How law firm can effectively use social media is a topic open for debate. I have seen some very persuasive individuals tell audiences that a social media strategy is absolutely critical for law firms. I have heard from lawyers who say they invested significantly in social media and saw little to no return on investment. I have talked to lawyers who say their law practices focused on a narrow area survives because of Google AdWords™‎. Other lawyers say they get little business from the Internet.

My personal opinion remains that the immediate impact of social media marketing for law firms depends on many factors, including the focus of the practice, the effectiveness of the person handling communications, the target audience and the community in which the lawyers practice. But what there can be no doubt about is that use of social media continues to expand and there can be no doubt about the importance of some social media presence for almost any law practice.

I decided to go back to basics with my column in the September 2014 Oklahoma Bar Journal, What Is Your Law Firm’s Social Media Strategy? I even included a sidebar with links to four articles to read for lawyers who still do not have a website. I primarily relied on Twitter in the example, just because it is not as complicated as trying to deal with the continuing evolutions of Facebook. (By the way Facebook now hides certain posts from you. Here’s how to see them.)

My column is a very simple and basic article. But it does provide the small firm lawyer in particular with a way to get started on a sustainable social media law firm presence. Share the link with someone who needs to read it—maybe someone in your law firm.

The Law Practice Magazine Sept/Oct 2014 issue is out and Law Prac Mag Sept Oct 2014the theme is law firm Finance.

As always. there is lots of good content, including Starting a Financial Relationship With Your Client- Packaging your fee agreement with an eye toward client relations, written by my colleague and friend Peter Roberts.

My Practice Management Advice column in this issue is What is Your Job Description? Many law firms have recently updated their job descriptions and some have a policy of doing that task regularly. Hopefully this will serve as a quick outline on the mechanics of drafting and updating job descriptions for those lawyers and firms who can use it.

Many of you will see a different look when you click on the article links above. The magazine board has decided to publish the e-magazine version publicly when it was previously only available to Law Practice Division members. So now you can read the entire magazine online and see all of the great color graphic images (and advertisements), along with a few items that were not previously published online.

With the recent Apple announcement about the Apple Watch coming in 2015, it is a good time to contemplate whether wearable technology will be good for lawyers, not so good or somewhere in between. Our new podcast is The Future of Wearable Technology for Lawyers.

“In this episode of The Digital Edge, Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway interview legal technology expert LTN logo
Richard Georges about wearable technology, how smartwatches enhances his ability to be productive, and what lawyers need to consider when adopting this new technology. Having a smartwatch, Georges explains, actually decreases court disruptions and car distractions while making him accessible to clients at all times.”

Many are familiar with Rick's FutureLawyer blog and we are glad he agreed to lend us his expertise and be a guest on our podcast.

Jeff Richardson of iPhoneJD.com posts Why lawyers will love the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Jeff Taylor of DroidLawyer.com posts Android Lawyers Won’t Love the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

They each posted respectful comments on each other's posts. So both camps can be happy with their respective phones.

Personally I am excited about the iPhone 6 because I skipped the 5 and have been increasingly impatient with my iPhone 4S this year.

If you are unsure which to choose between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, one aid is to go to WonderHowTo's downloadable PDF iPhone 6 cutout file and print it out on your printer to see exactly how big the 6 Plus is.

Everyone seems to agree that the camera has huge improvements. See Wired Magazine- The iPhone 6′s New Camera Could Forever Change Filmmaking. If that is important to you, you may want to consider paying extra for the 128 GB version so you won't be limited with your home movies (or witness statements.) One omission from the Wired article is the 6 Plus has DSLR-like optical image stabilization while it is "just" electronic for the 6. C|NET Personally I'm still leaning to the 6 because the 6 Plus seems a bit too big for pants pockets.

Upgrading from the 4S to 6 adds a ton of features, including the ability to sync with next year's Apple Watch. Upgrading from the 5S to the 6 is a much closer call. Here's a handy comparison chart. The 5 series will work with the Apple Watch.

David Pogue has a great post about all of the discussion of stolen celebrity nude photos – You’re Reacting to Celebgate Wrong. It is good reading for anyone since about everyone uses the cloud in some way today, intentionally or unknowingly. He believes that the photos were obtained through guessing the answers to each celebrity's security questions rather than any vunerability in the iCloud. He notes that an account of his was once compomised and his security questions were fairly easily guessed, e.g "What was your favorite car? when he has blogged about his love of the Prius. An Internet researcher can easily find your mother's maiden name as well.

I recently tried to help a friend recover her password. Her problem was she honestly could not remember who she would have named as her favorite teacher and none of the guesses worked. (Probably a black mark against her high school, but that is another story.)

