Briefs: Practice Panther Raises $3.5M, Enter Zola, Ghost Data, Etc.

Practice Panther just announced it has raised $3.5 million, and the already-affordable ($29/month/user, paid annually) software is free through the end of 2016 so the developers can collect feature requests to build out the roadmap. If you want to help build practice management software according to your own preferences, you might want to give it a try.

Zola recently entered the other end (cost-wise) of the practice-management software market, with plans costing $68/month/lawyer and $34/month/staff when paid annually. Although the $99/month solo plan is a great deal if you have staff, since up to 2 staff accounts are included. Zola is really full-featured for just-launched practice-management software. The web app looks great, includes a full accounting sweet, and there are apps for iOS and Android.

E-signatures and clickwrap agreements is that if you don’t capture good data about the transaction, they definitely aren’t enforceable. I’m still not sure how useful that information is, but it’s definitely better than not keeping any. [internetcases]

Wiping a hard drive is fairly easy (just boot up DBAN and nuke it), but mobile devices can carry “ghost data,” too, even after they are reset.

In an examination of 122 pieces of second-hand equipment—mobile devices, hard drives and solid state drives purchased online from Amazon, eBay, and Gazelle.com—48%of the hard drives and solid state drives contained residual data, while thousands of leftover emails, call logs, texts/SMS/IMs, photos, and videos were retrieved from 35% of the mobile devices.

The study was sponsored, of course, by Blancco, a company that makes software for wiping mobile phones. [The Ediscovery Blog]

Speaking of researching judges, there are a few big-data tools for trying to figure out your chances of success before a particular judge, including Lex Machina, Ravel Law, and ALM Judicial Profiles. [American Judges Association]

Gmail is going to start warning you when messages arrive over unencrypted connections. Email security keeps getting better, and more mail servers are encrypting email than ever before, but Google wants to speed things up by warning you when message arrive over unsecure connections. (Note: this is not the same thing as encrypting individual emails; we’re just talking about the pipe between sender and receiver, not the message itself.) [TechCrunch]

Featured image: “Hand holding retro stopwatch in black & white” from Shutterstock.

Briefs: Practice Panther Raises $3.5M, Enter Zola, Ghost Data, Etc. was originally published on Lawyerist.