New Year’s Resolution: Move to Online Backup

Stress. It comes with being a lawyer.

You have enough to worry about without the added concern that your electronically stored documents, case materials and firm financial information might be lost as the result of a computer crash, natural disaster or vandalism by a disgruntled former employee, client or opposing party.

Secure, fully automated online backup can make this potential nightmare go away. Painlessly.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make “set it and forget it” online backup a reality in your firm, you can take advantage of one of four free upcoming Webinars that CoreVault is hosting around lunch time on the last two Fridays in January and the first two Fridays in February, and receive a $10 Starbucks gift card just for participating.

CoreVault online backup service is an Alabama State Bar member benefit which offers daily, secure, encrypted, off-site online backup especially designed for attorneys and law firms. To learn more about how you can eliminate at least one of your worries, sign up for the Webinar session that fits into your schedule best. Click here to learn more and to register. You’ll be glad you did.

Tips to Make the Most of Your Bar Dues

The December issue of Law Practice Today is out, and it’s focus is very timely for the holiday season. It’s on making personal connections which, after all, are the basis on which practicing lawyers get most of their good business.

I highly recommend Erik Mazzone’s article Ten Tips for Making Your Bar Association Dues Work For You from this issue. Erik doesn’t just tout “member benefits” but concisely lays out how you can turn almost anything your bar association offers – from sections to pro bono opportunities – into connections that will bring you more business.

LPT is a great resource for lawyers looking to improve their practices, and you don’t have to be an ABA member to take advantage of it.

Is the iPhone Safe for Lawyers?

This subject was a hot topic for discussion on Solosez on Monday. While form and features – not to mention that certain “wow” factor that makes working fun – are important whenever a lawyer selects a smartphone, Rule 1.6 of the Rules of Professional Conduct dictates that the choice of device and service provider must always rest, finally, on which can provide the greatest security for the confidential information that will reside on the device.

Since there’s been a fair amount of back and forth about this, I thought it would be useful to provide links to some information that can help you make up your mind about whether the iPhone is right for your firm. I provided a post earlier which compares the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid and Palm Pre. Sharon Nelson and John Simek of Sensei Enterprises have graciously shared their recent article titled Why Lawyers Shouldn’t Use the iPhone: A Security Nightmare. And “Cousin” Jim Calloway just shared this link to a Wired article that details some specifics on how the iPhone works and what hackers are doing to take advantage of it.

Rule 1.6 requires that you take reasonable steps to protect client confidentiality, and being informed of how the device you are considering works will get you at least half way there.

Lawyer’s Guide to Word 2007 Has Ben Schorr Batting 1.000

The only constant is change.  Especially when it comes to Microsoft Office.  Many lawyers and firms have now upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007, which is why the recent release of The Lawyer’s Guide to Microsoft® Word 2007 is such welcome news.

Ben Schorr, the Hawaii-based law office technology consultant and Microsoft MVP, previously hit one out of the park with The Lawyer’s Guide to Microsoft® Outlook 2007.  And now he’s back with another home run with his new book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Microsoft Word 2007.

Recently published by the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association, this book is all you need to help you get the most from Word 2007.  For those who have already taken advantage of Ben’s last book, his easy, conversational style that makes the complex – well – just plain simple, will come as no surprise.  If you haven’t yet read one of Ben’s books, you’re in for a treat.

This one starts off with a quick tour of what’s different about Word 2007.  By the time you finish this chapter, you’ll have a great overview of all the things that Word 2007 can do – many of which you may never have discovered in earlier versions.  The following chapters take you through the process of creating a basic document, and then provide you with everything you need to know to obtain the formatting you want with ease, whether it’s fonts, headers and footers, page numbers or tables of information.

There’s also a chapter on features of special interest to lawyers, such as tables of authority, tables of content, and electronic filing, and chapters on collaboration (think: comparing document versions, among other things), using third-party document management systems, and dealing with metadata.  And the chapter on automating Word is so full of tips and tricks for saving time and making your work easier that it, alone, is probably worth the price of the book.

If you’d like to check out the bar’s library copy, email Kristi Skipper at kristi.skipper@alabar.org, or you can purchase a copy of your very own – at a discount, no less – through the bar’s automated bookstore.   You won’t be sorry you did!

Friday Reading: Don Draper’s Guide to Being a Better Lawyer

I try to make time every Friday to catch up on all the things that I’ve piled up, both literally and virtually, to read when I have a chance.  As I began sifting through some of it this morning, I thought it might be fun to share what I think is the most insightful, most useful, most humorous, or simply most interesting of the lot.

This week my recommended reading for you is a recent post from Adrian Barron’s The Nutmeg Lawyer titled Don Draper’s Guide to Being a Better Lawyer.  As a recent convert to the AMC series Mad Men, Barron has distilled some applicable wisdom about how anyone be a better lawyer from the show’s smoke-filled rooms and alcohol-induced antics.  Enjoy.

Mining for Diamonds, Panning for Gold

Whenever a blogger takes a couple of weeks off to catch up with other things (in this case, preparing and making CLE presentations before the end of the year) you can count on it that he or she will have a ton of stuff piled up to share.

