The 125th ISBA Annual Meeting will be conducted June 21 to 24 at The Abbey on Lake Geneva, Wis., where Timothy Eaton of Chicago will succeed Herb Franks of Marengo as president.
Disappearing Inc. makes e-mail messages secure
By Alan Pearlman
"The Electronic Lawyer"
As more and more attorneys learn about the rules and antics of cyberspace, one thing has been clearly learned: Sending an e-mail message is about as secure and private as writing it out on the Jumbotron in Times Square!
Almost all of the people, including technicians who oversee many of the e-mail systems, can use their prying eyes to peer into what you've written and to whom you've written it, if they choose. Much worse is that once an e-mail is sent or stored on a computer hard drive, there is almost no way to make sure that it has been erased or deleted.
We all know as lawyers that, given the right reasons in the courtrooms, we can obtain subpoenas that will allow us access to our adversaries' computer hard drives and allow our experts to pull out what they though were long-gone e-mail messages of importance to our cases.
What if I told you that from now on your e-mails can be written in "disappearing ink" make that Disappearing Inc. This is the name of a company, about a year old now, that has a product you must take a hard look at if you do any e-mail at all.
This San Francisco-based start-up company says, "We make e-mail go away, under the user's control," according to CEO Maclen Marvit.
He means, any e-mails the user wishes to have disappear. In general, the target is the garden variety, loose-lip business chatter that allows such experts as Bill Gates to get caught with his RAM chips down.
According to the company, encryption is used in such a way that over a time period, the entire message gets shredded. To put it in a simpler light: You send a message to me, and when you hit the send key, a small add-on filter in your e-mail program goes out across the Internet and notifies the Disappearing Inc. site.
An identifying number is assigned to the message, and you receive a software key with which to scramble the message. When I open the message, that same key unscrambles it.
What makes this message temporary is that the sender tells it how long to last and then, when time is up, the key is deleted from Disappearing Inc.
The technique, of course, is a highly guarded secret, but in all, it's based on the fact that the service will control one of the keys necessary to read an encrypted e-mail message.
After a time period set by the sender, or his or her employer, that key will be destroyed, rendering all copies of the message as a pile of unreadable bits. Once the message's time has run out, even the sender and Disappearing Inc. are not able to put Humpty Dumpty back together.
You can use Disappearing with all of the first-rate e-mail systems Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, Domino and Lotus Notes, and Sendmail.
Now the question may come to your mind at this point whether a recipient will know that a message is going to expire. That is entirely up to the sender or the sender's company policy.
The sender has the right to let the recipient know that the message may soon, although the company believes that people will begin to know. Since having a sender erase e-mail from a recipient's inbox can be both rude and annoying, in the long run most senders will inform them.
Marvit also points out that this system is not foolproof for paper copies. "We have to understand what problems we (Disappearing) solve and what ones we don't," he said.
Disappearing Inc. is not in the business of preventing folks from either photographing the computer screen or printing out e-mails. According to Marvet, "the fact the system isn't foolproof or, for that matter idiot-proof, doesn't mean that we are not a valuable business tool."
He sees Disappearing as useful to people who want to communicate with other people privately and not have to worry that some lawyer or other party is going to come along and ask for all their records.
How do you get it for your firm? Just go to their web site at www.disappearing.com and download the free 90-day version! When I asked about the ability of solo and small firm practitioners to purchase the product, I was told that the company would probably continue to allow free access to smaller firms.
All told, I find this product amazing and intriguing. For those of you from the days of Mr. Phelps and the original "Mission Impossible," all I can say is since I wrote this column in Disappearing Inc., beware! It will self-destruct after you read it.
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Northbrook attorney Alan Pearlman, an ISBA Assembly member, serves on the Law Office Management and Economics (Standing Committe on) Council and is past chair of the Committee on Legal Technology.
New lawyers recently admitted to the Illinois bar now have a link to specially tailored information on the ISBA web site. By accessing www.isba.org and clicking on New Admittees under ISBA and You, one can learn about services available with the free one-year membership for new lawyers.
The web site provides details of ISBA publications, legal education seminars, LEXIS-NEXIS discounts and other affiliated vendor programs, advisory ethics opinions, and networking opportunities through the Young Lawyers Division.
The site also includes an application form for those who did not take advantage of the first-year free membership, or want to become full ISBA members at the conclusion of the complimentary term.
YLD event nets $10,000 for kids in courthouses
The ISBA Young Lawyers Division recently donated $10,000 to the ISBA Children's Assistance Program for courthouse waiting rooms, raising the total contribution to $30,000 since 1998.
The donation represents proceeds from a holiday party organized by YLD Council secretary and ISBA Assembly member Franco A. Coladipietro, council member Francesco E. DiVito, who chairs the assistance program, and Scott Guetzow.
A total of $15,000 was raised for various charitable ventures during the December party, which was attended by 275 ISBA members and guests. Several made individual contributions of $100 to $500.
The funds provide food, toys and games for courthouse rooms where children of litigants can be supervised and entertained without exposure to proceedings in criminal and domestic relations cases involving their parents.
By Jim Covington
Director of Legislative Affairs
Members of the General Assembly are filing bills at a furious pace, and committees will begin reviewing them shortly. Here's a sample of what is going on in Springfield.
Documents Must Be Filed. House Bill 255 (Curry, D-Decatur) amends the Conveyances Act. It requires recording of certain interests affecting title to property for them to take effect and have force of law. The instruments include deeds, mortgages, contracts for deed, memoranda of agreement for deed, agreements for deed, and other instruments that affect interests in real property. Under current law they are effective against creditors and subsequent purchasers only after being recorded. This bill would be effective immediately.
