Many of you outside the state of Minnesota may not be aware of the blog Technically Legal. Technically Legal is a legal technology blog sponsored by the Minnesota State Bar Association and written by MSBA staffer Mike Trittipo. Mike is an intelligent writer. His posts are detailed and well worth your time. I do have a couple of minor criticisms about this blog. One is Mike’s lack of a profile, contact info or an about page, evidencing a modesty quite inappropriate for a blogger. I decided to contact him by phone about that one and he assured me he’s in the process of working on that. The other comment is that he doesn’t post often enough. If, after visiting Technically Legal, you agree that he needs to post more (or have other comments,) feel free to drop Mike an e-mail. (You see, Mike, even if you don’t post your contact info, others may do it for you.)

We’re featuring dual Websites of the Week this week. Adobe’s Rick Borstein publishes the blog Acrobat for Legal Professionals. Rick just needs to give us more content! His feature on redaction of PDF files is excellent. Granted he works for Adobe and when he examines alternatives to Adobe you don’t expect he will conclude "buy this $20 knock-off" but his essay on alternatives is informative. Really.  The blog PDF for Lawyers has been hitting its stride lately with lots of posts in December. It is by Ernie Svenson and Dave Fishel. (Yes, that Ernie.) There is a lot of information there. There are many good PDF websites, like PDF Zone, but I wanted to highlight these two weblogs focused on the legal profession.

Sometimes I just pick these sites for fun, but today I’m very serious because the subject matter involves a tool that too many attorneys are avoiding rather than embracing. Almost every week since one of our federal courts went to mandatory e-filing, I get call from an Oklahoma Bar member saying they need to create PDF files for electronic filing and "Isn’t there anything cheaper than Adobe Acrobat?" The answer to that question is yes, but the better question is  "Is there anything better than Adobe Acrobat?"

Well, part one of my reponse really excites some callers. When I ask what word processor they use and they respond with a fairly recent version of WordPerfect, they are pleased (and sometimes embarrassed) to learn of its "publish to PDF" feature. They sometimes have to listen to a few words from me on how this would be also really good to e-mail documents to clients who don’t have WordPerfect and so forth, but they hang up happy. There’s really no better answer than "you already have the application installed on your computer that will do that." Interestingly, some federal court clerks have discouraged this method, stating that the PDF’s generated that way are a bit larger. Well, they aren’t that much larger, particularly with WP 12. And they are smaller than some other third party software or the software bundled with the scanner may generate. But I digress.

There are lots of free or cheap PDF printers, This searchable database at Planet PDF should locate many for you. CutePDF has a nice free PDF printer and the $49.95 version has more bells and whistles. These alternatives make sense if you are operating on a tight budget or only need to do this a few times a year. But sometimes you just need to go with "the real deal." Anyone who has heard me speak during 2005 probably heard me talk about how great a tool Adobe Acrobat 7.0 is for the average, working lawyer. Here’s this week’s example (admittedly not for every average lawyer.) Many of you know that Typepad, the service that hosts this weblog, has had some service issues. It recently went down and for a while many recent posts on Typepad blogs vanished, leading me to think that despite my lecture to lawyers on backup, I had no personal backup of my blog. I trusted Typepad to do that. Well, even though everything returned, I decided to make my own backup. It was very easy to do by visiting each month’s archive and quickly using Acrobat to make a PDF of all of that month’s posts. There are other ways to make a PDF of the whole site as well using Acrobat. when I do online shopping or flight reservations, and I get the confirmation page that says "print this page," I just use Adobe to print it to a PDF.

I wouldn’t want this to sound like a sales pitch, but sometimes you can be, as the saying goes "penny-wise and pound foolish" when looking at PDF alternatives.

As I noted yesterday, ABA webmaster Fred Faulkner asked the question "Are You Ready for Local Search?" He makes the point that as local search tools become more utilized by the public, it becomes an absolute necessity for a law firm to have a web site.

Let me be dogmatic. Every law firm of every practice setting and size needs to have a website. This is actually the first time I’ve ever written that without any qualification. I’ve previously made allowances for the small town lawyer who only practices in one geographic area, those who rely mainly on court appointments, those who wish to practice part time and keep their overhead low, those who truly have more work than they can do or those who have only one or two core clients and aren’t seeking any more.

But as more and more people use online tools like local search in place of the phone book directory, it becomes clear that having no web presence makes about as much business sense as having an unlisted phone number for your law office. You need a website if for no other reason than you want to be found if someone types your name, city and state into Google local search or another search engine. It may be a client traveling who left your phone number back at the office, a potential client, an attorney who wants to contact you about a referral or a recently-divorced former high school sweetheart. Now with local search, we will see more searches for divorce lawyer in a certain city or Zip Code.

Certainly law firms representing consumer clients in matters like family law and bankruptcy have long needed websites for marketing. Larger law firms now all have websites. A website may not generate much new business or it may generate a lot, depending on many variables. But today, not having a website can lose the firm business. Many people now check a company’s website before doing business witht them just to see that they have one. Not having a website can mark a law firm as not being current in other areas.

(I recognize that those who are reading blogs or RSS newsfeeds probably are not those who have failed to create a firm website.)

You don’t need to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a website. There are many reasonably priced hosting services. (Here’s one.) You don’t have to have constantly updated content, although that would certainly be more likely to bring visitors to your site.

