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Legal Currents: Proposed cyberbullying law is unnecessary

By Nicole Black
POSTED: May 21, 2012
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Recently, Monroe County Legislators Mike Barker and Carmen Gumina proposed legislation that would make cyberbullying a crime. Under the bill, cyberbullying directed toward a minor would constitute a Class A misdemeanor in Monroe County, punishable by up to a year in jail. The crime of cyberbullying would occur where the defendant engaged in the following [...]

Legal Currents: Court of Appeals grapples with Internet porn

By Nicole Black
POSTED: May 14, 2012
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Last week, the New York Court of Appeals handed down its decision in People v. Kent, 2012 N.Y. Slip Op. 03572. In this decision, the court considered whether the defendant, by simply viewing images of child pornography on his computer screen, had knowingly procured or possessed child pornography in violation of Penal Law § 263.15 [...]

Legal Currents: IPad resources for lawyers grow plentiful

By Nicole Black
POSTED: May 7, 2012
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In just a few short years, iPads have become ubiquitous. Although the first iPad was released just 2 years ago, iPads are popping up everywhere, from coffee shops and airports to the boardroom and the courtroom. It seems indisputable — the tablet computing revolution has begun and, just like everyone else, lawyers are quickly joining [...]

Legal Currents: New York addresses legal blogging ethics

By Nicole Black
POSTED: April 22, 2012
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Although blogging has been around for well over a decade now, our profession was late to jump on the bandwagon. Nevertheless, the ethics of legal blogging has been an issue from the get go. For example, when blogging first reared its ugly head, there was much debate about whether a legal blog constituted an “advertisement” [...]

Legal Currents: Rochester: An emerging legal tech hub?

By Nicole Black
POSTED: April 15, 2012
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I’ve spent most of my adult life in Rochester, New York, having lived here for a total of 20 years. Aside from the typically harsh and lengthy winters, it’s not a bad place to live. It may not be the most metropolitan area, but Rochester offers something for everyone, from a vast array of festivals [...]

Legal Currents: Are police unlawfully accessing social media accounts?

By Nicole Black
POSTED: April 9, 2012
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It’s undeniable: social media use has permeated our culture. People are sharing information about all aspects of their lives via social networking sites. Some of these disclosures are broadcast publicly while others are limited to select friends and followers. This broad scale sharing of information has not gone unnoticed by the legal profession. In past [...]

Legal Currents: ABA Techshow 2012: Legal tech and innovation

By Nicole Black
POSTED: April 2, 2012
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Every year in early spring, legal technology enthusiasts from across the United States, Canada and even Europe, converge upon the Chicago Hilton to attend the American Bar Association’s premier legal technology conference, ABA Techshow. For those unfamiliar with this conference, it is sponsored by the the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section and its goal is [...]

Legal Currents: Apps, social media enhance conference experience

By Nicole Black
POSTED: March 30, 2012
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Last week, I attended the annual ABA Techshow in Chicago. It’s one of my favorite legal technology conferences. While there, I learned a lot and really enjoyed spending time with old friends and meeting new ones. It was also the first conference I attended as a vendor, rather than simply a participant, now that I’m [...]

Legal Currents: Are bloggers journalists? Courts are catching up

By Nicole Black
POSTED: March 23, 2012
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I wrote my first article about blogging in 2007. Back then, hardly anyone had heard of it, least of all my fellow lawyers. At that point, I’d been blogging for over a year at my law blog, Sui Generis. I started that blog in late-2005 on the advice of my cousin, Rochester attorney David Rothenberg. [...]

Legal Currents: Jurors punished for using social media?

By Nicole Black
POSTED: March 16, 2012
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Currently, the United States imprisons more than 2.3 million of its citizens.This incarceration rate means that 1 out of every 100 United States citizens is in jail. Since we already imprison people at a rate that some estimate is 10 times that of other Western democracies, I would suggest that it’s time to stop criminalizing [...]

Legal Currents: NC Bar Council issues final opinion on the cloud

By Nicole Black
POSTED: March 11, 2012
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The use of cloud computing products by lawyers in their law practices is an emerging trend — and one that presents unique ethical issues for lawyers who intend to store confidential client data on servers owned and operated by third parties. A number of ethics committees across the country have offered their take on the [...]

Legal Currents: The discoverability of social media evidence

By Nicole Black
POSTED: March 2, 2012
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For years I’ve been asserting that social media is not a fad — it’s a phenomenon. And now, from our current vantage point, the observation that social media has infiltrated, and affects, all aspects of our culture is indisputable. But an intriguing side effect of the mass incorporation of social media into the daily lives [...]

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