Greatest American Lawyer Blog

Newsletter Unsubscribe Friday

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:38:38 PDT

Most people don't really understand the CAN-SPAM Act or spam laws. As long as the header and other information is not misleading in the email, and you provide for an opt-out, you are likely not in violation of most spam laws. That's how we all get our emails added to newsletter lists, even though we didn't "opt-in."

I don't know where all fo the newsletters come from. But today, I searched through my inbox and unsubscrived to every newsletter that I thought was legitimate, although unwanted.

Another change we made is to stop copying so many internal attorneys in on the email that goes around for clients. Now, we only copy the attorneys who are involved in a particular project on particular emails. This has reduced the amount of total emails to the inbox by approximately 85% in our firm. While it's great to know everything that's going on in all cases, we easily can access the case management system in order to research a particular file.

One Lawyer’s Perspective: Getting organized in the morning

The Greatest American Lawyer — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:53:49 PST

There are so many ways to get organized. Software technology creates all sorts of lists, tasks, categories, tabs, flags, reminders…and on and on and on. But sometimes it is easy for a lawyer to get lost in all the various tools which allow for organization. Picking one tool, adding a process and sticking to it is the key. I’ve tried lots of different organizational techniques. With 300+ emails hitting my inbox every day, I am one attorney who sometimes wants to wave my arms in the air and say “give up.” We use Basecamp as our extranet tool. For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to recommit to Basecamp and simply load up my global to-do list on all projects, open each project that needs attention today as a new tab, and work through the list. To the extent I see things in my email or other documents which create task categories or tasks, I am simply going to dictate those into the extranet for handling. Using Basecamp to store, organize and work the relevant tasks of THE day will be my life for the next week. I’ll let you know how it goes.

How do you get organized given a major data overload we all experience?

Blogging in One Hour for Lawyers by Ernie Svenson

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:30:10 PST

For someone that has been blogging actively since 2004 and driven more web content than probably any lawyer or law firm in the world, I love the following series of posts by Ernie the Attorney where some of the top bloggers on the internet answer 5 questions as to why they blog.

5 Questions for a Law Blogger: Sharon Nelson

Sharon Nelson is the author of Ride the Lightning, a weblog about electronic evidence and information security. Sharon is a lawyer, and speaker, and the founder of Sensei Enterprises, which helps lawyers and law firms with electronic evidence and forensic issues. She and her co-host, Jim Calloway, interviewed me for their podcast, and asked me some questions about the benefits of blogging, but here I take the chance to ask her about her blogging experiences:

1): Have you had any unexpected benefits from blogging (if so, what are they)?

Regular blogging keeps me incredibly current in e-discovery and information security. And I’ve unexpectedly made friends with people that I don’t know in person – and some of those friendships have crossed over into real life, which has been wonderful.

5 Questions for a blogger: Tom Mighell

Attorney Tom Mighell works for Contoural, Inc. helping lawyers to develop records management programs, but back when he started his law blog (Inter-alia.net) he was a litigator with a prestigious Dallas law firm. Tom's keen interest in technology has made him a leading light in the ABA, and he's written several books on legal technology, including two on using iPads. He's also a past Chair of the ABA Law Practice Management Section. If anyone can offer useful perspective on law-related blogging, it's Tom. So, I asked him the usual 5 questions, and here are his answers.

1. Have there been any unexpected benefits to blogging, and if so, what are they?

For me, the most surprising benefit of blogging has been the "presence" that it created for me on the Internet. Because of the blog, I suddenly found myself being asked to speak around the country and write articles and books for legal outlets. And all because I had a presence on the Internet, where I could provide useful information to lawyers on Internet legal research and technology. In retrospect, this benefit really shouldn't have been unexpected, but back in 2002 when blogs were just getting started, we didn't know quite what to expect when we launched our blogs.

5 Questions for a Law Blogger: Townsend Myers

Townsend Myers is a criminal lawyer in New Orleans, focusing on state court actions. His weblog is called NOLA Criminal Law. He also makes effective use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google Plus. Here are his answers to my stock 5 questions:

1. Have there been any unexpected benefits to blogging, and if so, what are they?

Pure enjoyment of writing about things that interest me. I thought this was just going to be about generating buzz and SEO juice. It's been a real surprise how much I enjoy doing it.

5 Questions for a Law Blogger: Molly DiBianca

Here are 5 questions for long time law blogger Molly DiBianca, who practices law with Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor LLP in Delaware. She publishes the Delaware Employment Law Blog, a continual honoree by the ABA in its Blawg 100 list of top legal blogs. Molly also posts on Twitter at @MollyDiBi.

1. Have there been any unexpected benefits to blogging, and if so, what are they?

There are more benefits to blogging than I could name. I have met so many wonderful people, both other bloggers and readers, and have developed great friendships and referral sources. The blog also serves as a great research tool that I use frequently.

One of the more surprising benefits is the impact on my Google rank, which has value that money can’t buy. And, because of the blog’s good search-engine optimization (SEO), I get calls from national publications about the hot topic of the moment. As a result of that publicity, I am able to secure more national speaking engagements, which I enjoy immensely. All of these components have helped me secure new clients and cases and to develop loyalty among my current clients.

Being named to the ABA Journal’s list of the Top 100 Blogs in the country was an absolute shock, as I never petitioned readers to nominate my blog. It’s an incredible honor that I certainly did not expect but that I am incredibly thankful for.

5 Questions for a Law Blogger: Jeff Richardson

Jeff Richardson’s iPhoneJD weblog has been going strong for 4 years, and this year his blog was chosen for the 4^th time as an ABA Top 100 Blawg. Jeff is a partner in a large New Orleans based law firm, specializing in appellate litigation and representing defendants in class actions and complex litigation. His blog output is abundant and always incisive. If you have an iPhone or iPad then you should be reading Jeff’s blog every day, because that’s about how often he posts new stuff.

In writing my book about blogging for lawyers I asked Jeff if he’d answer 5 questions about his blogging experiences. If anyone can give sound advice on how to create and maintain a successful blog, it’s Jeff. So, here's the Q&A:

1. Have there been any unexpected benefits to blogging, and if so, what are they?

I'm surprised how often I will meet someone for the first time and they already know who I am because of iPhone J.D. It's a nice icebreaker. I had hoped to experience some of that when I first started the blog, but it still seems like a nice surprise every time it happens.

For the answers to the following questions, please visit Blogging in One Hour for Lawyers - by Ernie Svenson.

2): Were there any unexpected challenges to blogging?
3): Looking back to when you started, what did you envision would happen?
4): Given what you know now, what advice would you give a lawyer who’s just beginning to blog?
5): If you were going to start over, what three things would you do differently?