Here are a few things that I think a law firm should have on its website:

  • A domain name. You need a name for your site that is not a sublink of another site. Some web hosting services will do this for you at little charge, but make sure that the domain name is registered with your name and contact information as the owner not your vendor. If you don’t have an idea of what domain name ot choose, just play around with versions of the lawyer or firm name, city or state and "law" or "lawyer" until you find a combination that is unused.
  • The names and contact info for all the attorneys, omitting e-mail addresses for those who do not regularly check e-mail.
  • A map to the office. Unless your office is on the main street of a very small town, you should have a printable map to your office with driving directions at the bottom. I’m surprised at how many professional web design firms omit this basic content.

  • Your practice areas. Whether you handle many different types of cases or few, people are looking for someone who handles their kind of matter. Don’t be embarrassed to use more than one term that mean the same thing. Some potential client may not know what some legal terms mean.

  • Flawlessly written content with no misspellings or poor grammar.

  • Simple, clear and serious content.

  • Appropriate disclaimers. A website is informational, not legal advice. You are only licensed in certain jurisdictions. The usual stuff.

  • Compliance with your state’s ethics rules. They may have specific provisions about websites.

  • Attractive pictures and graphic elements. You don’t have to go overboard here, but the Internet is a graphic media and you need some graphics. Take some pictures.

Don’t spend months perfecting the most ambitious website. Start simple and do it right. Make notes of what additional things you would like to do for the next version. Then add your web address to your stationery, your e-mail signature block and your business cards. Oh, yes, be sure and e-mail the link to the only other lawyer you know who doesn’t yet have a website!

What could holiday gifts, predictions on legal technology in 2006 and local search all have in common?  Well, they are all topics featured in the December issue of the e-zine, LLRX.com.

As you know, I’ve already had two brief posts about Holiday Gifts for Lawyers, here and here. But Jeff Beard has a great outline of cool techno-gifts, great online shopping sites and more. 

Dennis Kennedy does his annual predictions for the upcoming year in legal technology. It is really a must read article, even if you think Dennis may be guessing wrong. (With so many predictions, some must be right and others must be wrong.) But you will enjoy reading about the future, according to Dennis.

ABA webmaster Fred Faulkner asks "Are You Ready for Local Search?" He makes a point with which I completely agree. As local search tools become more utlized by the public, it becomes an absolute necessity for a law firm to have a web site.  I’m going to post more about this tomorrow, so stay tuned and read these three great articles today.

Shopping time grows short, but Jeffery Allen and Allen Pearlman have published The Technologists Guide to Holday Shopping in the December GPSolo Magazine. Actually this whole magazine is a present as the ABA General Practice Solo and Small Firm Division continues to publish virtually all of its magazine content online for everyone. This issue’s theme is "Privacy and Security" and it includes articles on spyware, indentity theft, personal information available online, and much more.

NPR also has several features on books for holiday gift giving.

I wouldn’t want to leave out the New York Times 2005 Holiday Gift Guide. (Free registration may be required.)

I wanted to write an article about end of year tax planning and business tasks that should be completed before year end. Unfortunately, I lack the expertise to write such an article. So I talked Oklahoma City attorney and CPA Ken Klingenberg into helping me out with the subject for my monthly column in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. The result was Ken Klingenberg’s Top Ten End-of-Year Tax Tips. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but it contains some valuable reminders and tips, especially for the smaller firm lawyer. As for me, when I received Ken’s article, I experienced a little of the feeling Tom Sawyer must have had when he got the boys to whitewash the fence for him. Thanks, Ken.

Everyone seems to like a "top ten" or "top one hundred" list. PubSub’s Law List is a ranking of law-related weblogs (aka blawgs.) The rankings change frequently, moving up and down quite a bit, depending on the inbound or outbound links and (I assume) other factors. Still it is interesting to look at the rankings. You might discover a popular blog of particular interest to you on this week’s Website of the Week.

The Ten Commandments of Client Relationships has been around for a while. The Canadian Bar Association indicates that it originated with the Queensland Law Society of Australia. These simple ideas help you set the tone you want for your staff and publicly affirm your commitment to good client service. This PDF is formatted to easily print, frame and display in one or more locations in your office. This document includes such gems as "Clients are not an interruption of our work. They are the purpose of it." and "Clients are not dependent on us. We are dependent on them."

Download the Ten Commandments of Client Relationships

I wanted to point out a recent article that was inspired by periodic postings on Solosez and other tech related lists. Certain topics (e.g. Word vs. WordPerfect superiority) seem to crop up again and again. One of these is the full backup vs. data backup only debate. You can’t post to a tech list using the phrase "full backup" without someone immediately following with "you don’t have to do full backup, I just burn my documents/data files to CD’s periodically." It’s probably true that a true solo with no staff and only one computer can handle backup this way if they are so inclined. For one thing the odds are you won’t need your backup anyway. (Of course that misses the point.)
So I decided to outline how the process would work to really do a "complete" data-only back up, especially if you have more than one computer and staff. It is more complex that it appears at first. You can invest some time in setting it up, but it has to work fairly quickly or people won’t do it. (I also decided to try to do the outline without even using backup software.) The result is A Backup Proposal for Those Who Know That They Aren’t Doing Backup Well. Of course I couldn’t resist pointing out the shortcomings of this plan even after I had outlined this one way of doing it.
I was guest editor of the Technology and Practice Management-themed Issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal in which this appeared. Some of you may have an interest in the other articles as well.

    And, although this service is not available to non-Oklahoma lawyers: