BlogHer, BlawgHer

I've juggled (my schedule) and cajoled (Bay Area relatives/sitters) and will be making the trek up to BlogHer on July 30. I'll be joining Mary Hodder's panel on "Women who want to fund, build & sell things." I'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts on this topic. And I'm noticing and appreciating the good representation the blawgosphere will have at the event, including Carolyn Elefant, Wendy Seltzer, Jennifer Collins (and let's just make PrawfsBlawg — raw law prof blogging — "Today's New Blawg," shall we?), Lauren Gelman, and blawger-journalista Lisa Stone, who's one of the organizers.

Take That, Pat Robertson

The ABA has put together a collection of resources, the Supporting America's Judiciary Toolkit, "to help lawyers, bar leaders or anyone working to address the attacks on our judiciary." And for those seeking to find the judiciary (the federal ones, anyway), here's "a new interactive map that shows each of the 12 regional judicial circuits and 94 judicial districts. Clicking on the map will take you to links for the Web sites of the federal courts in a particular circuit or district." (via Genie Tyburski)

Dolphin Bytes Email — More Re ComplianSeek

Byte and Switch has a story this morning on ComplianSeek with more about the genesis and particulars of the technology (Dolphins Aid Compliance): "DolphinSearch is the brainchild of a Berkeley PhD, Herbert L. Roitblat, who started the firm in 1999. Dr. Roitblat aimed to commercialize his patented technology (U.S. Patent No. 6,189,002), which is based in part on neural networking techniques derived from research on dolphins' echo-based communication." (Though I'm fairly certain you don't need to hire Bud or Sandy to interpret the results.) The article also touches on my firm's contributions: "ReedSmith helped DolphinSearch design ComplianSeek to look for the 'right stuff' in emails. This doesn't mean keywords, but instead certain patterns, word associations, lingo, or subtler forms of reference to investment activity."

[Later:] Here's Dr. Roitblat's University of Hawaii page, with a pic of him communing with a research subject, an old Forbes article about his work and research, and a Hawaii Business one. Fascinating way to build a search technology.

[Later still:] It's nice to see lawyers associated with a different kind of sea creature, for a change.

New, New Thing: ComplianSeek

Today my firm Reed Smith announced what looks to be a very cool, and I think it's safe to say groundbreaking, joint project with DolphinSearch. Working together, Reed Smith and DolphinSearch have created something called ComplianSeek, "designed specifically to help meet the regulatory compliance needs of investment advisers within the financial services community. . . . as required by the Investment Advisers Act." ComplianSeek was unveiled today at the ICI 2005 General Membership meeting in Washington, DC. As I understand it, the current iteration of the project is aimed at helping investment advisors effectively search their email — which, like it or not, has become a de facto record repository for these and all modern businesses — to help identify and keep track of items that constitute "books and records" under the Investment Advisors Act. There's a nifty flash animation you can check out that explains things better than I can.

I'm excited about the project on several fronts. Like the 50 State HIPAA Privacy Study Reed Smith is also involved in, ComplianSeek recognizes that lawyers and technologists together can develop tools that help address and manage onerous regulatory compliance burdens. While the first iteration of ComplianSeek is aimed at investment advisors, I'm told modules can be built to address the requirements of any number of statutes. It seems to me these kinds of projects have the two-pronged beneficial effect of helping businesses tackle compliance in a cost-effective way, and helping lawyers carry out their businesses in ways that begin to depart from the much maligned billable hour.

As I said, this project is brand new and I'm sure more information will be available as time goes on. But I thought Bag and Baggage readers would enjoy being among the first to know about ComplianSeek and give it some thought.

America's Funniest Home Video Moment

You can't have a video camera trained on your kids all the time, and that's just a tragedy. Picture if you will Tyler and me at his Music Together class this morning. My theory, by the way, on pre- preschool classes is they can't help but make him somewhat less terrified than I was when preschool rears its big, wooly head. (In my case, there were killer sheep involved, don't ask.) He's tearing around, having a grand time shaking his maracas to the beat. The teacher bends at the waist to help another toddler with something. Tyler's running at her full tilt from behind, and doesn't anticipate her abrubpt halt–and–bend maneuver. With all the torque and momentum his 24-pound frame can muster (roughly the same as a pint-sized F430), he slams, nose first, into the teacher's derrière, then ricochets backward no fewer than four feet to land WHOOF on his own.

Rang his little bell good, and reduced everyone over the height of 2 1/2 feet to hoots of uncontrollable glee.