ABA TECHSHOW is about your Future

The Early Bird Deadline for registering for ABA TECHSHOW 2012 has been extended until February 24, 2012. This is a really good year to attend ABA TECHSHOW.

As ABA TECHSHOW Reid Trautz notes in his TECHSHOW blog post, Why ABA TECHSHOW is About Your Future, there are many changes impacting the legal industry. Some of these changes are the result of the adoption of new technology, while technology is the key to responding to others. An ABA Journal article this week quoted law professor Brian Tamanaha as writing that law schools produce 45,000 new graduates each year, while only 25,000 job openings are projected each year through 2018. Surely we all have to recognize that trend impacts many practicing lawyers, not just the newly minted lawyers who cannot find a job.

Read Mr. Trautz's post. This is a critical time for us all. I'm excited about ABA TECHSHOW and my Saturday morning presentation, The Future of Law Practice: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings. I hope to see you at ABA TECHSHOW.

ABA TECHSHOW 2012 -- Hope to see you there

ABA TECHSHOW is my best learning experience every year. No other legal technology conference has so many of the Who's Who of legal technologists because of the number of presentations that are offered. The Early Bird deadline is February 17, 2012 and the savings are significant. You can register and get more information at www.techshow.com. Just take a look at this great lineup of timely presentations. Many of you may be a member of a bar association that is an ABA TECHSHOW Event Promoter and provides you with another discount.

I am extremely excited about my two presentations at ABA TECHSHOW 2012. My first presentation is with Diane Ebersole, who is a practice management advisor for the Michigan Bar Association. Our topic is “Magic in Minutes: Effective Use of Document Assembly." This is truly a hot topic. With three cloud-based practice management systems announcing new document assembly tools in the last several weeks and a new generation of tools that operate as Microsoft Word plug-ins, there have been a lot of recent developments in this area.

“The Future of Law Practice: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings?” is the title of the plenary session that I will do to kick off the final day of ABA TECHSHOW. Doing a solo plenary session at ABA TECHSHOW is a great honor and responsibility. I will not claim to have the reputation and expertise of Richard Susskind, who addressed ABA TECHSHOW 2009 on a similar topic, but I have a list of ideas to share about preparing for your next decades in law practice. Here is an article I wrote for the Oklahoma Bar Journal that you can download to give you a preview. Download OBJ 2012 Jan14 - Preparing for ABA TECHSHOW

The world is changing. Attend ABA TECHSHOW to master these changes, As a tweet from @emyth observed recently, "If you're waiting for change to happen to you, it will, but probably not the change you want." I hope to see you at ABA TECHSHOW.

Et tu, Google?

One of the most significant items in technology news so far this year is Google's significant changes to its privacy policy. Google will now combine all of your data from all Google services together and users won't be able to opt out. See Washington Post Google announces privacy changes across products; users can’t opt out 

Long before I saw the movie The Social Network, I had come to the conclusion that the members of the Facebook team were, quite frankly, not good people. Facebook rolls out change after change of its privacy policy and the impact of each was that you had to make changes or your personal information would be shared more broadly than you originally intended. The average user really had no hope of maintaining control unless they were a privacy zealot willing to spend hours researching and coping with each change. My friend, Ben Schorr once said to me that you cannot look at Facebook just as a way you share information with friends. It is more accurate to look at Facebook as a giant advertising operation intent on selling your information which baits you into providing that information by letting you also share it with friends.

Google, on the other hand, had as its informal motto, "Don't be Evil." It was the company that allowed us to use the web in a meaningful way by giving us Google search. It seemed to be the embodiment of the idea that a company could do a great public service and make a healthy profit. GMail, Google Reader, Google Translate and many other services improved my life, did not cost me a thing and Google made tons of money with various advertising services. That was pre-2012 Google. Now Google is going to use my information in ways that I never intended and the nice little phrase "no opting out" can be Google translated as "and there's nothing you can do about it."

Your attention is directed to Google’s Watching You: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Google is now going to expand its practice of filtering Google search results based on what Google knows about me.

As the author notes, "Maybe if I’m from New York, I’ll see more articles favorable to the Giants for the next ten days. If I’m from Massachusetts, I’ll see articles supporting the Patriots.

"That doesn’t seem so bad… at first. But let’s dig a bit deeper.

