BC Law IPTF Blog

Just one of those things: I’m reading about Bougainville Province and their fight for autonomy from Papua New Guinea. Then I took a break to look up some Iron & Wine lyrics, for the song “Passing Afternoon.” The song goes, “She chose a yard to burn / But the ground remembers her / Wooden spoons, her children stir her bougainvillea blooms.”

Both the province and the creeping flowers were named after a French explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Bougainville dreamt of utopian paradise, away from civilization, free like the noble savages of the islands he explored.

The Iron & Wine song hauntingly takes to ask the story of a woman remembering her past loves, when life was free. Perhaps there is some hearkening back to the innocent utopia of Bougainville, as her “children stir her bougainvillea blooms” and she loses her wedding ring “somewhere near her misplaced jar of bougainvillea seeds.”

Bougainville Province, on the other hand, has less of an idyllic memory—what with war and revolution watering its recent history. Though there is irony in a Wikipedia quote where the Americans, while attacking Japanese troops in the province during WWII, left the enemy entrenched, “to whither on the vine” through starvation and disease. Perhaps on bougainvillea vines (though not native to Bougainville), or just listening non-stop to Iron & Wine (which didn’t exist during WWII).

Judge Nancy Gertner scathingly rebuked the FBI for its illegal and unjust activity in convicting four men for a murder they didn’t commit. The criminal charges were overturned six years ago; this is the civil side of the picture. Their appeals largely hinged upon the fact that a brutal hit-man turned FBI informant, Joey “the Animal” Barboza, framed them for the killing.

Unfortunately, two of the men, Tameleo and Greco, died in prison. The other two, Salvati and Limone, spent more than 30 years in prison.

Yes, I agree that the FBI should be punished for their blatant disregard for the law some 30 years ago. But I resent that these four men are portrayed as wronged “innocents.” They were all part of the Cosa Nostra gangland in Boston. They came in with dirty hands. Perhaps one or two of them were mere hangers-on, lowlife peons, but Tameleo was reputedly consigliere of the New England mob, and Limone was a Boston leader.

And, on a side note, the WBUR reporter, Fred Thys, is a graduate of my alma mater, Williams College. Hurrah!

This is probably an old story, but I ran across it while doing a Google search. At the bottom of my Google search, I saw this line:

“ In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.”

The link takes you to this URL:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=937

Where Chilling Effects posts a letter to Google saying this:

Re: Transfer and removal of Blog
I have attached the court order which provides for the following:

The removal of all of the information about myself, and my companies from your search results.

The transfer of the blog known as MarkRoyAnderson, over to me and the immediate removal of that blog from your search engines. The reason that the blogname is being transferred to me, is so that it can not he used again by anyone but me.

I have already set up an account with the blogspot.com. It is under the name [private]. With my email address “[private]”

Let me know how we can get this coordinated so that this can get done once and for all. This court order is to be effective immediately.

Sincerely
Mark Anderson [private]
Email: “[private]@aol.com”

Looks like a fellow named Joe Gallant took it upon himself to research a venture capital firm named “Summit Ventures.” He found out that the owner, Mark Anderson, may have been sentenced for securities-based mail fraud. (You can read Joe Gallant’s blog, archived at the Internet Archive.)

The small claims court then ordered Joe Gallant to transfer ownership of markroyanderson.blogspot.com to Mark Anderson, remove the domain name, and then enjoined Google from displaying search results referencing: “MARY ROY ANDERSON, CAMDEN HOLDINGS, SUMMITT VENTURES AND SUMMITT OIL AND GAS INC.”

Looks like from the SEC filings that Mr. Anderson and his various companies were trying to enter into investment deals and “misrepresenting” and “non-performing.” See this 8-K filing.

Interesting that a California small claims court can wield such power over terms and searched on the Internet. It effectively removes from the Internet–by removing from Google search results–public information such as SEC filings, and not just Gallant’s blog-with-a-grudge.

Regarding the SEC filings: how else would you find this information? I suppose you could go straight to the SEC web site. I also wonder if they’re on Yahoo! or MSN or other search engines. If someone can monopolize access to certain information by having them removed from search engines through the small claims court… Where are we?

The ABA Journal has 101 tips, tricks, and tools—”law hacks”—to help make lawyers (and lawyers-to-be) more productive. Quite a few of them focus on smaller offices and solo practitioners.

They mention using personal wikis, which I’ve always been a big fan of.

How Stuff Works: How much coal is required to run a 100-watt light bulb 24 hours a day for a year?

The answer? About 714 lbs. of coal. Let’s say you don’t run that one light bulb non-stop, but only for about 10 hours. That’s still almost 300 lbs. of coal. I can very easily imagine that I at various locations and times run at least 100 watts of electricity through light bulbs at least 10 hours a day every day. That’s a lot of coal.

