Time wasting lawyers, a visual guide to expungement and the trouble with crime stats

New test for time wasters

At the Washington Post, Catherine Ho reports on a new tech start up that has devised a test to help law firms make the best use of time-saving features that come with commonly-used computer programs — such as Microsoft Word and Excel — but are often not tapped.

The Legal Tech Audit, Ho writes, “rewards efficiency, which goes against a metric that lawyers have historically used to value their work — time. And it is gaining traction at a critical time for the legal industry. The economic recession forced many Fortune 500 companies, often a large law firm’s most important client, to cut their outside legal spending, which put pressure on law firms to differentiate themselves in order to hang onto their business.”

Ho reports that the test “is already drawing interest from dozens of Fortune 500 companies and large law firms…many of which are considering including the test in future request-for-proposals for law firms.”

Minnesota’s Second Chance Law: A visual explainer

Keyser Law, a criminal defense firm with offices in Minneapolis and Stillwater, has produced a handy usual visual guide to the state’s new expungement law.  The so-called “Second Chance Law,” which was passed by the Legislature last session and went into effect on Jan. 1, provides for the sealing of records for offenses ranging from misdemeanor drug possession to certain low level felonies.

Crime stats don’t reflect cybercrime

As everyone knows, crime rates have been going down across the country for years now. But the folks at The Crime Report point to a new study which notes that those heartening numbers figures come with a big caveat. They don’t incorporate statistics from one of the fast-growing categories of offense, cybercrimes.

“Many cybercrimes are never reported to police, and researchers point out that cybercrime victims are often unaware they’ve been victimized,” Crime Report writes. “They point to major attacks on retailers — like the ones on Target and Home Depot — in which data for millions of customers was compromised.”

According to a recently published study in Justice Quarterly (which you have to buy if you want to read), financial losses related to identity theft “appear far in excess of the damage inflicted by traditional property crime.”