It’s not suprising that David Maister now has a blog, "Passion, People and Principles." He has a long tradition of posting lots of advice and insight on the Web.

In case you have not heard of David Maister, suffice it to say that he is a management guru, particularly where professional service firm managment is concerned. He has published several important books, like First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals (with Patrick J. McKenna) and The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert M. Galford.)

For several years, he provided an "ask David" web feature posting responses to a number of submitted questions. While he has discontinued this after five years, the archives are available here. See this example of his thoughts on law firm succession planning from a prior "Ask David" response.

Along with the other great content on his site, he now regularly publishes detailed and thought-provoking essays on his blog. Here are some sample titles from just this month so far: The Brutal Truth About Other People, The Managing Partner’s Speech, and What Does it Take to be Truly Great? He also has a podcast among his other offerings. Check out the wealth of free information on this week’s Website of the Week.

The most surprising thing about his site is an entry on his blogroll for my blog. Wow! Color me surprised and very pleased.

I really need a macro for "Today Google releases a new tool." Today it is the Google Page Creator, a design-your-own-webpage tool. Google says "No technical knowledge required. Build high-quality web pages without having to learn HTML or use complex software…Your web pages will live on your own site at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com" Here’s a post from Google Blogoscoped if you want to learn more about it. I still think a lawyer or law firm needs his, her or its own domain name and not one at Google pages, but any web presence is better than none.

Some people don’t like the idea of PowerPoint presentations being submitted as the written materials for Continuing Legal Education programs. But we see more and more sets of PowerPoint slides submitted as the written materials for CLE programs. For some types of programs, especially techno-CLE’s like 50 Tips in 50 Minutes, 60 Websites in 60 Minutes or My Favorite Utilities, these work quite well.

But my topic today is not whether they should be submitted, but how they should be submitted. I often see PowerPoint slides printed off at four slides per page. This may save paper, but the result after duplication is sometimes too poor to be readable. Two slides per page will be readable and, of course, one slide per page will approximate a handheld copy of the slide show. Some prefer using the handout printout with the sets of lines next to the slides for note taking. This is especially good if you are giving the handout to a small group, I think.

Know your printing options. For printed CLE materials, I think the real trick is to print the slides in pure black and white rather than color or grayscale. You can either print to your printer or print to a PDF if you have that capability. The result will be very legible, even it a sacrifices a bit of your graphic design elements. But actually that is a good thing for the CLE presenter. Let them have the black and white version for the handout. You get to display the full-color version during your presentation.

Of course, if they are going to be distributed electronically, then it is different. I’d never send a native PowerPoint to a CLE provider. They might not have PowerPoint or might have a different version. Or the slides just might not print the same for them. You want to see the final product you are providing. So print the presentation to PDF in full color at one slide per page. Then review it before you e-mail it or copy it onto the CD.

The point is that you have dedicated a lot of time to preparing your presentation and your PowerPoint. You want to make a good impression. Spend a few extra minutes with Print Preview and printing some test pages to make sure the handouts people take home give the best impression of you as well.

I’ve been meaning to write about about Google and privacy, but I’ve been a bit under the weather. It should have caught your attention when the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned consumers not to use the Search Across Computers feature on the new Google Desktop for fear that contents of documents on your network would be indexed on Google and more easily available to the government by subpeona rather than search warrant. Hopefully law firms will recognize that careful tweaking and configuration setup is in order if they use this product. BuI I don’t have to go into the details because Catherine Sanders Reach of the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has posted some great information on the controversy surrounding the new Google Desktop Search. 

Don’t forget that there are desktop search applications that run on your computer and are not linked to the huge online search engines. X-1 and Copernic get high marks.

I’m not generally not as concerned about Gmail. Although you may see ads triggered by the subject lines or words in an e-mail that give you concern, none of this information is apparently saved outside of your inbox.

Developing new client service models is an important aspect of law firm planning and management. There is no doubt that clients have different expectations about service now than a generation ago. Some of this is related to technology. E-mail allows us to exchange messages hourly as opposed to the old "mail a letter and wait three days" mentality. Client extranets allow for an expanded type of client service. Generally speaking, clients know what is possible and they feel like they pay a premium for legal services and should receive a premium service. if their services are not convenient, timely and efficient, then they may seek alternatives. This would include non-lawyer and Internet legal service providers for the consumer and in-house counsel or offshore providers for the corporation.

