The cover story of the Washington Lawyer this month is The Tyranny of the Billable Hour by Robert Pack. It is not really about methods of alternative billing, but rather the impact of minimum billing quotas on the lives of larger law firm associates and, now, even partners. There was mention of how a firm might require 2400 hours billed per year even though the stated target is only 1900. The firm cannot recruit associates so easily if they were told it is 2400 hours. So they just lie? The difference in one’s family and recreational time between quotas of 1900 and 2400 is staggering. Solos may not find much in this article, but every managing partner should read it. It just doesn’t make much sense to invest all that money into hiring and training associates only to have them burn out or bail out once their student loans are paid. Solutions are not easy. Given the salaries that starting associates are paid at larger firms, they have to generate significant fees.

Many Oklahoma lawyers have benefited from their membership in the Oklahoma Bar Association Law Office Management and Technology Section. The section has a great e-newsletter and other great projects. If you are not a member, please consider joining when you pay your bar dues. If you have already paid your dues for 2005 and would now like to join, just e-mail me and I’ll get you some information. I have decided to include some pictures on my weblog and here is one of several of us as we visited the Oklahoma Frontier Drug Store Museum in Guthrie before the LOMT section retreat in 2003. If you want to see many more pictures from the retreat, go here.

Drugstore

I direct your attention to an article entitled "Alternative Billing for the ‘Main Street Lawyer’ " by Mark Robertson and myself. It was excerpted from the book Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, Strategies That Work by Mark Robertson and myself. Too often publications about alternative billing focus on the larger firms. This article talks about alternative billing for the small firm, small-town lawyer.

Even though Christmas is over, you may still want to download Wired Magazine’s TEST reviews publication. It has reviews of all sorts of products and gadgets. If it plugs into something, there’s likely a review contained in its 117 pages.  Download from here. When you get to the site, I suggest you right click on the download link and select "Save target as.." to save it to your computer as opposed to just opening it. (8 MB download) WARNING: This may make you wish you had more disposable income.

One great free resource for law firm technology and management information is Law Practice Today, the e-zine published by the ABA Law Practice Management Section. It is normally published near the end of each month. I suggest you subscribe to the e-zine while visiting the site. That means you will receive e-mail notification when each new issue is published online.

The December 2004 issue of LPT has many noteworthy features. "Looking to the Future: What Changes Do You See Coming in the Next Twenty Years" features some provocative comments from a panel of experts. For example, Colorado attorney Phil Shuey predicts that "[a]lmost all commodity practice (e.g., uncontested divorces, low damages litigation, basic estate planning, and simple business structure creation) will be provided either by non-lawyer commercial entities and/or by the court system itself. "  Phil’s not the first or only one to predict this, but if/when it happens it will be a shock for those lawyers that  handle these types of matters for the bulk of their practices.

Of interest to me as well was former ABA TECHSHOW Chair Mark Tamminga’s article on extranets. If you are still not sure what extranets are or why your law firm would be interested in them, this short article is a good read for you. If you want detailed information on law firm extranets, there’s a link there to the recently published book on extranets by him and Douglas Simpson.

Sabrina I. Pacifici posted a link to great resource on her blog, beSpacific

The American Library Association has posted the Best Free Reference Web Sites 2004.

The sixth annual list was complied by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of ALA. Add this one to your favorites.

Most of these are not law-related websites. Some like the U.S. Copyright Office are law-focused content.  It is important for lawyers to appreciate the power of factual research on the Internet, not just legal research. Lists of properly vettted authoritative databases should be treated like the gems that they are and saved to your bookmarks or favorites. You never can tell when you will need to quickly find the ingredients of common household products or locate in-depth information about the Federal Reserve System.

I’ll admit to being a proud WordPerfect user. But I know many of you readers now use MS Word. When I used Word, one of the things I didn’t like was the lack of the path and filename on the top of my display as is done with WordPerfect. I mentioned this to Oklahoma City Attorney John Brewer, one of the few lawyers I know who has always used MS Word. He agreed that would be a nice feature and a few days later, posted a "workaround" to our OBA members only OBA-NET showing how to do this. I think every Word user should try this one.

Open MS Word. Right click on one of the task bars. Select customize. Select the Commands tab. Select Web under Commands. On the right you will see "Address." Left click on "Address" and drag it to the task bar where you want it located. We put it on the top task bar to the left of "Help. (Since you are using the web setting, the pull down menu will show recently visited websites)

There may be better ways to do this, but this one worked and now I can see the path and file name of the document I have open in MS Word. Thanks, John.

I was very intrigued when I read Brett Burney’s Review of the Mirra Personal Server 2.0 on LLRX.com. I didn’t get one of these for Christmas, so I may have to buy one myself for my home system. I think that many lawyers should be investigating external hard drives as a part of their disaster recovery plans. They are much less expensive now. I haven’t seen the Mirra in person, but according to Brett it is fairly easy to configure. Then it simply makes a mirror image copy of everything you have designated on your hard drive, or your entire hard drive for that matter. The Mirra is more expensive than some similar products, but it has some exciting features that have sold me. You can invite others to share certain of your folders by logging into the Mirra website. You can give yourself a similar invitation to share all of your folders. So, for one price, it looks like a lawyer can set up a secure extranet to share documents with clients and others online, remote access for the owner to access files remotely and have a back-up solution that functions automatically. Yes, I’m very interested.

Even though it was published over a year ago, I’m still very proud of my article "Technology, Stress and the Lawyer’s Quality of Life." The link is to the online version of the Oklahoma Bar Journal. It was republished in the Amercian Bar Association e-zine Law Practice Today. One of my friends, blogger Dennis Kennedy, commented favorably on this article and also identified me as one of the people he knew who should be blogging. Thanks for the push, Dennis.