Think about the major economic drivers in the Wild West—railroads, oil steel—or other commodities—sugar, for example—and you’ll likely find a trust behind it. U.S. Steel and Standard Oil once ruled the supply, controlled the price, and generally monopolized the market in American in the nineteenth century.

The rich seemed only to get richer, which is why President Theodore Roosevelt sought to break up these trusts through legal action.

Teddy, with the help of Congress, soon passed The Sherman Act in 1890, which became the country’s oldest anti-trust law. In 1914, another anti-trust bill, the Clayton Act, was passed by Congress under President Woodrow Wilson. With it came the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC.

The FTC was an agency tasked to enforce anti-trust laws and regulate and oversee business practice to ensure fair and equitable competition.

More recently, the FTC started to work in conjunction with the Department of Justice to promote consumer protection and anti-competitive business practice.

The FTC’s professed mission, specifically, is to “prevent business practices that are anticompetitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers; to enhance informed consumer choice and public understanding of the competitive process; and to accomplish this without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.”

The key players in trust regulation in Progressivist America could never envision the lack of trust consumers face today with the evolution of e-commerce. Today, the FTC’s mission of protection is being challenged on its home turf—in court.

Adding to the U.S.’s long history of anti-trust regulation, a case pending in the federal court for the District of New Jersey will decide whether or not the FTC has the right to oversee and regulate data security services provided to consumers by private firms.

Hotel conglomerate, Wyndham Worldwide Corporation, is challenging the authority of the FTC to enforce action against Wyndham and several of its subsidiary companies. The FTC’s action alleges Wyndham failed to secure the data and privacy of its customer accounts after a hacking incident claimed more than $10.6 million from Wyndham’s customers via fraudulent charges and the loss of information belonging to 500,000 individuals, according to the Westlaw Insider.

Deciding whether or not the FTC’s authority extends to oversight and regulation of the operations and other practices of private companies will definitely change the way firms can and will business. Audits to ensure firms have incorporated sufficient security measures are on the horizon, and fines for insufficient security measures would, then, be imminent.

And, although consumer protection and privacy concerns should be considered paramount to businesses, to what extent should the government be privy to the same concerns and information? Also, to what extent are businesses liable for implementing state-of-the-art cyber-protection software in the eyes of the law?

These days, breaches of online security—from cloud computing espionage to electronic spam to broken passwords (despite the alphanumeric complexity)—are common place.

The Wyndham case should certainly prompt law firms and the clients they represent to tighten those security belts before driving down the information superhighway—not just because it’s good sense and safe, but because it may soon be the law.

In our modern world, the Wyndham case serves as a gentle reminder for firms to be wiser about their computer security hardware and software, but also for governments to implement constitutional measures to find the source of this malware without violating the same privacy they seek to protect.

For more information about how to protect your firm, read “Cyber Attacks: Why Your Firm Is At Risk & How To Prevent Them.”

-WB

Read more about the history of the FTC in a fact sheet, here.

What is it about Friday afternoons that attract last minute requests from clients, colleagues, and, especially, bosses?

Luckily, if you’re an iPad-wielding lawyer, there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy your weekend and work from home. Here are some new and improved legal services iPad apps, which–like the last day of the week—yield their own fair share of upsides and downsides.

Lexis Advance HD. FREE

Upside. Add to your defense of Flex scheduling or work from home policies.

Lexis Advance is mobile app available on your iPad that gives law firm professionals the ability to conduct legal research on the go.

Whether it’s in the courtroom, boardroom, or your bedroom, you can search, view, and annotate documents while online or offline. And, you can save files in folders remotely to access alter.

Downside. Now you can’t blame travel, family events, or other out of the office excuses for tardy work product. Research remotely has never been easier (and your boss knows it!).

iTranslate Voice HD. $1.99

Upside. No more miscommunication.

“Can you imagine talking into your phone in one language and immediately hearing yourself in another language?” asks iTranslate Voice HD.

“That’s exactly what iTranslate Voice does. Just speak into your phone and it immediately replies in one of our 36 languages.”

