Failing Law Schools by Brian Z. Tamanaha was published in June 2012. Among the most startling assertions in that book was that law schools will produce 45,000 new graduates annually while only 25,000 openings for lawyers are projected each year through 2018. Professor Tamanaha includes many strong critiques of how law schools operate today.

Predictably some law school deans and professors have gotten defensive about this book and other criticisms and have responded. The responses and counter responses have gotten interesting over the last week or so, so I thought I would pass some along to practicing lawyers who read this blog.

Last week Lawrence E. Mitchell, Dean of Case Western Reserve University’s law school, published an OpEd piece in The New York Times titled Law School Is Worth the Money. For those of us paying attention to these issues, this was probably one of most singularly unpersuasive pieces of professional writing that one will ever read.

Not suprisingly the legal blogosphere reacted quickly and strongly. Three days later the TaxProf Blog posted this lengthy list of dissenters to Dean Mitchell's opinion piece. A Google search reveals many more posts since then, including this one from Kyle McEntee, Executive Director and founder, Law School Transparency, which was posted as I was completing this post. These posts were not just from the "law school scam bloggers," who have been regularly posting on this topic, but from sources like the State Bar of Michigan blog and WestLawInsider, where the writer referred to "the Case Western dean’s misrepresentations (and sometimes outright lies)." This is only one instance of some tough talk about the OpEd.

I can count on my friend and colleague, Jordan Furlong, for some great insight on many topics and today he weighed in with How to kill (or save) a law school. This is great and provocative reading for anyone interested in the topic. I should note that I agree with Jordan when he says "I like law schools, and I hope they prosper." Jordan's primary point goes to law firms and law schools. If you want to deal with change and competition, first say, "if we were building a competitor to our business, what would we do?" Then do it now, before someone else does. Both law firms and law schools are constrained in what they can do in many ways, but those constraints are loosening.

Since many readers from other jurisdictions know me as an Oklahoma law blogger, I should note that "we're doing fine" here (as the song lyrics go.) We have had no huge law school expansion. We still have the same three law schools as when I was deciding where to attend. There are more practical skills taught in Oklahoma law schools, reflecting the reality that more and more graduates will find themselves in a solo or small firm setting rather than a very well-compensated apprenticeship. I guest lecture several times a year to law classes on law practice management and the University of Tulsa had me speak this year on the future of law practice to a mandatory program for 2L's.

It is the holiday season, which means it is time for the annual Tech Toys for the Holidays edition of the Digital Edge podcast. Sharon Nelson and I have searched far and wide for some fun and interesting technology toys for the lawyer or lawyer's spouse. We hope you enjoy the 2012 edition.

Our friend and colleague Reid Trautz has also just posted his 8th Annual Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers on his blog. He does not limit himself to tech items and this year he has interesting features like rock star wannabe shirts and chocolate covered bacon candy. MMMMMM!

From Twitter today I also learned of the collections of "Tech Gifts for your Significant Other" and "Tech Gifts for Babies and Toddlers" from techlicious.com.

For those who are looking for a more traditional gift for the lawyer in their life, maybe the kind of gift that doesn't plug in and has pages that turn, ABA Publishing has a very interesting collection of books that would make fine gifts for lawyers. Included among these is The Little Book of Cowboy Law.

So saddle up and round up some of these gift ideas, folks.

Equipping the Law Office 2012 is an article I was asked to put together for the Oklahoma Bar Journal. I try to cover generally everything that a lawyer might want to purchase to set up a solo practice or small firm. I tried to be comprehensive and hope this is valualbe for readers of my blog. Feel free to read this article and share it with anyone starting a practice or a law student who might be considering doing it after graduation.

Social media is obviously huge and significant. Certainly a lot of people use social media very successfully for marketing. Using social media can be fun, which means it holds the potential to be a huge time sink. By now most family law practitioners have had a case involving damaging statements or inappropriate photos posted to Facebook. But many lawyers feel they are too busy to use social media for marketing and some feel that it is a bit unseemly for a legal professional.

Let me be clear that I am now reviewing a book that I have not read. But I know the subject matter and Twitter in one hourI know the author. I have long believed that Twitter is very important for lawyers, particularly solos and smaller firms. So I would encourage all of you to preorder Twitter in One Hour for Lawyers by Jared Correia. Jared is a very entertaining and knowledgeable writer.

