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Collaborative Editing Comes to Dropbox
One of the best features of Google Docs is collaborative editing. You can hash out contract terms with another lawyer over the phone while both of you are looking at the same document instead of wrestling with Track Changes over a period of days or weeks. Your second chair at trial can let you see her notes in real time. You can work on an affidavit with your client. And so on. Anyway it’s great—if you use Google documents.
Collaborative editing came to Office Online in 2013, which was great because most lawyers don’t use Google Docs; they use Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, collaborative editing in Office only worked if you used OneDrive or SharePoint, both of which are pretty terrible and nobody uses.
But Microsoft just announced that collaborative, real-time editing now works with documents stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Which is huge because practically everyone uses Box or Dropbox. [Office Online blog]
And/Or is Unfair
A New Jersey trial judge repeatedly used and/or in his jury instructions, which rendered the instructions so unclear the appellate court decided the defendant was denied a fair trial.
The opinion also contains a lengthy catalog of criticism of and/or:
The imprecision of the phrase “and/or” and criticism for its use here and in other jurisdictions has been well-documented. In Fisher v. Healy’s Special Tours Inc., 121 N.J.L. 198, 199 (E. & A. 1938), our State’s highest court at the time described “and/or” as an expression that “has never been accredited in this state as good pleading or proper to form part of a judgment record . . . .” Other courts have been even more critical, referring to “and/or” as a “verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase,” Employers’ Mut. Liab. Ins. Co. v. Tollefsen, 263 N.W. 376, 377 (Wis. 1935), an “inexcusable barbarism[] . . . sired by indolence,” Cochrane v. Florida E. Coast R. Co., 145 So. 217, 218 (Fla. 1932), a “mongrel expression . . . an equivocal connective, being neither positively conjunctive nor positively disjunctive,” Holmes v. Gross, 93 N.W.2d 714, 722 (Iowa 1958), and an “abominable invention,” American Gen. Ins. Co. v. Webster, 118 S.W.2d 1082, 1084 (Tex. Civ. App. 1941). Wherever found in the decisions of our courts, “and/or” has been recognized as creating ambiguity. See Fisher, supra, 121 N.J.L. at 199 (finding ambiguity in a civil complaint alleging “Healy’s Incoporated and/or Healy’s Special Tours were the owners of a motor bus and operating the same”); Howell v. Ohio Cas. Ins. Co., 130 N.J. Super. 350, 355 (App. Div. 1974) (finding ambiguity in an insurance policy describing the insured as “husband and/or wife”); In re Estate of Massey, 317 N.J. Super. 302, 303 (Ch. Div. 1998) (finding ambiguity in a Will bequeathing one-third of the residue to “my niece . . . and/or [g]randniece”); The Nat’l State Bank of Newark v. Morrison, 7 N.J. Super. 333, 339 (Ch. Div. 1949) (finding ambiguity in a power of appointment of a trust given to the settlor’s “widow and/or nephews and nieces”); Ward v. Jersey Cent. Power & Light Co., 136 N.J. Eq. 181, 182 (Ch. 1945) (finding ambiguity in a request reforming a stock certification in favor of “Celia ‘and/or’ Nora”).
Go ahead and bookmark that for the next time you get into an argument with another lawyer about contract drafting. [the (new) legal writer]
Law Job Reports Get Confusing
Amid report after report of abysmal career prospects for new lawyers, the National Law Journal reported that offers extended to summer associates are the highest rate they’ve been in a decade. What gives? It’s the rate that’s high (95% of summer associates received an offer), not the total number.
tl;dr: the legal jobs market is still pretty awful.
Bilzerian Gets SLAPPed
Adolescent bro hero Dan Bilzerian is primarily known for partying with scantily clad women and showing off fancy cars, guns, and piles of cash. Now he’ll also be known for getting SLAPPed by Marc Randazza. (You may also remember Bilzerian from this letter he somehow got Supreme Court litigator Tom Goldstein to write for him.)
What Google Paid for Google.com
Last year Google lost google.com for about a minute, and wound up paying $6006.13 (which spells Google in 1337-speak) to the guy who bought it. Then Google doubled the reward when he donated the money to charity. [The Verge]
Unchecky Helps Keep You From Installing Unwanted Software
Lots of free software comes bundled with crapware, or more recently, tries to change your default search engine. This is, as far as I can tell, the only reason why anyone would have the Yahoo! toolbar or use Yahoo! as their default search engine. Unchecky is a little Windows app that automatically unchecks those kinds of offers in software installers. Handy.
Featured image: “angry businesswoman is slapping across the businessman’s face” from Shutterstock.
Briefs: And/Or is Unfair, Bilzerian Gets SLAPPed, Collaborative Editing Comes to Dropbox, Etc. was originally published on Lawyerist.com.