NC State Bar-LegalZoom Settlement Sets Stage For Legislative Action

,

Editor’s note: This story appears in the February 2016 edition of North Carolina Lawyer.

By Russell Rawlings

The North Carolina State Bar and LegalZoom.com Inc. took a giant step toward resolving their longstanding differences when the parties signed a consent judgment on Oct. 22, 2015. The highly publicized agreement gave the State Bar consumer protections that it was seeking while clarifying LegalZoom’s right to provide documents to North Carolina citizens via the Internet.

Read more

10 Ways To Prep For a Successful Mediation

,

From an attorney’s perspective: 

As we all know (or should know) the purpose of mediation is to maximize the chances that our client’s case will settle before they are forced into a potentially unnecessary trial. In order to facilitate this process it is imperative that we, as attorneys, arrive prepared to resolve our client’s issues.

Read more

Encryption Is Not a Four-Letter Word

,

What is encryption?

Encryption is a process to store your data so that only you can access it. There is an encryption “key” (essentially a password) that you keep to encrypt and decrypt the data. When the data is encrypted, it is converted to ones and zeros so that it can be stored securely, and if the encrypted data falls into the wrong hands (the bad guys or the NSA) it can NOT be read. You hold the only encryption key, and your data can only be decrypted (unlocked) and read by you.

Read more