♬ …I care for you… I’m there 
… I’m there for you…I care… ♬

Lyrics, music and recorded by Wolfsheim.

Jay Fleischman in a blog post entitled: “Is the Virtual Law Firm Model Coming up Short?” opines that lawyers practising in a virtual practice are ‘missing an ingredient’. Mr. Fleischman continues:

Those who offer the virtual law firm are selling something most people don’t want.  People want to be able to make a personal connection with other people, to build trust in a lawyer’s expertise.  They don’t want to be met with a password-encrypted firewall and triple-redundant backup systems.

Mr. Fleischman and I agree on at least one point thou:  it isn’t about the technology.  Most certainly!

But with respect, we differ on where to take it from there. In Mr. Fleischman’s view:

You need to figure out how to connect with people who are not necessarily in front of you.  In fact, you’ve got to determine when being face-to-face is best for the client.

Yes, but … that is only part of the picture.  In my view, Mr. Fleischman fails to take his argument to its logical conclusion. Why would face-to-face be best for (some) clients?  Not because “people want to make a personal connection” (per Mr. Fleischman) but because they have to know – trust – feel – that you care. (more…)

♬ I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes, I would if I only could, I surely would… ♬

Lyrics and Music by Daniel Alomía Robles, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel.

I have just returned from an invitation from Anthony C. Infanti, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of Pittsburgh School of Law  and Keeley P. Mitchell, Esq, 
Director of Public Interest and Government Relations at Pitt Law, to participate in a panel for the University of Pittsburgh 2^nd year law students on legal career prospects.  In my humble opinion, this discussion attempted to answer the question: “Why stay in Law School, given the current economic climate?” Accordingly, I thought I would write down my thoughts on why the current cohort of students should consider staying in law, doing my best to also include and summarize the comments of the other panel members (any misquotes or errors are mine, not those of the respective learned panel members!).  In addition to the Associate Dean Anthony C. Infanti, who moderated the discussion and your humble scribe, the panel consisted of:

• Robert Denney, the President of Robert Denney Associates, Inc.,
• Michael Ginsberg, a Partner in the Trial Practice of Jones Day,
• Erin M. Lucas, an associate Manion McDonough & Lucas, P.C. and the President of the Allegheny County Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division,
• Catherine Martin, a managing attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services Association in Pittsburgh, PA.,
• Gabriel Reis, an in-house attorney for Alcoa Inc. and
• Mark Vouno, the ACBA President-Elect and  a partner in Vuono & Gray, LLC.

First, a career in law offers you not just a job – it offers you much more.  Your legal career has the possibility of working on novel and fascinating work that continually changes and brings you in touch with bright and interesting people.  You learn about new things all the time.  It is an intellectual exercise that can captivate your skills, your intellectual faculties and can result in achieving some real and meaningful results for people – and allows you to be,  in every respect of the word, a legal professional and not someone who just has a legal job. (more…)

♬ Tell me what you want and i’ll give you what you need… ♬

Lyrics and Music by Patrick Simmons, recorded by The Doobie Brothers.

PLTC 2011 Logo

The 2011 Pacific Legal Technology Conference will be held Friday October 7, 2011 at the new West wing of the Vancouver Trade and Convention Center.

The Pacific Legal Technology Conference is a bit different from other legal technology conferences due to the fact that attendees can take the conference survey and tell us which courses, issues and topics they would like to see in the program. The survey contains the ‘short list’ of topics that the Advisory Board pulled together in their preparations and deliberations.

So: Welcome to the 2011 Pacific Legal Technology Conference Survey – where you can design the conference that you wish to see! I invite you to have a hand in designing this year’s Conference by indicating to us which proposed sessions are of most interest to you.

This survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete and we ask that you complete the survey on or before JUNE 30, 2011.

Here is a link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NN3PKZF

Furthermore, at the end of the survey you will receive a web address entitling you to a special survey respondent admission rate for this year’s conference. This special rate of $325+ HST CDN ($325 USD) (or $225+HST CDN for law students/staff ($225 USD)) is our way of saying ‘Thanks’ and represents a $50 savings off of our Early Bird Rate!

This special survey rate is only good until July 31, 2011 – you have to complete the survey by June 30, 2011 and send in the registration by July 31, 2011 to be eligible for this offer.

Furthermore, by completing the survey you are eligible for a draw for one of two free admissions to the Conference.

Thanks for your participation!

