Last week ABA TECHSHOW 2010 was held. Although I've never met an ABA TECHSHOW I didn't like, this one was outstanding and special. Congratulations to Debbie Foster and the rest of the TS planning board. Congratulations are due as well to the attendees, vendors and rest of the ABA TECHSHOW community. In a time when some conferences are folding and videoconferencing replaces many face-to-face meetings, it seems clear that there will be ABA TECHSHOWs for many years into the future. Of course let me be one of the first to note the pressure on the members of the 2011 ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board to top this one.
One of the highlights of ABA TECHSHOW is 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. This year's presenters did a great job and the links to all of their 60 sites has already been posted.
Cloud computing and social networking were hot topics. But I also noted how many presentations centered around our phones. 60 iPhone Apps in 60 Minutes was a great new addition and I vote for it to return next year. Check out the collection of this year's 60 apps. There were two other presentations on tips for using smart phones, or as some are now calling them, app phones. I'll be writing more about app phones in this month's Oklahoma Bar Journal and will link to it here when that is published online.
The night before TECHSHOW, Ignite Law 2010 debuted with 16 speakers showing how well they could communicate a message in six minutes. (Lawyers recognize that time unit as 1/10th of a billable hour.) If you had to miss it, as i did, you can watch the videos of all of the speakers online. One of the popular favorites was my good friend Tom Mighell. I hope all of my fellow bar executives and many law school faculty members will watch his six minutes on why teaching of practice management skills in law school should increase and why more state bars should offer practice management advisory services. I'd also encourage you to view fellow Oklahoma lawyer Doug Sorocco's program on small firm lawyers slaying the beast.
The ABA Journal covered the TECHSHOW alternative billing presentation by me and Natalie Kelly in the story Alternative Billing Gains Traction for Solos, Small Firms. Nicole Garton-Jones and I teamed up for a presentation on The Traveling Lawyer. You can read her thoughts on Working Virtually in the current issue of Law Practice magazine.
There's so much more to blog about, but I've got to head off to give a speech. There are already dozens of other online accounts of ABA TECHSHOW 2010 for you to read anyway. But, in my view, one blogger who really nailed it was Gabe Acevedo with "The ABA Techshow: You Say You Want A Revolution? There’s an App for That" at AboveTheLaw.com. He said: "The ABA Techshow has done a great job at carving out a very specialized niche for itself — a niche which is attracting a breed of lawyer that is operating ahead of the curve on a daily basis....The majority of the Techshow attendees are not just curious about technology, they live for it. Where Biglaw is resistant to change, the Techshow crowd is always looking for ways to adapt. They are scrappy. Most are constantly writing articles in journals and other publications and are not afraid to use social media to promote their ideas online." ABA TECHSHOW attendees "get it." You should join us next year in Chicago on April 11-13th, 2011.
And, by the way, welcome to all of the new subscribers to the RSS feed and e-mail updates to this blog. There are often some new subscribers after ABA TECHSHOW and I hope you will find my content useful.
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