Here is a nice currency converter site to add to your favorites. "FXConverter (Foreign Exchange Currency Converter) is a multi-lingual Currency Converter with up to date exchange rates provided from leading market data contributors and is filtered for validity. To get the exchange rates for any of the 164 currencies, select the desired currencies …."

This was suggested to me by Reba Nance, Director of Law Practice Management for the Colorado Bar.

The ABA TECHSHOW website says it best: "Year after year, one of the most popular sessions at ABA TECHSHOW® is 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. This session is a fast-paced and often irreverent look at web sites that may be of interest to lawyers. Many of these sites are incredible legal or law-practice related resources while others range from interesting to just plain wacky."

The 2006 60 Sites list is now online. There are a few more than 60 because we also post the ones that we intended to show, but time (or Internet connection) didn’t permit. Thanks to my co-presenters, Bob Ambrogi and Natalie Kelly, for another interesting tour through the Internet.

From LifeHacker, here’s a really interesting post on how to improve your note-taking.
I really like LifeHacker and featured the site at as one of my 60 Sites in 60 Minutes at ABA TECHSHOW.

Not all of these ideas may apply to lawyers, but I really liked the idea of symbolizing your note taking, e.g.
[ ] A square checkbox denotes a "to do" item
( ) A circle indicates a task to be assigned to someone else
* An asterisk is an important fact
? A question mark goes next to items to research or ask about

Some of the free notepad template generators noted in the post are really great. They create a PDF and then you print out as many as you need.

X1 Desktop Search, which many of you downloaded for free from a link I posted earlier, has several Tabs for different search filters, such as e-mail, documents, etc. The documents tab does not include WordPerfect files. (A request has been made to fix that in the next release.) However, you can fix it yourself by the following steps.

Click on Documents tab
In the TYPE window you will see the file formats listed in the following format " OR pdf= "
At the end of that list type <space> OR wpd=
From the toolbar click File and then Save.

OK, I try to help you out with tips and interesting information. Now I’d like some help. My Treo 650 carrying case doesn’t work for me. It has a belt clip and can fall off too easily. Plus it is just too hard to unsnap and remove the thing quickly enough when it rings. I’ve got a really geeky looking neck pouch that works great for either the phone or iPod when I am doing things around my house, but it is not for public display. I don’t wear a jacket seated at my desk, so I cannot use the jacket breast pocket. Plus I want to carry it all the time, not just when I am suited up. I thought about the kind where the belt threads through rather than clips, but I’m hoping some of you have a great solution you love. E-mail me with any solutions by clicking this link.  Be sure and mention if you’d prefer your name not be disclosed.

From beSpacific, I learn that WSJ.com is celebrating its 10th Anniversary online by giving everyone ten free days full access to its content that is normally for subscribers only. Just click here. But I probably wouldn’t have mentioned that here except for the fact this information lead me to do a search that revealed to me that famed Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg has a free, no-registration-required ninety day archive of his tech writings in the WSJ online here. Surely I’m not the only one who was unaware of that. Memo to self: Calendar Read Mossberg as a 90 day repeating event.

Amy Campbell is a marketing and communication consultant who serves professional service firms. Her blog is located here. A couple of years ago I stumbled across Amy’s list of web diversions. My Site of the Week is Amy Campbell’s Top Ten Web Diversions for 2005. Even though it was posted in December of 2005, there’s a lot of entertaining materials that probably many of you have not seen. And don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom for the links to the 2004 and 2003 collections. (They often do load slowly. I think it is a Harvard blog thing.) Sorry I didn’t get to your site at ABA TECHSHOW’s 60 Sites in 60 minutes last week, Amy. But it will be posted with the other 60 Sites archive links, which should hopefully go up next week at the TECHSHOW web site. For those of you who are anxiously awaiting that, take a last look at our 2005 collection, which contains a lot more than just 60 sites.

Well, I have been meaning to do an ABA TECHSHOW Roundup. But I’ve been sort of busy. Now Tom Mighell has collected links to many other comments from TECHSHOW attendees with blogs, so I think, as we lawyers say, I will incorporate all of that by reference here. I also agreed to write a post-TECHSHOW article for Law Practice magazine, so I’d better save something for that. Part of my recent "busy" time was a real challenge. I spoke for five hours yesterday on a six hour program we called "The New Lawyer Experience – Hit the Ground Running."  I’m very pleased with the initial presentation of this free program. We had over 100 lawyers attend, although not all were brand new. A few were slightly used, but still in good repair. <grin> We are going to tweak the program before the fall, but it seems to be a "keeper." Non-Oklahomans, feel free to pass the link along to your bar associations. Five hours yesterday made my fifty minute presentation this morning to the Oklahoma University College of Law Professional Responsibility class seem like a walk in the park.

