The Forecast is for More Clouds. We Hope that Not all Fade like Drop.io.

As readers of my blog know, I love Dropbox. It is growing in popularity, as it makes many, if not most, lists of  "must have" apps for iPad.

I do mourn the loss of Drop.io. It was a fine place to set up a one-time document repository for group to post and exchange documents. Some months after everyone quit using the drop, it quietly self-destructed. At first I thought that Facebook had bought Drop.io to add that feature to Facebook, but it appears maybe not.

Our friends at the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program did not just mourn the loss of Drop.io. They did some research and gave us a nice resource in Drop(site) Like It's Hot: Alternatives to Drop.io. Then yesterday Makeuseof.com  posted 3 New & Superb Ways To Share Files Online. That post pointed out that the introduction of HTML5 not only makes it easier to build web-based online document repositories, but also to do other "amazing" things with web pages.

Noted blogger Carolyn Elefantmentioned to me that the demise of Drop.io made her a bit uneasy about putting anything in the free cloud. I understand that. But we all like free. Maybe the key to using free cloud services is to pick those which have a premium or paid component. Hopefully while you use the free service,  others will be paying to support it and when you need more space or new features, it will be much easier to upgrade to the premium service than to move your files elsewhere. Of course you could always maintain duplicate sets of files on two services, but unless you set them up to synchronize automatically, that would defeat the "quick and easy" nature of these cloud services.

Ultimately the goal of a free cloud-based service of this type is almost certainly to make money. So they intend to be acquired, or convert to paid subscriptions only, or hope the service is so good that the free(up)loaders upgrade to receive more. But with more people relying on smart phones, iPads and other mobile devices in addition to their computers, we tightwads will hope that all of the free data clouds do not fade away.

Don't worry if you don't understand social media. Many media pros do not have a clue either

Today's observation and rant is inspired by the Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper that quite literally changed a man's life and whose management then couldn't figure out how to leverage that accomplishment to its own advantage without looking petty. Have you heard about the homeless guy with the golden voice? Well, sure you have. Most everyone has by now: young people, old people, people without Internet connectivity, people who couldn't name the current Vice-President. It was an incredible feel-good story that saw a guy go from homelessness to appearing on most of the national news shows and signing lucrative voice-over recording contracts. I am one of many hoping that he makes best use of this opportunity.

And this all happened because a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch posted a short video of the man, Ted Williams, on YouTube that went viral. Millions of people watched it and the national media pounced. So after, this huge rush of attention, how did the Columbus Dispatch make use of its position in this hot media story? The Columbus Dispatch has issued a takedown order demanding YouTube remove the video, which it has apparently done.

I am not claiming to be an expert on social media. In fact I am generally wary of the term "social media expert." Too many times this applies to someone who lost a job and had lots of time to play around on Facebook and Twitter while collecting unemployment or someone who is convinced that old media rules can simply be applied to social media. Here's your tip for the day. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the rest didn't get where they are today because they were complicated and challenging to use. Give them a try. Sure there are nuances and right/wrong ways to use them. But if you have a question, before you write some expert a check for ten grand, call your aunt who posts to Facebook ten times a week and see what she has to say. (She's been dying to hear from her nephew, anyway.)

And here's my non-expert advice to the Columbus Dispatch. I wouldn't know of your paper's name and Ted Williams would still be panhandling if not for YouTube. Dance with the one that "brung ya." Instead of making the paper look like an old media company that just doesn't get it, leverage your fifteen minutes of fame. Reach out to advertisers with "we made a homeless guy world famous, what can we do for your business?" See if Ted Williams will take your phone calls and keep doing follow up stories about how your reporter has changed this guy's life. Link to the YouTube video. Don't try to monitize it or move it exclusively to your site or whatever silly plan you have in mind.

It's a good lesson to lawyers and their clients. Sometimes the legal remedy is not the best plan. There may be a back story, but so far today the Columbus Dispatch went from having a warm place in many hearts to looking a bit sillly.

Websites for the New Year

Websites for the New Year was the theme that Courtney Kennaday and I picked for our Sites for Sore Eyes Column in the December, 2010 GPSolo Magazine. The format is "I resolve to..." and we featured some sites and safe surfing practices that take a little investment of time to set up. But there are some valuable sites and services here--if you take the time to set them up. As noted in the article, "[w]e are not going to tell you which of these sites we finally started using after much delay and which of us still needs to try a particular site. This is New Year’s Resolutions, after all, not True Confessions." We do hope that you try at least one or two of our resolutions in 2011.

Virtual Law Offices are Becoming a Real-World Alternative

Virtual law practices (or virtual law offices) might mean different things to different people. For today's discussion, I am talking about a lawyer who decides to practice without a physical office by using the Internet to attract and serve clients. I know a traditional law firm might decide to add a virtual practice component and some law firms have many or all who are virtual lawyers and do not work in the same location. But for today let's talk about the lawyer who decides that he or she can function without a physical office to meet and greet clients and avoid the overhead associated with maintaining that location.