Occasionally technology makes our dreams possible. For Star Trek fans, this is a real-life universal translator. Let’s hope that warp drive, transporters, and commercial space travel is next.

Downside. Without reasons why not, your boss may send you on more trips abroad for client meetings, which means less time at home. And, unlike Enterprise captains, you can’t transport there instantly.

TrialPad for iPad. $49.99-$89.99

Upside. Trial prep in the palm of your hand.

The top iPad app for lawyers in 2012, TrialPad and TranscriptPad are specialized iPad apps that bring productivity to its peak.

Litigants can use these apps to organize trial materials. You can highlight, annotate, redact, and zoom documents and depositions. You can add exhibit stickers to documents, create reports of all your evidence with these exhibit numbers, and process them via Dropbox and other Cloud apps. Edit video clips or take snapshots of surveillance video, then bring them to court.

Meanwhile, organize all these documents with folders with separate case and witness files.

Basically, this is a lawyer’s entire trial prep in one, small, digital box.

Downside. Only for tech-savvy legal professionals.

Fastcase. $65-95/mo

Upside. Easy to use, quick to understand.

Fastcase is another legal research app. It’s competitive advantage is the easy and quick access to the comprehensive national law library via more powerful searching, sorting, and visualization tools.

Its user-friendly design may be way many big name law firms already use it.

Downside. Must subscribe, and it can get pricey.

Readdle. FREE

Upside. Something lawyers love to keep for themselves but hate to give away to clients—this product is free.

One of the newer apps on the market, Readdle is an all-purpose app that lets you read, listen, view, download, annotate almost anything you want on your iPad. Readdle is an all-stop shop for viewing, reading and annotating documents, editing text files, viewing photos, watching movies, listening to music, managing files, sharing files remotely with others, and storing email attachments and other web documents.

Like an all-service firm, this app serves general audiences.

Downside. In a world of specialization, do we really need one more app for these things?

Have a wonderful weekend on your iPad. Whether it’s for work or play, technology certainly has a place in a lawyer’s everyday life.

-WB

According to ancient philosophers, like Plato, a just man is a man who gives the precise equivalent of what he has received. With extortionist billable hours, lawyers these days aren’t often the pillars of equivalency.

But, there still exist some legal professionals who can lead the rest of us by example.

For example, Shearman & Sterling
understand what it means to be a public servant. Although firm partners require each lawyer in its U.S. offices to spend at least 25 hours on pro bono work annually, the New York office goes above and beyond.

According to the New York Law Journal, Shearman & Sterling’s 340 New York-based attorneys have logged over 27,000 hours in pro bono practice from 2009 to 2011. It’s nice to know justice can prevail without a high premium for the wrongly convicted of murder, veterans fighting for benefits, or labor rights of pizza delivery workers.

But, it’s not just about what you do, it’s about what you don’t do.

Lawyers are always held to the highest standards in court. So, when a cellphone rang during a prosecutor’s closing argument in a domestic violence trial in Michigan, the judge held the culprit in contempt. The problem was, the culprit was the judge himself.

Chief Ionia District Judge Raymond Voet recently bought a new phone and, as it turns out, didn’t turn it off properly before court.

“I got very embarrassed, and I’m sure my face turned red,” Voet told MLive.com, according to Martha Nell for the ABA Journal.

“I thought it would never happen to me.”

The same judge posted signs posted outside his courtroom warning the public that individuals face a $25 fine if it goes off during a hearing. Luckily the judge is a stickler for justice for all, so Voet held himself contempt of court and paid the fine during the next recess.

As a law firm manager, you too can lead by example.

When it comes to discipline, law firm managers should take the reigns. No excuses for top management for the violation of human resource policies.

When it comes to productivity, leading by example pays in dividends.

In fact, “It Pays to Be Optimistic,” reports Jennifer Robison for the Gallup Business Journal.  Recent research shows that optimistic managers do a better job at driving productivity in the workplace whereas pessimistic managers pave the way for the worst by expecting it.

Leading by example through optimism doesn’t just help your bottom line, but it also helps the health of your human capital.

