The Dirt Lawyer's Blog Archive

Yes, I am a CrackBerry addict. I've had one since 2000 so I guess that makes me a dinosaur. I tried going without one for a few months and failed miserably. I think most dirt people have some kind of remote email access these days, no? I just read that BlackBerry had some kind of " critical outage " this afternoon. For me everything worked perfectly until 4:43, when my last email came in. Now, I have had nothing for almost 30 minutes, but it is the end of the day so I only missed two messages. I can also tell you my web browser's down. Arrrgh. I hope this is short-lived. I remember last April's outage all too well. I don't need it as much now as I do when I am traveling or during golf season (when I can sneak in golf during the workday). UPDATE: email is back up; but the web browser's down. I probably would not have noticed otherwise.

Here is an interesting discussion on The Bloodhound Blog on paperless transactions to which I made a recent contribution. Thanks to Jeff Brown for pointing it out. I've been reading about this paperless phenomenon for years. We're still not 100% there in my opinion, and that's okay with me. Call me old fashioned, but I like having the final documents in some tangible form in addition to the PDF copy I usually consult for ease of reference. Thankfully, however, the mountains of due diligence materials I have to review on a deal are all scanned and put into eletronic form, thus making them easier to send around the world. (And we're also saving trees, although some documents just still have to be printed to read carefully. I find that a BIG monitor for the PC helps in this regard.) In most cases, there is just no substitute for a piece of paper with ink on it. And if you want to exchange documents electronically without originals, I like to make sure that you can demand...