On the Web at: http://www.nettechinc.com/lts.htm

A Note from the Editor (Dennis Kennedy)
New Versions, Upgrades and the Hidden Y2K Problem (Dennis Kennedy)
Patent, Trademark and Copyright Information on the Internet (Bruce Burdick)
Great Internet Resources for Cyberspace Law (Dennis Kennedy)
A Progress Report on Voice Recognition (Dennis Kennedy)
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and Late Night Thoughts on Rethinking the Practice of Law (Dennis Kennedy)
BAMSL’s Technology in the Practice Committee
About Our Authors
About NetTech, Inc.
How You Can Write Articles for LTS
Administrative Matters and Contact Information

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR - By Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com)

A new author for us, Bruce Burdick, contributes a primer on using the Web in an intellectual property practice. I’ve added a list of great Internet resources on cyberspace law. You’ll also find a progress report on my experiences with Dragon Naturally Speaking. I’ve also included two other articles that are works in progress and are probably as unfinished as anything I’ll ever publish, but both reflect some ideas that have been kicking around in my head recently and that I think are important. I’d enjoy getting others opinions on these subjects. The first deals with the "hidden" Y2K problem and how thorny this issue is at the practical level. The second discusses some ideas I’ve had, some of which are in the draft of my book, about the practice of law, using a discussion of a book on the history of the Xerox PARC research labs as a jumping off point. Neither piece is "finished" in the usual sense, but I’m interested in getting reactions to the ideas.

Speaking of books, I wanted to plug a new book by Elizabeth Norman called "We Band of Angels." It’s the compelling story of a group of Army nurses who lived through the early battles of World War II on Bataan and Corregidor, only to be captured and held in a POW camp in the Philippines for three years. One of the nurses was my great aunt, Eleanor Garen, who is featured in the book. It’s quite a story.

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NEW VERSIONS, UPGRADES AND THE "HIDDEN" YEAR 2000 PROBLEM - By Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com)

There are days when I think that I may spend too much time worrying about the Year 2000 Problem. On the other hand, since, according to general statistics on small businesses, it’s safe to say that over half of law firms are not paying any attention to the issue, I figure someone should be thinking about its impact on the legal profession. It might as well be me. It’s been two years since I wrote my first article on Y2K in the legal profession.

I spoke to a group of paralegals on Y2K a week ago. On the way, I was thinking about the part of my talk where I describe myself as a "moderate pessimist, by which I mean that I’ll keep milk containers of water in the basement and stock up on canned goods, but I’m not planning to buy a shotgun yet." As I wondered whether I should call myself a "mild pessimist" rather than a "moderate pessimist," I thought about the statistics I recently read about the number of PC software companies that have revised their assessment of software this year. Most of the revisions have been downgrades to the "compliant with minor issues" category or to the interesting new category of "retired."

Anyone who has not done so lately should take a look at the web sites of Microsoft, Corel and other law firm software staples and take a look at Y2K compliance information. You will definitely find food for thought. (I’ll soon be adding a list of links to the Y2K information for most of common legal software companies to the NetTech site).

The real question on Y2K compliance has always been what level of compliance will make you comfortable? Or: how bulletproof do you want to be? If Microsoft thinks they are "minor" issues, they must be, right? Do you want to bet your business on anything less than a full-scale attempt at compliance? It’s one thing to make decisions about taking halfway measures on your home computer, but I’m not sure decision makers have that option in the business setting.

Here’s an issue I think we’ll see played out in many law firms in late 1999 and 2000. Imagine a law firm that has managing partners who take a less-than-aggressive approach toward Y2K compliance and make minimal plans to install upgrades and service packs and fall far short of an attempt to get as bullet-proof as they can. What do technologically savvy attorneys in that firm do? What happens if decisions not to make major Y2K efforts result in problems that hinder attorneys’ practices in 2000? In the cold light of hindsight, less than full efforts toward Y2K compliance, especially in light of the tremendous amount of information available on this issue, will certainly put managing partners in a difficult situation.

