David Snow, editor of Law.com Legal Technology, will report from LegalTech New York 2007. With his daily e-mail, registered participants won't miss any of the show's highlights. Watch for it in your e-mail inbox!

Sunday night's light snowfall and Monday's bitter chill aside, New York weather has been unseasonably mild lately. But you can always tell when late January rolls around by one unmistakable sign: The LegalTech conference comes to midtown Manhattan, bringing much of the legal technology industry's movers and shakers with it.

With more than 11,000 visitors and 285 exhibiting companies in attendance, ALM Media kicked off LegalTech New York 2007 on Monday, the start of a three-day run of educational sessions, technology demonstrations and parties.

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David A. Thomas, deputy assistant director of the FBI's Science and Technology Branch, delivered LegalTech's opening keynote address, which focused on his agency's work in the face of increasing online crimes worldwide. He painted a grim picture.

"What are you going to do when you have an incident?" Thomas asked the roughly 400 people in attendance. Note the absence of "if" in that question. Thomas stressed throughout his presentation that survival in the current environment -- in which teenage kids are savvy criminals and sophisticated crime rings in former Soviet bloc countries are acquiring thousands of credit card numbers at a pop -- requires preparation and vigilance.

In one anecdote, Thomas described a 15-year-old hacker, whose computers the FBI had confiscated, using a reconfigured gaming console to steal credit card information online, allowing him to take delivery on several new computers, which in turn enabled him, just days later, to mount a denial-of-service attack that brought down the agency's Web site for 72 hours.

Another story featured a VoIP hacker who made $1 million a year reselling bandwidth stolen from phone companies. On a related note, he added, "Hackers can eavesdrop on 70 percent of Web phone calls," as just one method criminals all over the world can use to extract sought-after data from U.S. companies. And though Thomas' talk focused a great deal on the work of thieves in Eastern European countries, he stressed that the risks will only increase as the vast population of China rapidly becomes more tech-savvy.

Fortunately, the address, sponsored by Attenex Corp. and KPMG, also covered some measures corporations can take to protect themselves and their shareholders from internal and external threats. From an IT perspective, he said, it's not just about patching security holes that've been exploited, allowing malicious code into your network. It's also critical for IT departments to assess what data has been taken.

For those responsible for an organization's data security, Thomas recommends tactical measures:

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Monica Bay, editor of Law Technology News magazine, makes no bones about it -- she steered clear of Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," because she thought it would be shrill and political.

"I couldn't have been more wrong," says Bay, who watched the movie on a December flight to Kauai, Hawaii. "I instantly drank the Kool-Aid." In the documentary, Gore not only outlines the science behind global warming, and details with concrete examples (and photos) the tremendous threat it presents to our planet, but shows how today's technology can ameliorate the damage, she explains.

"It took me about five minutes to realize that Gore's message -- that technology can be used not only to help combat global warming, but to simultaneously reduce operating costs and increase profits -- is a perfect issue for LTN. And law firms and corporate law departments are ideally situated to be leaders."

Last year, LTN focused attention on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Bay traveled to New Orleans to report on how the devastation affected the legal technology community. She has pledged to focus LTN's spotlight in 2007 on global warming -- "a natural extension of my interest in Katrina, which after all, is a global warming issue." At Monday night's LTN Awards dinner, Bay will announce the launch of a new column in the magazine, "Green Law," which debuts in the February issue, with a profile of Adobe Systems Inc. The San Jose, Calif., technology company won three 2006 platinum awards from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council for its efforts to save energy in its office towers, which take up about 1 million square feet.

The retrofit program -- which includes everything from recycling (on steroids) to using nontoxic cleaners to offering cash incentives for employees not to drive to work -- dramatically reduced the company's energy costs. Since 2001, Adobe has cut its electricity use by about 35 percent and gas consumption by 41 percent, despite increasing its head count by 80 percent. Bay says she was particularly impressed by Adobe's $150 investment into a timer that controls garage exhaust fans and outdoor lighting -- saving the company $68,000 a year.

LTN's new "Green Law" column will spotlight law firms, law departments and legal technology companies -- as well as individuals -- who take innovative steps to help fight global warming via technology. "I invite other members of our legal technology community to tell me how they, too, are creating environmentally responsible protocols and policies," says Bay, who also has pledged to report about these issues on her blog, The Common Scold.

In fact, her initial  blog reports generated contacts from two members of our community who already were involved, she recounts. "Alvidas Jasin, business development director of Cleveland's Thompson Hine, and consultant Stewart Levine both e-mailed me to tell me that they were en route to Tennessee for ClimateCrisis.net's three-day training programs that will prepare them to take Gore's message -- and his impressive slide show -- on the road."

And be careful. If you spend more than five minutes with Monica, she's likely to get you to promise to go get a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" -- or give you one. "As soon as I got home from Hawaii, I went right to my local video store and bought out all the copies they had of the movie," she admits.

The LegalTech New York 2007 daily newsletter will feature vendor updates each day of the show, space and time permitting.

Attenex Corp. has updated its widely used electronic discovery software with the release of Attenex Patterns 4.0. "Some of the new features include the identification, processing and review of documents written in 23 languages, more thorough management of suspect files during processing, easier reuse of previously marked documents, improved searching and tagging capabilities, and additional reviewer productivity tracking," says Mike Kinnaman, vice president of marketing for Attenex, which is based in Seattle.

CaseCentral, located in San Francisco, has introduced CaseCentral Corporate Edition and CaseCentral Law Firm Edition. The programs manage files related to shareholder and product liability class action suits, Sarbanes-Oxley-related litigation and government regulatory investigations. Privileged document tracking automatically creates audit trails and shows who reviewed a document and the changes they made. Both programs can store multiterabyte-sized cases to comply with the increased data storage requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

LexisNexis, based in Dayton, Ohio, has integrated CaseMap 7 and Concordance 2007 into the company's Total Litigator program. Legal professionals use CaseMap to organize and evaluate the facts, people and issues involved in a case. Concordance is transcript management software. Within Total Litigator, the new combination offers more assessment, discovery, filing, research and trial preparation tools. Lexis also introduced its Total Practice Advantage for Estate Practice. The software package combines practice management, research, client development and investigation tools.

MetaLINCS, headquartered in San Jose, Calif., unveiled version 3.0 of its Enterprise E-Discovery Suite, aiming it chiefly at companies bent on moving e-discovery in-house. The program, with suites designed to assist in major aspects of e-discovery -- processing, analysis, review and production of data -- includes enriched directories, with 25 content categories and 150 search parameters, among other changes, the company says. "The new [amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure] play to a lot of these strengths, and we've seen an uptick of interest from companies," says CEO Ramon Nunez. "The up-front 'meet and confer' makes early case assessment critical." MetaLINCS also plans to announce its new contract with the U.S. Department of Justice on Feb. 5 and an integration with Symantec Corp. security products in March.

Editor's note: Claire Duffett, news editor of Law Technology News magazine, contributed to the vendor news briefs.

Following a day-two keynote address entitled "Globalization and the Impact on the Legal Industry," the day's educational sessions will cover topics including corporate legal IT, knowledge management, litigation technology and emerging technologies.

I'll be honored to moderate two discussions on Tuesday: a case-assessment panel for LegalTech and a discussion of the changes to the Federal Rules for CIO Forum, a special ALM event that overlaps LegalTech.