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"Is Grandma Drugged Up?" is an interesting CNN article on overmedication of senior citizens with some valuable information and links. This isn't my usual fare here, but I figure that many of you practice elder law, most others have elderly relatives and all of us hope to become elderly some day.
If you were to try to boil down into three words the most important thing for a law firm to focus on to succeed, you couldn't go wrong with "superior client service." Leo Bottery did a post listing numerous Client Service blogs, which revisits a list Dan Hull published in early 2007. I'm happy my blog was on the list and inspired to do more client services postings the remainer of the year. But, the main reason I point this out to my readers is the great chance to do a little client service improvement in your own law firm. Here's one idea. Take 90 or so uninterrupted minutes with this list of blogs and a legal pad and pen. (See, I'm really an old fashioned guy at heart who still likes a pen.) Visit several of these blogs. Read the most recent posts and click on some of the categories or past month's archives. There are 30. So if one doesn't speak to you, move quickly on. Make some notes. After some time for reflection, try to come up with three simple ways you can improve your client services. E-mail the other decision makers and set a quick meeting to discuss implementation. (Hat tip to Larry Bodine.)
Today we have another report of a law firm making a technology blunder that appears to arguably violate a court order on what should be sealed and could adversely impact the client's case. According to an article originally published in the Connecticut Law Tribute, pleadings from a class action lawsuit against GE that the court ordered sealed were improperly redacted before being filed. Apparently anyone can access the pleadings through PACER, copy the redacted material and reveal the "redacted" text by pasting into a Word document. This is a class action sex discrimination suit seeking a potential $500 million recovery. Hopefully by now, the offending documents have been removed and others substituted.
Whether it is improper redaction of documents or metadata disclosure issues, the simple fact is that lawyers have to understand the technology tools that they and their staff are using. Judges are learning new technology lessons due to e-filing and electronic discovery and they will be less inclined to forgive lawyers who make these kinds of errors in the future. Don't try to do redaction without the proper tools, which means using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 (not a prior version) if you are using Adobe to do it or one of the other redaction tools like the plug-in mentioned in the article.
Several months ago a lawyer called me expecting to be criticized, I think. They were working late on a deadline and became concerned about a few redactions they had to make. They ended up printing the documents, marking through the text with a black magic marker and then scanning/OCR'ing the marked document to create a new PDF. "I guess you think we were pretty dumb, huh?" He said. My response was that I thought they had all slept well that night, knowing that they had erred on the side of caution and were sure they hadn't disclosed any information by accident.
Attorney Ralph Losey publishes the e-Discovery Team Blog. He has posted over 100 items there in the last 18 months. Of particular note is his most recent post where he mentions how useful the search features of his sites are and then provides summaries of his 31 "favorite" e-Discovery cases complete with links to the complete opinions. What a great resource!
I got a kick out of Martin v. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, 2006 WL 148991 (M.D Fla. Jan. 19, 2006) where the court held ignorance of technology is no excuse for failing to comply with e-discovery requests. The District Court held that the attorney’s “claim that he is so computer illiterate that he could not comply with production is frankly ludicrous.”
Ralph Losey is also the author of e-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases. I am pleased to recognize e-Discovery Team Blog as my Website of the Week.
You finally got your law firm Web site online and waited for the new clients to come rolling in. But for some reason it just didn't happen that way. Well, all of our marketing efforts are long term projects, with the possible exception of TV, radio and newspaper ads. Your marketing efforts will hopefully still pay off for years in the future. But the Internet is all about immediate gratification, right? So this week, I'll have a bit of an online symposium on getting noticed by the search engines.
The first article is The ABCs of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by two of my favorite people Sharon D. Nelson and John Simek of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. SEO is one of those terms that intimidates a lot of people. Sharon and John do a great job of explaining the basics in understandable language. Everyone should read this article even if you don't have time to start your SEO project this week. And, remember that you don't have to try all of these techniques. Trying just a few simple ones will no doubt boast your search engine ranking. You may want to print or save this article for later reference as it is hosted at the Canadian Bar's PracticeLink and may slip into the "password required" area soon.
The Technology eReport from the American Bar Association General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division this month featured two articles on online marketing.
Internet Marketing 101 for Attorneys: How to Reach Prospective Clients Through Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing by lawyer-turned-Internet-entrepreneur Jeff Lantz covers many topics such a PPC (pay per click), the importance of anchor text and questions to ask a SEO company before agreeing to pay for their services. Since Jeff heads a company that does SEO, among other Internet marketing services, I appreciate his sharing of knowledge. This is a quite good in-depth piece. I know how anchor text works to optimize your site's ranking by search engines. People link to my blog by its name. Do a Google search for "law practice tips" with or without the quotes and see the results.