Attitudes—like productivity and habits—are contagious. Start conducting pro bono suits and your colleagues will follow. Be cheerful in the office and watch the contagion. Made a mistake in a meeting? That’s ok, forgive and forget yourself as readily as the follies of others.

See, it’s amazing how fairness in business policy or leadership comes down to a simple doctrine of treating others the way you’d like to be treated (or visa verse in the case of one judge!).

Some clichés and successful management practices are here to stay. In law especially, just leadership depends on them.

To learn more, attend a C4CM First Friday Event, “Team Management: 6 Key Leadership Elements that Pump-Up Efficiency and Productivity“, a live, interactive telephone course to help your law firm managers lead by example.

-WB

“The demise of Dewey is blamed on the long-term financial commitments the firm made to lure rainmaking partners from other firms,” wrote Max Harris, chief executive of Axiom, a 900-person new-model legal services firm, for Forbes.

“However, the real problem is less the commitments themselves and more a firm structure that worships short-term interests and punishes long-term investments of any kind.”

Why? Because most law firms are structured in a way that allows partners to freely move firms (and take clients with them).

“The hyperactive market for mergers and lateral partner moves, akin to unrestricted free agency in sports, presents law firm managers with a seemingly intractable dilemma,” Harris lamented.

“Investment in the future, whether aimed at transcending industry pressures by acquiring game-changing talent or at innovating through increased use of technology and more streamlined delivery models, requires a deferment of near-term compensation, and thus it risks inciting an exodus by a firm’s top producers.”

However, not all law firms need to be crippled by their own organizational structure. In fact, law firms these days are not going down like Dewey. Instead, law firms are looking for new ways to market one of the oldest professional services.

Uniqueness is a great way to attract clients and retain employees. In a competitive market, it’s all about what sets your firm apart, rather than how your firm conforms to standards. In the past, clients wanted law firms that looked like a law firm (oak molding and boat paintings), moved like a law firm (billable hours and face time with the partners) and talked like a law firm (lots of legal jargon) to quell their fears about uncertain litigation.

Today, clients are looking for innovative billing practices, modern legal technology, and low-cost services. Associates are looking for adequate incentive to join and then stay in a firm.

How do you achieve uniqueness? Discover your firm’s value-add. Let’s take two examples.

According to Gabriel Cheong, owner of Infinity Law Group in Quincy, Mass. and Cambridge Divorce Group in Cambridge, Mass., over 90 percent of litigants in Family Court are unrepresented, pro se litigants. To fill this gap and differentiate his practice, Cheong is in the business of selling legal services, not attorneys.

See, Cheong’s firms provide unbundled legal services (or Limited Assistance Representation) that give individuals looking for help, but not representation, the legal advice they need at a low fee. Uniqueness in this case stems from meeting the client-side of the legal business.

How are clients being under-served? If you can’t answer this question for your legal niche already, just ask your current clients. Circulate a survey or mention it in the next meeting. Then, go back to the office and brainstorm new ways to meet this need.

Next up, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner have chosen to solve a persistent associate-side problem: law school loans.

Does your law firm need to recruit and retain top new talent? Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner provide their attorneys with a law school loan payback scheme. Attorneys who work for the firm during law school as student associates qualify for the reimbursement program.

“I signed some checks for Harvard and Stanford in the past year that nearly made me choke,” joked Barbara McCurdy, managing partner, to the Washington Post. But “the benefit for us is that we attract really excellent talent.”

The program isn’t just for lawyers, either.

Lawyers don’t underestimate the value of a good assistant or paralegal. Often these support services make or break a case. That’s why it’s so important to retain talented staff.

At Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, tuition reimbursement for non-attorney staffers is available at 100 percent for straight-A employees. B-students are eligible for 80 percent reimbursement and a C-students eligible for 60 percent, according to the Washington Post.

Your firm will only excel to the extent your human capital is excellent.

Whether it’s on the client-side or associate-side of your legal business, look at how your firm can stand apart from the rest. Do you feel secure that your equity and managing partners are here to stay? If not, what is your retention strategy?

