One of my favorite projects with the Oklahoma Bar Association is our annual OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. It is a great opportunity for these lawyers to enjoy CLE targeted to their needs. There is also a good amount of networking and potential for referrals. Whenever possible, I’ve tried to help other bar association officials organize similar events and I’ve been a guest speaker at several of these conferences.

My friend Ross Kodner and I are co-chairing the first-ever National Solo and Small Firm Conference organized by the GP/Solo Division of the ABA. Ross has done a lengthy blog post about the event and so I will just refer you to that for more details. There should be more information posted on the division website soon. I certainly hope to see some of you there and, if you follow this blog, be sure and introduce yourself to me if you do attend.

My presentations include panels on 60 Top Practice Tips, Gadgets & Websites In 60 Minutes; My Billing: Powerful Techniques To Get Paid; Keeping Them Happy: The Secrets Of Client Satisfaction and Bloggers Speak: Why SSF Lawyers Should/Should Shouldn’t Blog.

Forbes.com has some commentary from Robert Ellis Smith entitled Laptop Hall Of Shame.

The article begins "When the history of personal privacy is written–and there are persons who monitor this sort of thing–they will call this "The Year of the Stolen Laptop."

Read the article and ask yourself "Have we taken reasonable steps to ensure that our client’s confidential information would not be compromised if one of our laptops was stolen or lost?" There is only one right answer to this question.

Thanks to Michael Arlfeld’s Electronic Discovery and Evidence blog for the pointer.

Now that I’ve been using speech recognition software (DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition version 9) for a few more weeks, I decided to write an article about it for the Oklahoma Bar Journal.

The article is titled "Computer, Can You Hear Me Now?  One Lawyer’s Surprisingly Positive Experience with Speech Recognition Software." It is online at http://www.okbar.org/members/map/articles/2006/090206.htm

In case anyone is curious, here’s the headset I ended up buying.

I needed to be able to use one headset for both computer and phone. It just arrived and I have not installed it yet. This purchase pretty much precludes me from buying any interesting hardware or software for the rest of the year. But do you see that little blue button? It is a toggle switch with a computer icon on one side and a telephone icon oh the other. It will sit on the desk between the laptop in its docking station and the telephone. That is exactly what I want instead of buttons on the headset.

OK, class, has everyone now completed reading the 200 or 300 pages that were assigned a couple of weeks ago? If you don’t recall what I am talking about, scroll down a bit. Between August 8th and 18th, I linked to a lot of material for you to download.

I’m now instituting a new form of post called a "Round-Up." The term reflects Oklahoma heritage. The rationale is that there will be times when I get behind on my online reading, and when I catch up, I may want to refer you to lots of unrelated items. So, in case it rains on you this Labor Day weekend, here is some interesting reading material.

I have noted previously my strong belief that most lawyers, particularly solos, would be better off with a laptop computer and docking station than a desktop. Ross Kodner agrees and has a lengthy post about the things to consider when doing this. His "money quote" from the post is: "I have never seen any lawyer or legal pro who decided to transition to a laptop as their primary PC ever want to go back. The freedom of choosing when and where to work, and the ability to turn unproductive downtime into productive billable time are all irresistably positive experiences."

GP/Solo’s August Technology eReport is out. Lots of good stuff, including a very positive review of WordPerfect Mail and and a feature by Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch on how lawyers can use e-monitoring and e-mail alerts to stay informed.

From the makers of Sanction, trial presentation software, is a brief white paper with a long name, Comparative Overview of the Functionality of Common Litigation Support Tools versus Trial Presentation Products. We understand that they aren’t going to say anything that puts their product in a bad light, but it is still a worthwhile download, especially if you do not understand the differences between the two classes of products. Note: You have to give them your contact information before you can do the download and then they will send you a 30 day evaluation copy by mail to try if you wish.

There were two big announcements from Google this week. I’ve previously noted Google’s decision to take on Microsoft office appilcations head on. This week they released a new suite that many of us are already calling Google Office. As the linked article notes, it still is missing a word processor and a spreadsheet, but both are out in beta. Lawyers will be rightfully cautious about client confidentiality. But the idea of free, automatically-updated applications underwritten by a few ads instead of my software purchasing dollars remains viable. Of more immediate interest to readers may be the announcement that many books that are out of copyright, including many classics, are now available for free download from Google Books. (More details here.) You can download and/or print the books, which are in PDF format. If you haven’t registered with Google for the many services it offers, including Gmail, what are you waiting for?

Deniis Kennedy directed me to Ed Yourdon’s blog. It is not law office material and some of you may not have an interest. But of special note are his posts Email is Broken, JotSpot: Wikis for Non-Geeks, Recurring Themes from My Web 2.0 Visits and a post on Digg.