The general approach to "resolving" the Y2K problem - at least to the greatest extent you can - is to move to "compliant" versions and install all indicated upgrades and service packs. As a practical matter, the prudent approach would be to install the newest versions of software and all upgrades, especially any released between now and the end of the year (and, more so, any upgrades or service packs issued in January 2000).

Conceptually, this approach is pretty straightforward. But, the devil is in the details.

In the last month or so, Microsoft and Corel have released the new and Y2K compliant Office 2000 and WordPerfect Office 2000. Both these programs are powerful programs with important user improvements and Internet orientation. The overwhelming response: well, we’re not sure about installing the first version of any software - let’s wait until the first service pack or two come out in a few months.

Why? Because people have been burned with buggy first releases of programs too often in the past. A new version of one program may even cause another program to break or stop running. There is a lot of wariness about new versions of software.

So, we face a choice: risk Y2K problems later or face now the unknowns of a computer environment with the newest versions of all programs running.

These are not matters of speculation. We at NetTech have been doing Y2K remediation and it is tricky (upgrades have to be carefully installed in correct sequences), time-consuming (in some cases, manual work has to be done on each computer) and temperamental (performance slowdowns, problems with peripherals and a variety of quirks). New versions of programs may cause problems for older hardware. Visits to vendor web sites and calls to customer support are much more common than anyone would hope.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing whether total replacement of hardware and software is the only realistic (that is, the best and most cost-effective) solution for firms with older (two years? one year?) systems. My personal opinion is that total replacement gets you as close to bullet-proof as you can get these days.

Once again, we see that the Y2K problem is an enormous management problem. It requires that business decisions be made, and difficult ones at that. No one wants to make a decision to scrap a relatively new installation of hardware and software.

But we are stuck on the horns of a dilemma. On the one side is the unknown, unpredictable consequences of the Y2K problem, which we won’t be able to know for certain until it gets here. On the other side is what we know practically: that creating an environment of the newest versions of all software and newest peripherals all but guarantees that something won’t work right and we’ll be tracking down drivers, patches and fixes.

In short, Y2K continues to show itself to be a bear of a problem. If you stand still, you are likely to lose. If you move now, you may have a rocky road for a while. But, as time winds down, we’ll no longer have the luxury of waiting to install new programs until the first few service packs are out.

So, I find myself moving away from "mild" to something slightly more than "moderate" in my pessimism. We’ve all got a lot of work to do on this issue and it’s time to bear down on it. Unfortunately, neither the consequences of the problem or the fixes look like they’ll be to much fun. The bottom line is the same as it’s always been: the sooner you get started the better and no one wins by waiting to the last minute.

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PATENT, TRADEMARK AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET - Bruce E. Burdick (beb@burdlaw.com )

The amount of information on patents and trademarks freely accessible to the public has dramatically increased in recent years. The major quantum jump in information came just this year with the United States Patent and Trademark Office putting over 2 terabytes of information online for free at http://www.uspto.gov. My site linking this and other intellectual property information is at http://www.burdlaw.com, and is particularly useful for independent inventors that may be looking for basic information on this subject.

All patents since 1976 are now searchable in full-text on the United States Patent and Trademark Office official web site at http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-adv.htm, with images available. IBM also maintains an extensive and comprehensive patent database going back to 1971, freely accessible at http://www.patents.ibm.com. In addition there are several proprietary databases which are even more extensive. For example, Corporate Intelligence maintains an on-line searchable patent database that goes all the way back to 1790 and is full-text searchable back to 1945 at http://www.1790.com. MicroPat has a similar proprietary database from 1980-present at http://www.micropat.com. All of these collections are expanding back in time by addition of backfiles. Soon the full collection of US Patents will be available full-text with images for searching. In fact, there are two places that already have full text searching of all patents back to 1790: the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Sunnyvale Center for Innovation, Invention and Ideas (SCI3) which each have the APS (automated patent search) database http://www.sci3.com/apstrn.htm.