Stand Up and Be Heard: One Lawyer’s Thoughts on Stand Up Desks

The Greatest American Lawyer — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:32:58 PST

Two years ago, I went from a kneeling chair to stand up desk. It has literally changed my life. There is no question that a stand up desk is great for your health, your back, your stamina, your engagement and your overall awareness. Sure it takes about two weeks to gain the strength to be able to stand comfortably. Put restaurant mat under your feet and some tennis shoes to provide support is all you need to get to the point where the stand up desk feels great.

We now have three members of our office who are using a stand up desk. Check out the Anderlyn Desk here for more information.

New Blog Launched - UnIntellectualProperty.com

The Greatest American Lawyer — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:58:55 PDT

My law partner, Brian A. Hall, has launched a new blog: UnIntellectualProperty.com. This blog highlights instances where an owner attempted to claim exclusive intellectual property rights in a trademark, copyright, or trade secret (and to a lesser extent patents) only to have a court of law or other authority declare no intellectual property right exists.

This blog not only is informative to Internet and IP lawyers, but it also contains Brian's humor and insights in a way that makes sense to non-lawyers. Check out one of the unintellectual property posts, and you will see how he is trying to provide a resource for those interested in identifying instances of overzealous IP owners.

Know Your Business and Mind Your Business

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:08:30 PDT

It is important to know what kind of law firm you are. If you are a firm that drives business off your reputation and referrals, then those are the people you need to make sure you are attending to. If you get your business off the internet, you need to pay attention to your internet web presence and make sure your search engine rankings do not decrease. If your business model is dependent on getting your initial customers to sign up for a second and third project, then you better make sure you are showing those projects as part of your process.

Every law firm is different. You need to fully understand what kind of law firm you are and make sure you are attending to those things that really count.

Larry Bodine Named Editor-in-Chief of Lawyers.com and Martindale.com

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:57:23 PST

Larry Bodine is now the editor-in-chief of two of the largest and most prestigious services and websites in the world, www.lawyer.com and www.martindale.com. I’ve known Larry for many years, as we have both been active bloggers for some time. Lawyers.com has grown tremendously over the years in terms of content and attorney bio databases. If you’re looking to find a lawyer, lawyers.com is a great place to start.

Congratulations to Larry, lawyers.com and martindale.com on their efforts moving forward.

Read the full article.

Top Tech Trends Lawyers Should Keep an Eye On in 2012

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:41:49 PST

Monica Goyal at the Law Times News published this article about the top five tech trends lawyers should keep a close eye on in 2012. See her list below:

Goyal, Monica (2012, January). Bits and Bytes: Top 5 tech trends for lawyers in 2012. Law Times

1.    Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom are said to be entering the British market in 2012. Furthermore, a few notable legal web services have come up in the last year, all positioning themselves to take advantage of the new legal regulatory framework in Britain, including Everyman Legal and Net Lawman.

This undoubtedly represents the start of a wave of new legal technology companies and services that may come to this side of the ocean once they’ve proven themselves in the British market. All of this because of recent changes to the Legal Services Act there. Will the United States follow suit?

2.    Cloud-based software services: Microsoft Word, a staple software for almost everyone, will now be cloud-based with Office 365. This has been a long time coming and it represents a huge shift for those still refusing to get on the cloud. If you haven’t already, you should be asking the question what you need to do to prepare yourself for cloud computing.

3.    Business Analytics: Analytics and accountability go hand in hand for most businesses. Today, there are many tools to allow businesses to measure and then adapt their behaviours in order to improve their bottom line. Take social media, for example.

Customers and clients use social media and you could possibly engage with them there, but how does a company capitalize on this and what kind of return are they realizing on this investment? In 2012, people will be talking less about getting their businesses on social media and more about how to measure the return on investment through analytics.

There are many tools already available that will measure your influence online or your click-through rates on your tweets.

4.    Mobile payments: In 2012, with the emergence of near field communication, you’ll now be able to use your smartphone to make small purchases at stores, restaurants, and even in taxis. It’s totally cool but is it too convenient?

5.    Behavioural advertising: Currently, there are countless technology startups with an advertising revenue business model. To make it work, they go beyond general demographic information and instead use a person’s private online browsing preferences to sell them something.

Ernie the Attorney Provides Great Solo and Small Law Firm Tips. Have You Heard of Ruby Receptionist?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Play: Interview with Attorney Earnest Svenson about Digital Workflow CLE - Part 2
(click title to listen)

With: Ernest Svenson

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

Read Show Transcript

Publish to My Site

Share on My Networks

Enrico:   One of the really interesting curriculum items that I have seen on your website is called "Little Big Firm:   Tips for Small Firm Lawyers".   It is clearly something you are out there teaching in your CLE to lawyers who come to get their CLE credit and learn about technology.   Tell me a little bit about this particular educational track.

Ernie:   Well, it all started with a blog post that I wrote for my Ernie the Attorney blog which I dashed off quickly.   It was something that had been building up for a long time.    It was the idea that as a solo lawyer, practicing commercial litigation and corporate type stuff, that I could do as good a job or better than I could if I was working at a mid- to large-sized firm.   This was all based on my actual experience.

I wanted to do commercial litigation when I got out of law school, so I went to work at a firm in New Orleans that was on a small size.   There were one or two firms in New Orleans that had a good reputation, but they were smaller than the big firms, and whenever I was applying to go work at someplace – and this was, of course, in the heyday when people, if you did well in law school they fought over you, so I had a lot of job offers - most of them were from big firms.   The big firms were always saying, "No, you don't want to go work at that firm. That's a small firm.   We're bigger and we can do all this great stuff. We have lots of important clients.   You should come here."

I didn't want to do that, because I felt that I liked the renegade way that these smaller firms were doing things.   The smaller firms maybe couldn't afford Lexus, but our firm cobbled together and they shared their account with Arthur Andersen so we had access to Lexus even though normally a firm that size wouldn't have it.   The receptionist was really well-trained so if you called them, they paid a lot of attention to what she sounded like on the phone and some of these larger firms didn't.   They'd have the old battle-ax who answered the phone and they thought it was good enough.

The small firm I went to had a Wang computer system which created really good-looking document, but they were the smallest firm in New Orleans that had the system.    The rest of the firms were big.   So they were working really hard to establish this presence and this perception out there that they were good, because they were good.   They had really good lawyers, but it was hard to convince clients that they were really good, unless they came in and worked with them.   Their method was signaling at all levels that we're really good and we pay attention to details.   But all that costs money. It wasn't something you could do unless you were in a firm of at least 20 lawyers.   So when I left the firm after 20 years to go out on my own, I wanted to maintain that same thing.   I felt like I was going to be able to maintain most of it because of a lot of it just depends on the technology. The clients that I wanted didn't care where I worked.   They didn't want me go take out rent in a high-rise building and spend a lot of money.   They didn't care about that. But they would care about what my website looked like.   They would care what my stationery and my pleadings that I filed with the court looked like.   They would care if when they called me whether I had somebody to answer the phone or was I was answering my own phone. They might care about those kinds of things.