So I suggest that all lawyers would benefit by reading one of my favorite blogs, Dan Hull’s Whataboutclients.com. He writes many thoughtful and provocative posts. He also looks for other online articles about client service and references them. He’s been posting rules about client service. The first six are here and include:

1. Represent only clients you like.

2. The client is the main event.

3. Make sure everyone in your firm knows the client is the main event.

4. Deliver legal work that changes the way clients think about lawyers.

5. Over-communicate: bombard, copy and confirm.

6. When you work, you are marketing.

Good material. Rule #1 may not always be possible for the criminal defense lawyer, for example. But thinking about these things and reading Dan’s extended commentary will help your law firm develop a plan for success. (Rules 7  and 8 have been posted, but you’ll have to go to Dan’s blog to find them.)

This is a bit of an unusual Site of the Week selection for me. Guy Kawasaki’s Let the Good Times Roll blog has only been around over a month. His one week in law school doesn’t qualify him as a legal expert. But I’d just ask you to read two of his posts and see what you think. I think they will be worth your time and you may have an opportunity to pass the first one along in response to an e-mail some day very soon. One is The Effective Emailer, with 67 comments posted and 26 trackback links in less than a week. The other is The Art of Schmoozing.

I’d never been invited to speak at or even attended LegalTech New York. So an invitation to do so was greatly appreciated. The only hard part of the decision was explaining to my family why I should go do New York City without them.

The show didn’t alter my bias in favor of ABA TECHSHOW, but it is a great event. LTNY, produced by American Lawyer Media, features a huge vendor exhibition area with 370 vendor booths spread across three floors of the NY Hilton. (No, that’s not a misprint.) That sounds overwhelming and it could be. But for someone who thinks he wants to know everything about law office technology, it is great.

This was the 25th Anniversary of LTNY and it was announced it was the largest LTNY ever. It was a good chance to see a lot of old friends and make new contacts. I got to hang around with Craig Ball, Tom Mighell, Dennis Kennedy and Matt Homann quite a bit. I also got to meet Technolawyer’s Neil Squillante and Sara Skiff and Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog, all of whom I had only known through e-mail exchanges and blog posts before. Most importantly I got hugs from ALM’s Monica Bay and Jill Windwer.

But I know readers don’t care about the friends I saw at LTNY. What did I learn that is important to your practice?

Well, first of all, if one judged from LTNY, the conclusion would be that every law office is buzzing about and working daily on electronic discovery issues. Many are. Many aren’t. But well over one third, and perhaps close to half, of the vendors had the label "Electronic Discovery" attached to their booth. If you talked to them as much as I did you’d be surprised at how many different things that term can mean. It’s almost like the dot.com explosion again. I have to believe that many of these companies won’t be around for the long haul. But ED brings many challenges and opportunities. So many ED vendors may thrive.

E-mail management and retention could be viewed as a subset of ED. I frankly expected to see all of the ED vendors, but was surprised at the number of vendors who wanted to help you with everything from spam to ensuring copies of every e-mail were retained as business records. I detected an unspoken belief that while Sarbanes-Oxley may only apply to public companies now, at some future point either new legislation, regulations or court decisions will make it a smart business practice for every business and, yes, even every law firm to retain copies of all e-mails and other documents for a time. I’m not saying that is the case and couldn’t force myself to attend any SOX/document retention policy sessions. Searching online for the topic will yield you a lot of reading material like this.

LTNY is really for the large law firms, even though some small firm lawyers attended and I even had a dinner with a group from Solosez. One item of interest was how many CEOs of companies were actually present for much of the show in their company’s vendor area. I’ve never seen that at any other event. I think a lot of business gets done at this event.

The highlight was hearing a keynote from Jonathan Zittrain on "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it." He was so entertaining and informative. If you ever have a chance to hear him, take it. We shouldn’t believe that the Net will always be what we have now, plus more. Between aggressive government regulators, technology "advances," cautious administrators and political pressure groups, we could end up with less, not more, in the future.

My final presentation was on the "Future of the Lawyer’s Desktop." As I anticipated, with it being scheduled at the very last hour of LTNY, it was lightly attended. But it gave me a chance to develop my thoughts on this topic and seemed to be well-received. Gazing in the crystal ball is always fun.