These public and private databases have an absolutely incredible amount of information. Indeed, it is the record of the technology of the most advanced countries industries in the world, on-line and available for all to view. Foreign patents are steadily becoming more and more readily available, too. For example the World Intellectual Property Organization has begun putting "International Patents" (patents published under the Patent Cooperation Treaty or PCT), which represent 100 countries, including all major foreign countries of the world, at http://pctgazette.wipo.int. A list of foreign patent office web sites, several offering online databases, can be found at http://www1.uspto.gov/web/menu/other.html.

Patent searching is still a specialized activity that, despite the availability of the information online, requires technical knowledge of the subject matter of the invention and experience. The classification systems in use by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and foreign governments are different from each other and constantly change. Nevertheless, the inventor can now do at least a reasonable job of preliminarily screening his/her invention for exact prior art using the United States Patent and Trademark Office databases.

For most inventions, the use of manual searching by a professional searcher at the United States Patent and Trademark Office search rooms is still the most efficient and reliable way to search. However, if the searcher is familiar with the patent classification system http://www.patentec.com/data/class/Classes.html and the class definitions http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/clasdefs/index.htmlthen a bare bones job can be done on-line. The limitations of the on-line databases must be kept in mind, as they only go back to 1976 (patent office database) or 1971 (IBM database.)

A patent attorney will have a number of additional proprietary databases available to him/her, such as Dialog, Q-Pat, MicroPatent, Corp. Intell., Questel, WIPO, Derwent, or other similar databases that add an additional capability. The patent attorney will also have an association with one or more professional searches near the United States Patent and Trademark Office to do manual searches on short notice with prompt turnaround at reasonable rates. The best searchers work exclusively for patent attorneys, as that is where they can make the most money, and these searches produce the best results in most cases.

Routine free trademark searches are now just a click away. All trademarks pending or registered back to the beginning are searchable on-line with images on the official United States Patent and Trademark Office web site at http://trademarks.uspto.gov/access/search-adv.html. However, the PTO trademark database above, as good as it is, is just the tip of the iceberg. Trademark searching can now be supplemented with internet search engines to find possible common law conflicts that heretofore were nearly impossible to dig out without using an expensive "full search" from Thompson & Thompson, Coresearch, or one of the many other lesser known trademark search companies.

We are routinely finding superior results over the Internet. This is true because almost every business of any size now has a web site. One search engine we find particularly good is Copernic 99 Plus available at http://www.copernic.com/plus/index.html for $29.95. That search engine searches multiple sites simultaneously and then provides a ranked list with highlights of the relevant language either in a short output. A simpler version Copernic 99 is available for free at http://www.copernic.com/free99.html. I have also found other metasearch engines such as Dogpile or Cyber411 good for this. We also from time to time used the comprehensive database of search engines at http://www.allonesearch.com. Allonesearch lists hundreds of search engines with windows enabling direct entry and searching of any selected engine . . . if you have never visited that site, it will astound you with its comprehensive listing and direct entry into almost all known free search engines.

Here there is one site that will serve almost all needs: the official site of the Copyright Office at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/. The Copyright Office, a division of the Library of Congress, has traditionally been a leader in adoption of Internet technology. The forms and instructions for copyright applications are freely available on their site. Recognize, however, that an actual paper application will nevertheless usually be needed because an actual sample of the work must accompany it so that the work can, in fact, be put in the library and registered for future reference. The fundamentals of copyright registration are simple and this results in general practitioners sometimes thinking they can do copyright registrations without using a copyright attorney. In my experience that is a mistake. If trouble arises, a faulty registration is usually worse than no registration.

While any lawyer can attempt this searching, the results are dependent on the search strategy and techniques and resources used in the search. There is still no substitute for experienced professional searching in patents. Any general practitioner attempting patent searching is asking for a malpractice claim, because technical knowledge and familiarity with searching techniques and tools is necessary.