Tom Mighell tells us about the Rollbar bookmarklet from Rollyo. He says, "Just drag the link up to the Links bar of your browser. Then when you’re at a site you want to search, just click on the Rollbar, enter your search terms, and Rollyo will search that particular site for your terms. This is a great tool for sites that have no search feature, or a bad search feature."

Jonathan Stein had a few comments about lawyers accepting credit cards, which led me to post a couple of comments on his blog. Even though we disagree, hopefully you will agree that the post and discussion in the comments provide food for thought.

Well, the latest legal technology and law practice management expert to start a blog is none other than Ross Kodner.  Ross Ipsa Loquitur is the name of his blog. Surely Ross’s name will be familiar to most of you reading this blog. It certainly is familar to many Oklahoma lawyers due to his numerous guest appearances at our Solo and Small Firm Conferences. It was just a couple of weeks ago that I was noting that his materials on "sweet spots" for purchasing tech gear were available on the Web.  Now he’s are ready reposted them (or, knowing Ross, an updated version of them) to his blog.  Ross’s list of accomplishments is too lengthy to go in to in the short space.  But I can say without qualification that you will want to either make this blog a regular part of your web surfing, subscribe to its RSS newsfeed or use the e-mail subscription form.  (I cannot even claim to be unbiased about this blog as I am the one who came up with its name in a little informal contest that Ross ran.)

Ross Ipsa Loquitur is my Website of the Week.

I want to share something with you that has been working very well for me for the last several weeks. I’m not suggesting it for all of you as it deals with both my needs and my failings.

Let me start out by saying that I am not one of those hyper-organized types that make for good legal secretaries and administrative assistants. I think that I’m pretty well organized, for a lawyer, but I have to watch myself to avoid lapsing back into the old habits of using piles of paper to organize.

When I was in private practice and used paper systems, I always thought that organizing brief banks or form banks was a challenge as it was always difficult to figure out the appropriate level of categorization and subfiles.  I’ve created a folder on my computer called "My Library." I still use other folders for specific projects, but this folder is for things written by others that I decided to save for any reason. It is all articles and essays. Some are scanned, but most are printed from web pages with Adobe Acrobat. I can use desktop search to locate things in the folder and am building quite a collection which all can be full text searched. It also allows me to stay focused when working on an online project. If I stumble across something interesting, I do not stop to read it, but grab it for later use and return to the present matter.

Here’s my method. It is quite simple. When I find a great article online (or one I don’t have time to read now, but might want to later) I carefully look to see if there is a printer-friendly version. Often there is. Then I print it to PDF using Adobe Acrobat. I give it a name like "PowerPoint Woes by Bob Smith August 2006" which is often not the name of the article.

If I have a spare moment, I might check to see if there are any recently saved articles I haven’t read. But, even if I haven’t read them yet, I am building a collection and because it is a digital file, I may find something there months from now as a result of a desktop search.

Bottom line is that I now save articles to My Library every week. My rate of saving articles is more than it used to be when I tried to organize by topic. I may delete an article after reading it weeks later. Many lawyers may not have a need to read many online articles. But it works for me and might work for some of you. Save the digital info today and figure out the details later. Some of you might be able to use this to organize your online reading of recreational topics, too.

Tom Collins is the founder and former president of Juris, Inc. He is presently a law firm consultant.  From the name. one would think that his blog, MorePartnerIncome.com, (which is sponsored by Juris) might be a rather dull discussion of analysis of financial reports, partnership agreements, billable hour requirements, equity ratios and profit-loss figures.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In recent weeks his blog has featured posts such as "Attorneys Should Never Underestimate the Power of Politeness" and "Attorneys Should Never Underestimate the Power of The Flavor." He also covered such diverse topics as work/life balance issues, law firm websites, and attorney time entries, just this month. His blog also covers the range of profitability issues that you would expect to see from its name and does so in an interesting manner.

I am pleased to feature MorePartnerIncome.com as my Website of the Week.

I’ve been meaning to encourage you to download and read InnovAction, a great new e-publication on law firm innovation and creativity from the College of Law Practice Management. Now it is 4:59 p.m. Friday and I’m ready to head out. Luckily Dennis Kennedy explains so well why you need to download it and provides the link here. I know I’ve given you a lot of "download and read" homework this week, but it is back to school time!

With changes to the Federal Rules on the horizon for December, many firms are scrambling to get up to speed on electronic discovery issues.  My good friend (and noted legal technologist) Craig Ball has compiled five of his articles on electronic data discovery into one file for your free downloading pleasure.

Please note that this is a direct link to a 104 page PDF file that exceeds 1 MB in size. Thanks for sharing with us, Craig.

Blawg Review  #70, the "Back-to-School" edition, is just too interesting for you to miss. Check it out here.  This layout is very clever.  Am I the only one who thinks that this format actually allows you to scroll through the posts more quickly? There are quite a few worthwhile posts noted this week. The Blawg Review rotates between guest authors each week.  I hosted Blawg Review #49 way back in March, 2006.