Total Credits: 1 CLE, 1 Ethics
Opposing lawyers routinely email versions of a document back and forth during the negotiation process; and many instruments are never reduced to paper until they’re ready to sign. This approach is unquestionably fast and convenient compared to mailing or faxing paper documents. However, electronic document exchange presents many issues that practitioners need to be aware of and risks to protect against. In this seminar, you'll learn when it's appropriate to use word processor files and when it's appropriate to use PDFs. We'll cover how to track your changes in a document and how to ascertain what changes were made by others (even if there are attempts to conceal those changes). You'll also learn how to add comments and annotations to Word or PDF files, how to lock documents down to prevent further changes, and how to avoid including hidden (and potentially damaging) information in the files you're working with (this hidden information is known as metadata). Finally, using plain email arguably affords you no reasonable expectation of privacy. We'll also discuss your email encryption options which ensure that only the intended recipient can open your emails and/or attachments thereto.
Speaker:
Barron K. Henley, Affinity Consulting Group
Barron Henley is one of the founding partners of Affinity Consulting Group, a national legal technology consulting firm which handles all aspects of law practice automation including document assembly, case management, document management, legal accounting software, trial presentation/litigation support, paper reduction/scanning, hardware, networks/servers and security. He is an attorney and has been helping other lawyers with technology since 1990.
He received his B.S./B.A. (marketing and economics) and J.D. from The Ohio State University and is a member of the American, Ohio and Columbus Bar Associations, and the Worthington Estate Planning Council. He is a member of the ABA Law Practice Management Section and is the former Chair of the Ohio State Bar Association Law Office Automation & Technology Committee. Mr. Henley heads Affinity's document assembly/automation and software training departments; he is a renowned expert on Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat and HotDocs document assembly software; and has authored legal-specific manuals on HotDocs, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Word, Excel & Outlook.
Barron teaches continuing legal education (CLE) classes throughout the U.S. and Canada covering a wide variety of topics related to law practice management, technology and ethics.