I direct your attention to two resources on this topic: Jay Fleischman has a great new blog post "Being a Virtual Lawyer is all Mindset, not Technology" and in this month's podcast, the 33rd Edition of The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology, Sharon Nelson and I take on the topic Virtual Lawyering Goes Mainstream.

There are many reasons a lawyer might want to have a virtual law practice. A lawyer might have family responsibilities caring for children or (increasingly these day) ailing parents that keep one from practicing law full time and require flexibility in scheduling. A part time lawyer may have real trouble supporting a bricks and mortar practice overhead. A lawyer may have moved out of the state in which the lawyer is licensed for a few years, but intends to return and wants to do some legal work and keep current on the law. A veteran lawyer might want to slow down and focus on a few areas or a few clients he or she really enjoys. A lawyer might find that market forces have reduced what clients are willing to pay for certain types of services and the lawyers need to reduce the fees the lawyer charges without reducing net income.  A lawyer might want to travel more without retiring. A young lawyer wanting to open a law practice might not have the start-up capital and might be concerned about incurring more debt on top of their student loans to do so.

A lawyer also might have time committed to another endeavor or vocation. If a lawyer really enjoys officiating sporting events several nights  a week, a 9 - 5 job might be too much. A virtual law practice might be great for a lawyer in training for the Olympics or who is also a professional skateboarder. 

But while this practice could be good for the lawyer, the really important thing is that a virtual lawyer might also fit some client's needs and desires very well these days. Many potential clients are already doing a lot of their business and work online. Some clients have a difficult time getting off from work to meet with a lawyer from 9-5 and if the husband and wife both need to meet with the lawyer, it can be almost impossible. Besides if you offer the client the ability not to lose pay by missing work to meet with you, you are offering them an arguably more attractive service.

So the virtual lawyer might spend Thursday morning at the gym, have a lunch with friends or colleagues, run a couple of errands and then settle in for a late afternoon and evening session of video conference appointments with clients in their homes via Skype. You might not want to do that every night, but you wouldn't have to. Parents could spent the time when kids are in school or doing their homework doing legal work. For many, just avoiding a long commute would add several hours to their weekly schedule.

More and more, people are using the Internet for all sorts of reasons. Meeting with your lawyer online will seem no different than talking to your lawyer on the phone to many. If the workload is too much, there are those who serve lawyers as virtual assistants. Now certainly there are some situations where this may not work. It is hard to see a busy litigator who makes regular court appearances almost every day going virtual and if your work requires a staff of paralegals and assistants, that might be hard to manage virtually.

The virtual lawyer will probably have to make very smart decisions about limiting the practice areas and assignments they will accept. A virtual lawyer might have to accept that there is a ceiling to how much money could be made this way. (However, if one is paying 60% or more in overhead, the lawyer might also find a virtual practice with fewer clients still equals more money.)

Listen to the Virtual Lawyering podcast and read Jay Fleischman's outline of the tools he uses in his practice. There's a lot more to setting up a virtual law practice than we have covered here, including a far different marketing plan. But, give consumers a choice and you may find that they will choose a real, live "virtual" lawyer in their state instead of some national so-called document preparer who wants to charge them twice as much for no advice and a poorer result.

Google Scholar Adds Legal Journals and Opinions

In a move with possible profound implications, Google Scholar has added a dedicated search for legal journals and court opinions. Check it out here. Apparently they have the entire Heinonline database included as I located a couple of articles I wrote back in 2005 that I didn't know were available on the free web. My first guess is that this will not convince many lawyers to move from their current legal research tools, especially since so many now enjoy free legal research via their bar associations. But for those who pay for a limited plan, there may be a way to find cases outside of the plan for free. Many may now find that they have access to legal journals previously not available.

In a related note, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has just released a free full-text online law review/law journal search engine that searches the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals as well as other document repositories.

Social Media for Lawyers

I got a chance to meet Gerry Riskin and hear him speak last week. As many of you know, Gerry is a principal of Edge International and shares his wisdom with us through his Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices blog.

Gerry discussed Social Media as it related to the legal profession. Social Media suffers in our legal community by its name. It sounds more like a dating service or chat service than something a hard-nosed lawyer would have time to deal with. Gerry showed us a video that I'd like to share with you. Please trust me not to waste your 4 minutes and 33 seconds. It is a great video with good production values. But it is full of the kind of statistics that a good lawyer would use to prove a case. Be sure and view it in full screen mode.

The Travel Site Less Visited

For this September's Sites for Sore Eyes column in the GP/Solo Technology eReport, Courtney Kennaday and I review some online travel resources. It's just too bad we don't get to make more use of them!

Online Reputation Management: First Rule is to Avoid Self-Inflicted Wounds

A lot of people are concerned about online reputation management. They are worried about things posted online about them or their families. Lawyers in particular worry that unhappy former clients will post untrue things about the lawyer online that are difficult or impossible to refute.