So I steadily tried to pick apart those little problems and solve them so that in the end I got to a point where you could come to my office where I was in a co-working space downtown. It was the old large law firm that had once made me an offer.   I was working in the same building but I wasn't paying the same amount of rent. I'm paying a fraction of what it would cost. Instead of my overhead being 50 to 60 percent, my overhead was about 8 percent of my collections. Yet I looked, for all intents and purposes, and acted and functioned like I was in a big firm. Basically, I knew the same things that I knew when I worked with the big firm; I just had to deliver that as a solo lawyer.

That blog post was about that. Then I got invited to speak by the Louisiana Disciplinary Council on their road show. They wanted me to come and talk about that topic because they thought that would be interesting. And I thought, "Great. I'll have a greater presentation." It was extremely well-received. It's one of the top two presentations in terms of people wanting to hear it. When I give the presentation they want to know more and they're very excited because there are a lot of solo and small firm lawyers out there, or lawyers who are at big firms who to leave, who want to figure out how to connect those dots. That's basically what that presentation is all about.

Enrico:   So it sounds like what you've done over the years is sifted through the process of figuring out what really are the things that are important to most clients in terms of appearance. I always say there's form over substance. If you want to pay for form, there are a bunch of suits down the street in a fancy conference room who are going to take $10,000 from you in order to come through the door, and you'll get all kinds of form. But if you want substance, if you want good quality legal work and a return on investment, and an attorney who is going to think about these things, then you're in the right place hiring us.

But there is a certain minimum level of expectation of clients out of their attorneys, especially when you're handling a complex matter. Give me a rundown of what you, in your experience, believe are really the important things that you have to have in place.

Ernie:   I think number one is you have to deliver a good quality product. You have to be a good lawyer and you have to pay attention to the details. That goes without saying and that's not part of my talk but that is obviously the most important thing. That precedes everything.

But assuming you're doing a really good job and you know you're competent, what are the little things that signal to clients, to judges, to opposing counsel, to everybody, that you know what you're doing? For example, the pleadings that you file in court; do those look coherent? Is the typography part of it right? A lot of lawyers say, "Typography? What do I care about typography?" Well, you might not care, but if I showed you two things where one was incorporating typographic principles that apply to legal documents and the other one didn't, you would know right away that one of them is better than the other. You would tend instinctively, whether you acknowledge it to yourself or not, to be ready to receive that one with the better typography as something that you would expect to be higher quality.

There's a book called "Typography for Lawyers" by Matthew Butterick. He has a website and he explains the principles of typography that apply to legal documents. He used to be a design guy and still is, went to law school, saw the problem, and said, "Let me explain to lawyers why they need to do this," because they create professional documents like a book or a magazine. Those are professional documents. Well, so are the things that lawyers file, but lawyers wouldn't pick up a book or a magazine that had the typography principles that they use in their own briefs. They'd say, "My God, this is garbage."

So why don't they do the same thing for their pleadings? The answer is that they don't know what those principles are. Butterick's book and his website say, "Okay. Here's what you need to do." If you do those things and set up your documents, you'll have a template that will work great and your documents will always look great. You'll never have to think about it again because you've set it all up in the beginning.

But if you're unaware that that's something that you should do, you'll just keep doing what all lawyers do, which is copying everything that everybody else is doing, and it's all crap.

Enrico:   Excellent. That's an interesting thing. So definitely your work product has to show competence and professionalism. You also mentioned a receptionist and phone. What are the issues there that lawyers need to be thinking about?

Ernie:   Well, when I started out on my own, my first goal was to just spend as little money as possible. While I also wanted to be as good in terms of my appearance as my old firm, I couldn't really afford or I didn't want to start paying money for things that I didn't need. It would be great to have a receptionist. There were phone-answering services but those weren't that great and they were expensive, so I didn't do that.

After a couple of years a friend of mine said, "Have you heard of this thing called Ruby Receptionists?" I said no. He told me how much it cost. It was $200 a month for 100 minutes. I thought, "That's pricey. I don't want that." He said, "Well, just try it for 30 days for free and see what you think." And I thought, "Well, okay. At least I can test this idea of what it would be like to have a receptionist service and how good would it be, and then I'll cancel it."

I kept the service, and I still keep them because for the $200 a month, which is more than I pay per month for anything other than my malpractice coverage, I have the best receptionist you could possibly ever have. My receptionist, and the service of my receptionist, what my clients experience when they call me, is better than my old firm ever had and that any firm I know of ever has. It's just one of those things that's kind of weird, but that's the way it works. The way it works is big firms, or firms that hire a person and put them there, first of all, they generally don't train them. Firms aren't in the field of saying, "Let me figure out what makes her a good receptionist." They just hire people that are good and hope that they keep working there.

But if the receptionist that's the optimal, best receptionist gets up and goes to the bathroom and is replaced by somebody else, then suddenly the quality of their call-answering has gone down a notch or two. If that receptionist doesn't show up for work because she's sick, and that happens, it's the same thing.

This service, Ruby Receptionists, always answers your phone. Assuming it's not a holiday and assuming it's not after hours, they are going to answer your phone. They have a pool of people that they assign to do this. It's not like the typical reception service that some people are used to. These people are high-touch, really high quality. I can't say enough about how good they are. They are trained to be receptionists the way that the Navy trains the SEALs to attack people.

Everybody that I've recommended this service to has come back and said, "Oh, my God, thank you so much. That is just the most amazing thing in the world." You literally go from having an okay receptionist to now having as good or better, usually better, than any other large firm could ever have.

Enrico:   Wow.

Ernie:   So it's little things like that. But that makes a difference because you're not answering your own phone and you're getting a screening of the calls, because when they call you and say, "I have somebody on the line," they're going to tell you if it's a new client or a judge or somebody who is wanting to know this. If you don't want or need to talk to them, you can say, "I'm in a meeting right now. Tell them I'll call them back later." They don't feel like they've been ignored. They've gotten a human being to answer at least part of there question.

So there are all kinds of things that Ruby Receptionists can do. I think 40 percent of their clientele is now lawyers because this is something that lawyers need. You need to have clients feel like you're there for them, even when you're not, because you can't be there for every client at every moment of the day. You've got to get work done and you don't need to be disrupted.

Enrico:   And your staff doesn't need to be disrupted. I'm looking at the website right now and I'm thinking, "Okay, if we had someone else running the tower and directing traffic, our secretarial staff wouldn't be distracted from doing the things that we really need them to do, which is typing documents, figuring out local rules, e-filing, PACER, and the rest."