Also, here’s a link from How Stuff Works about how much energy a transformer pulls, regardless of whether the appliance is on or not.

Oh, and FYI: A Google search on “What the fuck is a what?” doesn’t result in anything informative.

To create a condominium in Boston, you must obtain a Tregor Tax stamp from the City Hall. The Tregor Tax was created by a Boston politician who wanted to curb the condo-ization of apartments and houses in the city. When you create a condo, you get the first condo for free; every condo thereafter costs $500. So if you’re creating 11 condos, you have to pay 10 * $500 = $5,000 to get your Tregor Tax stamp.

The Tregor Tax stamp goes on the master deed of your condominium project. To obtain it, go down from the third floor to the mezzanine. Go around the central offices and to Window 31. There you present your master deed for their review along with a bank check or a check from an IOLTA, conveyance, or client’s account fund. If all pans out well, you get a stamp and a signature from someone in the back.

And now the procedure for obtaining a Tregor Tax stamp in Boston is on-line. (Until this moment, there’s only a Craigslist mention of this on Google. And I’m pretty sure that “Tregor” is the correct spelling because “Traeger” and “Trager” came up with nothing.) Best of luck to all of you, and please remember to tip your waitress.

I don’t consider my setup that “unique” in that it would differ greatly from what I would regularly use. But there are nuances that help me with my legal work that I’d like to document.

Del.icio.us

You *should* use Google as your first step in researching an issue. It’s fast, free, and helps you get background and narrow your research tasks. And as you use Google, you run across web pages that need to be bookmarked for later reference (or citation). You need a bookmark manager that you can access across computer (at work, school, and home) that allows you to describe, tag, and find your saved bookmarks. That’s what del.icio.us is for. You can see an example of how I used it for some of my corporate research.

The problems with del.icio.us are numerous, though. The tagging functionality is too basic: you can’t have multiple words in a tag (e.g., “Rule of Law” has to be RuleofLaw or ruleoflaw), you can’t browse on multiple tags (e.g., I want all bookmarks tagged “work” and “afghanistan” because I have bookmarks tagged “education” and “afghanistan” that I don’t want to see). It also can be slow. And it’s not private in that I can’t tag my bookmarks with a client name.

Also, I should note that Zotero (a free Firefox plugin) has awesome capabilities for this type of thing. It’s specifically made for academic and legal on-line research. I’d use it more, but for me, right now, it’s a overload. Del.icio.us, while technically and functionally lacking, does what I need simply and fast.

Firefox

Tabbing in Firefox is crucial. Tabs are the step before bookmarking—you “save” searches and web pages as tabs in the background while you’re browsing other branches of your thought-process. The plugins and bookmarklet support are crucial (see Zotero and del.icio.us above). Also, it “works around” some of the little things that Westlaw and LexisNexis do with Internet Explorer that can slow down your research and make it more expensive. (I don’t know 100% because I pretty much use Firefox all the time, and the few times I have used IE I’ve experienced frustration with what I can’t do.) You can open up multiple Results from searches in multiple tabs and browse them all at once, instead of one at a time. You can background Results pop-up windows. I think you can print from the browser in some instances where you can’t with IE.

Launchy

Launchy replicates the functionality of Mac’s Quicksilver or Spotlight onto the PC. I hit alt-space and a translucent box appears in the middle of my screen. I start typing the name of an application I want to launch (e.g., f-i-r, and it finds Firefox, and I hit enter to launch it), or a Firefox bookmark (e.g., w-e-s and I get my Westlaw bookmark), or a filename or folder, or I start typing in a math calculation (e.g., 162/6, and I get the my billable hours for a project), and Launchy finds and executes it for me.

Freemind

Freemind is a mind-mapping tool that makes nice charts and graphs easy to make, but it’s also great for note-taking. Let me tell you, it’s a lot better than Microsoft Word for outlining your ideas. And when you create presentations with this people always ask, “Does PowerPoint do that? How’d you make it look like that?” To which you answer, “No, and I can’t tell you.”

Here’s a mind-map that I just created about Demand Resources in energy auction markets:

Use a Wiki

I use my own personal installation of MediaWiki, but I have used hosted services like the excellent PBWiki. It basically use it for to-do lists and for notes that I want to access and edit anywhere in the world. They’re not super-fancy, but they’re functional and fast and easy to use. You can collaborate via them, but I don’t.

Google Desktop Search

I save nearly all my cases as PDFs onto my hard drive for later reference. With Google Desktop Search, you can search all these PDFs. Very useful.