This past weekend I was inducted as a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. It is a prestigious group and frankly my reaction when I heard I had been nominated was along the Grocho Marx quote of not wanting to be a member of a club that would have him. I was concerned that COLPM might be slipping with their standards to even consider me. This feeling reoccured during the induction ceremony itself. The inductees were presented in alphabetical order and before they even made it to the C’s, they had inducted former ABA President and Chair of Dickinson Wright Dennis Archer and my friend Andy Akins, Director of the Legal Technology Institute at the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law . Here’s a COLPM newsletter with the complete list.

But the weekend was grand and I particularly enjoyed hearing poet David Whyte, who kept the room spellbound for two hours with his observations and reflections. The most humbling part for me was being nominated by two icons of law practice management, both with ABA LPM Lifetime Achievement Awards, Texas lawyers Jimmy Brill and J. Harris Morgan. If there was a Mount Rushmore of Law Practice Management, these two gentlemen would have their faces carved on it. Thank you both.  I had never been to Vancouver, B.C. before and wish I had had more time to explore, but it is a great city.

Ellen Freedman of Freedman Consulting has recently launched her Law Practice Management blog. I’ve known Ellen for years. She provides management and technology consulting services to the lawyers of Pennsylvania. She’s a prolific writer and has already posted several interesting items. She has given great presentations in the past at ABA TECHSHOW and LegalTech New York. I know this blog will be a very valuable resource for law practice management information and am proud to feature it as my Website of the Week.

The new issue of LawPro magazine has hit the Internet and our friends from north of the border have hit another home run. The theme of this issue is electronic discovery and every lawyer should go download it now. As I keep telling groups of lawyers, general familarity with electronic discovery will be needed in almost every aspect of the practice of law from corporate governance to family law to litigation. From Dan Pinnington’s article on "Why Electronic Documents are Different" to Susan Wortzman’s article on "Spoliation, Preservation and other ‘Gotchas" to the downloadable sample electronic discovery request letter, you’ll be glad you took the time to download this entire publication. True, it is geared for Canadians, but you may have noted we have few precedents of any kind at the moment.

OKLAHOMA LAWYERS, and those within easy travel distance, should not forget our Oklahoma Electronic Discovery Summit slated for September 22-23 at the Reed Center in Midwest City, OK. We’ve added even more value to this program with local and national vendors attending and a free ED forms CD to be provided to all attendees. For more info, go here.

My feature article in the August 13, 2005 Oklahoma Bar Journal was "Do You Have the Time? A Few Thoughts About Time Management  for Attorneys." It was inspired in part by a great program on time management given by Tahlequah, OK attorney Tery DeShong at our Oklahoma Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference. Tery’s much better at living time management principles than me. Most lawyers are well aware of the need to efficiently use time and probably do a better job in this area than they think they do. But I do think that is one of these topics that we all need refreshers on from time to time. It’s short so you can read it in a brief time.

With millions of blogs online and tens of thousands of new ones appearing daily, there is a need for tools to sort through the many new voices posting on the Net. Certainly traditional search engines like Google index the blogosphere, but there are other tools focused primarily on blogs. When I want a search to see what’s hot and recent in the blog world, I go to Technorati. The search results are presented chronologically, so often the first results returned are mere minutes or hours old.

Even if you do not see a present need for them, it’s important for lawyers to be aware of powerful tools. Genie Tyburski‘s The Virtual Chase Alert directs us to an article worth reading by anyone who fancies themselves as knowing how to do Internet research. A free article, available to nonsubscribers, on the Wall Street Journal’s online edition discusses blog search engines and has a nice chart comparing five blog search tools. Read it today. I’m not sure how long it will be online before being archived. Even lawyers with little interest in blogs should peruse this one.

Of course there are always new trailblazing concepts. Cutting edge blogger Matt Homann of the [non]billable hour blog is already dismissing those of us who use Technorati as behind the curve. He points to Talk Digger, which is a metasearch engine that submits queries both to the blog search engines and traditional ones. Here’s the Talk Digger FAQ. I have to disagree with my friend Matt as TalkDigger only indexes and lets you search Website addresses, not traditional keyword searchs. It is useful for bloggers to see who is linking to their posts and in some other situations. (Trackback links, like you see at the bottom of this post, only capture a very few of those who link to a blog post.) But for common searches I’m sticking with Technorati and, if I ever find time, will be examining more closely the other tools identified in the WSJ article. (IceRocket was new to me.)

This past week my inbox simply overflowed with e-mail from lawyers and those who serve the legal community with ideas and plans to help the victims of the Katrina disaster. The American Bar Association has set up two impressive Websites to help those who are impacted.

The ABA Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief page now has general information and sections for victims needing legal help, for displaced lawyers needing help, for military personnel needing help and for lawyers wishing to volunteer help. This is a very professional effort done in a short time.

In addition, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has launched the site Technology Related Resources for Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief. This site will prove very useful for lawyers who will soon be attempting the difficult process of recovery of their law practices. Many of the resources here were prepared by my fellow practice management advisors. In fact, if your empathy for those impacted by this disaster has made you wonder how well prepared you were for a disaster, you will find many disaster planning resources here as well. Check it out.

There will be many more victim assistance efforts from the legal community and from the legal technology consulting community. Helping those lawyers get their practices restarted and functioning will also help their impacted clients. These two sites for disaster assistance are my joint Websites of the Week.

I did a CLE program for a group of Edmond, OK attorneys yesterday and they had several questions about weblogs. As you know, law-related weblogs are sometimes referred to as blawgs.

How does one locate blawgs of interest? Well, generally by the same two methods that one uses to locate anything on the Internet, which are search engines and web directories. Two directories for blawgs are Blawg.org and the Blawg Republic. You’ll find plenty of blawg links, organized by topic, at these two sites.

What a terrible and emotional week! Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of Katrina. The American Bar Association Midyear meeting is scheduled for the first week of February, 2006 in New Orleans. But it seems very unlikely that will occur.

My friend Ernie the Attorney has escaped New Orleans. His posts about Katrina are compelling reading. Dennis Kennedy has posted a set of links for Hurricane Katrina Help, along with some other information. We’ve all been captivated by the horrific images from the Gulf Coast on television. People are uploading images to the web as well. There’s a Flickr tag for hurricanekatrina and videos are being uploaded as well. Words simply cannot describe the devastation.

When doing research on a difficult ethical issue, it is sometimes helpful to review the ethics opinions from jurisdictions other than your own. If your state doesn’t have an ethics opinion on a particular issue, it’s always good to read what smart lawyers have written about the application of a rule. Doing such comprehensive research is easier since the Colorado Bar Association has compiled a set of links to "Legal Ethics Opinions and Resources Around the United States." Nice job! The Colorado Bar has a fine Law Practice Management program as well, headed by my good friend Reba Nance.

I must note that one should also visit LegalEthics.com for similar resources and legal ethics news items. My Bar has a nice Oklahoma Ethics Research Page as well.

We’ve all heard about the Zotob worm shutting many businesses as it swept across the world recently. The Law Tech Guru Jeff Beard reminds us that he posted a primer called "Wireless Networking Best Practices: Version 2.0" some time ago which is still valid. He notes that he mentioned in that primer to disable the Universal Plug ‘n play (UPnP) unless you need it. UPnP was the primary exploit used by Zotob. I think I’ll be adjusting my home wireless router tonight with Jeff’s article in hand.