David Dickens Faculty, Resources, Students

LexisNexis App for iPad

For those of you who are in law practice or hope to be in the near future, it is becoming clear that you will want to exercise every advantage you can to make your contributions as a lawyer as competitive and innovative as you can.

As in many professions, the use of technology to leverage your skills to greater efficiency is a boon to law practice.

Lexis and Westlaw and now Bloomberg Law are anxious to stay relevant in a world that is in an app frenzy.  Not to say that many apps are not valuable, in fact there are myriad apps that address specific needs very well.

Lexis Nexis’ release of TextMap for iPad leverages this mobile platform for those reviewing transcripts in TextMap  6.2 .  If you are not familiar with TextMap, it is a transcript summary tool most commonly used for summarizing deposition transcripts.

This product is a far cry from what we used for deposition summaries back in the early 1990’s when I was a young law student looking for extra work … “Depo summaries my boy!  That’s what you should do!”  At least we had WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS back then — much better than a manual typewriter — I’m not THAT old.  But in the end it was high pay, highly manual, and high eye strain!  A terrific combination!  I couldn’t hack it.

Facts of life: There will be depositions in law practice.  Where there are depositions, there will be transcripts.  Where there are transcripts there will be transcript summaries.

Yes, you can hire someone to take the transcripts for you but in the end, every party needs their own depo summaries.  Who’s gong to summarize your depo transcripts?  You?  Get a tool.  TextMap is a popular solution and now with the iPad app, you can do it on the run (while you are sitting in the hall outside the courtroom waiting for the next thing to happen).

This is not an endorsement for TextMap.  Think of it as more of an endorsement of getting tools that work for you.  In the end, I found that I wasn’t cut out for depo summaries at all so I’m hardly the person to recommend any product in this area BUT if it makes it easier, I’m a fan.  It’s certainly worth a look.

To keep yourself up to date on law technology news, click here to be directed to Legal Tech News, powered by Law.com.

David Dickens About Us, Faculty, Services, Students

Change Your Password

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You’ve probably seen or heard of the myriad of recent news headlines where popular organizations like Twitter or Evernote have been hacked. These organizations assure us that our data is not compromised, and advise us to change our passwords or they promptly change our passwords for us to reduce the amount of damage a hacker can do. There is often more to the story, and even passwords we think are quite clever may be cracked with relative ease. The blog Ars Technica featured a couple of stories recently about passwords, which I recommend you read. There are a few examples of presumably safe passwords that were cracked with relative ease. The first article described how a blog editor managed to crack passwords with some basic tools, and can be found here. The second is a follow-up article, where the consulting hackers took a shot at the same list. You can view that one here. They are both fairly detailed but I encourage you to read all the way to the end.

There is a convenient graphic that illustrates the complexity of certain passwords, which I also encourage you to read. It can be found here.

Safe passwords are hard(er) to crack. You cannot rely on a website to properly encrypt your password, as we have seen in the news so often lately. Password managers can be a useful tool to generate random passwords for you, if you are concerned you cannot come up with a good password. The downside is that these passwords will be nearly impossible to remember, which then requires a master password that you can remember. There are a number of password applications out there, KeePass and LastPass among the more popular options. Which one you choose is up to you. Be sure to look for apps for your chosen smartphone as well, so you can be safe from whatever device you are using.

Our own Julie Tausend also recently wrote a post on information security. In it, you’ll find links to university services and policies that can be useful to you in securing your information. You can also go straight to the source for passwords and other types of security at community.pepperdine.edu/it/security.

Be safe out there, and be sure to CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS!

David Dickens About Us, Faculty, Services, Students

MyID Password Reset Errors

The Password Reset- Error Messages includes screenshots of various error messages that may be seen in MyID when attempting to reset a password.

Note that the https://myid.pepperdine.edu website provides some additional resources, including a link to verify/update your MyID profile, a link which can be used to change a known password, and a short training video.

1. The user’s profile information is blank.

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2. The user doesn’t recognize the email or phone number that the PIN was sent to.
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3. The system doesn’t recognize the user.
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Note: All of these messages direct you to go to: https://myid.pepperdine.edu/help

This URL will:

  • Link to our new Password Reset Request Form.
  • Generate a help desk ticket for Anytime Support.
  • Anytime Support (the Password Reset Group), will help people update their profiles.