"Let’s say I’m a political animal. Perhaps I get a lot of mail from Move On, or spend time with the Drudge Report. Google already uses this information to select what it shows me when I search. The 'Obama' links shown to the Move On reader are very different from those shown to the Drudge browser." id.

That is pretty significant. I can imagine someone working on a degree in Abnormal Psych may have some interesting sponsored links in their GMail account. Congress passed a law saying video rental stores could not keep permanent records of what movies I rent, but now Google will be doing that for what YouTube videos I watch. It is really quite Orwellian, except it turns out Big Brother isn't the government, but it is Google, which is already much more powerful than a bunch of national governments.

What can be done? Not much. European privacy laws may eventually temper some things. There will be antitrust investigations and Congressional hearings. But Google is already too ingrained in our personal and professional lives for most of us to even limit our usage. Google Reader will know your online reading habits and combining that with your YouTube viewing habits will give a significant window into your life and thinking.

What Google has proved is the truth of the cliché about online services: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Et tu, Google?

The iPad for Litigators is a hot topic

Later today I will be presenting for an online CLE titled The iPad for Litigators. Don't bother rushing to enroll as the program is now sold out. The last I heard they were closing in on 600 registered to take the class. (It will be repeated on February 3, 2012.)

My co-presenters are Tom Mighell, chair of the ABA Law Practice Management Section, blogger at iPad 4 Lawyers and author of iPad in One Hour for Lawyers and Jamie Moncus of the firm Hare Wynn, who recently obtained a $37.5 million verdict using iPad trial presentation technology. I hear more every week about how lawyers are using iPads in their practices. I am grateful for the opportunity to co-present on this topic. As is almost always the case, I have learned more preparing for this program and may learn even more during the program.

Moving to a Virtual Practice Model – Do You Have the Right Stuff?

The September/October issue of the ABA Law Practice Magazine covers virtual law practices. I was the guest editor for this issue of the magazine and wrote the story Moving to a Virtual Practice Model – Do You Have the Right Stuff? I won't recapitulate the entire article here, other than to say my conclusion is "it depends." But I have no doubt this business model will prove very attractive to some.

I appreciate all of those who contributed to this issue of the magazine. There is a lot of great content here from a lot of experts. The features include:

The Next Five Years – Predictions for the Future of eLawyering By Richard S. Granat and Marc Lauritsen

Watch Where You Set Your Virtual Foot – Advice on Dealing with Varying State Rules By Daniel J. Siegel

The Untethered Law Office – Tools and Tips for Getting It Done By Jay S. Fleischman

Using Online Service Providers – Where the Duty of Confidentiality Reigns By Kathryn A. Thompson (research counsel for ETHICSearch, a service of the American Bar Association Center for Professional Responsibility.)

Leading the Virtual Firm By Karen Mackay

Popular Cloud Computing Services for Lawyers: Practice Management Online By Stephanie L. Kimbro and Tom Mighell  (Stephanie's blog VirtualLawPractice.org is a great resources on this topic.)

And there is a related article: Marketing Alternative Fee Arrangements By Mark A. Robertson

There are other greeat columns and articles in this magazine. I hope it can serve as a resource for some of you interested in learning more about virtual law practices.

Venture Capitalists Take Aim at Lawyers

“First they came for the book store owners, and I didn’t speak up because I didn’t own a book store and cheaper books sounded good. Then they went after the big music labels and I didn’t speak up because I never liked the Big Music industry anyway. But now they are coming after the legal profession and that is just wrong in so many ways. It is time to fight back.”

The paraphrasing of Martin Niemöller’s famous statement may strike many readers as a poor attempt at humor. But the recent news articles about Google focusing on the legal industry merit the attention of lawyers. Let’s face it. If you are in a contest, you would probably not want it to be against Microsoft or Google.

Forbes magazine carried the news this month that Google Ventures is part of a group pouring $18.5 million into Rocket Lawyer, which is claiming to be the “fastest growing online legal service.” This news was followed up by a Forbes column titled “Google Backing of DIY Legal Forms Will Force Lawyers To Lower Fees.”

