North Carolina Bar

BBQ, Crawfish, Gumbo and Soul

As I start my journey back home to Florida, I shoot over to Memphis to partake of some great BBQ. When it comes to barbeque, there’s four distinct types: North Carolina, Texas, Kansas City and Memphis.

I stopped in at a little shop in Memphis that’s been serving up a great Memphis-style menu for 60 years.

Some locals told me I had to try The Bar-B-Q Shop , Home of the Dancing Pigs . It’s not on the main tourist drag of Beale Street but right in the heart of a residential area and is definitely a local favorite. That’s the type of place I always look for when traveling — a great restaurant known only to the locals.

The Bar-B-Q Shop's glazed ribs, topped with a dry rub, won first place this year at Memphis in May , one of the largest BBQ competitions in the country.

It sounded so good, I had to order my pork ribs glazed. Along with the ribs, I tried their beef brisket and pulled pork sandwich. I must confess that I’m not that much a fan of BBQ, but I ate until I couldn’t hold another bite. The food was everything I was told it would be. If you’re a BBQ fan, or even if you think you’re not, stop here next time you’re in Memphis and be prepared to pig out on some pig!

Next I drove down to Lafayette, LA, for some southern soul food cooked up by Dwyer’s Café .

This place has been serving up great home cooked foods for decades, and it’s definitely a favorite among locals. You’ll find students, attorneys, judges and construction workers all sitting side by side at lunch enjoying the food here.

I opted for the “Meat and 3” buffet. You’ll find this in many southern home cooking places. You choose your main meat, plus three sides from a large selection. I tried the fried catfish, cornbread dressing, navy beans and yams. Again, the locals knew what they were talking about. The food was great home cooking. If you want a meal like mom or grandma used to make, then this is where you come in Lafayette.

My final stop, and definitely one of my favorites, was at a true “hole in the wall” along a road that cuts right through the industrial area.

It’s a concrete block building that you would zoom right by and never even notice if you weren’t looking for it. But I was looking for it, and even though my GPS had a hard time locating it, I got there just minutes before they opened their doors for lunch at 11 a.m. There was already a line waiting for those doors to open — a very good sign of a great place.

NC Bar Goes Back to the Drawing Board on Cloud Ethics

One thing seems certain about the Ethics Committee of the  North Carolina State Bar —it is trying hard to get its opinion right on the ethics of cloud computing.

In April 2010, the committee issued a proposed opinion that addressed the question of whether a law firm may ethically use Software as a Service in light of a lawyer’s duty to safeguard confidential client information and protect client property from destruction or loss. The opinion answered the question in the affirmative, “provided steps are taken effectively to minimize the risk of inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of confidential client information and to protect client property, including file information, from risk of loss.”

The proposed opinion generally elicited praise from lawyers who use cloud-based applications and from vendors that provide such applications. (See what we at Catalyst had to say about it in two posts,  The Legal Ethics of Cloud Computing and  N.C. Ethics Opinion on SaaS Merits Broader Inquiry .) But after putting the proposed opinion out for public comment, the Ethics Committee withdrew it and, on April 21, 2011, filed a revised proposed opinion (Proposed 2011 Formal Ethics Opinion 6).

While this second proposed opinion again endorsed lawyers’ use of cloud computing, it also proposed minimum requirements a lawyer should adhere to in selecting a cloud provider. This time, the comments were less favorable, with many in the legal computing arguing that the requirements were so onerous as to effectively block the use of many cloud applications. On behalf of several cloud vendors, the  Legal Cloud Computing Association filed  written comments objecting to the proposed opinion. The comments said:

[W]e believe that the additional minimum requirements imposed on lawyers as mandatory requirements will, as a practical matter, limit the ability of North Carolina lawyers to use cloud computing services in their practices, causing North Carolina’s lawyers to become less competitive with lawyers from other states.

Rather than “mandatory requirements”, we believe that it makes more sense to establish basic principles and suggested guidelines, leaving to the individual attorney to use their best judgment to exercise reasonable care under the particular circumstances of their practice, in choosing a SaaS provider.

The  International Legal Technology Standards Organization also filed comments opposing the proposed opinion, as did a number of individual attorneys.

The North Carolina bar

The North Carolina bar

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North Carolina journal of law

Report of the ... annual meeting of the North Carolina Bar Association