Our Rules of Professional Conduct say a lawyer may reveal information relating to representation of a client "to establish a claim or defense on behalf of the lawyer in a controversy between the lawyer and the client" or " to respond to allegations in any proceeding concerning the lawyer's representation of the client." ORPC 1.6(b)(5)

OK, who thinks that applies because you didn't like something a former client said on Twitter or Facebook? Yeah. Me neither. Well, maybe if it libels the lawyer. But proving the fact of libel as a defense to an ethics complaint is not a road most of us would choose to travel.

So to me, the key to online reputation management is to put lots of positive information about you online and to tell your story. Just overwhelm any critics.

As we have seen with many well-documented Facebook and Twitter stories, the biggest potential danger area for damage to your online reputation is you. We saw it happen with flame e-mailing when angry and now you can post your anger or missteps online for the entire world to see with social networking.

Today's example is from a lawyer who uses Twitter. This lawyer is one of those who tweets many times a day and certainly has more followers than I do. I'm not going to identify that lawyer because I do understand if you do that many tweets a day not all will be award-winners.

But here's what he posted on Twitter as a "rule," not just an offhand remark: "If your lawyer's email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com), find a new lawyer." Now don't bother searching. His identity is not the point. And the rule was apparently reprinted from a national publication.

But that jewel coming from a lawyer insulted a lot of people and made a lot of them angry. He's already had one blogger today react negatively. When I read those words, even now hours later, my reaction is "You judgmental self-important jerk. How dare you tell people to fire their lawyers because of the e-mail service they use?" I recognized this person's name as a lawyer whose Twitter posts I had read before. I had a neutral, leaning positive opinion of him. But now for a long time, this is what I will think of when I see his name.

The ironic thing is I don't disagree with his general thinking. Lawyers in private practice representing clients should use an e-mail address that includes the law firm domain name in most cases. But failure to do so is not a firing offense. So the point gets obscured by the message. A few minutes ago a very, very techno-savvy sent several of us an e-mail using his Gmail account because of temporary problems with his primary e-mail account. (That's OK, Erik. None of us can fire you.) One of the most techno-savvy lawyers I know uses a Yahoo address and has for well over a decade. Right, Dan?

In fact, every techno-savvy lawyer I know has a GMail account!

Still somewhere, some person will search Twitter for "find a new lawyer" and learn that someone thinks they should fire their lawyer because of his or her e-mail address. If they are searching for that, they obviously aren't happy and maybe that will be the tipping point to fire their lawyer. Maybe they will even file a bar complaint.

So why am i going on about this? Because it is an unneeded, serious self-inflicted wound. It would be one thing entirely if this person sold e-mail services or was writing a paper on e-mail services. I have heard lawyers make the case that Gmail should not be used for confidential client e-mails because of Google's Terms of Service. That's a defensible opinion. But even the most jealous advocate of that theory knows it wouldn't be smart to insult the audience.

We've all been there. I have one rather infamous e-mail in my past I'd still like to have back. If you tweet multiple times per day, you are going to hit a few foul balls. I'll probably anger some people with this post. But, I think I am trying to make a point, which is let's all be careful out there on the Internet, OK?

By the way, three people subscribed to my blog e-mail alert service today. One used Hotmail and one used Gmail.

E-mail Management: Unsubscribing Works

I hate spam e-mail. It fills my inbox and wastes my time. I saw a report from a bar association this week that 94% of its incoming e-mail was spam. Of course, they filter most of that out.

But today I want to make sure you understand that some of the advice you received in the old days is not good advice anymore.

While there are many kinds of spammers, for today's discussion, let's assume there are two kinds: lawbreakers and legitimate businesses.

For lawbreakers and those who operate in the gray areas, we need help from the FBI, IT people, spam filters and the like. We can't do much on our own.

But many otherwise legitmate businesses use "e-mail marketing." Surely, I am not the only one who has noticed that when I toss business cards into fishbowls, trying to win a nicer iPod or some other great prize, what I always seems to win is being added to the company's e-mail marketing list. Other companies seem to add me just because they ran across my blog and found my e-mail address.

But, In the old days we were told never to click on "Unsubscribe" links at the bottom of spam e-mail as it just confirmed your identity and generated more spam. But since the federal CAN SPAM Act is being enforced, that is no longer true. So I regularly click on unsubscribe links to reduce the inflow of unwanted commercial e-mail. If I get spam e-mail that doesn't have an unsubscrobe option at the bottom, I will reply with a warning of legal consequences and a link to the FTC's page on requirements for commercial e-mailers. Often I get a quick apology by return e-mail. A person who built illegal spamming tools even got a jail sentence earlier this summer. Try it. It even makes you feel good.

The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links”

That's what Fred Wilson says and I agree. I think it is becoming clear now that there are many ways to use Twitter and many reasons to use Twitter. But to me the best thing about Twitter is the fact that it provides me with a large group of friends, professional acquaintances, some total strangers and some technology superstars who all voluntarily serve as a clipping service for me with links to news articles, blog posts, product launches and more. They also toss in their "special" content, too. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue gets wound up with some pretty funny stuff at night as he assembles his book based on readers' Tweets. Check him out here and see what I mean. (Twitter registration not required.)