The VLW Blog

A woman near Bluefield found out the hard way about the perils of social media. When she clicked the “like” button on the Facebook page of the county sheriff, her fugitive boyfriend ended up in jail and the girlfriend now is charged with obstruction of justice. The girlfriend, Samantha Dillow, 22, may have wanted to [...]

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Proponents of the paperless clerk’s office held forth in Portsmouth last week at the annual gathering of the Virginia Court Clerks’ Association. E-data pioneer Jack Kennedy, clerk of the Wise County Circuit Court, joined the county circuit judge and the commonwealth’s attorney to describe the benefits of the court’s electronic filing system, Kennedy reported in [...]

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The holidays and the new year mean electronic upgrades for many lawyers. Experts warn there’s a risk in disposing of your old phones and tablets without proper safeguards. Just yanking the SIM card is not enough, data security specialist Lee Reiber posts on Ride The Lightning. He said he recently examined a bunch of used [...]

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A Virginia State Bar discipline committee rejected First Amendment defenses and distinctions about public information to find misconduct on the part of a lawyer who blogged about his cases without client consent and without a disclaimer saying case results can be unreliable. The eight-member district committee ordered Horace Hunter of Richmond to yank from his [...]

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Editor’s note: Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek of Sensei Enterprises Inc. make their living going into law offices and offering advice on technology and information security. They often encounter lawyers who are otherwise careful in their practice of law make sloppy mistakes when it comes to protecting their electronic data. Here is their [...]

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The Virginia State Corporation Commission has taken a giant leap away from its kludgy web-based service of two years ago with the debut this month of streamlined processes for creating corporations and LLCs online. In what the SCC clerk calls the “crowning achievement” of the agency’s eFile project, online users now can pick one of [...]

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A federal jury Tuesday found Verizon infringed patents for video-on-demand technology, delivering a big-dollar victory for a small tech company founded by a Virginia Beach man. “We’re ecstatic,” one company lawyer told The Virginian-Pilot. The jury had been hearing testimony for three weeks in the case that focused on Verizon’s FiOS cable television service. In [...]

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Holding that “obscene” means more than just “pornographic,” the en banc Court of Appeals of Virginia has affirmed the conviction of a Texas doctor who persistently harassed his estranged wife with vulgar emails. While completing medical training in Texas in 2009, Dennis Barson sent scores of graphic email messages to his wife in Virginia Beach, [...]

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Want to know where the cops are checking for drunken drivers? There’s an app for that. Or at least, there was. Apple has put the kibosh on mobile applications that identify DUI checkpoints unless the checkpoints have been publicly announced. The existence of such apps led a gaggle of U.S. Senators to send letters to [...]

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A man who posted menacing lyrics on his MySpace page can be convicted of  communicating written threats, even if the alleged victim didn’t have a computer, the Court of Appeals has ruled. John Holcomb used online rhythm and rhyme to broadcast his animosity toward his former girlfriend during a custody battle over the couple’s daughter. [...]

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