Before I ever went to work for a bar association, I was involved with three types of bar activities: 1) My local hometown bar association, The Cleveland County Bar; 2) The Oklahoma Bar Family Law Section and 3) The Oklahoma Bar Association Annual Meeting, which takes place this week. (Info here.) I think beginning lawyers make a real mistake by not getting involved with their local bar and the Young Lawyers Division of their state bar. There’s no better source for so many things young lawyers need: mentoring and wise advice, possible referral of work, insider info on how things really work at the courthouse, potential employment in small firms that may not be advertised and much more. You may be a bit uncomfortable the first meeting or two as you get to know everyone, but don’t let this deter you from a great networking opportunity.

For Oklahoma lawyers who do any family law, the OBA Family Law Section is an incredible resource. At their meeting this week, one of the doorprizes is a trip to the ABA Annual Meeting in Hawaii this summer.

There was a recent online article bashing the volunteers who work in bar associations. I won’t even dignify it with a link. You can come to our OBA Annual Meeting and get to know some of the best lawyers in our state. Stop by the OBA Management Assistance Program exhibitor’s booth and say "Hi." Sharon and I would love to hear from someone who we didn’t know that follows the blog. We even have a modest giveaway.

(I’ll bet most readers don’t connect a movie reference with the title of this post. It starred a native Oklahoman who grew in my hometown.)

Here’s a free site with an interesting service. We know how "reverse" databases operate. In an online reverse phone directory, you type in the number to locate the name of the individual who owns the number. (For e.g. See Anywho.com reverse lookup.)  But a reverse lookup dictionary is a more complex concept. Try the One Look Reverse Dictionary, where you type in a series of words or phrases describing a concept and in response you get a list of the words (or sometimes phrases) suggested by your input with the best matches shown first.

Here’s an article I found on LifeHacker entitled Ten "Must Have " Bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are small bits of javascript that you can save in your Favorites. But instead of just taking your browser to a favorite Web page, they can perform other actions. If you don’t get bookmarklets, let me give you an example you may appreciate. Readers of this blog know I really like services like TinyURL to make shorter links to web pages for e-mailing or even communicating verbally over the phone.

The Tiny URL bookmarklet is here:
http://tinyurl.com/#toolbar 

After going to that page, right click on the link to the bookmarklet and save it to your Favorites. (Some of you may want to put it on the Links Toolbar in IE as they suggested, but mine is full with higher priorities.) Then I opened my Favorites and moved this new one from the bottom to near the top of the list. Just drag and drop it higher on the list.

It looks just like a normal Favorite, but here’s the benefit.

Assume that I am already at a webpage and want to create a tiny URL for it to paste into an e-mail or for some other purpose.

Old method:
Copy the URL from the webpage to my clipboard
Surf to TinyURL.com
Paste it it into the data window in Tinyurl
Click the button to create the Tiny URL
(Tiny URL has improved to automatically copy the new URL to your clipboard and save that additional step.)

New method:
Click Favorites and Select the TinyUrl Bookmarklet (which looks like the
other favorites)
As I see the TinyURL Web Page appear, I know that the task is done and
the new URL has already been copied to my clipboard.

For more bookmarklets, see Bookmarklets.com. One bookmarklet I like that wasn’t mentioned in the article referenced above was page freshness, which allows you to see when a Web page you are viewing was last updated. It is here.

Joy London was an early blogger. Her archives on her Excited Utterances blog go back to mid-2002, before many of you had even heard of blogs. Excited Utterances focuses on knowledge management ("KM") within law firms. KM was the big buzz in corporate circles a few years back and still is an important subject for law firms. How do you avoid reinventing the wheel? How do we capture the things lawyers learn in one case to be used in the next? How do we keep lawyers from hoarding their knowledge within the firm?

I have to admit I don’t visit her blog (or read the RSS feed) every day. You cannot just zip through Joy’s posts. Joy makes you think. Just read, for example her recent post "To Classify is Human" (10/21/05.) In it she quotes or references Nena (did the song "99 Red Balloons,") the 18th Century botanist Carolus Linnaeus, the Global Director of KM at Baker and McKenzie and James Mallet (an evolutionary biologist at University College London.) You do need to check out this important and significant blog. You will find as much introspective, original, smart content about your law practice as you will find most anywhere – even if she does make you think!

It sounds bizarre, but did you know that your color printer has likely been modified to provide information about your use of it to law enforcement? Yes, I know. I couldn’t believe it either.