Ernie:   Exactly. It's just an amazing service. You can give them a list of commonly-asked questions and they will respond. If it's just something that people tend to ask you all the time, you can say, "Well, here's a list of the answers," and they will answer as though they work at your firm. People can ask how to get there; you can explain to them, "Here's how the parking situation works and here's how you drive," and they'll explain it to people as though they are working in your building.

Enrico:    Wow. Are they 24/7? Are they an answering service as well, or just business hours?

Ernie:   No, they're just business hours. If you sign up for them, you get a toll-free 1-800 number that you can use, but you forward your main line to them so they catch all that traffic.

They're in Portland, Oregon, and I forget what business hours they can be available, but generally speaking, the usual business hours for anybody in the contiguous US. That, and they don't work on holidays. But they're pretty much there all the time. The only time somebody doesn't answer your phone there would be if for some reason the Internet on your line went down or if their system goes down. That's happened once in the past three or so years that I've used them. They immediately emailed me, and everybody else, I'm sure, and said, "We have this problem. We're not sure how quickly it will be repaired, but we just wanted to let you know about it." I got the impression that maybe the phones would be down for half a day or so, which that happened at my big firm, too, so I wasn't shocked or freaked out about that. It was back up in 20 minutes.

So that's the only time I ever had downtime, which is another reason why I think they are better than a receptionist you would have elsewhere. Like I said, if the receptionist takes coffee breaks or is sick, none of that happens with them. The only mission-critical point of failure is if their phone service goes down or if their system goes down. So far, that's not been the case.

Enrico:   All right. I'm looking at the website right now. It's www.callruby.com. A great tip from Ernie the Attorney. Ernie, it was a pleasure having you on today. Have a great week.

Ernie:   Same here. Thanks for having me.

Enrico:   All right. We will see you next time on GAL Radio. Until then, have a great New Year.

Ernie the Attorney Launches New Company Dedicated to Lawyer CLE

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Play: Interview with Attorney Earnest Svenson about Digital Workflow CLE - Part 1
(click title to listen)

With: Ernest Svenson

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

Read Show Transcript

Publish to My Site

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Ernie Svenson: I'm doing great, Enrico. It's great to be here and great to welcome in the New Year with a nice radio podcast.

Enrico: Exactly. You sent out a Facebook post announcing that you're about to embark on something really new for you. You are a licensed attorney; you've been practicing law for how many years?

Ernie: Twenty-two, twenty-three. I lost count. Somewhere in there.

Enrico: A lot of years. Now you and a couple other folks have launched a website, digitalworkflowcle.com, and you are starting this as a start-up business, essentially, with a couple other folks. Tell us what you're doing.

Ernie: Actually, we had started this website, Digital Workflow CLE, about three years ago. It was an outgrowth of something that was happening in the law technology world, namely, that lawyers were trying to figure out technology. Of course, 20 or so years ago when I graduated from law school lawyers didn't have computers and they weren't required to know anything about how to use them.

Over time it seemed that, very quickly for many lawyers, all of a sudden these computers were something that you needed to know something about. You needed to know how to work with people who understood a lot about technology. I think it was by virtue of going to a TECHSHOW, which I think is where I first met you . . .

Enrico: Exactly. ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago.

Ernie: Yeah. When I went there, I realized, "Wait a second. There are all these lawyers and these people who help lawyers understand technology, and they're doing a really good job of speaking. They are really good at explaining all this stuff. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if back in Louisiana where I practice law there was something like this?"

That was really where Digital Workflow CLE, the company and the website, started. I and another lawyer friend of mine decided that we would undertake to bring that flame back to Louisiana since we were trying to figure this stuff out ourselves. We started providing CLE courses usually at the end of the year because that's when lawyers in Louisiana need their credits. It's kind of like the pari-mutuel windows at Churchill Downs right before the horse race goes off. They're scrambling to get in under the wire and get their CLE. So it was easy for us to attract the attention of lawyers who were looking to get just any kind of CLE. But we were really trying to pitch the message. What we were trying to do was to teach lawyers about technology because that's what we knew and we felt was most needed.

Every time we did one of these CLEs we got a lot of great feedback. Lawyers said, "My God, this is really great. We wish you would do this more often. We wish there were more CLEs like this." Then another year would go by and we'd wait until the pari-mutuel windows were about to close and then set up our shop and deliver our message. So the reason that I am changing from practicing law to doing this full-time is that I realize there's a huge demand for this, and the only way for me to meet that demand and do what needs to be done to grow the company is to figure out a way to deliver this information at times other than when lawyers are scrambling to meet their last-minute obligations.

Enrico: The demand for this, Ernie, is endless because lawyers and technology haven't necessarily gone together through the years. As lawyers are billing their hours they tend to focus in on just that. Every once in a while a new little piece of technology finds its way into the office complex, but now everything has changed. A lawyer who doesn't understand how to use technology may not only have some malpractice issues that they're going to be looking at because they're messing something up that they should know about, but they have to compete and figure out how it is that they are going to keep up with their clients.

Ernie: Right. It's a challenge for everybody. It's a challenge for the lawyer who, like me, graduated in the mid '80s and didn't expect to have to know technology. I was a little ahead of the curve because I was messing around with computers, but I was doing that just because I thought they were cool. I didn't really anticipate that it would be something that would take root. I guess I sort of did, but I didn't realize how quickly and how firmly and widespread that root would be.

Most lawyers were just kind of thinking, "Well, I'm not going to use email. I'm not going to use this, I'm not going to use that." Then all of a sudden they have to know how email works, not just so that they can get their email but also because that's a component of e-discovery. If you don't understand how email works, it's very hard to know whether the other side is really giving you what they're supposed to be giving you or how to object if you feel like they haven't.

All of a sudden, seemingly overnight from the perspective of lawyers, you're suddenly required to know all this technology that you didn't expect to have to know. What's the best way to learn this kind of stuff so that you don't drive yourself nuts, but you get the benefits where there are clear benefits? How do you get those as quickly as possible without disrupting your life?

Enrico: Yeah. How many of the people that come to your seminars, Ernie, do you think end up coming away from it motivated to change their business model in some way in order to incorporate a piece of technology which is going to help them compete, help them deliver value, and help them make their lives easier?

Ernie: From what I can tell in the past couple of years, they're all motivated to make the change. It used to be that in the early years I would proselytize and say, "Oh, everybody should be paperless and everybody should pay attention to technology," and a lot of lawyers would say, "Yeah, that's true. I probably should, but I don't really have to and I don't really know how to, and I'm kind of busy. Thank you for the CLE credits and I'll be moving along now."

Now when we do the seminars, or at least for the past couple of years, people are energized. At the end of the seminar they come up and shake our hand profusely and say," My God, this is just the most amazing thing in the world. We really want to do this and we want to be paperless." But the trick, I think, is to stay motivated and to stay connected to that idea that you're going to try to bring all this stuff in and figure it out.