Tell me what you want and as Chair of the Conference, I will endeavor to give you what you need…

♬ Magical beams ignite your dreams
See another world than the one you know
The lightening bug glow..♬

Lyrics and music by Cowboy Swami Shaman

Fireflies

This is the latest in the “What’s Hot and What’s Not” posts by Bob Denney of Robert Denney Associates, Inc. for June, 2011. As usual, Bob’s analysis of what is happening in the legal profession is not only interesting, it provides great insight into the currents that are underlying the practice of law at this time.

One of the summer diversions for kids in certain parts of the United States is trying to capture lightening bugs in a bottle. Compiling this Update has been a lot like that – trying to capture in a few pages everything that’s going on in the legal profession right now. We don’t claim to have succeeded. But here are what we consider the most significant – or interesting – developments.

PRACTICE AREAS

Red Hot

 Health Care. Includes many areas and all type of providers.

 Energy. In addition to oil and gas, there are increasing issues in nuclear and now coal.

 Financial Services. Institutions are trying to understand the scope of Dodd Frank in many areas including consumer protection. Some firms have formed multidisciplinary teams to guide clients in dealing with the new regulations, some of which are not yet defined.

Hot

 Regulatory. Both federal and state, especially in health care, energy, financial services and possibly environmental.

 White Collar Crime. And getting hotter.

 Labor & Employment. There are continued reports that wage-and-hour laws have been widely violated.

 Intellectual Property. Congress may pass patent reform legislation any day now. As one CMO said, “This should create an interesting world for a while.” (more…)

♫ ‘cuz I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud
it’s taken me all this time to find out what I need… ♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Bush.

It seems these days that virtually everyone is jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. However, while the cloud offers a great deal especially to the solo and small firm lawyer, there are considerations to take into account prior to moving to the cloud. Here is a selection of ethical and practical considerations in cloud computing illustrated by real-life examples of turbulence felt in the cloud:

What if the cloud provider goes down?

Can’t happen? Just ask any of the businesses that used Amazon cloud services. The New York Times in an article by Steve Lohr on April 22, 2011 detailed the issues that Amazon’s 4 day outage created: (more…)

♫Cause there’s something inside of me I left behind
And there’s something inside of me
I just, I just got to find

It’s reinvention re-i-n-v-e-n-t-i-o-n
(I’ll say it again)
It’s reinvention re-i-n-v-e-n-t-i-o-n …♫

Music and lyrics by: Hazel O`Connor – A. Karner.

I have been a bit wrapped up lately in getting ready for presentations at ABA TECHSHOW and the Ethics 20/20 – Globalization, Technology and Transforming the Practice of Law symposium at the McGeorge School of Law (presenting with Stephanie Kimbro, Mike Downey, Professor Paul Patton and Chas Rempenthal of LegalZoom).  But I read with interest Drago Adams regular “Monday Morning Motivator” email from The Adams Advertising Group and thought it was such a wonderfully motivating piece that I have reposted it here with his permission:

Reinvention Has Never Been Easier

This week we share a powerful and timely message from one of our favorite authors and idea virus spreaders, Seth Godin.

Are you serious about transformation?

I’m not talking about polishing yourself, improving yourself, making things a bit better. I’m talking about the reset button’s reinvention that changes the game. That means an overhaul in what you believe and how you do your job. If you’re up for that, then right here, right now, you can start. How? (more…)

♫ A bright light
A new position
A new conviction…♫

Music, lyrics and recorded by The Appleseed Cast.

This is another great guest post from Beth Flynn from the Ohio State University Leadership Center:

Beth Flynn

This post deals with ways to Inspire employees to embrace change in your organization:

1. Awareness: The manager is responsible for generating awareness of the proposed change.

2. Value in awareness: The manager is also responsible for providing employees with supportive information that will inspire them to find value in the proposed change.

3. Thinking: While the manager still has some responsibility in supporting the thinking of employees in this stage, this is the stage where employees begin to bear the burden of responsibility for the proposed change. If you are the manager and you do not begin to see a transfer of responsibility taking place with a noticeable shift in thinking by employees you must go back to stage two.

4. Actions: In this stage, responsibility has mostly shifted to employees. The beauty of this process is that thinking drives actions, so the shift in thinking that takes place literally sets the stage for new actions and behaviors. Again, if you are not seeing actions and behaviors supporting the desired change, you must go back to stage two.

5. Results: The results are everybody’s responsibility. For the proposed change to be embraced and realized within an organization, the results will be a natural outcome of the shift in thinking and new actions and behaviors (Laurin & Morningstar, p. 11-13).