However, with trademarks, a reasonable job can be done by even the layman. With copyrights, a careful layman or general practitioner can do a decent job, even with the application process. However, for the corporate client with an important product, it is still best to refer the matter to a registered patent attorney, so that the same person can

handle the process from start to finish and do the enforcement if required. Patent attorneys also will usually have experience with the marketing and licensing of inventions - that is, how to turn the idea into money - and that is, after all, the thing that usually most interests the client and is usually why he or she has come to you in the first place.

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GREAT INTERNET RESOURCES FOR CYBERSPACE LAW - Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com)

Bruce Burdick makes some good points in the previous articles about using IP attorneys for your IP work and gives you some great resources. Ever since I got involved in creating intellectual property, I’ve struggled with the intricacies of the various laws protecting intellectual property and what they mean in practice. I told my wife that I knew I had really become a writer when I realized how angry it made me that I had to get someone else’s permission to use an article I wrote and that they could say no.

Last weekend, I was cleaning out the basement in anticipation of a family garage sale. I kept seeing copyright and other IP issues everywhere I looked. I know some of these issues have easy answers, but there are many difficulties that arise as we move from, as Nicholas Negroponte says, from atoms to bits.

For example, I found a box full of old Macintosh software. Great, I thought, I can sell some of this to old Mac users. Then I remembered they’d probably need serial numbers and, looking for one, I ran into the licensing agreement, which I tried to read. My conclusion: I simply don’t know the answer to the question whether you can resell software. I like to think that the fact that the Mac is no longer operating helps my argument, but I don’t know. Similarly, what if I buy a new program, register it and then decide I don’t like it and uninstall it? May I take the program disks and sell them to someone else? Seems like I should be able to, but I don’t know technically what the answer is.

Anyway, I was thinking about these issues, to no avail, when I started wondering why it wasn’t some kind of copyright violation to resell used books (at any rate, it seemed like I was depriving the author of something). I decided it was time to think about something else. Too bad I didn’t have one of the following sites or Bruce Burdick’s http:www.burdlaw.com site handy to help with this new world of cyberspace law, a mix of intellectual property law and many other things that relate to technology and the Internet. My friend Nic Terry, cyberspace law professor at St. Louis University Law School, has said that cyberspace law as a specialty area may disappear quickly as what we now know as "law" gets folded into it. If you want to learn more:

Nicolas Terry’s Web Page (http://lawlib.slu.edu/nicolasterry/) – A trip to the web page of St. Louis Cyberspace law authority Nic Terry’s web site will reward researchers with some helpful lists of resources, links and an indexed bibliography on cyberspace law.

FindLaw’s Cyberspace Law Center (http://www.cybersquirrel.com/clc/) – Another superb directory of resources from FindLaw.

Cyberspace Law for Non-Lawyers (http://www.ssrn.com/update/lsn/cyberspace/csl_lessons.html) – Great introductory outline from Lawrence Lessig, David Post and Eugene Volokh. Excellent resource for non-cyberspace lawyers as well.

Cyberspace Law Subject Index (http://www.jmls.edu/cyber/index/index.html) – A comprehensive set of resources from John Marshall Law School.

BitLaw (http://www.bitlaw.com/) – Well-organized set of resources from Daniel A. Tysver, a patent attorney with Beck & Tysver of Hopkins, Minnesota.

The Perkins Coie Internet Case Law Digest (http://www.perkinscoie.com/resource/ecomm/netcase/) - A compilation, with synopses, of national and international cases and other information related to the developing law of the Internet.

Philips Nizer Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions (http://www.phillipsnizer.com/internetlib.htm) – Similar in scope and aim to the Perkins Coie site. The two sites should help you located most primary source.

Cyberspace Law Bibliography (http://www.gse.ucla.edu/iclp/bib.html) - A great online bibliography of cyberspace law issues. Part of the excellent UCLA Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy site.

ABA Committee on Cyberspace Law (http://www.abanet.org/buslaw/cyber/) – Great resources and a place to get involved in to shape cyberspace law issues and connect with other cyberlawyers.

KuesterLaw Technology Law Resource (http://www.kuesterlaw.com) – From Internet pioneer, Jeff Kuester, this long-running site is one of the standard starting points for cyberspace law research.

