Right now I’m working on a personal injury case where a couple got rear-ended.  They, and their passenger, were injured.  One of my clients has two herniated discs is his low back, which is a serious and very painful permanent injury.  Initially, they tried to negotiate and handle the case themselves, because they thought the liability insurance company would “do the right thing”.

Not so much.  They got frustrated and came to me a year later, after really mis-handling their own claim.  Now, about another year later, I’ve about got the mess they created straightened out and am able to reach a settlement which more closely resembles reasonable compensation.

So, Here are a few reasons to at least consult a lawyer immediately after getting injured, and BEFORE talking to an insurance liability adjuster.

1.  You don’t know how to put a liability insurance claim together.

Insurance adjusters consider “specials” — special…

One of the conceits of writing is the perception that when you’ve written on something, it’s behind you.  Not that nothing else need be said on the topic, but only that it need not be said by you.  That’s silly for a host of reasons.  I started writing the print version of Ball in Your Court ten years ago–before the 2006 Federal Rules amendments and before the EDRM.  Half my readers weren’t in the field then, and veteran readers surely missed a few missives. Plus, if the point was worth making, perhaps it bears repeating. So, I now revisit columns and posts from the primordial past of e-discovery–starting over as it were, updating in places, and hopefully restarting a few conversations. As always, your comments are gratefully solicited.

The DNA of Data

[2005: the very first Ball in Your Court]

Discovery of electronic data compilations has been part…

By: Jamie Collins

Today, rather than attempting to write a semi-brilliant blog post because, quite frankly, I’m not feeling all that semi-brilliant, I’m sharing some incredibly cool keyboard hacks for savvy legal people everywhere. 

Read them. Test them. Love them.
(I know I do…)

For the record, you are simply pressing and holding the “ALT” button, then entering the number code listed below for each of these hacks. DO NOT press the + key. (Just ALT and the number. Got it? Here goes…)

For the corporate and business law legal peeps:

ALT + 0153 = ™
ALT + 0169 = ©
ALT + 0174 = ®

(Please feel free to send Belgian chocolates or a big bag of Haribo gummy bears of gratitude my way, people. That’s “Collins” with two L’s.)

For those poor legal souls who spend countless hours typing or editing legal documents (which I’m pretty sure is ALL of…

My son’s apartment in Chicago was burglarized and ransacked over the weekend while he was here in Austin.  The thieves climbed up and forced the patio door.  It’s a reminder of the disparity between our perception of security and its reality.  Who among us is protected by more than a pane of glass and the fervent hope that someone is looking, listening and caring enough to intervene?  A locked door little deters a determined intruder.  Mostly, we stave off opportunistic threats of the sort that move on to easier pickings when the doors are locked and the lights are on.

In the context of data breach, I’ve often laughed at big companies who attribute intrusions to “ultra-sophisticated hackers and coordinated attacks.”  When you hear such claims, know they mean little with respect to the difficulty of the hack.  Big companies say such things because no one wants to admit that…

In his keynote speech at the Zapproved Preservation Excellence Conference in Portland, Dr. Tony Salvador of Intel compared the “encores” of performers today to those of performers a century ago. “Encore,” Salvador noted, is French for “again;” yet, we use it to mean “more.”  Today, performers brought back by applause don’t repeat their performance; they play a different song.

But for hundreds of years, the encore was an unpredictable, spontaneous eruption.  Stirred by a brilliant aria in the midst of the show, members of the audience would leap to their feet in applause, shouting, “ENCORE! ENCORE!” The singer and musicians were compelled to stop and perform exactly the same song AGAIN.  This might happen over and over, until the rapture was so fixed in the listeners’ minds they’d let the show go on.

The audiences of the 18^th and 19^th centuries demanded repetition of what they heard because…

This series focuses on methods of improving the relevancy of your results of social media searches, while not being logged into the services themselves. Again, social media searching is clearly trending upward in the law librarianship profession, as attorneys are increasingly making these requests while conducting informal discovery. In Part 1 of “Searching Social Media” we examined how to use Google’s advanced search features to retrieve relevant Facebook results. In Part 2, we will examine methods of conducting higher-relevance Twitter searches.

Twitter is currently the 8th most popular website on planet earth, according to Alexa. And, luckily for our purposes, Twitter provides an advanced search screen that does not require the user to log in! This is accessible here: https://twitter.com/search-advanced

And it looks like this:

Name Search

Typically, our requestors are trying to locate an individual’s Twitter account. The first and easiest search presumes the user has a portion of…

I’ve lately been immersed in the minutiae of load files while trying to complete a primer on forms of production and craft a load file exercise for the workbook students will use in the upcoming Georgetown E-Discovery Training Academy.

By the way, there’s still time to register for the ultimate e-discovery master class cum boot camp—a week in Washington, D.C. studying electronic discovery with a dedicated faculty, getting down and dirty with data.  You promised you were going to get your arms around the e-stuff; now is the time, and the Georgetown Academy is the place.  June 1-6, 2014.  I’ll sweeten the pot: Use the code EDTAREFERRAL when registering and take $300.00 of the price.

While sojourning in load file hell, I stumbled upon a tidbit of information I thought other e-discovery groupies might find mildly diverting.

Our Sesame Street words for today are Thorn and Pilcrow.

I…

When I was a Staff Attorney for an Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in the 1990’s, I read countless appellate briefs. I really only remember one. That brief contained a Statement of Facts that opened my eyes to how well an appellate brief could be written. It was simply the best Statement of Facts that I have ever read.

It was a wrongful death case. A single mother was killed in an automobile accident when pulling out onto a county highway from a local road at dusk her car was struck by a logging truck going well over the posted speed limit. The jury had awarded a sizeable verdict for the decedent’s estate and the Alabama Supreme Court, then composed of a majority of Justices elected as business-supporting Republicans, affirmed the verdict without opinion.

I don’t recall the name of the case, the details of the facts, the…