Forbes was wrong to think that the legal market can’t handle harsh competition. Law firms are not all going bust like Dewey & LeBoeuf. Nevertheless, survival still depends on successful management of your firm’s long-term assets and investments. That’s right, long-term….

So, take stock, and stand out like a sore thumb. In law, a little soreness from growing pains may be a good thing.

-WB

HBR case studies draw from real-life examples of business dilemmas. Too soon to IPO? Challenge the boss or stand down? Are you losing all your good people? Can this brand be saved?

These questions and more are addressed in narratives written by real-world professionals. And, the attached teaching note includes the answer—at least, the action of the firm that experienced this debate at ground zero.

Case studies teach the fundamentals of business and aim to evoke out-of-the-box solutions to traditional business problems. Practice them over and over and pretty soon, you’ll surprise yourself with the ease at which you can tackle corporate obstacles.

So, imagine for a second that you are living a HBR case study. You are about to prepare a timeline for a case on PPT. Why PPT? Why not Prezi or Keynote or SlideRocket?

You are about to go to lunch when a client calls. He wants a discount on his billables for a case because he gave your firm a positive referral. What’s your firm policy for clients regarding referals? How much will a discount affect your firm’s bottom line? Will a discount today set a precedent for lower and lower fees in the future? What is the moral hazard for capitulating?

“By adopting the ‘Everything is a case study’ mindset and seeing the world through the Case Method third eye, you’ll learn to filter out the disinformation that life throws at you and uncover startling insights,” writes Robert Plant, associate professor of computer information systems at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, in the HBR Blog.

“You’ll also increase your effectiveness at questioning your company’s strategies, processes, procedures, and methods of data collection.”  For law firm managers, this means initiating the creative problem solving mindset necessary for advancing your firm.

Law firms—specifically old-school equity partners—can be stuck in their traditional ways. Sometimes it’s difficult to know where to begin with long-overdue changes. Purchase new technology? Hire younger lawyers? Retrain older lawyers?

Start with one HBR case study-style question a day. For example, when signing off on billable hours, ask yourself, what are the needs of this client? How did today’s casework directly contribute to those needs? By what methods are the associates assigned to the case fulfilling these needs, and can these methods be improved?

Read the timesheet descriptions line by line and look for one way to improve the process. Start with one case, one client, and one question.

“This will help you assist your company in finding innovative solutions. And it might be good for your career,” continues Mr. Plant.

“After all, CEOs hate canned, staid, boring, predictable answers to business problems (just as business professors hate canned, staid, boring, predictable responses to business cases). They crave creative, adaptive, innovative thinking.”

Law firm managers must be the best in the very specific business of law. Legal services may have idiosyncratic strategies and processes about them, but there are certain fundamental business principles that apply to every firm. That’s what case studies are all about.

Furthermore, case studies remind us to question and criticize in a productive fashion.

Finally, case studies remind us that success comes from paying attention to detail, challenging stale business practices, and continuing to practice the basics. Innovative thinking can grow from a simple 4-page academic exercise. And, you don’t need to get an MBA to give it a try.

-WB

The use of Navajo during World War II is perhaps the best known example of code talkers. Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles, first proposed the use of Navajo to the United States Marine Corps. Johnston was a World War I veteran who was raised on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary.

As one of the few non-Navajos to speak the language fluently, Johnston knew that the complex grammar, the fact that the language was unwritten, and mutually intelligible pronunciation with the even the language’s closest relatives within the Na-Dene family meant Navajo could provide meaningful information across enemy lines, as well as an undecipherable code.The use of Navajo code talkers in World War II was invaluable in winning the war, but the practice of using code talkers in wartime dates back to World War I.

In fact, the first known use of Native Americans in the American military to transmit messages under fire was a group of Cherokee troops in the U.S. 30th Infantry Division during the Second Battle of the Somme in 1918. The unit was under British command at the time.

Cherokee is the only Southern Iroquoian language that remains spoken today. And yet, on March 25, 2011, Google announced the option to perform searches in Cherokee. As of November 2012, Gmail is supported in Cherokee, and on December 18, 2012, Microsoft announced Windows 8 will be released in Cherokee, containing “nearly 180,000 words and phrases” in this Native American language.

