Google Law

Supreme_CourtEarlier this week Google announced a slew of new products (check out the official Google Blog for a full list). Of particular interest to lawyers was the addition to Google Scholar that allows searches for federal and state court decisions. This in itself is nothing new, as many websites currently offer access to federal court decisions for free, such as openjurist.org or justia.com. Like these other free offerings, Google hosts the case itself.  While such sites are not new, Google’s implementation has the potential to transform legal research.

A more user-friendly search is one of the many ways Google beats out alternative free and pay legal research options. While the search engine is far from perfect, queries can be focused by either state or federal court, and searches can be further refined by “author” and date constraints. This can be a great help when starting a new research project on an unfamiliar topic. For example, if staring research on an ADA question regarding “reasonable accommodation,” a simple query of “ reasonable accommodation” and “Posner” (if you wanted a 7th Circuit decision) in the author field yields useful results. The results are organized by which decisions have been cited most, rather than which decisions are most recent. In contrast to Google, both West and Lexis give search results by the date of the decision, and require further investigation in order to differentiate which cases have significance. Because Google doesn’t make money on content directly, Google has no incentive to locate this information behind an additional pay walls whereas pay sites make money by obfuscating information behind additional clicks—the more one clicks the more they make.

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Work Email: “I Always Feel Like … Somebody’s Watching Me”

Bigbortherorwell No, this post is not about the singer Rockwell or that annoying Geico commercial, but about whether you should just assume that your boss monitors your email.

A new Wall Street Journal article suggests that is what exactly may be happening, but now there is some push back from employees and their advocates:

Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically . . .

In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property.

Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees.

That was what happened in a case earlier this year in New Jersey, when an appeals court ruled that an employee of a home health-care company had a reasonable expectation that email sent on a personal account wouldn’t be read.

To be honest, I don’t think this a new trend at all (though it makes a nice theme in a WSJ story). Since I was practicing management side employment law back in the late 90s, we would advise clients routinely that they had to have clear language in their employee handbooks that employees had no expectation of privacy in their computers, internet browsing, or emails.

Nothing new, but still a good practice for employers to follow if they want to avoid this type of lawsuit.

Hat Tip: Joe Seiner

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Lessons from my Grandmother

It has been ten days since my grandmother’s funeral and I have been, if not enjoying this past week, definitely enjoying telling stories about her life and her influence on her grandchildren.  She died at age 99, laying down to take a rest because she did not feel well — the Torah writes that those who die in their sleep are Tzadek, truly righteous, and I know she belongs in that category.  I popped in last week to talk to my dean briefly and proceeded to tell him the following:  I made it all the way through law school before I believed at all that perhaps, perhaps, women were not quite as assertive as men in negotiations when I found, in the year that I taught negotiation at Stanford, more of the women needed some work on being more assertive and more of the men needed some work on listening.   Now, that has not been the case in every class that I have taught over the years and it was a pretty simplistic view of each student’s skill sets at the time but . . . the point was that it did not even occur to me that there were gender differences in levels of assertiveness because I never saw any in my family. (Just ask my brother, husband, or brothers-in-law!)   I had read about these so-called gender differences in my negotiation class.   I just did not buy it — no one I knew would ever have been subject to that description.  And, with Mama’s passing, I realize how indebted I am to her for my understanding of negotiation. 

Over the past 15 years in particular, as I have led an “adult” life — marriage, kids, career — I also started to view my grandmother as a three-dimensional adult and not just the relatively limited view that grandchildren tend to have of their grandparents, particularly when we are children. 

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