek legal assistance because they simply don’t know that they need legal help. They don’t realize they have a legal problem that has a legal solution. This education gap is where the access to justice issue begins, but isn’t where it should end. Can technology help improve access to justice? Increased accessibility and technology that identifies and addresses legal problems are gradually reducing barriers to equal justice under the law for all. Yet, we have a long way to go. For instance, over 90 percent of Americans have a smartphone, yet only one percent have a legal…

Do junk and spam emails overflow your inbox? What about those emails that appear to be from a friend or colleague, but you’re not quite sure? Or an unsolicited business opportunity that seems too good to be true? Cybercriminals bombard us with new tricks and ploys asking victims to grant access to otherwise protected accounts and data, often through phishing emails. A variation of this scam – spear phishing – takes a more targeted approach to a specific person or organization. Roughly $500 million a year is being scammed from phishing attacks alone, according to the FBI. And those…

Social media has changed the way we communicate and live. It’s an empowering tool for many people worldwide. Social media is also an extraordinary source of evidence. Our digital footprint grows daily with every photo posted, status updated and video shared. These footprints are hard to erase. The tweet of yesterday may become the exhibit of tomorrow’s litigation. This is especially true in criminal, family, personal injury and employment law. The duty of preserving social media evidence mirrors that of other electronically stored information (ESI). Likewise, that duty to preserve is triggered when a party reasonably foresees that that evidence…

Social media has changed the way we communicate and live. It’s an empowering tool for many people worldwide. Social media is also an extraordinary source of evidence. Our digital footprint grows daily with every photo posted, status updated and video shared. These footprints are hard to erase. The tweet of yesterday may become the exhibit of tomorrow’s litigation. This is especially true in criminal, family, personal injury and employment law. The duty of preserving social media evidence mirrors that of other electronically stored information (ESI). Likewise, that duty to preserve is triggered when a party reasonably foresees that the evidence…

You become a better problem solver by solving a lot of problems. In theory, a more experienced legal professional becomes a better problem solver. They’ve experienced the clear, common paths to address clients’ needs. They’ve tackled those crazy outlier circumstances that might turn on a buried statute or vague case law interpretation. They’ve completed the job, closed the client file, time and time again. Lawyers’ common path to problem solving usually goes like this: Get a massive amount of facts dumped on you (read: intake interview), determine what problems exist that the client knows about or not (read: issue spotting),…