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A VOICE RECOGNITION UPDATE: LIVING WITH THE DRAGON by Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com)

I’ve been experimenting the last month or so with Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile. I’m about to upgrade to the new version 3.51 and thought this might be a good time to give a progress report.

I’m pretty positive about my experience to date.

I’m running the Dragon (an aside: IBM’s ViaVoice may be a good product, but I think the Dragon name will carry it to a higher market share - it’s cool to talk about "firing up the Dragon" for voice recognition) on a Dell Inspiron 3500 notebook with a 233MHz Pentium II and 96 megs of RAM. I couldn’t successfully install the Dragon until I downloaded a patch because of an issue with the Inspiron 3500 series. Everything went fine was the software patch was installed. The information on the Dragon site about these kinds of issues looks pretty good.

I also had minimal success with the included microphone and purchased a VXI Parrott microphone (definitely recommend by Dragon for the Inspiron notebooks). I’m quite pleased with the Parrott.

To date, I have dictated about 200 pages of material. I dictate into the Dragon text editor and then move the document into a word processor rather than use the Dragon in a word processor. I’m doing straight unformatted text and see no reason not to use the Dragon in its native environment.

You train the program by reading one or more of three selections from recent books. I read all three selections to train the program more throughly. I may never read anything by any of those authors again. You get a passage from 3001 by Arthur C. Clarke, a Dave Barry selection and a Scott Adams selection on Dilbert. In general, the training is painful and tedious, but necessary. Clarke is a better storyteller than stylist; and Barry and Adams are acquired tastes that I’ve never acquired. After about 90 minutes with the three, you’re ready to go, if only to hear your own words instead of theirs.

You’re given an option to train further on some of your own documents. I thought this would be great, but it’s a quite limited tool that simply adds words you’ve used in your documents to the Dragon’s vocabulary. In some documents, you may add no new words.

My results with the program have varied widely. I’ve had moments where the accuracy is astonishing and I’ve had times when I’ve dictated passages that are all but unusable.

The most important factor for me seems to be microphone placement. Small changes in microphone position can greatly improve or diminish my results. At the times I’ve been most frustrated with the program, I’ve found that readjusting the microphone, especially by looking in a mirror, greatly improves the results. At those times I’ve also found that, not matter how loudly you yell, the program will not transcribe swear words.

I get the best results when I dictate in phrases of 3 to 7 words. Correcting individual words by redictating them can be maddening. I tend to train the program on words that are close to each other when I see the Dragon making similar mistakes. For example, if I say "find" and it is transcribed as "fun", I’ll train the program by dictating and training "find", "fine", "fun", fund", and "often" in hopes that the program will begun to learn some of my speech patterns.

I’ve had a poor experience using commands. In particular, the command "delete that" often gets transcribed as a different phrase. I’m reluctant at this point to use dictation for commands, although when it works it is pretty cool.

One of my discoveries is something that I had been told but hadn’t appreciated – voice recognition programs negate your spell checker. Whatever sound you make will be interpreted by this software as a word and, because of the program’s built-in vocabulary, as a correctly spelled word. As a result, whatever you dictate will show no spelling errors. There’ll be errors all right, but not spelling errors.

What have I learned? My sense is that my set-up is OK, but probably somewhat under-powered. The transcription tends to lag a bit behind my dictation and I’m not a fast talker. Starting fresh, I’d probably move up to somewhere in the 200 megs of RAM range. My sense is that maybe 128 megs would be a recommended minimum. I have no objective basis for that conclusion, but it’s the feel I get. Also, for voice recognition, you’ll want to go for the fastest processor you can afford. Upgrading microphones is very important and I may move up even higher in microphone quality.

My purpose with Dragon was to generate first drafts of articles and other written materials that would then be substantially revised. It works very well for that purpose. If I had expected or wanted high degrees of accuracy that delivered finished product, I would be disappointed.

On the whole, I pretty pleased with my experience and look forward to the improvements in the new version.