Marketing Your General Practice Firm Online is an article by Jennifer Black. "Although legal–related businesses are one of the top five topics consumers search for on the Internet every single day, the trick to connecting with these potential customers, involves a successful online marketing strategy that helps improve the ways these local firms can be found online," she states in this feature. I found this interesting. In the early days of law firm websites, the lawyers noticed that they initially got a lot of out-of-state clients who used the Internet because they didn't have access to local resources like phone directories. But now people use Web searches for local resources because they find the results more easily and quickly than with a phone directory. Want to start the betting pool on the eventual death of the Yellow Pages in print?
These three articles can expand your understanding of how the Internet can bring your clients--if you have a Website. But let's not forget the basics either. Have a unique and understandable domain name for your law firm website. Then make sure it is included on your stationery, firm brochures and the e-mail signature blocks of everyone in the firm. You might even have a sign in your waiting area "Visit us on the Web at xxx." Update your content regularly and if the domain name is short enough, include it in your Yellow Pages ad, as long as you still have one.
Courtney Kennaday and I have just published "See You Later, at the Aggregators!" for our column Sites for Sore Eyes that appears regularly in the ABA GP Solo Division Technology eReport.
Despite the huge initial embrace of RSS newsfeeds and newsreaders from the technology early adopters, many lawyers and other Net users have shied away from fully embracing the RSS concept, at least intentionally. So this month Courtney and I decided to outline all the different forms of news aggregators, from those that will download all of the feeds you want into a inbox and save them until you have time to review them to the simple idea of customizing a personal news page so that you can visit it when you have the time.
So if you really don't understand RSS feeds or news aggregators, this article is for you. But even those who use an aggregator now may want to read this to learn of the newest options that are now available. Hopefully more court opinions will be available via RSS feeds, like the Oklahoma appellate court opinions (and other states we mention in the article.) As I have noted before the effect of court RSS feeds is just like free electronic advance sheets.
There are literally tons of books published on increasing your productivity and improving your time management skills. There are numerous classes, blogs, (I noted 100 of them not long ago.) websites, coaches and other resources to give advice in this area. 50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily is a quick treatment of much of the advice you would learn from these other resources. You can't try all of these at once or you'd overdose on productivity. But you can pick three or four that you willing to try and save the link for future reference.
I think all-on-a-page news aggregators are pretty slick and I've featured several of them already this year. Law.alltop.com is a really nice example of combining many newsfeeds from blogs and law-related news sources. The great thing here is you can hover over any headline and see all or a large part of the linked item. This preview lets you decide whether you want to click for the entire item or not. This is very cool and law firm web designers should take note. Law was not the first subject of an Alltop treatment. The Alltop site shows you the varied collections that have already been created.
We're still getting quite a few visits to our Oklahoma Bar Law Practice aggregator, with tips from the practice management advisors, and its three companion aggregators. There are more advanced methods with more customization and features. But, for now, it seems like many lawyers like the idea of a simple "click, click" for their news and information break as noted in this article.
Here's an idea our family is trying this summer. Hopefully it will help us with scheduling and hopefully we will continue after the summer. We are setting up Google Calendars and sharing them so that you view all in one combined view. There are many other options for online calendars, like CalendarHub or 30 Boxes. But we all have GMail accounts, so the choice was easy. It's not like this is a new idea. But we think the time has come to have one place we can check online for the family plans, trips, sports camps, times Dad will be staying out of town for work and Norman, OK events we want to attend.
The setup was simple (as are most things Google) so we will see how it goes. I also think it gives my 6th grade son a little training in a life skill. No matter what career he has, I can't imagine that it won't involve keeping a calendar on a computer, a hand device or perhaps a holographic display. And, of course, it is my favorite price - free.
The ironic thing is that earlier this week I was promoting Erik Mazzone's Law Practice Matters blog and when I visited his blog I noticed that his latest post was this one saying that you must only have one calendar. Well, I'm not saying he is wrong. Maybe this is just the exception to the rule. There will certainly be some duplicate entry required with a few family matters that have to go on the office calendar because they impact it. But I like the idea of keeping business things on the "work" calendar and when I get contacted with some personal invitation I can have the family calendar available in seconds. It beats the present system, which is bothering my spouse with an inquiry.
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