This month's Digital Edge podcast covers "The Best of Legal Tech for Solos and Small Firms 2014."

John Simek is our guest, who is the business partner and spouse of my podcast teammate, Sharon Nelson. Together with Michael C. Maschke, they were the authors of The 2014 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide: Critical Decisions Made Simple, published by the American Bar Association. I was quite honored to be asked by them to write the forward for the book.

We discuss all sorts of technology for solo and small firm lawyers, including practice management software, workstations and cloud-based services. Enjoy the podcast.

My most recent column in Law Practice magazine is titled The Breakdown: When Things Go Wrong. The inpiration for this was pretty simple. As my friends know, I have had a thing or two go wrong this year. But things are getting better. Lawyers should consider their personal work habits in view of how easy it would be for someone to step in in the case of an emergency. Every law firm should have a business continuity plan. it is just as important for the best interests of the lawyers as it is for protection of the clients.

As always there is a lot of great material in Law Practice Magazine. You can read the articles from the May/June issue 2014 free online. Your attnetion is directed to Tom Mighell's Web 2.0 column on the Internet of Things in Law Practice. After reading that piece, I am now frustrated with my simple "unconnected" alarm clock.

Every law firm should have a business continuity plan. – See more at: http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_magazine/2014/may-june/practice-management-advice.html#sthash.e4RysAlK.dpuf
Every law firm should have a business continuity plan. – See more at: http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_magazine/2014/may-june/practice-management-advice.html#sthash.e4RysAlK.dpuf
Every law firm should have a business continuity plan – See more at: http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_magazine/2014/may-june/practice-management-advice.html#sthash.e4RysAlK.dpuf
Every law firm should have a business continuity plan – See more at: http://www.americanbar.org/publications/law_practice_magazine/2014/may-june/practice-management-advice.html#sthash.e4RysAlK.dpuf
THE LAW FIRM BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN
THE LAW FIRM BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN
The Breakdown: When Things Go Wrong
The Breakdown: When Things Go Wrong

Here's a great explanation of why you need to use Evernote.

"Evernote is software that is a digital extension to your biological memory. Remembering ideas becomes trivial….The intellectual demands on professional life can be overwhelming. Great minds are best deployed to the intractable problems to hand. But life is made up of lots of little things that have to be remembered. Evernote stops you wasting effort on remembering all those little things, and liberates your imagination."

That explanation was written by Philippe Doyle Gray, a barrister from Sydney, Australia. I was privileged to sit in on the session he taught at ABA TECHSHOW on How to Optimize Evernote. He is now sharing his paper and his training videos on how to use Evernote with the world. Sometimes a picture, or a short video, really is worth a thousand words. Check out his online collection of Evernote resources for lawyers. We believe that Philippe was the first Austrailian to give a presentation for ABA TECHSHOW and my guess is that this will not be his last time.

Here are my addtional Evernote tips. Don't be a cheap skate. Subscribe to Evernote Premium for only $45 per year. Your monthly upload limit then increases from 40 MB to 1 GB per month. You get a PIN lock for mobile devices for improved security. Search tools are greatly enhanced as well. I use Evernote's web clipping service all of the time to save web pages for future reference.

Thanks to Philippe Doyle Gray for sharing his great insight.

Surely you have heard of the Internet security threat Heartbleed by now. But the explanations seem a bit complicated and advice to change all of your passwords yet again seems so “been there, done that.”

This is a serious matter. The short explanation is that Heartbleed is not something that infects your computer, but a flaw in the security setup of the websites you visit that could allow wrongdoers to steal some of your personal information when you visit the site. Essentially websites where the address began with https:// were thought to be secure as opposed to the plain http:// address. Then, literally because of a typo by a programmer, that was not so sure. This might not be a big problem if you are reading an online newspaper, but is a big deal if you are shopping online with your bank card or have given the site your personal information. The good news is that there is a patch the websites can apply to fix the problem and most major websites have done so. The bad news is some sites have been slower to implement the change than others and changing your password before the site has updated does not solve the problem. There are a number of sites that allow you to check whether a site is still vulnerable. I am directing our members to the LastPass Heartbleed Checker.

My colleague Laura Calloway did a very nice blog post How To Handle Heartbleed that is highly recommended reading. She notes “[m]ajor sites that were affected include Google and Gmail, Yahoo and Yahoo Mail, Dropbox, Box, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Etsy, Flickr, Minecraft, Netflix, SoundCloud and YouTube.” She also directs us to Mashable’s comprehensive list of affected sites.

Merely changing your password from “Password 1” to “Password32” or from your dog’s name to your cat’s name is not the long term solution. Today you need to be using a password manager tool that will generate and remember long, random passwords. But it is also time to strongly consider using two factor authentication for sites handling sensitive information. I wrote about both of these topics in the August 2012 Oklahoma Bar Journal. It you have not yet taken those steps, maybe you should read that article, E-mail Issues for Lawyers Today.

Two factor authentication will be painful for all of us. Essentially the future for most of us is you will log into a website by copying and pasting your password from your password manager. Then the system will text a number to your phone that you also have to enter to complete your login. Leaving your phone at home or losing it will be even more of a problem than it already is and preserving very carefully the instructions for how to log in when your phone is missing will be critical. 

But we have seen this time coming for a while. It is time. Here are some other articles to read if you still need some more convincing. 