In many color printers, there are tiny almost-invisible hidden yellow dots generated on each page which can be decoded to reveal the serial number of the printer used and the date and time of printing. Apparently this practice was first brought to public attention in this article in PC World about a year ago. Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation started investigating and produced this white paper. This month the EFF announced they have decoded the dots and published this Web feature "Is Your Printer Spying on You?" with links to many resources including a chart of which printers do and which printers don’t. The Washington Post ran this story on the topic yesterday. (WashingtonPost.com may require free registration.)  The rationale for this practice was the Secret Service could use it to track counterfeiting. One researcher said he found the "feature" in documents produced by ten year old printers. (Thanks to Norman, OK attorney Kevin H. Pate for bringing this to my attention.)

"One Law Office to Go, Please" is the title of my column for the Oklahoma Bar Journal this month. It covers the very basics of how a law office can be made mobile with current technology. I’d like to expand it into something more lengthy sometime, but time marches on and the Oklahoma Bar Association Annual Meeting is on the horizon.

I would note that I firmly believe that many, if not most, lawyers should consider utilizing a laptop rather than a desktop for their primary work computer. This particularly true for true solos with little or no staff support or those brand new lawyers trying to start a practice on a shoestring budget. It just makes too much sense to always have all of your work in progress within handy reach in case you decide to put in another hour after your kids have gone to bed or there is an unexpected situation. (This may not be so true for larger firm lawyers with remote access and a home computer.) Of course, the maximum benefit of this practice does depend on how far down the road you have gone on scanning incoming documents and creating a digital client file.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. A parent dying and leaving small children is an unmitigated disaster to the family. As far as they are concerned, it is of more significance to them than the Gulf Coast hurricanes. The family disaster is worse if the deceased was the family breadwinner without adequate life insurance, but all of the life insurance one could buy doesn’t repair the damage.

After spending time with many lawyers impacted by disaster in Mississippi and Louisiana, I’m still trying to collect my thoughts. Losing your business completely to wind or floodwaters is bad enough, but it is just the first part of the equation. Then you have clients scattered across the country with no way to contact them. Your cash flow dries up. You have to deal with a court system that is not fully functional. If you are really unlucky, you might have to deal with a lawyer from another state who thinks that you should have been able to return to business as usual by this time. The Mississippi casinos employed 17,000 and there were many more industry-related jobs. All these people can no longer pay their lawyers–and many other things.

We know there are more disasters ahead, whether they are small or huge, heart attacks or floods.

There is no time like the present to prepare yourself and your law practice to better survive the worst. Here’s an article I wrote several years ago: The LawyerThinks About Disasters. This month’s Law Practice Today is a special disaster preparation and recovery issue with lots of great articles by experts. (The link is to the current issue. Later, you’ll have to look for October, 2005 articles in the archives.)

It started out as a Website catering mainly to the interests of the legal academic community. Then, with vision and the hard work of a dedicated group of law student volunteer citizen journalists and editors, it grew into a great legal news Website. Now Jurist, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is a true Internet news and information powerhouse with video clips, downloadable documents and research studies, links to live webcasts, expert commentary and more. It is news for lawyers. A story on a criminal defendant includes a link to the indictment in PDF, for example. I’ve never met Prof. Bernard Hibbitts, the founder, publisher and editor-in-chief, but it is clear he is a man of vision and a hard worker. For more reading on what makes Jurist unique, go here.

Jurist is my website of the week. Check it out.

Well, folks I am really excited to be a part of a law office management and technology team going to do some free CLE and consulting with lawyers on how to rebuild their practices affected by Hurricane Katrina.

The program is called Rebuilding Your Practice After Disaster Strikes. It will be presented twice. First on Friday, October 7th at Best Western Hotel Acadiana & Conference Center, Lafayette, LA and then repeated on Saturday October 8 at the Harrison County Courthouse (2nd floor) in Gulfport, MS. My colleague, J.R. Phelps, from the Florida Bar, has quite a bit of first-hand knowledge about helping lawyers recover from hurricanes and more than one of us has seen the damage from tornados. If you are an affected lawyer there, contract your respective state bar for details. We want to try and talk to as many people as we can while we are there to help. I am told that 130 have pre-registered for the Louisiana program and don’t know what the room capacity is.

Here are the program details:
8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. Registration
8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Avoiding Ethical Disasters When Natural Disaster Strikes – Suzanne Rose
9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Rebuilding Your Practice – JR Phelps and Gisela Bradley
10:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. Break
10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Technology Triage – Jim Calloway
11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m Lunch with Bill Leary discussing Personal Trauma
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Malpractice Concerns and Claims – Roland Johnson
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. NY 9/11 Experience; Personal Experience; How Bar Can Help You – Panel of Steven Krane, David Jester
3:00 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. Break
3:15 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Question and Answer Session with speaker panel.

I have to brag about the Oklahoma Bar Association. When I asked about doing this program, I mentioned that LA and MS would reimburse my travel expenses. Within a very short time, the word came back from our bar officers that the OBA did not want reimbursement. They wanted that money spent on the lawyers who needed the help there.