PSA Re Law Firm Voicemail

Note to anyone who might be contemplating calling a law firm and leaving a voice message that might be even remotely considered, shall we say a novelty:

More and more firms are using voicemail integration systems like Cisco's Unity Messaging. The upshot of this is voicemail becomes automatically and immediately freed of the phone, showing up as a .wav attached to the recipient's email. (I'm now so used to receiving voicemail this way I've all but forgotten how to get it off the phone itself.) From there, the message becomes trivially easy to forward or upload, whereupon the analog circle is closed as audio bits become widely circulated paper.

Yet another check on lawyers behaving badly? Time will tell. In the meantime, make no mistake: we're laughing at you, not with you.

[Update, 8/31] Ernest Miller notes that VoIP is poised to make this phenomenon even more widespread.

Series B Linkage

My latest post for The Industry Standard finds Steve Jurvetson's blog. Again.

Pop Off

Another post at The Industry Standard.

Our California

Derek Powazek was on the radio yesterday, and I happened to catch the show. The book being flogged, My California, looks very worthwhile: a collection of unconventional essays about the Golden State, all donated by the authors, and with all proceeds going to the California Arts Council.

Ernest Goes To Court

I'm most honored to help inaugurate Ernest Miller's new series on IT Conversations, The Importance Of...The Law And IT. Fred von Lohmann, Tim Wu, C.E. Petit, and I participated in a panel discussion on MGM v. Grokster this afternoon, and it's live already tonight. I'm hopelessly addicted to IT Conversations, and my iPod is looking forward to future installments of Ernie's show. (There's apparently a cool way to point to audio clips from our talk, but I'm just not awake enough at the moment to take advantage.)