DEALERS OF LIGHTNING: XEROX PARC AND LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON RETHINKING THE PRACTICE OF LAW – Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com)

I’ve been reading Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik, the story of Xerox’s Palo Alto research labs. Arguably, PARC has been the United States’ most important research and development think tank over the last 30 years. PARC scientists created the personal computer, graphical user interface, laser printer and a variety of other key product prototypes. Alumni of PARC include Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of ethernet and founder of 3COM.

Ironically, what Xerox and PARC are best known for is dropping the ball on most of these developments. Some examples are part of the legend of computing. Steve Jobs, for example, saw the prototype for the GUI that became the Macintosh operating system on a tour of PARC. I’ve never seen a Xerox laser printer.

The book is full of important stories and personalities. However, rather than taking Xerox to task for what are now clearly seen as blunders, Hiltzik explores the question how an organization can fail to develop the products that grow out of its own research and development, especially ones that seem to have changed the world. While one answer is that hindsight is 20-20, he raises some important points that have some implications for law firms poised on the threshold of the Internet age.

This subject intrigues me because lately I’ve run into some law firms that are uniquely positioned, with appropriate investments, to adopt Internet and technology approaches that I believe will make them important players in the new digital practice of law. The opportunities, to me, seem as "plain as the nose on your face," as mother-in-law liked to say, but I don’t think these opportunities rise to the level of discussion in the firms.

One reason for that failure to see is the "not invented here" problem, which is a subject for another day, but the fascinating part of the PARC story is that it was invented there and still not used.

Here are three themes to consider:

1. When you know what business you are in, it is difficult to consider and gauge opportunities in other businesses. Xerox was in the copier business. They owned it. More particularly, they were in the leasing and service contract business, with a sales force geared to selling these products to a certain set of customers. When PARC brought them the first personal computer, they focused on how they could use their existing sales force to get their customers to lease and enter service contracts on PCs, which were products that were priced to be purchased and did not involve the same level of service requirement. It just didn’t fit the existing business model.

Law firms will struggle with opportunities to produce and sell videos, create seminar, training and consulting businesses, and exploit potential e-commerce opportunities. It’s hard to see the world through something other than "a law firm practices law" glasses.

2. It’s hard for a big ship to maneuver quickly. Say what you will about Bill Gates, and most people do, but the measure of his genius in business will be seen in his decision in 1995 to reverse himself and turn Microsoft to the Internet. That was an attempt to make the biggest ship in software try to turn quickly.

Xerox suffered the pains of a large organization that made decisions bureaucratically at a time when speed was of the essence. They avoided making some mistakes, but avoiding opportunities also was a mistake. Even more difficult was making decisions to move forward on opportunities that could undercut their core business. Compare that to the Internet model of cannibalizing your own core business before someone else can do it.

Law firms grow out of a conservative profession that has enjoyed a monopoly. Many are doing quite well in the current market and there is little inclination to rock the boat (an interesting parallel with Xerox in the 70s and 80s). Firms acknowledge inefficiencies, but tend not to eliminate them, and tend to rely on highly labor-intensive, often repetitive practices. Most law firms are big ships that turn very slowly. Expect to see innovative developments in the small firm category and a growing trend of small firms developing from the splintering of large firms.

3. Development of new products and services, especially recent technology developments, seem to require an entrepreneurial setting. Some of the PARC products that Xerox brought to market in fact were the result of people ignoring directives to terminate the products. Other products were developed by PARC employees after they left PARC in frustration. The entrepreneurial setting seems to have been a key element that was missing from Xerox. Creating spinoffs and inside entrepreneurial organizations might have better served Xerox and might have helped retain stars who left the company.

Law firms will need to consider ways to bring entrepreneurial sprit into new developments. Independent strategic business units that focus on specific niches of practice might be one example. Turning a specific set of skills into a business (library research, seminars, training videos, courtroom presentation, document scanning and coding) might be another. We haven’t seen anything yet compared to what may come in the way of "multi-disciplinary practice."

