Link: Law.com

Recent headlines have highlighted the blurring divide between professional and private e-mail accounts: The White House and its staffers were subjected to criticism and scrutiny for their use of non-governmental e-mail accounts and BlackBerrys in connection with official business; New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's aides' personal e-mail accounts have been targeted for communications concerning the investigation into the Senate majority leader; and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine recently declared that he would stop using e-mail entirely in response to legal requests for private e-mails between the governor and his ex-girlfriend.

The overlap between business and personal e-mail and computer use isn't limited to the political arena. An April 2007 survey revealed that 33 percent of employees use personal e-mail accounts at least once or twice weekly for business purposes, and that 17 percent do so daily.

Link: Adobe

Chances are if you are on a legal technology listserve or read blogs, you'll hear about alternatives to Acrobat. Apparently, you can do everything with these alternative products that you can do with Acrobat for $29!

Cheaper is better, right? Maybe not . . .

Link:  SpamNotes

This isn’t the first time this has happened – that a lawyer receives an electronic notice from the other side or the court and blames it on the spam filter – but the consequences here are more severe than previously imposed by other courts: Pace v. United Servs. Auto Ass'n, Case No. 05-cv-01562-LTB-MJW, D. Co., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 49425, July 9, 2007

Link: InternetNews.com

While organizations scramble to protect themselves against the next big TJX-style data breach, they're overlooking another risk: social networking. Nearly every organization has an in-house blogger -- officially or not.

Barely a day goes by without some company in a completely different market announcing that they too now have an “e-discovery solution”. Debra Logan at Gartner, who is fast emerging as one of the leading lights of the e-discovery world, tells me she is speaking to 30 vendors for her forthcoming research – and could easily have covered twice that number.

Link:  InBoxer

More than 50 court opinions on electronic discovery have been issued since the Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect about a year ago. These opinions can guide organizations and IT departments about which aspects of the FRCP are really important because the courts often base future decisions on prior opinions.

Link:  Reuters

Former Communist Party chief of state-owned power company wept as he read a four-page "letter of apology" during his corruption trial, but his sentiments were later found to be strikingly similar to those of a disgraced former party chief of Tongan village