That's where I think the challenge is, both for the people who come to the seminars and for us. For us, we need to figure out a way to deliver a constant stream of information, because it's just too much to come to a seminar that lasts six or seven hours and expect to do a lot of things with all that information. You might pick one or two things and if you're motivated you might press forward and connect the dots to make those things work.

A lot of lawyers really need help connecting the dots, and that means constant reminders or webinars. That's another thing we want to get into. Instead of just doing CLEs that are live, we want to do webinars where we can say, "Okay. You're at your computer, we're at our computer. Now we're literally going to show you how to connect these dots while you're at your computer so that you can follow along and do it."

There's a huge demand for that. It's a latent demand. A lot of people don't know that that's what they want, but if you deliver it and they can figure out how to see it, they'll say, "Oh, okay. That's a much easier way for me to plug in some of these things. My computer, your computer. You show me how to do it, I do it, and now I've actually made it work."

Enrico: Exactly. I see on your website you just completed a CLE in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the topics are Digital Case Management, Acrobat and PDF Tips, Email Efficiency and Practice, Social Networking for Lawyers, Information Gathering, Little Firm, Big Firm, and these types of issues. This is kind of the stuff that a lot of lawyers are having to do every day in any event, such as PDF. It's very practical information in a lot of ways.

Ernie: Definitely. What's interesting is the PDF aspect. I've had a blog called PDF for Lawyers which I started shortly after I started my Ernie the Attorney blog. The PDF for Lawyers blog was really just my effort to take this blog experiment and say, "Okay, let me focus on something that's practical and basic." It was a little niche, but I thought this was something I can deliver some information on.

I've been doing that blog for a long time. In the beginning there weren't that many lawyers that paid attention or knew what all that meant. It grew over time, so now when I give these seminars about PDFs, lawyers are paying attention. Instead of blitzing through the material in an hour because nobody has any questions, suddenly I find that what would have been an hour-long presentation takes me three hours to get through because people have lots of questions, which is good. But I learned from the questions how basic the lack of information is.

Lawyers don't know how to use Acrobat, or a reader for that matter, to search. They don't know how to do bate stamping, they don't know that you can redact, and they don't know how to create bookmarks. There's a lot of stuff to know. The challenge is to just be very patient and spit out a steady stream of bite-sized morsels of information.

That basically means sending out an email once a week. What I tell people is to go to the website and sign up for the email. That way you won't have to figure out how to pull it in or whether we post, or to remember to do anything. You'll just get an email once a week that will contain whatever we posted on the website. Usually it will just be little tips. A lot of them will repeat, but that's okay because you may have forgotten how to do it or you may have forgotten that it was something you should have paid attention to. That's the way for people to learn. Steady, bite-sized, regular delivery of little chunks of information that they can say, "Aha. That's useful. I'm going to do that now."

Enrico: When I give speeches on technology to lawyers, it's always interesting because sometimes I find that their heads are spinning by the time I'm done with them. I always tell them it really is the journey and not the destination. It's not like you're going to know all the things that I know, but in this age you have to keep learning. You have to keep getting another step up the ladder at all times. You don't have to be the best, but if you want to be competitive, you need to keep up the learning curve. You need to keep understanding what the next level is; getting more efficient and being better able to process and work with the data and information that you're trying to analyze. That's really what it is all about.

Ernie: Absolutely. When I first started going to TECHSHOW I would experience this information overload feeling that we all have, the feeling that you're trying to drink a little bit of water from a fire hose. So I tell people when they come to these seminars, "Look, the first step, especially if you're coming to one that's all day, you're not going to process all this information."

The trick really is to just sit back and absorb what it is that you were unaware was possible. A lot of it is just knowing," Wow, there's a way to do something that I didn't know there was a way to do." There's going to be a lot of those different things that you didn't know were possible. Many of them you don't care about or you can't implement right away, so the trick is just to learn what's possible, pick a few things that you really want to be motivated to do, focus on those things, make them work, and then move onto something else. Trying to implement a lot of them at once is crazy. I can't do that and I know you didn't do it that way, either.

Enrico: Nope. It's amazing a couple of years down the line, though, if you keep at it, how far you can come.

Ernie: Yeah, that's how we all did it. Just take one little thing at a time and move forward, and just find the next thing that you think would be useful for you to do. If you do that, in a very short period of time you'll suddenly be in a completely new place. The process of doing that on a regular basis, whether it's once a month or once a week or whatever, suddenly you find yourself having a fluency with this stuff that you didn't have before.

Part of it is just getting comfortable with it and accepting the fact that to some extent you're going to fumble around a little bit, but that's okay. You're not going to break anything. It's software. It's not china in a fine antique store.

Enrico: What's your roll-out plan, Ernie, for digitalworkflowcle.com and your business model? I take it you're going to continue to do CLEs in Louisiana and people pay to go to those. How is it that you're going to expand your business? What's the business model here?

Ernie: Well, we're going to kind of feel our way around. That's one thing. We're not going to commit to one plan that we're not sure how to execute. I've learned a lot about this kind of thing and how the Internet works and how technology works. You can only see a certain way ahead. There's only so far ahead you can see. What we see for the next year is that we'd like to do more seminars and webinars, and also create online videos that people can watch whenever they want to. We want to create more content. We want to create it throughout the year. I guess the main thing to focus on is webinars and live seminars in Louisiana. Well, the webinars can be anywhere, but we can't offer CLE credit anywhere because there's a whole challenge to that which you and I were talking about earlier.

Enrico: Yeah.

Ernie: But to deliver content on a regular basis so that people that we're trying to reach are acclimated to the idea that we're here all year round, we can do webinars, which are great, we can do seminars, and we're going to be putting out more information in the newsletter. We want to focus on building that. On the back end, we want to focus on creating reach so that when we scale out beyond Louisiana and we figure out how to offer credit outside of Louisiana, that people are engaging with what we're doing and we don't have as big of a challenge in trying to reach them by email or whatnot.

I don't know how you've done what you do, but I'm learning that email is definitely a component to how you reach people. The problem with email is there's so much spam out there, so if you suddenly were to magically have the email list of all the lawyers in the US, and I know a large percentage of them want to know this kind of stuff, I can't just email them and say, "Hey, we're over here. We're doing this really cool thing and we're giving away a lot of free information," because the spam filters would catch it.

Enrico: Yep.

Ernie: So the way to communicate to people these days is through social media, engaging them and showing them, "Look, we're over here having a conversation. If you want to join in, you can." That's what I've learned from having a blog and from doing social media; is that it's really the best way to engage people. That's the other component.