“Why do organizations like Microsoft and Google care about languages with so few speakers?” asks Nataly Kelly for the Harvard Business Review Blog.

“Without a doubt, providing members of linguistic minority groups with access to technology in their native tongues is very important. It empowers these communities, enabling their languages to survive and thrive in the digital age,” Kelly answers.

But that’s not all. In an analysis of gross domestic product by language use, Mark Davies discovered in 2003 that English and Chinese held the highest purchasing power, followed by Japanese, Spanish, and Russian, i.e., $87.50 of every $100 spend corresponds to a person who speaks a world language (via HBR).

Kelly goes on to argue that the remaining percept of micro-language speakers, like Cherokee or Navajo speakers, still possess a powerful and influential market share.

However, there’s another reason why businesses should care about language. Communication today, whether via code, programming, tweets, or traditional press releases, is an important and powerful tool.

For law firms, the extent to which you can effectively communicate your services and practice philosophy to clients affects your profitability. In his article “From Biglaw to Boutique: Networking Contraditions,” Tom Wallerstein stresses the need for partners to ask clients for work.

He points out that lawyers asking their acquaintances for work doesn’t have to be laced with a clandestine agenda. Nevertheless, “beating around the bush” won’t boost your firm’s bottom line.

Furthermore, attract clients by speaking in their language. If you want to represent a young, upcoming start-up in technology, the first step would be increasing your Klout score (or, at least, knowing what one is).

Clear language is important for selling your firm to clients. It’s also important for keeping them.

Your clients are no longer restricted to a single national, cultural, or language border. Especially in a melting pot like America, clients come from a variety of countries and cultures around the world, and their businesses serve a variety of different interests and needs.

Law firms are in the business of servicing micro-language clients—put in a single room, your engineering clients, corporate clients, and criminally prosecuted individuals will stress words, phrases, and their general demands differently.

This means your use of language should be meaningful and direct, but also universal. Unlike the intent of code talkers in military ventures, the language of law firms should aim to be understood by all. There should be no hidden messages, agendas, tricks, legal jargon, fine print or fees.

Retain your clients with a clearly written, custom retainer.

Finally, language is important in internal communication. Ethnic, cultural, and gender differences exist within, as well as outside the firm. It’s not just about preventing workplace discrimination suits with a one-size fits all policy, but it’s about making employees feel heard.

When associate competence and career goals are understood, management can them employ them in more productive ways. This is only possible with effective, adaptive internal dialogue.

So, not only is it important to know the language or your own law firm, but it is also equally important to know the language spoken by your clients and their customers. Cracking the code of sustainable business strategies is knowing when to speak up, what to say, and how exactly to say it.

For more information, listen to C4CM’s audio guide on Handling Difficult Conversations: Communication Strategies for the Workplace.

-WB

King & Spalding announced to its employees this week that private e-mail will no longer be accessible at work. And, in the event firm network blocking measures are inadequate, employees have been advice not to open personal email accounts from a firm computer, according to a King & Spalding e-mail released by Above The Law Blog.

“The firm’s internal security experts, as well as our outside security experts, have advised us that accessing Personal Email Accounts from firm computers creates a significant security risk,” the widely-circulated e-mail states.

“The firm has installed a wireless network called ‘ksmobile’ in each office. This wireless network is reserved for K&S personnel (not clients or visitors who should be directed to the ksguest network), is a direct route to the Internet, and is appropriately sized to accommodate the many personal devices that are being used by K&S personnel.”

So, although checking personal e-mail on firm computers is prohibited, responsible and irresponsible Internet browsing is permitted on mobile devises, like smartphones. With network firewalls and digital security measures improving day-to-day, some wonder if this announcement isn’t a bit technologically too late.

However, what any number of firewalls, complex passwords, and e-mail prohibitions can’t solve is human idiocy.

Seriously.

“There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots,” Mark Rasch, director of network security and privacy consulting for Falls Church, Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), said to Bloomberg.

