The American Bar Association Midyear Meeting in early February in Beverly Hills had some aspects that might be of interest to readers. The ABA Midyear Meeting is a working meeting, so I spent a fair amount of time in committee meetings and workships.

I attended several good presentations, including a motivational talk from sports figure Terry Bowden.

Daniel J. Siegel, Havertown, PA lawyer and law office technology consultant, gave a technology tips presention to bar executives that was very good. He started with a discussion of scanning and moved on to several other areas. One of his suggestions was one I had heard before. But this time I think he convinced me. He advocates moving the Windows taskbar from the bottom of your desktop to the left side. After watching his use of it in that position, I think he may have something. You have to turn on auto-hide, so it doesn’t cover up icons; but you can read a lot more about the open apps and docs that way. Here’s a brief tutorial on how you can set it up that way. I think I’ll give it a try when I get my new computer.

Another good speaker/entertainer was Sean Carter, humorist at law. I’ve talked with Sean at other bar events and I introduced him to Nerino Petro at a reception. We three had an entertaining conversation and  I figured some of Sean’s funny observations were from his presentation the next day. But, no, his program was all original and different from what I’ve heard him do previously. The group of assembled bar executives greatly enjoyed Sean’s program and lined up afterwards for autographed books. You can have a few laughs and see about booking Sean for your bar event by visiting his website, Lawpsided.

The presentations I gave at ABA Midyear were about bar associations better serving lawyers. I was on a panel entitled Cutting-Edge Electronic Communications: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with Mark A. Tarasiewicz, the Director of Communications for the Philadelphia Bar Association and John Sirman who is Manager, TexasBar.com, and Technology Editor, Texas Bar Journal. The preliminary version of the slide show can still be downloaded here if you are interested. Given that title, I had to invest $.99 with iTunes for some appropriate mood music to start the program. Texas has started the first bar association-sponsored members only social networking site for lawyers, TexasBarCircle. (Although Oklahoma Bar’s OBA-NET tends to have a lot of social networking as a by-product.) I also did a solo program for the National Council of Bar Presidents entitled Continuing Legal Education Technology Trends and Barriers. (Yeah, I’m sure you are sorry you had to miss that one.)

As noted, there were lots of other committee meetings I attended and I serve on the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s Council, which also met. But I wanted to give a special nod to Dan Siegel and Sean Carter for jobs well done.