But I do want to say a couple of things about TECHSHOW. It is, in a way that no other event that I have attended is, the gathering of the clan of the legal tech/law practice management community. There’s a great feeling there; a positive spirit. There are other great legal tech conferences. But none brings together so many of those who write and speak on legal technology issues or spend most of their time amassing expertise in a technology area. I have many friends in that community that I only see once or twice a year – at TECHSHOW and maybe at some other conference where we are both speaking. At the "other conference" we can all go out to dinner together one night.  At TECHSHOW, there may be three competing events scheduled for one night. One such event was the 7th Annual Consultants and Technologists Dinner, produced by Ross Kodner and JoAnna Forshee, and supported by a long list of vendors. It is sort of like the Academy Awards for the law tech/geek crowd, but without the awards, the publicity, the TV coverage, the fancy designer gowns, the stunningly beautiful stars, the…… well, OK, maybe it isn’t much like the Academy Awards at all. But it is still fun.

But you don’t have to be an insider to enjoy ABA TECHSHOW. Several first timers mentioned to me how friendly the conference speakers and attendees were. I visited briefly with a group of three ladies from West Virginia who seemed to be having a great time. Walking through the lobby and bar area late at night is an experience as you catch snatches of conversations like "hadn’t updated the firewall in months," "thought we could just instantly convert the data" and "installed three different desktop search apps." Dennis Kennedy and I agree that it is important to get as little sleep as possible during ABA TECHSHOW so you don’t miss as much.

When, through a startling chain of events, we found ourselves with a dying Internet connection (and no backup plan that survived) for "60 Sites in 60 Minutes" late Saturday morning before a crowd of several hundred, it could have been bad. It was the last event of a two and a half day conference. The crowd could have gotten angry. Instead they laughed along with us as we quipped while showing sites at a slower rate. They wanted us to succeed. Incoming ABA TECHSHOW Chair Dan Pinnington and the hotel staff were up front with us, frantically unplugging and plugging cables. Soon the Internet was back and we were back in business. Hardly anyone had left the room. It was another example of the positive TECHSHOW spirit. Come next year to experience it for yourself and visit the TECHSHOW blog while you are waiting.

Live blogging from ABA TECHSHOW is almost passé by now. it was befitting the 20th anniversary of ABA TECHSHOW that we heard from Burgess Allison for the keynote yesterday. Simon Chester blogged during Burg’s keynote and even took the time to look forward to my presentation with Tom Mighell the next day. Burgess talked a lot about the facts revealed in the book The World is Flat. He also noted the rapid increase of technology advances, laughing at a recent bid by some IT staff to recreate blogging software for $30,000 when we all know it can be done using several methods for less than $100 or free.

The program Tom Mighell and I did on Marketing Your Practice with a Blog was blogged by Rob Robinson with photos posted very quickly as was the panel discussion four of us did later on 60 Marketing Tips in 60 Minutes. That went quite well if I do say so myself. I have more to say, but a reception is starting downstairs.

It is day one of ABA TECHSHOW. Last night I got to see lots of old friends at the TS speakers’ welcome reception and LexThink. I started off the morning with a breakfast with several other state bar practice management advisors and representatives from the Chicago Bar Association who are investigating how to implement a practice management program in their city. I hope they succeed. I then went to a great program by Dan Pinnington Excel at Excel. I am now sitting in a presentation called Ebenezer Scrooge’s Law Office: Technology for Pennypinchers with  Bruce Dorner and Cory Furman. They’ve focused on technology strategic planning, budgeting and implementation. It is certainly true that the most expensive piece of law office technology is the investment that sits around unused. We’ve all had our bad experiences with "shelfware."

I’ve already picked up a couple of pointers and seen some cool new product demonstrations. Law Practice Magazine has asked me to write an article about cool things I learned at TECHSHOW. The thing about TECHSHOW is you may learn something really important in the hall or an afterhours event. It is one of the "friendliest" events you will ever attend.