That's why we brought in the third member of our team who is not a lawyer, Megan Hargroder. She is a social media expert. She consults with people and shows them how to do this and she's helped me. I know it sounds crazy to some people that you would hire somebody or pay somebody to help you to understand social media, or that I would do that, because some people say, "Well, you have a blog. You know all this stuff." But I don't, because that's not what I do all day long. There are people who do that all day long and they are on top of all the latest little things you need to do or to pay attention to. So it's great to have somebody who knows that stuff to help us figure it out because it's a key component to what we're going to try to do.

Enrico: Excellent. I would encourage everyone to go to digitalworkflowcle.com. On the right-hand side there's contact information, but more importantly, you could subscribe via email to the website or put it in your RSS reader or follow them on Twitter. There are some great blog posts here on all kinds of things that lawyers are interested in, in terms of technology and things that they really need to know.

If you don't have time to go to a CLE, you don't have time to go to a webinar, this is a great web resource for lawyers on all things technology. I love the byline, "Helping lawyers use technology to improve their law practice." That's really what it's all about.

Ernie: Yep.

Enrico: Ernie, thanks for coming today. I really had a great time having you on the show today.

Ernie: Same here. It was great talking to you, Enrico. I hope to see you soon, maybe at TECHSHOW.

Enrico: Yep. We'll see you soon.

Ernie: All right. Take care.

Enrico: Thanks, Ernie.

Ernie: Thanks.

Growing Your Law Firm in 2012

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio, brought to you by the Greatest American Lawyer Blog. Changing the way law is practiced through technology, innovation and creativity. Turning the business of law on its head and shaking things up to the betterment of clients, lawyers, law firms and society

Welcome to GAL Radio. My name is Attorney Enrico Schaefer. I’m an internet and technology lawyer, founding partner of the law firm Traverse Legal. We have developed a number of innovative ways to provide client service, to bill clients, to provide flat fee defined deliverable projects with a price guarantee, and a variety of other methodologies all designed to improve the business model of law. We did actually turn the business of law on its head, we shook it up, and we started from scratch doing only those things that made sense from a business point of view. And let’s face it, law firms and lawyers typically are very poor business people. Why? Well, in an hourly business environment, it doesn’t take much creativity or any intelligence to be able to develop a system which spits out hours and bills them back to the client, and, if you’re lucky, that bill gets paid at the end of the month. That does not require any innovation, creativity or foresight.

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With: Enrico Schaefer

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Well, what if in 2012, you were a lawyer that wanted to grow your business and break things up a little bit and push the edges of the envelope. Here are some things I want to tell you about how we have become so successful by turning the business model of law on its head.

The first thing I want to talk about is web marketing. Web marketing is a huge potential draw for you if you are an attorney who specializes in some particular area of law. If you share your expertise by blogging it or using social media to brand yourself as that area of legal specialization, you are going to attract customers because guess what, like all other consumers who are shopping for skis, hats, boots or whatever, legal consumers – consumers of legal services – also use Google in order to research their problem, so they ask Google: “what do I do if I have been the victim of defamation on the internet?” “what do I do if I have been pulled over for a drunk driving in Michigan or California?” They post their question to Google and guess what? Organic search results are returned of people who have drafted blog posts or articles about those issues. If you have posted an article about one of these issues, you put yourself in the running to come back on a Google search and allow that client to find you by your specialization.

The second thing I want to talk to is customer relations. Lawyers are used to bullying their clients. They’re used to providing services that are no different, no better, and no worse than the attorney down the block. Well, what if you wanted to be special? What if you wanted to provide the best customer service of any other lawyer in your town or any other lawyer globally practicing within your area of specialization? There are lots of ways which technology allows us to do better customer service. Obviously, email allows us to return emails and communications faster. We have digital dictation which allows us to, in real time, dictate things and have them turned around within minutes, if not hours. Therefore, technology allows you to do better customer service.

Why don’t you make your case management system available to your clients online so they can see everything that you are doing? Basecamphq.com offers such extranet systems. They are beautiful, simple, cost-effective, and you can allow your clients to see what’s happening in their case day-to-day. That sense of connection and communication with the clients will create a customer service experience beyond anything they have ever felt before with any lawyer or attorney they have worked with previously, guaranteed. As part of your customer intake process, what kind of turnaround are you able to achieve? Can you improve your process of client intake so that their very first experience with you and your law firm is one that impresses them as being responsive and attentive to their needs.

I want to talk about another area. Billing. Clients hate the hourly bill at the end of the month. Have you considered flat fee billing or value billing as part of your business model? Many of the things that you do within your area of specialization as a lawyer are things that you do every day. You know how much time it’s going to take. You know what it’s going to cost to get through a particular stage of a threat letter or some other commoditizable service that you provide. Give them a flat fee bid. Tell them exactly where the project is going to start and where it’s going to end, and allow them to pay up front. You don’t even have to send a bill at the end of the case. They’ve already paid. These are types of things that you can do as a lawyer to set yourself apart, to deliver a better customer experience and to grow your legal practice in 2012.

That’s all for GAL Radio. We’ll see you next time.

Why Are So Few Managing Partners Great Leaders

The Greatest American Lawyer — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:19:38 PST

I was lucky. My first law firm was Bowman and Brooke, a niche firm providing automotive product liability defense to the automobile industry. The founder and managing partner of the firm was Richard Bowman. By in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, he was one of the most out-of-the-box and innovative managing partners of any hourly billing firm in the world. Dick Bowman never did anything because it was the way other law firms were doing it. Bowman and Brooke became an innovator and stood out from the crowd in many ways.

I have often wondered why so few law firm managing partners are like Dick Bowman. They seem to inspire nothing except hourly minimums. They innovate little beyond new billing techniques and policies.

In the video below, Simon Sinek talks about how great leaders inspire action at a September 2009 TEDX Talk. He points out that great companies always start with the question "Why?" as they pursue greatness. Think about whether or not you know any managing partners who come to mind as you watch the video…

How to Meet, Sign Up and Obtain Payment from New Clients in Less Than 60 Minutes

The Greatest American Lawyer — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:44:20 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio. My name is Attorney Enrico Schaefer, and today we’re going to talk about something that’s really important to lawyers and law firms alike. How do you sign up your clients?

Keep in mind that the industrial age model for signing up clients was to get them on the phone or in a conference room, have a lawyer or lawyers sitting there. Those lawyers would then impress the client that they knew more than the client about some legal issue. Of course, before the internet, the client’s chance of knowing anything about their legal issue was fairly limited.

Play: Trademark a Logo to Protect Your Logo Design from Trademark Infringement
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With: Enrico Schaefer

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

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After they have impressed the client, then they’ll go ahead and slide that retainer agreement across the table. The client will often take that retainer agreement with them or review the retainer agreement before getting it back in a day or two. Once the agreement is signed, it has to be countersigned by the law firm. And then once all that happens, then the client has to pay a retainer. Typically, that’ll come by check. If all goes well, within a couple of days - in a non-emergency situation - you may or may not have your signed retainer agreement with the client and the actual retainer. Some law firms will actually wait for the check to clear before they start representation of the client.

