At our recent OBA Annual Meeting, I did a program called "Cutting-Edge Technology for the Domestic Lawyer." I told the participants I would upload the PowerPoint and am doing so here in PDF format. This wasn’t designed to be free-standing without my commentary, but I’d immodestly suggest that it is still worth a download if you practice domestic relations law.  You probably want to right click and then select "Save Target as" on the link below.

Download CuttingEdgeTechFamilyLawyer.pdf

Appearing rude or arrogant is something we lawyers need to guard against. The temptations are many. At how many Christmas parties this year will you walk by a group and hear someone make a patently ridiculous statement about a legal matter? The temptation to stop and correct is strong, but if you do, those people will just think something negative about you. New lawyers and experienced lawyers often have difficult relations in negotiations as the young lawyer thinks "this old guy hasn’t kept up on changes in the law" while the experienced lawyer thinks "they may have taught you that in that fancy law school, but Judge Whitehead isn’t going to rule that way." It becomes easy for either side to view the other as arrogant.

I got a kick out of Oklahoma City lawyer Douglas Sorocco’s post "Blackballed – You are the Brand" about how one rude lawyer got her entire firm blackballed from possibly representing a Fortune 100 client. Too bad she’ll probably never see Doug’s post about her.

The recently-launched LooksTooGoodToBeTrue website represents a great new effort to help consumers spot Internet fraud. It includes real-life scam tales, new warnings, and quizzes designed to educate consumers. The Web site is a cooperative effort of the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, the postal inspection service, and several private firms, including Monster.com and Target Corporation.

The November issue of Law Practice Today has been posted. It contains the usual assortment of helpful articles including such topics as law firm culture, strategic planning and "Eight Things Keeping Law Firm Management Awake at Night". But the feature I really want you to notice is one on the abundance of law practice management blogs that are online. Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell profile nineteen blogs focusing on law practice management (including this one.) This is really sort of amazing, Consider all of the paid law office consultants, coaches and other fee-for-services vendors to help lawyers improve their practices. Now we have 19 sources of practice management advice online for free. Hopefully the number and quality of blogs noted here will convince visitors to this site that it is about time to get one of those RSS newsreaders installed and set up so you don’t miss any of these words of wisdom. But, (as the infomercial goes) wait, there’s more! New practice management blogs are popping up all the time, like The Practice, mentioned in my post of earlier today.

(And just because I mention subscribing to the RSS feeds, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I don’t appreciate their visits to this site. It gives me good feedback on what topics interest the readers.)

A new law practice management blog has been launched. It is called The Practice. It is the brainchild of three lawyers–Jonathan Stein of Elk Grove, CA, Shane Jimison of Richmond, VA and Barry Kaufman of Jacksonville, FL. For a blog that has been online less than a month, they have a remarkable number of good posts.

But they may have already made a few posts that are, well, just wrong! Why would I point that out? Well, that’s part of their design. They don’t all agree on everything and don’t hesitate to do point-counterpoint posts on various topics like whether a solo lawyer should purchase pre-engraved stationery or print it as they print each letter. Since they disagree, one has to be wrong. Right? Well, actually no. I would think that attorneys, more than most all other professions, would appreciate the benefit of hearing both sides of an issue. Anyway, this is a great blog and my only concern is that these guys keep up the good work and don’t burn themselves out early with such a large volume of posts. We all want to keep hearing from them.

Last month I wrote an column "One Law Office to Go, Please" in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. I also blogged about it. This piece was intentionally focused on the big picture and the major components to illustrate that you can have a mobile law office. I did not cover the details of what every road warrior needs to carry.

For example, if you fly very often, then contained within your computer bag you probably need a small "no fly" bag for things like pocket knives, screwdrivers and other items that won’t pass airport security. Hopefully you will remember to transfer this bag to your checked luggage when packing. But if you don’t, at least you may have time to take the bag back out to your parked car and save your items. My computer travel bag is very heavy with things like network cables, blank CD’s, a three prong electical outlet adaptor, headphones and USB flash drives.

While I am occupied at the OBA Annual Meeting this week, I’ve been directing you to some of Dennis Kennedy’s blog posts. So, even though it is almost a year old, your attention is directed to "A Mobile Computing Kit for Lawyers," which was originally published in Law Office Computing magazine. This is a very good guide for items you might want to carry on the road. The only problem is that by the time you fill your computer bag with everything you would like to have while you are on the road, you may not have enough room left for your computer.

You can now receive Oklahoma appellate court opinions and Oklahoma Attorney General opinions via RSS newsfeeds at no charge. I believe Oklahoma is the third state to do this, after West Virginia and Louisiana. You may get more information and see the various RSS subscription options here: http://www.oscn.net/Applications/OSCN/rss.asp . I am proud to note that my wife, Terri L. Calloway, Director of Legal Information and Law Libraries for the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, brought this new service into being. It is, of course, free to everyone.

I believe we will see more and more state governmental bodies and agencies jump on the RSS bandwagon.  Just think that one day soon if you have an interest in the business of your state’s Corporation Commission or Historical Commission, you will be able to subscribe to their RSS feed and get their hearing dockets, decisions, rule changes, announcements and press releases all delivered to you via RSS.

Don’t we all want the very best? Dennis Kennedy has recently been republishing on his blog some of his older writing that were originally published elsewhere. There’s a lot of good, very relevant information to be found in those posts. But I really wanted to highlight one concept because it relates to my daily work. I often discuss with lawyers their intended law office technology purchases. Lawyers by their education and daily tasks are trained to do exhaustive research and produce the very best result for their clients. So when they are considering buying new technology they apply these same skills and this same approach. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Unfortunately, achieving perfection with technology purchases is sometimes impossibly difficult.

Dennis quotes author Harry Beckwith in his post "The Best is the Enemy of the Good: Making Good Technology Choices." This well-written post illustrates something many of us find to be a struggle. You can read and compare features until your vision gets blurry, but buying the very best hardware or software is extremely hard. Is a laptop that is 2 pounds lighter really better than one with a slightly faster processor? Should I buy now when I heard that there may be a new version in a few months? Then, after you’ve made a tenative decision, any comment from anyone about the product or a competitor’s product can cause you to start the process all over.

Here is Beckwith’s ratings of the "best" options:

Very good
Good
Best
Not good
Truly god-awful

Note that "best" as a concept ranks third? Why?  "Because," Beckwith says, "getting to best usually gets complicated." I really appreciate Dennis pointing us to that thought.

When I talk to lawyers agonizing between a choice between two or more software packages, I sometimes tell them, "I want you to think about a few things. Any of these packages can do a good job for you. As a matter of fact, you probably won’t fully use the power and features that any of these packages offer. So rather than continuing to analyze the relative apples and oranges, just do two things: 1) Commit to spending money and effort on education and training to more fully utilize the software you do purchase, and 2) Set a deadline by which you agree to make a decision, even though you still may not have all of the facts." Now I will be adding to those comments that getting to the best is often just too complicated.

After you have read the post from Dennis linked about, then read his prior post "Seven Easy Ways for Law Firms to Throw Away Money on Technology" and you’ll be all prepared for your next technology purchase. Just remember that we will all make purchasing decisions that we question later when a new version of the software is released or an ad in the newspaper makes us think we could have purchased more inexpensively. It is worse for your business to devote dozens and dozens of wasted billable attorney hours to decision making than to have purchased "very good" instead of "best."