Field Sobriety Testing. Representative Tom Dart (D-Chicago) held a press conference in which he announced that he will be re-introducing a bill to make a driver or person who is in actual physical control of a car to consent to a standardized field sobriety test if a law enforcement officer has reasonable suspicion of the driver's intoxication. The officer, prior to an arrest, may request the person to perform the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus test, walk and turn test, or one-leg stand test. Last year's bill allowed the results of a standardized field sobriety test to be used against the defendant as evidence in any administrative or court proceeding for a violation of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. A refusal to perform the tests will cause the driver's license to be suspended for six months, and a second offense would result in a two-year suspension.
Eavesdropping Exception. House Bill 256 (Cross, R-Yorkville) creates an exception to the Eavesdropping statute. It allows a law enforcement officer or any person acting at his or her direction to record or listen with the aid of an eavesdropping device to an "undercover conversation" in the course of an investigation of a felony violation of the Illinois Controlled Substances Act or a Cannabis Control Act. The exception requires prior notification to and verbal approval from the state's attorney or his or her designee of the county in which the conversation is anticipated to occur.
Statute of Limitation Change. House Bill 543 (Righter, R-Mattoon) amends the Local Governmental and Governmental Employees Tort Immunity Act to increase the statute of limitation from one year to two years for patient care. The statute of repose is four years, and it applies to pending actions.
Increase in Interest. House Bill 383 (Saviano, R-Elmwood Park) amends the Interest Act to increase the rate of interest to which creditors are entitled on money after it becomes due from 5% to 7%.
Race-based Traffic Stops. House Bill 335 (Hoffman, D-Collinsville) requires peace officers to record and report the race of the individual stopped for traffic violations. This bill will also be debated within the political context of House Bill 294 (Beaubien R-Barrington Hills), which allows law enforcement officers to stop or search any vehicle solely on the basis that officers suspect an occupant is not wearing his or her seat belt. Parentage Act. Senate Bill 65 (Silverstein, D-Chicago) amends the Illinois Parentage Act of 1984 to provide that in a custody action under the Act, the court may enjoin a party from removing the child from Illinois pending the adjudication of the custody issue. It also authorizes sanctions against a party who commences a custody action in bad faith to thwart a parent from removing a child from Illinois.
Stephen Anderson
Editor
Supply and remand
The chief justice has spoken, and those who listen will be the better for it. Never has the imperative for equal justice through pro bono service been more eloquently expressed or so thoughtfully forceful.
Moses Harrison's crisp and perceptive homily on this page starts with the confession that our Access to Justice Award meant more to him than others can know. This was not just a gratuitous felicitation.
The chief justice is offered many meritorious tributes but he accepts very few recently only from the NAACP and the Justinian Society, for special reasons, and now from the ISBA, because he is "passionate about access to justice."
But more than passion molds his message. It is punctuated with practical wisdom that pierces myths of the misguided and foreshadows a deepening chasm of unrest.
Too many lawyers? For Moses Harrison, there won't be enough lawyers until the legal needs of all Illinois citizens are met until the least are availed the most that our court system was consecrated to provide.
The math is dumbfounding: more than a million in poverty and only 200 legal aid attorneys to provide basic assistance and to attempt enlistment of the practicing bar into the small but valiant pro bono brigade.
There is more to this equation, and less hope of solving it. The whole of the legal-needs integer is expanding geometrically in relation to the sum of the parts of our fractional universe of willing practitioners.
Sure there are close to 76,000 registered Illinois attorneys, but only three-fourths of them have law practices within the state's five judicial districts. And the previous leaps and bounds of this population, as reported by the ARDC, seem to have ground to a crawl.
After admission ceremonies in November, the net increase in the master roll was fewer than 200 lawyers over the prior year's tally. More than 2,300 left the practice during the 12 months in which 2,500 more were admitted.
Other factors include the lower ratio of passing grades on the bar exam, which our Committee on Legal Education, Admission and Competence notes has "plummeted" from 94 percent in 1995 to 78 percent last year.
Then there is the cream of that first-year crop being paid on par with fixed salaries of the judiciary, and given the extraordinary responsibility of earning it through obeisance to a time clock at the expense of such leisure pursuits as pro bono representation.
So Moses Harrison is quite right that a greater burden falls on "the rest of us" as a "moral and professional duty" to expedite equal justice for whom and whenever it is needed.
The chief justice kindly credited this bar association for leadership that has made a difference in providing legal services for the poor. One wonders where we'd be if not for some major achievements.
Establishment of the Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois, supported wholeheartedly by the ISBA and the Supreme Court before its inception in 1981, now provides more than $3 million annually to legal assistance providers throughout the state.
The Illinois Pro Bono Center, which the ISBA founded in 1993 and has funded generously, coordinates and enhances existing programs and develops others where legal service gaps exist.
The Pro Bono Center was our response to the Illinois Legal Needs Study that in 1989 reported a shortfall in civil legal representation for a million matters each year involving 600,000 low-income households. A joint initiative of the ISBA and CBA, the study was funded in part by our foundations and the Lawyers Trust Fund.
Our own Bar Foundation makes charitable, educational and subsistence grants totaling almost $300,000 each year from an endowment that has grown to $2 million, thanks to the aggregate contributions of ISBA members and some significant bequests.
The state legislature, again with diligent encouragement from the ISBA, has enacted the Illinois Equal Justice Act and appropriated $500,000 for an IEJ Foundation to begin seeking funds and distributing grants to legal service providers.
Institutionally, the organized bar has explored every identifiable venue for money to run the umbrella offices that coordinate pro bono