All of this sounds like nonsense in the internet and technology age. And how many lawyers actually relied on the retainer agreement to protect them from a disgruntled client? And how many of those disgruntled clients actually went to court over the retainer agreement? And the answer is either none or extremely small number of clients. My message is this.

Your retainer agreement doesn’t protect you from much of anything, and isn’t as important as lawyers make it out to be. So here’s a method for actually meeting a new client, talking to them, quoting the project, getting them signed up and getting payment in less than an hour.

At our law firm, we use an extranet system for our entire case management solution. We use Basecamphq.com. So, here’s what happens. A client calls or sends an email. We have a whole process for intake. Today, I spoke to a client on a Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down issue. That client called, I spoke to them on the phone. There wasn’t a whole lot of need for chit-chat. As soon as I found out that they had a YouTube video take-down request, that they had copyright registration, that there was no fair-use defense, all of which took me about 30-seconds of question and answer, I bid them a project with deliverables such as:

Obtain background documents from the clients including copyright registration, infringing YouTube URL and basic business model information from the client;
Interview the client concerning client goals, risk tolerance and budgets;
Prepare draft DMCA take-down notice and provide to client for review;
Send DMCA take-down notice to YouTube demanding that the video be removed;
Determine whether or not YouTube has taken down the video and bid next projects and potential fees for such.

That’s it! I’ve given them a set of defined deliverables, and I quoted them $600 for that very limited project. All of that took about 5 minutes. I dictated the project to the extranet; the extranet manager uploaded the project, and within 10 minutes after hanging up the phone, the project was up. The client had their login information. Our billing department had already generated an invoice so that they could pay by credit card. The invoice was paid within 30 minutes of the extranet project coming live, and we were in the saddle representing this client within an hour of my conversation with them. They had paid; the project was defined, and we were off and running.

So here’s my message to lawyers and their law firms. Why do you put up barriers which make it more difficult for a client to hire you? I didn’t need a retainer agreement. I quoted them deliverables. There’s a link to the billing policy within the email. And BOOM! Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am! We are done! Try and remove barriers to getting a client signed up with you. Try and remove barriers to payment, take credit cards, issue electronic invoices. Get the client signed up so you can do what you’re supposed to be doing. Lawyers need to focus on one thing: client relationships. Create the client relationship, get them in under the tent, show them what a great law firm you are, what a great lawyer you are, how specialized you are at their particular legal problem, and they will come back for another project.

What we have found is of the 220 or so prospects that contact us each month, of the approximate 10-20 who actually hire us on a project for that first time, that the vast majority, well over 60%, hire us for yet another project or a third project or a fourth project. And a high percentage of those actually become lifelong clients.

This is Enrico Schaefer and that’s all for Greatest American Lawyer for today. We will see you next time on GAL Radio. Have a great week.

Just A Few Reasons a Lawyer Should Fire the Client

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:38:38 PST

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s blog found at sethgodin.typepad.com. Seth talks in this post about an unreasonable customer and the reasons why you should consider firing a customer or, if you happen to be a lawyer or law firm, a client. Here’s his list:

He willfully corrupts your systems at a cost to other customers
Your employees are prevented from doing their best work in the long run
His word of mouth can't be changed or doesn't matter
He distracts you from delighting customers that are reasonable

I also found Seth’s comments about tolerating certain problem clients to be interesting. That list is found here:

You promised you would
She helps you raise your game
Her word of mouth is very powerful
The cost of frequently figuring out which customers to fire is too high compared to the cost of putting up with everyone

I have to say that bad clients typically don’t make for good word-of-mouth marketing for any attorney. If a client is really a pain in the ass, you’re probably good than harm by sending them on their way.

What We Can Learn about Online Reputation Protection from Herman Cain and Joe Paterno

The Greatest American Lawyer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:47:10 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio. Today, we’re talking about reputation management in the internet space. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on on the internet. There are review sites such as Yelp and Google Places. Your Google Places’ page has a place for people to post a review of your services. For lawyers, there is AVVO and a host of other rating services. One thing that has caught my attention the last couple of days is the reputation issues that are being faced by Herman Cain, who, as we all know, is facing any number of accusers on sexual harassment, and Joe Paterno over at Penn State, as a result of his alleged failure to do more when he became aware of an assistant coach’s alleged abuse of a child in the locker room. All of this got me thinking about something that we do at our law firm every single day, which is online defamation/ internet defamation claims and defense on behalf of people who are looking at a Google search result that they don’t like, on the plaintiff’s side, or they have been accused of internet defamation in a defamation threat letter from an attorney.

Play: What We Can Learn about Online Reputation Protection from Herman Cain and Joe Paterno
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With: Enrico Schaefer

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I think that the internet has fundamentally changed the reputation game. Reputation used to be something that was very community oriented. It was something that we worried about on our block and in our town and in our city and in our relevant profession, what other lawyers in town thought of us was potentially important in terms of reputation. What our neighbors think of us is potentially important in terms of reputation. The internet changed that because all of sudden someone could post something online and literally the whole world could see it.

So, if someone posts a false statement of fact about me online, that can be a lifelong problem if I don’t deal with it somehow. If the person who’s posted something online is anonymous, then I’ve got the added challenge of, well, hey! How do I go about identifying this person and figuring out who they are? And, of course, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provided immunity to providers of web services such as web hosts and the people who run the websites such as Yelp and AVVO from liability for defamation, which, of course, gives me no leverage at all to go to the person who’s running the website and have the defamatory content taken down.

Well, what really has occurred to me and has come home within the last couple of days watching Joe Paterno’s reputation get dragged through the mud, and Herman Cain’s reputation get dragged through the mud is that, really, reputation is becoming more important both offline and online. In a way, Joe Paterno’s problem is pretty predictable, and even if we didn’t have the internet, it would be on the news every night. It would be in the newspaper. It would be a traditional defamation problem. Joe Paterno’s problem is exponentially made more severe by Facebook, by the internet, by the fact that this information is also online, but he would have had the problem anyway, same with Herman Cain. He is an important enough person that the issues that he’s facing would have gained enough traditional press to where lots of people would have been aware of the allegations.

Now, everyone has the same type of problem as Herman Cain and Joe Paterno, right? Because, it used to be if the guy down the block from you, or one attorney in town didn’t think very well of you, then your reputation problem was fairly contained. If that person down the block posted on the web, and now everyone that you potentially deal with in life can do a Google search and see what that person is saying about you, and if it happens to be false statements of fact, have this permanency of a Google search result on the web, now, you’ve got a hug problem. So, in a way, we are all Joe Paterno and Herman Cain now, where our reputations as attorneys can turn on a dime. The importance of protecting your reputation as a result has never been as important as it is today. The importance of protecting your reputation as an asset for lawyers, doctors and everyone else has become critical. And whereas before we used to, as attorneys, worry about reputation, I think now we need to worry about it at a much higher level. So, the decisions that you, as a lawyer or as a law firm, make every day should be driven by the importance of reputation, and the knowledge and understanding that if you let your reputation get away from you, and it starts to run across the internet, that you may be forever impacted.

