Technically Legal

Shredding

If the holidays (or the end of a calendar-based fiscal year) may bring a new computer to your office, you will face the question of what to do with the old one.  That question includes many subquestions, ranging from recycling (it's probably illegal to just throw it in the trash) to repurposing or donating. 

But if it's leaving the office, you'll want to be reasonably sure that no one else can pull any data from its hard drive that might include client secrets or privileged information or that might allow identity theft. One option is physical destruction of the hard drive: melting, shooting, acid baths, and so on.  But short of that, you could use a liveCD with a copy of "shred."  Even a few passes should provide a reasonable comfort level. There are other ways to do essentially the same thing.  But do use one of them (or have your tech support do it).

Computer connections 18 months and up

Every month or so, someone asks where something connects to something else, such as where to plug in a cable to show a presentation through a projector, or where to hook a printer to a laptop. Luckily, the answer these days is generally the children's toy answer. It's almost always simply fitting shapes: square peg in the square hole, star-shaped peg in the star-shaped hole, and so on.  Even hard drive cables are keyed by shape now, rather than requiring someone to match the red cable to pin 1. Software use may always pose problems; but at least the hardware connections are easy.

 

Real uses for a live CD

Live CDs (i.e., an operating system that runs from a CD, without needing to be "installed"—rather as one used to boot DOS from a floppy rather than a hard drive) sometimes come across as mere demos or toys. But they do have some practical uses, even for lawyers.

One such use is for when you're out of your office and can use a computer, but don't trust it not to have had a keystroke-logging program or other spyware already installed. I spent a month in the Czech Republic this summer.  As I didn't trust the PCs in Internet cafés there to be secure, I didn't want to log in to my email (let alone to a law firm file-server) with any ID and password.  So I used the café just once, using a throw-away email account (whose ID and password had nothing in common with any "real work" ID or password) for some non-privileged communications. The rest of the time, I used a PC that I bought-to-return, but I ran it only from a live CD.  That way, no keystroke-logging program ever had a chance to start (and I was reasonably confident that there was no hidden logging device). When I sold the PC back, there were no Windows event logs to indicate that I had even ever turned it on.

(For curious lawyers: "buy to return" is a statutorily defined contract type in the Czech Republic. One buys something, but the contract gives one a right to make the seller buy it back at some determinable price within some agreed time. The end result is much as though the temporary buyer had rented.)

Staying at home (well, in the U.S., but at the office), a lawyer can find practical uses for live CDs in troubleshooting or upgrading her computers. Two examples come to mind.

One is when installing new memory. Bad or intermittent memory errors can be responsible for flaky computer behavior. So if you add memory to a computer, it's good to test it. Several live CDs include the "memtest" program, so after installing the RAM you can boot from the CD, and run the memory test for long enough to satisfy yourself that the RAM is good, before you reboot to Windows. Of course, one has long been able to use memtest from a floppy; but lots of computers don't have floppy drives anymore.

A second is to help diagnose whether some problem is due to a hardware or software issue. If a computer's speakers or some other component work when the computer is booted from a live CD, but not from the installed Windows, you at least know that the hardware is fine. Knowing this much may at least save you from the kind of shoot-aim-fire tech support that prematurely suggests you buy new hardware.  Conversely, if the same problem appears even under the live CD, you are on good ground returning some hardware for a refund.

Live CDs have other uses, of course. But most of them are not sufficiently related to real-life law practice to be worth mentioning here. And the field where live CDs excel that is highly law-related (electronic discovery and drive copying) is almost exclusively in a "hire an expert" category for most lawyers.  First, you don't want to have to be a witness to the procedures used. (Minn.R.Prof.Cond. Rule 3.7's three exceptions won't apply.)  Second, you don't want to run the risk of botching the procedure.