Rasch is responding to an experiment conducted by The U.S. Department of Homeland Security where, in order to determine how easy it was for hackers to manipulate employees or gain access to computer systems, Homeland Security employees secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors.

Not only did workers pick up those devises, but 60 percent of them plugged in the USB drives and inserted the discs into their office computers. If the devise displayed an official logo, 90 percent of workers installed the drive.

It turns out, curiosity does kill the cat—or, rather, scrambles the cat’s computer screen, steals its social security number, and swipes its confidential data through viruses, clandestine computer programming, and general digital mayhem, describes The Center For Competitive Management (C4CM)’s law blog.

“The test showed something computer security experts have long known: Humans are the weak link in the fight to secure networks against sophisticated hackers,” reports Bloomberg.

And, because 92 percent of lawyers agreed that email was the primary function of their smartphone in an ABA Legal Technology Resource Center survey, perhaps King & Spalding’s reaction isn’t as misguided as first believed. Accessing personal e-mails from a smartphone, according to participants, was more important than making a call, which goes to show how frequently lawyers rely on electronic communication, concludes an article about attorney mobile phone use.

Coupled with curiosity, perhaps law firms should consider even more stringent Internet policies.

It’s surprising how many liabilities and issues accompany Internet access in the office. And, smartphones open up an additional can of worms for curious cats.

Write a smartphone policy that addresses:

• Handing data breeches
• Use of company phones outside work
• Wage and hour compliance
• Text, talk driving issues
• Text harassment
• GPS tracking
• Lost devices
• Etiquette
• Employee productivity
• Photography in and out of the office

If you’re unsure how to draft a policy, including what kind of language and tone to use, take C4CM’s audio conference on crafting a bulletproof workplace policy for smartphones.

In the end, it’s important to write and implement a concrete and clear policy regarding Internet access, e-mail, and mobile phones. It’s important to highlight the security risks and repercussions for both employees and clients.

Make sure your employees know how to safely navigate the world wide web, only then will law firm managers have piece of mind when engaging in legal technology and software.

Remember, the “smart” in smartphone refers to requirements of the user, not the gadget.

-WB

The 24-year-old worked at a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and he discovered a way to make use of old scraps of paper discarded by the mill. Holley decided to bind the scraps into a notepad and sell them at a discounted rate.

In gathering scraps of paper to make his pads, Holley constructed a fairly successful refurbished paper business. And, in the 1900s, a local judge asked Holley to add a margin to the ruled pads so he could have some extra space to make comments on his own notes.

Thus, the legal pad was borne.

With 1.25-inch margin, yellow legal pads are now iconic in the legal industry. American Pad & Paper Company—Holley’s entrepreneurial firm—finally closed their factory in Holyoke, Mass., but the company and its legacy lives on in courthouses and law offices across America.

Lawyers have formed a psychological attachment to legal pads. Philip Moustakis, a mid-level associate at the New York firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, uses one legal pad per case. He prefers yellow over white pads and a faint, as opposed to a dark, rule, telling Legal Affairs Magazine, “The darker lines intrude upon my thinking—they’re yelling back at you.”

“You want a more subtle line.”

Nevertheless, technology is encroaching on more traditional industries, like the market for notepads. And, corporate social responsibility, especially concern for the environment, is taking hold in firms.

Iris Harris, the assistant director of purchasing at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, told Legal Affairs Magazine that her firm no longer leaves stacks of pads lying around on conference tables. Harris’ firm consumes, on average, 1,200 legal-size legal pads, 12,000 letter-size legal pads, and 4,200 Junior-size legal pads a year. Around 2000, her firm switched from yellow to white pads.

“Yellow wasn’t recyclable,” Harris explained.

Today, lawyers are more economical and ecological. The yellow legal pad has been replaced by the iPad.

Luckily, technology today is more flexible than in Holley’s paper mill days.

Jotting down notes, writing in the margin, and drawing diagrams are often the work of handwriting. Many have trouble typing on the iPad, even if they appreciate its dynamic uses.