I receive lots of new books that publishers hope I’ll review.  My desk is piled high right now.  And I dutifully try to slog through them all because, every once in a great while, the payoff is that I find a real jewel which I can pass along.

My most recent such happy discovery is The Lawyer’s Guide to Finding Success in Any Job Market by Richard L. Hermann.  According to the information about the author on the back of the book, he received his JD from Cornell Law School and is a Concord Law School professor specializing in legal career management, as well as the founder and president of Federal Reports, Inc, a provider of legal career information in the US, and the co-founder of AttorneyJobs.com.  He’s taken this background in lawyer career development and turned it into one of the single most useful books I’ve ever seen for lawyers who are worried about losing their jobs, lawyers who have already lost their jobs, and lawyers who would like to move from a less than thrilling practice area into something more fruitful.

Smartphone Shootout – Which Is Best For You?

Big-firm-lawyers with BlackBerrys are so common that the image this phrase conjures up is almost a cliché. And many solo practitioners have been quick to adopt the stylish iPhone, so that they can keep on top of calls and email with a minimum of assistance from staff. After all, solos don’t have to build group consensus and often don’t have IT issues that firms with more than one lawyer have to contend with when deciding on the right smartphone.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence, wanting to upgrade and trying to decide which smartphone, and which network, will best serve your firm’s needs, this 4-way comparison review of the top four contenders (iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid and Pre) from InfoWorld will help you make up your mind. There’s also a side article which provides a visual tour of the new Motorola Droid.

When It’s Time to Say “So Long…”

From time to time I get calls from lawyers who are looking for information on shuttering their practices.  Sometimes it’s for happy reasons, like appointment or election to a judgeship or a long-awaited retirement.  Other times it involves a family relocation and, sometimes, small firms just don’t gain the traction they need to keep on keeping on, so  the principals decide it’s time to move on to something else.  Here are some thing to think about should you decide to close your practice.

ABA TECHSHOW Discounts, Plus Best of TECHSHOW

It’s time to start thinking about making plans to attend ABA TECHSHOW 2010.  For those who are not familiar with it, TECHSHOW is the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s annual two and a half day CLE program and vendor expo centered around practice management and the use of technology in the practice of law.   ABA TECHSHOW 2010 will be March 25-27 at the Hilton Chicago, and Alabama State Bar members receive a $150 discount off the regular registration price.  Check the ads in upcoming issues of The Alabama Lawyer and The Addendum for the discount code, or give us a call at the Practice Management Assistance Program for more information.

In order to help those who have never attended before know just what a great value this CLE program and expo is, the ABA TECHSHOW Blog reports this morning that it will be posting a Best of TECHSHOW paper and slide show each week from now until the show, free for download.  The first installment, which is supposed to be available soon, will be Email Archiving:  So What’s Wrong With Saving Everything? originally presented by Peg Duncan and R. Jason Barron at ABA TECHSHOW 2009.

Add the ABA TECHSHOW Blog to your regular daily reading and don’t miss out on these extremely useful papers which will help you save time and improve the way you practice law.  And don’t forget to put ABA TECHSHOW 2010 on your calendar now!

 

A Tale of Two Emails or I Don’t Talk to Strangers

I received two email messages recently. Each was from someone I did not know. Both posed a single, easy-to-answer question, but it’s amazing how different my reaction was to each.

The first contained nothing but the question and the sender’s name and city. The question challenged something that I had written in an article in Law Practice Magazine. I was surprised at how visceral and angry my reaction was. It wasn’t that the person questioned what I had written. Normally, I would be delighted to discuss an article and hear someone else’s point of view, but the sender didn’t lead up to the question by telling me who she was or why she was interested in the issue. Her email didn’t contain a signature and her email address didn’t give me any indication of where she worked or why she might be trying to pin me down in writing (OK, email) to a particular position on the issue in question.

The second email was also from a stranger, but the sender had given a little more thought to posing her question. She started out by telling me who she was, where she worked, and why she was contacting me. She then posed her request, and ended her email with a signature that included her company’s name, a street address and phone number, and a link to her company’s website, where I could verify who she was. Needless to say, I was much more receptive to responding to her request for information.

We’re all busy, and email can help us accomplish many more things in a single day that phone calls and letters, but it can backfire on you if you don’t take a few steps to help the person receiving the message. Here’s what you can do to make sure your email messages are answered promptly:

• If the recipient doesn’t know you, or if you’ve met only once and may not remember you, introduce yourself.
• State your question or requiest simply, but provide enough background information for the recipient to understand what you want and why you want it.
• Use a professional-sounding email address that identifies you or your law pratice.
• Remember that a brief email can come across as rude if not thoughtfully worded. Use complete sentences and proof-read your message before you hit Send.
• End your message with a signature that includes your full name and the name of your firm. If you have a website, provide a link.
• Include your phone number in your signauture. Often, you’ll get a much faster, and more complete, answer if you provide the recipient with the option of responding immediately by phone.