Garry 100 percent

It’s another busy day at the office when you receive an email with an attached memo. You don’t remember asking for the memo, but you download the attachment anyway. Alarm bells! It’s not an attachment. It’s malware that’s now infecting your computer and every other computer in your law firm.This was the situation that Jessica Mazzeo and Fran Griesing faced. In July 2016, the computer system for their small Philadelphia firm of 12 lawyers was infected with malware. They contacted Integrated Micro Systems, their outsourced information technology provider.“We caught it almost immediately,” says Mazzeo, chief operating officer at Griesing Law. “We took down our network and ran virus software on every computer in the firm. Once we located where the virus originated, we wiped the hard drive.”That incident changed the way the law firm dealt with websites, emails and mobile devices. As a small firm, Griesing Law leans on outside providers … [Read more...] about Law firms must manage cybersecurity risks

The top donor to Garry McCarthy’s fledgling mayoral campaign is a Chicago personal injury attorney who has had his law license suspended three times, including for paying a funeral director and a morgue worker for steering him business from grieving families.The former police superintendent has accepted more than $25,000 in contributions tied to Joseph Dombrowski, an attorney whose ethics record also is marked by agreeing to a $3.3 million settlement in an insurance fraud lawsuit in which he was accused of staging traffic accidents.State campaign finance records show Dombrowski and two companies he controls made the campaign contributions on March 21. That’s the same day McCarthy told the Chicago Tribune in an exclusive interview that he would run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who fired him as the city’s top cop in 2015. The campaign cash from Dombrowski accounts for more than 20 percent of the $122,985 McCarthy has raised to date, records show.A McCarthy spokesman said … [Read more...] about McCarthy’s top campaign donor: Lawyer with checkered past

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday showed his 2019 challengers how quickly he’ll be able to raise campaign cash now that contribution limits are off, depositing more than $1.7 million into his political fund in a single day.The mayor collected $1 million from just three donors: $500,000 from investment executive Michael Sacks and another $250,000 each from two major Chicago unions representing the operating engineers and laborers.The latest contributions widen the already major financial advantage Emanuel holds over the early field of challengers trying to defeat him. The mayor has now raised more than $5.7 million in his bid for a third term, state campaign finance records show.Friday’s heavy haul was made possible by businessman Willie Wilson recently giving his campaign $100,000. Wilson’s move erased state-imposed limits on how much much candidates can raise from a single donor.Under state law, individual donors are limited to a $5,600 contribution to a single campaign. … [Read more...] about Emanuel flexes fundraising muscle with $1.7 million deposited in a single day

During the last week of October, legal technology company CaseCrunch held an AI-versus-lawyer competition, and the machine came out on top.The competition pitted over 100 attorneys from firms like DLA Piper and Allen & Overy against CaseCruncher Alpha to predict outcomes of just under 800 real, historic insurance misselling claims. The goal was to correctly determine if the claim would succeed or not.According to CaseCrunch’s website, the software predicted outcomes with almost 87 percent accuracy, while the lawyers were 62 percent correct.“The main reason for the large winning margin seems to be that the network had a better grasp of the importance of nonlegal factors than lawyers,” read a statement on the company’s website.Digging deeper into the structure of the competition, Legal IT Insider quoted Ralph Cox, a patent litigation partner at Clyde & Co. in London and an attendee of the event, as saying: “I keep an open mind. However, it struck me … [Read more...] about Artificial intelligence software outperforms lawyers (without subject matter expertise) in matchup

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the growing field challenging him in the February 2019 election will be able to raise unlimited amounts of money after one candidate on Wednesday said he made a large contribution to his own campaign.Businessman Willie Wilson, who ran unsuccessfully against Emanuel in 2015, said he gave his campaign $100,000, enough to erase state-imposed limits on how much individual donors can give. Wilson said he made the deposit Wednesday afternoon, but the contribution had yet to show up in Illinois campaign finance records.“Rahm is going to get all the money he is going to get,” Wilson said in an interview. “I’m doing this to level the playing field for some of the other candidates who may not be able to get as much money. This lets them get $50,000 or $100,000 at a time if they can.”With or without the financial limitations, Emanuel figures to have a major fundraising advantage in the mayoral race. In the 2015 contest, he out-raised his next … [Read more...] about Rahm Emanuel, challengers won’t have fundraising limits in 2019 mayoral election