That’s all for GAL Radio today. Go ahead and post our comments below on the importance of online reputation for lawyers and law firms in today’s internet-connected world, and we will see you next time.

In the Internet and Technology Age, Isn’t it Time for Lawyers to Stand Up?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:15:05 PDT

Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. And I adore the internet. As a lawyer specializing in internet law and technology issues, it is hard for me to complain about anything related to technology. Our law firm thrives on the growth and innovation that is occurring online.

After six years of working on a laptop from my kneeling chair, the last 18 months on a MacBook Pro, I’ve had enough. I am done. No more. I’ve always believed that my kneeling chair was way better than a regular chair because it properly aligns the spine and puts the weight down through your thighs where it should be when you’re sitting. But the days of kneeling are done. For the last four days, I have been working on top of a Banker’s Box, and standing in front of my MacBook Pro and dual screen. Thus far, it’s been awesome. In fact, I’m awaiting delivery of my Anderlyn Desk, which will sit on top of my desk to take the place of my cardboard Banker’s Box. Here are the things that I’ve noticed and currently love about standing up while I work:

I’m standing up! Being in a chair has always made me feel a little bit like a caged animal. I hate anything that is limiting, mentally, emotionally and physically (Well, I might let my wife tie me to the bed if she was ever so inclined). Standing up gives you range of motion, keeps you moving and keeps you active.
You feel more engaged with your work. Because there is a lot more motion involved, the brain is more active and able to flip from item to item.
Did you ever see the movie WALL-E? You know, the movie where all the people end up on a spaceship in motorized chairs that they never have to get out of? It’s kind of what the technology age feels like. People are strapped to their computers and can do more and more without ever getting up. Sitting is not only bad for you physically because you have to lean over your keyboard, but it means you aren’t doing anything. Standing up is exercise. Don’t believe me? Try doing it for an 8-hour day and see how your legs feel when you wake up the next morning.
I love to pace. When I’m dictating or talking on the phone, my brain is active as I move from side to side. With my Plantronics headset, I can move of approximately four feet around my computer as I dictate to my computer (as I’m doing now). When I pick up a call, I can pace as well without having to get up.

I’ll let you know how things progress. But thus far, I could not happier and more liberated with my stand-up desk and my new found freedom. Do you stand up? Let me know how it’s going for you.

When Selecting an Attorney, Does Geography Count Anymore?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:32:58 PDT

I was recently interviewed by The Northern Express Magazine who did an article titled “Internet Law.” One of the interesting quotes that found its way into the article is as follows:

“It used to be that clients felt secure having an attorney who lived down the block,” Schaefer says. “Now, they feel secure having an attorney who’s written an article about their problem, no matter where he or she is from... The reality is that clients want answers, not lawyer-speak or disclaimers. They want business solutions and to real advice about how to proceed.”

Rereading the article got me thinking. How important should geography be to clients in the internet era? Even if you have an issue which going to wind up in a local courthouse, our clients better off finding the best attorney for the job rather than an attorney who happens to be local? And if it’s a matter that doesn’t require you to be in court, aren’t you better off simply finding the best attorney in the country to handle your issue?

No doubt, some issues which involve state law require expertise in that area of state law. But the barriers to regional, statewide and federal practice continue to dissolve in the internet era.

I can’t get around this simple fact. If I’m a client and I have a specific legal issue, I want the lawyer who wrote an article on my specific issue to handle my case. I don’t care where they’re located or how far away they may be. I go into that attorney-client relationship knowing that my lawyer has already handled my issue before and is enough of an expert to write an article or blog post about it.

What do you think?

State Bar Associations Continue to Lead from Behind

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:56:42 PDT

The Virginia State Bar Association took aim at a Richmond, Virginia Attorney engaged in the nefarious pursuit of “blogging.” An article concerning the decision is posted here. The Virginia State Bar Association’s misconduct charge can be viewed here.

As usual, my take on this is as follows. State bar associations, by and large, continue to operate under the premise that it is much better for prospective clients and consumers of legal services to have no information related to lawyers or the legal problem faced as existed before the internet. There are a lot of vested interests within legal circles who simply don’t want lawyers to have to compete with other lawyers for business. There are many lawyers who do not want clients to have any information concerning alternatives or their legal issues. Bar associations continue to push back against lawyers who share information online as some sort of “illicit advertising” when the reality is exactly the opposite.

Before the internet, clients were ripe for abuse by lawyers because of the complete lack of information and lack of real-world competition (clients were lucky to know a single person who knew a lawyer). Before the internet, a client could not review dozens of potential law firms to handle their matter. Some clients want their stories told so that other people can benefit. Because blogging upsets the system under which bar associations and lawyers have existed for decades, there is this sort of inevitable pushback.

When will bar associations embrace the web rather than try and impede it?

Growing a Law Firm in Tough Economic Times

The Greatest American Lawyer — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:27:53 PDT

Lawyers and law firms are not exempt from the economic downturn. When the economy is chugging along, companies regularly look to enhance their business model. Clients have no problem hiring attorneys to do things which are important, but not critical. While a trademark registration with the USPTO is important, the cost of a lawyer opinion letter on availability, legal fees for trademark registration and a filing fee to the USPTO can run about $1,600. It is a discretionary spend. Unless you get sued as a defendant in litigation, you typically have a choice as to whether or not to spend money on legal services.

In order to overcome the economic disincentives to spending money on important legal items, which are not otherwise critical or mandatory, lawyers need to continue to differentiate their legal service offerings. There are lots of ways to do this. Innovative billing techniques, payment schedules, improved customer or client service, transparency or perhaps the most important item, is to make sure that you do not charge the client to learn about their problems. Lawyers who charge for miscellaneous phone calls to or from their client are creating a huge disincentive for that client to contact the attorney.

Internet Law Article by the Northern Express

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:10:19 PDT

I’m an internet lawyer by trade who loves to blog about innovative business models for law. I was recently interviewed by the Northern Express on a variety of different issues ranging from the technical aspects of internet law, what it means to be an internet lawyer as well as how I ended up in Traverse City, Michigan founding the law firm called Traverse Legal, PLC.

I’ve been blogging for over seven years about the law, use of technology by lawyers and alternative billing arrangements with clients. This article is a great summary of how I got started and where I am today. You can read the article on "Internet Law" at the Northern Express.