Inc. Heartbleed Proves the Password Is Dead. This Is What You Need Now

Lawyerist Passwords: a User Guide for Lawyers and Law Firms

ABA Legal Technology Resource Center Lessons from Heartbleed

 

ABA TECHSHOW 2014 was a great success, breaking all of its previous attendance records. Congratulations to ABA TECHSHOW chair Natalie R. Kelly and the rest of the TECHSHOW planning board. For our Digital Edge podcast this month, Sharon Nelson and I interviewed Natalie about her thoughts after the whirlwind experience of the week before. We called the podcast Headlines from ABA TECHSHOW and we think you will enjoy listening whether you have attended many times or just want to some day.

Even if you missed TECHSHOW, you can get part of the benefit by visiting 60 iOS Apps in 60 Minutes 2014 and Pictures from TECHSHOW 2014 courtesy of iPhone JD. And no one wants to miss the ever-popular 60 Sites in 60 Minutes lineup- ABA Journal article on the program and 60 sites list.

The 2014 Oklahoma Bar Solo & Small Firm Conference will be coming to the Hard Rock Casino Resort Tulsa June 19-21, 2014. Our speakers include Bryan Sims (who many of you know as The Connected Lawyer), Oklahoma Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice John F. Reif, OBA General Counsel Gina Hendryx, Jeffrey Taylor aka The Droid Lawyer™ and many more. Since the conference will take place at the Hard Rock Tulsa, check out our rock 'n roll-themed conference website at http://www.okbar.net/solo for the entire schedule and more information.

This year we will be kicking off with the OBA Open golf tournament. We are looking forward to a lot of fun! Oklahoma lawyers can satisfy their entire continuing education requirement for the year at this conference. We hope to see you there.

Time management is a challenge for us all these days. There are so many more distractions and so many more electronic avenues for assignments to come our way. It is a constant struggle to maintain productivity and a constant goal to improve. Missing a calendar entry can be critical in a law firm, so we live by our calendars. But making certain that critical tasks are completed promptly is equally important. Many lawyers put critical to-do items or deadlines on their calendars, even though they should be in a task list.

My latest column in Law Practice Magazine is titled Time Management by Buckets and Lists. It is quite short so you will not have to spend too much time reading it. If you go to a bookstore, you will likely find many titles on time management and personal productivity. I cover what many of these approaches have in common and then interview my friend Paul Unger of Affinity Consulting Group for his step-by-step approach for to-do lists that combines modern technology with old-school methods.

I hope you will find value in Time Management by Buckets and Lists.

This column is in the March/April 2014 issue of Law Practice Magazine. It is the annual ABA TECHSHOW issue since ABA TECHSHOW is later this month in Chicago. There are many great articles in this issue, including the cover story, Social Media 2.0: The Next Generation of Hyperconnectivity by Daniel A. Schwartz. The stories and columns are available online, but you may find that you can more easily find the time to read them if you subscribe via the mobile app.

How do I do that? It is one of the challenges we all live with in today’s times. We need to do something with our technology, and we are aware that there are technology tools to do it. We just aren’t sure which of the many available tools is appropriate and how much training, installation and setup will be required to make it happen.

So, in my February Oklahoma Bar Journal column, I decided to cover a few of these tools in What Tech Tool Should I Use to Do That? In particular, I wanted to note the changes in Google and tools that help with the need for stronger passwords. I hope this works as a sort of basic training for the lawyer who uses technology– or anyone.

I do not have comments enabled on my blog, but if you think I have left out any simple, basic tools, then drop me an email and I may do a follow up.

Adopting Mobile Technology – What Does that Mean for Today’s Lawyers? was my column last month in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. Although this was a very basic treatment of the topic, I hope lawyers and law firm managers appreciate that, for marketing purposes, how your law firm web site appears on smart phones and other mobile devices may be more important than how the site appears on a computer screen.

Hopefully my two opening examples make that point.

Two friends are having lunch. One is a former client. The other mentions a need to retain a lawyer. Your satisfied former client says that she used you and recommends you as a lawyer. Then she picks up her phone, does a quick search, locates your website and texts the site to the friend. The friend looks at the information on her phone for a moment and then they go back to lunch. The text message with the link remains on her phone.

Someone has had to bail a relative out of jail. As they leave the bondsman’s office, they are told there will be a court appearance in a few days and they will need to hire a lawyer. They sit in the car, discussing the situation. Neither of them has ever retained a lawyer before, nor can they think of anyone that they know who has. What happens next? One of them pulls out their phone, but not to make a phone call — at least not initially.

Feel free to share the article with a lawyer who needs this information.

The Early Bird Deadline for ABA TECHSHOW 2014 is February 10. (UPDATE: Extended to Feb. 17) TECHSHOW will be held at the Chicago Hilton March 27-29. There are many exciting programs as you can see on the conference schedule. Of special note  will be keynote presentations by Rick Klau, who is a partner at Google Ventures where he helps lead Startup Lab and former White House counsel John Dean on The Evolution of Ethics and How it Applies to Today's Technology. Of course there will also be all time favorite programs like 60 Tips in 60 Minutes and 60 Sites in 60 Minutes.

Oklahoma Bar Association members can save by using the OBA Event Promoters code EP1403 when they register. I hope to see you there.

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