Laurin, C., & Morningstar, C. (2009). The Rudolph Factor: Finding the Bright Lights that Drive Innovation in Your Business. Hoboken, NJ. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Rudolph Factor is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. Click here to borrow this resource or any other resource. Then click on the Spectrum icon.

Learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is inspiring others to take a leadership role that empowers the world at http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu

Thanks Beth for being our bright light!

♫ You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do … ♫

Music, Lyrics and recorded by: Jackson Browne.

A recent quote by my friend and notable practice management consultant Gerry Riskin caught my eye: “[T]oo many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetencies believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant. I say they might as well be sneaking into the firm at night and taking cash out of the safe. The costs associated with that attitude include:

• poorer client service by failing to capitalize on the efficiencies technology offers
• competitive disadvantage (clients do not find incompetency charming ever)
• wasted IT personnel time
• distracting and therefore delaying or discouraging the latest IT initiatives.”

Has knowledge of information technologies reached a stage where it can be considered a de facto, if not quite a de jure, standard of practice? One way to look at this is to see where IT knowledge is necessary to legal practice:

Land Titles: The Land Title and Survey Authority of BC has made it known that an end-date for filing most documents in paper form is not far off.

Corporations: Corporate Online is the route to deal with a corporation’s filings in BC.

Courts: Courts Services Online will be expanding the use of technology in the courts over the next three years. Mandatory e-filing is not far into the future.

Metadata: e-discovery has literally taken the litigation world by storm. Aside from the need to be able to handle discovery in multiple electronic formats (video, audio, text, chat etc.) failing to obtain discovery in native electronic form may fail to find the ‘smoking gun’. In the US case of: In re Payment Card Interchange Fee & Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation, 2007 WL 121426 (E.D.N.Y. Jan. 12, 2007), it is set forth: “[D]ata ordinarily kept in electronically searchable form ‘should not be produced in a form that removes or significantly degrades this feature.’” Production in TIFF, a common e-discovery format, can delete non-printable metadata.

Legal Reseach: Whether it is LexisNexis, Westlaw or CanLii, legal research today is carried out in on-line form. Law firms use bound case reports to decorate their hallways.

ICBC e-billing: This is a recent development that requires litigators to submit invoices in purely electronic form if they wish to retain ICBC as a client.

Adobe Acrobat: Hardly any application has had such a dramatic impact on the legal profession. It is applied for e-filing, document exchange, archiving of emails and records and more.

Security, privacy and encryption: Knowledge of how to create, store, access and exchange documents and communications confidentially and securely is implied by the Canons of practice. This extends to e-documents and e-communications by implication.

Remote Access: Today lawyers must be able to securely access their files and information using the Internet from where ever they may be.

Sharepoint: The next frontier. Clients are demanding private secure areas on the net that contains all the information on their files accessible 24/7.

Failing to keep current with legal technology has a hidden cost that will become increasingly apparent as technology becomes a necessary component of competent practice.

(This post was originally written for the Canadian Bar Association – British Columbia Branch’s newsletter “BarTalk” in the column “PracticeTalk”).

♬  Modern technology
unleashed upon mankind…♬

Lyrics, music and recorded by Cause For Effect.

Microsoft Office for the Mac

Well I thought it was about time to try the latest version of Microsoft’s Office for the Mac, version 2011.  2011 was released in Oct, 2010 and has been followed by ‘bug fixes’ and the usual series of updates (one major one shortly after release), so I thought it would be safe to download this latest version by now.

I had been using the 2008 version with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Entourage.

One of the major differences in the 2011 version is the incorporation of Outlook onto the Mac to replace Entourage.   I won’t go into an extensive review of the differences between the 2008 and 2011 version since PCMag did such a great job, giving the 2011 version of Microsoft Office for the Mac a Best of the Year 2010 Award.

Now I have to say that while I learned to adjust to Entourage, I use Outlook on a PC daily (I work concurrently on a PC and a Mac).  I learned to like (and know) Entourage, I knew Outlook from years of use and experience.  So yes, I was actually looking forward to seeing Outlook on the Mac. (more…)

♬ Crystal ball
There’s so many things I need to know
Crystal ball
There’s so many things I’ve got to know
Crystal ball…♬

Music and lyrics by: Tommy Shaw, recorded by Styx.

I wanted to end off this year by gazing into the crystal ball and make a list of the top 10 legal technologies that I see influencing 2011. There is always a danger in making predictions but it is also a bit of fun too. So without further ado here is Dave’s Top 10 List of Legal Technologies for 2011: (more…)