Certainly Rocket Lawyer is not the only business seeking to profit from providing preparation of legal documents online. When the economic outlook for the legal profession is certainly not projected to be one of increasing profits, why are venture capitalists apparently so interested in the legal profession? To answer that question, I turned to Richard Granat. Granat is the lawyer behind DirectLaw, a firm that provides lawyers with the tools to set up virtual practices that deliver documents and legal services online. He is also a long-time member and current Co-Chair of the eLawyering Task Force of the ABA Law Practice Management Section.

Calloway: So what is the story behind such VC interest in the legal profession?

Granat: With Google Ventures funding both LawPivot and RocketLawyer™ and Kleiner Bell’s group investing $66,000,000 in LegalZoom combined with other evidence of interest that I have seen in the VC community, I see a “buzz” or “new paradigm” going around this community ( “the VC community”), that it is time to break the back of solos and small law firms by funding disruptive experiments that are designed to bring real change to the delivery of legal services, no matter what impact it has on the livelihoods of solos and small law firms.

Calloway:  I talk to a lot of lawyers who already say they are working longer hours for less money. I thought the VC money chased highly profitable and emerging ventures.

Granat:  The legal profession is just the next target of opportunity, no matter what the social cost. The VC funds don’t really care that what they are investing in may be violating existing unauthorized practice of law (UPL) laws, e.g. LegalZoom. They just see an opportunity to radically change the solo and small law firm legal industry sector at whatever costs, in order to create value for the enterprises they invest in and for themselves. Disruption means sucking the value from an industry sector in favor of the disrupter,  just as Apple sucked value from desk-top computing, and changed the music industry, Amazon permanently sucked value from the book retail industry, and Netflix changed the movie distribution industry.

Calloway: Disruption sounds very scary, as do the examples you cite. But haven’t we seen this before? Every lawyer I know has several stories of clients who had to pay thousands of dollars to fix the mess created when they tried to do something themselves or had some non-lawyer try to do it. These so-called simple matters are often not as simple as they may seem.

Granat:  I agree in part. It depends on the problem. Some consumers will settle for what I call a “good enough” result. So for example, if consumers buy a set of no-fault divorce forms and file their own divorce, and it is awarded, they get a result they can live with, because it is better than paying thousands of dollars in legal fees, which is often the other alternative.

On the other hand, the average consumer does know what they don’t know.  In this instance the uninformed party may not know what rights they are giving up to child support, spousal maintenance or property division. To cite another example, a will may look simple, but if one issue is dealt with incorrectly, the entire document might be invalid, or a subject to attack.

LegalZoom says that it has sold more than 1,000,000 wills, and Robert Shaprio, of O.J. fame, claims the ”Law is on Your Side”, whatever that means. But the reality is no one knows whether the content of those wills fits the circumstances of the testator and reflects the testator’s true intent. When the consumer learns that a mistake has been made, it is often too late.

Calloway: You mentioned UPL laws. Lawyers believe that UPL laws serve an important role in protecting the public when some of the most important issues of their lives are in play. When I was in private practice, there were many times I was consulted when someone was about to sign a terrible document, like a completely unfair divorce settlement agreement.  Are lawyers the only ones who see the danger to the public here?

Granat:  This is a complicated area. I don’t think that the general public would want a regulatory régime where anyone could represent another person in a court, without being licensed. The courts would not permit it any way.

On the other hand, drafting and preparing documents seems to be another matter. I think that one of the consequences of the release of legal information and legal forms from the law books, and onto to the Internet, is that a large majority of the American public now think they can do things on their own without the assistance of a lawyer.

I don’t think the legal profession has done a good job of marketing its true value and its social contribution in this area. While every state has a statute on its books that prohibits a non-lawyer from preparing a legal document, LegalZoom continues to do so with impunity. The top leadership of the American Bar Association, dominated as it is by larger law firms, has done nothing to promote the contribution and role that solos and small law firms play in our larger society. So if the top leadership of the organized bar doesn’t take a position on the matter, it makes it look like solos and small law firms – the target of these new disruptive ventures – are just out to protect their incomes, rather than protecting the public from real harm.

Calloway: I can sense already a reaction from some lawyers that we only are talking about high-volume, lower cost work that is not really that profitable in the first place. Some lawyers avoid this type of work and other lawyers do it as much for a public service and building good will as anything. The legal profession is currently very competitive. Lawyers know how to compete. So won't a little competition just make us better?