An easy way to fix this is to memorize false, impossible-to-guess answers to common security questions. Since these answers would never change, hopefully they will be easy to recall than ever-changing passwords. But if you are afraid you will not remember the bogus answers, you can always store them in a text file you keep on your phone or online. The first rule is not to name the document My Passwords. (Yes, people do that!) The second rule is to paste in a page (or more) worth of boring text that seems to match the name of the document. Then on page 2 (or 3) you can put your answers in a disguised format with a few typos, to wit:

I rekall great moments at home with XK37B_PWRD! We would go 0u66T for a ride in Slugbug491. I still like to visit PigLattinHigh sometime with my huney Tork000##. It is still on 972un4seen Road. (Well, you get the idea.) Or you could be really clever and bury them in a spreadsheet.

The real work, of course, is recalling every service that you use, logging in and changing the answers to the security questions. But as you learned at PigLattinHigh, sometimes you have to work hard for something that you really want–like Internet security.

I'm a big fan of Jeff Richardson's iPhone JD blog and with the recent Apple new product announcement date scheduled on September 9 in a much larger-than-usual venue, you don't want to miss out on Jeff's in the news roundup this week.

But I really want to direct you to the recent guest post – Lawyer iPhone and iPad stories: Will Harrelson where Will discusses in detail his favorite iPad and iPhone apps and how he uses them. I sometimes hear lawyers say things like they don't see the point of apps or apps are not really important. This post shows in great detail how real lawyers use apps to really practice law. Don't miss it!

Get your technology news update here. Recent Technology News and Developments for 2014 is my column for the August "Back to School" issue of the Oklahoma Bar Journal. I cover lots of tech developments with some serious and some not-so-serious commentary on these items. Lawyers who took the summer off from reading tech news can catch up here. 

How many times do you see "Visit my blog!", "We have great news articles online here" or "See our website for more"? How often do you actually follow up just to see what is there?

My guess is the honest answer for most of you is “not often.” The more telling question is if you find something great there, would you remember to return for more in the future?

Our online reading habits have changed. It is increasingly rare for most Internet users to go to many news sites just to see what the current stories are there. There are, of course, exceptions. I am a long-term reader of the New York Times and often read articles from the online edition. Many people still visit one or two popular news sites, like CNN.com or Google News. With football season fast approaching, I will be most certainly reading more articles on sports news websites.

But today it is much more likely that I will go to a site just to read a specific article than to just look for current news. I think that is true for many. I read a lot of online articles because they were suggested to me by someone I follow on Twitter, a Facebook friend or a link aggregator like SmallLaw® from TechnoLawyer.® I often don’t have enough time to read all of the good content that is suggested for me, much less to search for more content on my own.

Newsreaders are a great tool for each individual Internet user to collect all the content that they might be interested in reading. Unfortunately, for most lawyers, the term “RSS newsreader” translates into “something that is too complicated for me and I probably don’t have time for anyway.” That is simply not the case.

So I decided to outline some of the tools and recent developments in this area for my Oklahoma Bar Journal column Reading Online News Items (2014 Edition). There are some really great tools available today. If you haven’t tried Flipboard on your mobile device, you are missing out on something easy, simple and beautifully elegant. Likewise, if you use the federal court database PACER, you really owe it to yourself to give the free PacerPro® service a try.

You may be worried that these tools will be setting up another inbox that you will not have time to review. But it is pretty easy to scan many articles in your newsreader for the few you want to read. If you return from a vacation or a week-long trial to find hundreds of items backed up, you can just mark them as as read and start over. After all without the newsreader, you would have likely missed all of them anyway.

I hope you enjoy Reading Online News Items (2014 Edition). Even if you don’t sign up for one of these services today, you can go to Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog and enter your email address to subscribe to receive my blog posts via email.

The American Bar Association is once again seeking nominations for its annual list of the 100 best legal blogs. You can find the form here (scroll to the bottom). While my blog hasn’t made this list in the last few years, I’d still appreciate a nomination. I hope you can take the time to nominate your favorite legal blogs. This is always a great collection of legal blogs and I learn of a new interesting legal blog when this list is released almost every year. The deadline for nominations is 5 p.m. ET on Aug. 8, 2014.

Visualizing Document Automation: Five Steps For Success is a free one-hour webinar sponsored by the folks at The Form Tool. It is set for Thursday, July 31st at 10:00 a.m. CDT. I shared this information with a few of my colleagues yesterday and when I began this blog post, I learned that my friend Laura Calloway, Program Director of the Practice Management Assistance Program of the Alabama State Bar Association, had already said everything I wanted to say on her blog. So, with my apologies for the extra click, here’s everything you need to know about this seminar. (Or you can just register here.)