Instead of using a laptop or typing on the touchscreen, consider one of these iPad apps that make paperless notes both practical and productive.

Notability is an app that allows legal professionals to switch between typing and handwriting notes. The thickness of the stylus is adjustable, as well as the ink color. Notability also allows the user to record a message and embed it into the digital notebook.

Organizing your notes has never been simpler or thinner with Notability’s filing feature.

Penultimate is another popular iPad handwriting notebook. Change the background from ruled to grid to plain paper, and channel Holley as you do it.

Use Your Handwriting is a great app for iPhone and iPad.

A more organic reflection of handwriting, Use Your Handwriting lets lawyers create sublists, quick alarms, and sync data with one press of a button. It’s clear we’ve moved a long way from the mill to mobility in notetaking.

The iPad may not conform to the patented standards of a yellow legal pad, but where it remains deficient in screen size, it will likely exceed in expectations and outcomes for efficiency.

-WB

It was the first person to use a cell phone in the movie theatre, the first person to run over a pedestrian with their skateboard, and the first person to get too drunk at a work function. Now we have to watch annoying advertisements about how “silence is golden,” ride skateboards exclusively in the skate park, and pay cash at the once open office-party bar.

The problem is, all good things come to an end… and they usually come to an end quickly.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently,” Warren Buffett once said. In business, one failure, one event, or one person is all it takes to ruin a good thing.

Unfortunately, the same applies to the Internet.

Once considered the best thing to happen to business, the World Wide Web is opening a world wide can of worms. From Facebook browsing during office hours to computer viruses, the Internet has put workplace efficiency in jeopardy.

With marketers trolling for bits, cookies, and IP addresses, say goodbye to your privacy. With sites like Wikipedia, forget finding reliable information online. With the immediacy of email, proper etiquette has been replaced by emoticons.

“As our inboxes have become more demanding, we have all become less responsive — because we get so many messages it’s hard to keep up. But the harder it is to keep up, the more messages (‘I just thought I’d send another email asking if you got my first two emails’) we send,” writes Sarah Green for the Harvard business Review Blog.

“The problem with ‘responsiveness’ is that email then becomes like a hydra—cut off one head (answer one email) and you spawn nine more,” continues Ms. Green. “The more responsive you are, the more email you receive, and the more responsive you need to be.”

On a personal level, you can put an end this inefficient desire to be “responsive” by following some simple steps here.

Or, you can tap into new technology. Take, for example, Yesware.

Yesware is an ad-on to Google Mail that transforms what many have ruined in electronic communication—informal or inappropriate greetings, responsiveness, and excessive urgency—into a good thing once again.

Geared toward salesmen, Yesware is an ideal email productivity app for lawyers. With Yesware, law firm professionals can:

• Get alerts each time someone opens an email or clicks on a link
• Know exactly when to follow up with your clients and prospects
• Know where in the world your message is being viewed
• View the device that prospects are using to open your email

In addition, the Yesware app is customizable. Restore formal language in business communication with Yesware’s email templates:

• Choose your best templates by seeing which ones your customers reply tomost
• Incorporate links and rich text to send great looking messages at the click of a button—every time
• Use [brackets] to indicate custom fields to make your templates even faster and easier to use

Finally, seize business opportunities with Yesware’s analytics functions:

• Know exactly who is best to follow up with by using our personal tracking reports and gauge your email opens for the last 30 days
• See where in the world people open your emails from inside your inbox
• Find out if your message is reaching top decision makers
• Prioritize your email prospecting with subject filters and email activity sorting

Forbes says about the app, “If You Want To Be Awesome At Emails, Add Yesware To Your Gmail Today.”

According to Forbes, Yesware raised a Series A of $4M from IDG Ventures and Golden Venture Partners (alongside Google Ventures and Foundry Group that participated in their $1M seed round in 2011) exactly one year ago. So, it’s only a matter of time before somebody finds a way to ruin the efficiency of web-based business behavior that Yesware has finally restored.

Say “yes” to Yesware (or similar productivity solutions) and salvage efficiency from email.

-WB