Granat:  I think that the economics of solo and small practice is undergoing a major transformation. Lawyers will still be able to demand high fees for complex, value-added work. For tasks where there is a large information component which can be manipulated by software, such as web-enabled document automation systems, lawyers will feel the effects of disintermediation, just as other industries have that have been transformed by the Internet.

Much higher volume work is the bread and butter of solo and small firm practice. If these services are pulled away from the law firm, and delivered by non-lawyer entities, it will completely destabilize the economic model upon which solos and small law firm practice is built. I think that the economics of small firm practice is beginning to change in a fundamental ways. $150-$250 an hour billing rates are not a guaranteed “right”. They are, or were, a response to market dynamics. The market for legal services is changing.

Calloway: Admittedly we both have personal objectives here. I’ve been advocating for some time that lawyers should have better document assembly solutions in place and your business is to help lawyers set up virtual law practices. But I’m sure you have some ideas about how solo and small firm lawyers should respond to this challenge.

Granat:  Lawyers have to learn how to work smarter. Last year, Marc Lauritsen Co-Chair of our eLawyering Task Force wrote a brilliant book, The Lawyer's Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools, on how lawyers can work smarter but it has not been widely read. It should be required reading by every solo and small firm practitioner. Further, to compete in today’s connected world, lawyers need to pick up the skills to market their services online and to deliver legal services online. If you are not online, you are nowhere.

Calloway: There are other resources readers can review. Jordan Furlong recently did a blog post on this topic called Here come the disruptors and you can get a flavor of Marc Lauritsen's book mentioned above by reading this article he wrote for Law Practice magazine.

Like the law enforcement slogan, lawyers protect and serve their clients. I have no doubt that centuries-old tradition will continue, even if some methods of delivery of legal services may change. The ramifications of the trends discussed above are yet to be seen.

Your Future as a Lawyer

Thinking about your future can bring forth many emotions, especially if the future looks challenging and uncertain. That's why it may be easy for time-challenged lawyers to avoid the exercise. If you are going to retire in the next few years, skip this blog post. Otherwise, invest thirty minutes this week reading the articles I have linked here. If you need inspiration to think about this, just start with the following feature story from the July 2011 ABA Journal Law Job Stagnation May Have Started Before the Recession—And It May Be a Sign of Lasting Change. Quite a few observers of the legal industry have drawn some of the same conclusions. Just to make certain you click on the link to the story, here's the "money quote" from the article:

• "For most lawyers, survival will depend upon their ability to harness technology to deliver greater value to clients at a cost that declines—yes, declines—over time. The biggest challenge for law firms will be transitioning away from internal firm metrics that reward billable hours and discourage or prohibit the crucial trial-and-error experimentation needed to create, refine and market more innovative work processes that do more with less." Id.

So go read the article to see how the authors reached that conclusion.

But the future brings promise as well as challenges. Maybe none of us will see that future where one can make a living as a "Space Lawyer," but it is not hard to see new and emerging areas of law practice.

But a good opportunity to chart your future appears this month in another ABA publication, the "Careers" issue of Law Practice magazine (July/August 2011.) The Time to Take a Leap feature begins with an important story by a good friend of mine. Lawyers Join the Free Agent Nation by Stephen P. Gallagher charts how career paths have changed for lawyers just as the idea of life-long employment with a single company has changed for the majority of the American work force. The is followed by 10 Steps to Prepare Yourself for a Graceful Launch by John H. Snyder. Although this is written for a hypothetical associate about to leave the big firm, it is good reading for anyone taking stock of your career. The feature then focuses on several lawyers and their successful career changes.

But, wait, you might say, "I really am my law practice at  this point and there's really nowhere to leap." (Joke in poor taste omitted.)  It is certainly true that for many lawyers, from solo/small firm lawyers to partners in larger law frims that they could change their address or their partners, but the clients that they serve are their law practice. Absent taking a salaried job and shuttering a private practice, they may feel  certain that they are not looking at career change.

As suggested by the ABA Journal article on stagnation, you may have the choice of reinventing your practice or watching while others reinvent it for you. So continue your tour of the Careers edition of Law Practice magazine by reading Make the Right Move: Career Assessment Tools by Wendy L. Werner for some ideas on learning about yourself, Optimizing Your Online Shingle: On-Page and Off-Page Best Practices by Bob Ambrogi and Steve Matthews and enjoy the fun of Sharon Nelson and John Simek discussing using an iPad in your law practice. In the Ask Bill column, Bill Gibson talks with me and Tom Mighell about social media for lawyers.