We live in a time of great opportunity. The PARC story shows that even in the best cases it is difficult to see, evaluate and implement great new ideas. For most of us, the first step will be learning to see. Hiltzik’s book may help you open your eyes.

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TECHNOLOGY IN THE PRACTICE OF LAW COMMITTEE (Next meeting: July 13)

If you are interested in legal technology and the Internet, the place to be at noon on the first Tuesday of almost every month is the Technology in the Practice Committee meetings at the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis headquarters at the Metropolitan Building downtown.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday, July 13, when the committee hold a roundtable discussion on the recent recommendations to the ABA about multi-disciplinary practice. For details and reservations, call BAMSL at (314) 421-4134.

The Committee also has an e-mail discussion group. Contact Bob Babione (rcb@babione.com) for information about joining the list.

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Bruce E. Burdick (beb@burdlaw.com) manages the workload and personnel of the Intellectual Property Department at Herzog, Crebs & McGhee, LLP, a medium sized law firm in St. Louis, MO, and has been a registered Patent Attorney for over 25 years. He maintains an extensive intellectual property law information website at http://www.burdlaw.com.

Dennis Kennedy (dennisk@nettechinc.com) is the Director of Legal Technology of NetTech, Inc., a technology consulting firm focusing on law firms (http://www.nettechinc.com). Dennis writes legal technology columns for Lawyers Weekly USA and the Indiana Lawyer, and is a frequent author and speaker on legal technology and Internet topics.

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NetTech, Inc. was founded by Bill Coplin and Mehran Shahnam in 1995. NetTech is a technology consulting firm based in St. Louis, Missouri that specializes in law firms and the legal market. The presence of technologists who are also lawyers is unique and gives NetTech the ability to provide technology solutions that mesh with the business and practice needs of law firms, from small to large.

NetTech's web site will become a resource for both lawyers and technologists. Watch it grow.

NetTech's people write, teach and speak on a variety of technology topics and are able to break the communications barrier between technology people and lay people. There is a powerful combination of talent at NetTech and a wealth of ideas that can help law firms change their practices through technology.

NetTech is a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. Want to know more? E-mail us at info@netttechinc.com or call us at (314) 231-5005.

We're always looking for writers. We hope to have a few regulars and a large group of people who will contribute items from time to time. And by contribute, we mean contribute. No pay at this time.

If you have an idea or an article, send it to Dennis Kennedy by e-mail at dennisk@nettechinc.com. We prefer that you simply copy your article into your e-mail rather than attach it to e-mails. Shorter (a page or two), informal articles with practical information are best. For longer articles or ideas, get in touch with Dennis first.

Although the primary focus of the newsletter is St. Louis and St. Louis authors, we're looking for great material of general appeal.

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1. Copyright. The copyright of each article belongs to the author of the article. Any unattributed material was written by Dennis Kennedy.

2. Recirculation. I have no problem with, and even encourage you, to pass along copies of the newsletter to your friends and colleagues. Be sure to include attribution information.

3. Republication of articles. Highly encouraged, but get in touch with authors directly to work out details and arrangements. Similarly, if you quote from articles, let the author know as a courtesy. Cite as: Legal Technology Strategies, Issue __, (date)(URL).

4. Subscriptions. Subscriptions are free. Subscribe by sending an e-mail indicating that you want to subscribe to Dennis Kennedy at dennisk@nettechinc.com. Issues will appear monthly on the 1st of each month.

5. Archived issues. Legal Technology Strategies will be published simultaneously on the Web and archived on a web site at http://www.nettechinc.com/lts.htm.

6. Feedback. Greatly welcomed. Let us know what you think at dennisk@nettechinc.com. Reach us at NetTech, Inc, 710 N. Tucker Blvd., Suite 602, St. Louis, MO 63101 (314) 231-5005.

7. Problems with delivery, et al. Let me know and we'll try to work them out. The newsletter is being produced at the simplest level (text in an e-mail) to produce the best results for the most people.

Let me know if you'd like to write something on any topic that interests you. I'm always looking for new authors.