Whether you are a new lawyer or law student entering the job market, who should read the entire Careers edition of Law Practice magazine or you want to pick and choose, there's a lot in Law Practice magazine, this month and every month and I'd say that even if I wasn't on the magazine's editorial board.

Is Google Chrome the new browser of choice?

Since I did a presentation at ABA TECHSHOW 2010 with Erik Mazzone called Supercharge Your Browser: Add-Ons, Extensions and Tweaks, I've been thinking about how many lawyers use Microsoft Internet Explorer as their browser just because it is handy and they always have used it.

But one trend I noticed pretty clearly at ABA TECHSHOW 2011 is the number of people who are very smart about technology who use Google Chrome as their primary browser. Yes, it wasn't that long ago that the "Alternative to IE" crowd was all about Firefox. But now they seem to be moving quickly to Chrome. Lifehacker noted this trend last year in How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users. This would be a good starting place for anyone wondering why anyone would even care to change their browser.

The reason is that it is all about the plugins---browser plug-ins that is.  

Erik Mazzone gave us his favorites for Chrome in SmallLaw: Browser Bliss: My 14 Favorite Chrome Apps and Extensions at the Technolawyer blog.

Last week HuffPost Tech weighed in with Google Chrome Extensions: The 11 Best Add-Ons For The Busiest Browser.

David Whelan recently published a nice chart of research browser plug-ins for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. There are more for IE than you might imagine.

If you are interested in trying out Chrome, it is a free download. So there's little risk in becoming familiar with what many now say is the best of the browsers.

Supercharge Your Law Practice

During my almost fourteen years with the Oklahoma Bar Association as the practice management advisor, I have planned or helped to plan quite a few CLE programs, including our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. (This year's Solo & Small Firm Conference will be held June 9-11, 2011.)  But today I want to direct your attention to what I think is an extremely important OBA CLE program this week with lots of information about your future.

Supercharge Your Law Practice will be held this week- on May 18, 2011 at the Oklahoma Bar Center and May 19, 2011 at the Renaissance Hotel in Tulsa. The May 18^th program will also feature a live webcast. The live webcast will be a bit more expensive, but all of your staff can sit in and watch it with you.

There is a lot of change ahead for lawyers who want to be successful. It is not just about technology or even hard work. One of our “Supercharge” speakers, Tim Green, gave me this interesting quote from "Making It All Work," a sequel to "Getting Things Done" by David Allen:

            "[S]tudies have proven that the vast majority of all performance improvement is systemic. Additional motivation and intelligence make only a negligible difference in the long run."

Given that observation, we are going to spend some time talking about designing efficient law office systems. We’re going to talk about future trends impacting the legal profession. Some of these trends are quite scary. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read this article from this month’s The Economist- A less gilded future: The legal business has undergone not only recession but also structural change. Ever-growing profits are no longer guaranteed. Nor, for some firms, is survival.

We are going to discuss digital law practice and digital client files. We’re going to demonstrate some tools to use for document assembly in the law office. Law firms need to incorporate document assembly tools to be effective, but that impacts billing and other business matters. I will demonstrate a document assembly tool that a solo practitioner with no staff support and no technology skill can use to automate his or her own forms. This is particularly significant to estate planners. In fact the demo documents in this document assembly program are estate planning documents.

Here is the link for more information and to register for Supercharge Your Law Practice. I hope to see you there, or at least for you to see us via the Internet.

If you cannot make the scheduled dates, the program will be archived for future viewing later. But why wait? Summer is a good time to make some changes.

The Wonders of Windows 7

Last week I wrote about using a Windows 7 keystroke shortcut to make your two monitors appear as four. (Yes, you can do the same split screen thing with one monitor.)

I have to say that I am a big Windows 7 fan. So I want to direct your attention to The Wonders of Windows 7: Is It Time to Upgrade? which was written by Jim Calloway and Catherine Sanders Reach, Director of the ABA's Legal Technology Resource Center for the March/April 2011 edition of Law Practice Magazine. There are many reasons to upgrade to Windows 7, but I urge you to consider this strongly. Many lawyers have agreed with my comment that I never really cared that much about operating systems, but this one makes a difference in my day-to-day activites.