The nice thing about Twitter is that if you skip a week (or two) posting tweets, it is not as obvious as when you do not post to your blog for a month and every visitor can scroll down and see that. For solos and small firms, Twitter is like a free public relations agency. You set up an account for your law firm. Solo lawyers will want to use their real name, if available. If it is not, maybe you can add Esq or Atty to your name. You then put your Twitter name with a hyperlink in your email signature block. Do a few inital tweets about your law practice or the subject areas of law that you primarly handle. Then e-mail all of your buddies telling them you are on Twitter with a link to your Twitter account. That's less than an hour of work. You may be surprised that people quickly start following you.

The next time you have an hour or so to invest, do a few searches for lawyers in your area and follow them on Twitter. Then do another tweet or two, pehaps linking to a really interesting online article or two about law. Follow lawyers in other states who tweet about your practice area and retweet (RT) them occasionally. Then (and this is the really important step) follow all of the media outlets in your area, along with their writers and broadcasters who have Twitter accounts. And you may be surprised that several follow you back. Today's journalists get many story ideas from Twitter.

Try to tweet every week. But don't worry about doing many tweets each week unless you come up with really good material. At least twice a month check the Direct messages and Connect areas to see if anyone you do not follow sent you a message. If someone posts about you, using your Twitter name, you should get an email notification.

You may get a call from a reporter sometime as a result of this, but the real payoff is when you publish a story in a publication for lawyers and can tweet out the link to the article in seconds. You should send out tweets when you teach CLE programs, when you are mentioned in the media in any way or when you publish an update to your law firm web page. My view is that you will probably want to keep your tweets mainly about you or the law, but others disagree. There are tools to help you manage and automate this. I'm sure Jared will inform you all about those in the book. When you have big news to share, do not worry that you only have 200 (or 50) followers. Many of them will RT interesting items.

OK, it won't be just an hour. It will be more like 3 or 4 hours to get started and an hour or half hour per month. But Twitter is free and having your own press release distribution service can be pretty amazing. Many tweet from their smart phones using the Twitter app. Do not "hard sell" your legal services. Twitter users really do not like that and may unfollow you or block you. But unlike many other ways of increasing your visibility online, this is something that a lawyer who is inexperienced in marketing can do effectively in a small amount of time each month.

The final point is do no harm. Do not post tweets when you are angry at someone and want to tweet back at them. Do not drink and tweet. :-)  Watch your language. I recently heard from someone who followed a lawyer on Twitter and the first several tweets from the lawyer all contained obscenities. She unfollowed him immediately. Have fun. Be light hearted–at least part of the time. Don't expect huge results, but pay attention when you get them.

So preorder this book right now. Don't wait for any "real" reviews. The book is inexpensive at $39.95 and you can get a 15% discount for preordering. (In addition, some state bar memberships provide an additional discount. The discount code for Oklahoma Bar members discount code is PAB9EOKB.)

As I noted in my Oklahoma Bar Journal column earlier this month on Email Issues For Lawyers Today, Dropbox really had no choice but to speed up releasing Two-Factor Authentication for better security. They have now done that and you should set it up. Thanks to a tweet from PDFforLAwyers.com, I can now pass along to my readers a truly GREAT tutorial video How To Set Up Two-Factor Authentication On Dropbox from DocumentSnap.

Email Issues For Lawyers Today is my column in this month's Oklahoma Bar Journal.

Dealing with email is a challenge for many business professionals. I actually intended to write this piece about something that was related, but I was inspired by a blog post by Erik Mazzone, Should Lawyers Use Encrypted Email? and something very interesting that one of our Oklahoma family lawyer practitioners said in a presentation at our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. You hear talk at technology conferences criticizing lawyers for using web-based email. But it is still widely used, at least by solo lawyers. I came up with four questions and some discussion about each, even if there are not clear cut answers sometimes. Many times a lawyer simply has to decide for himself or herself–at least until there is a consensus or some clear guidance from your jurisdiction. But there are some clear situations where the email that a client uses can be very problematic.

If anyone strongly disagrees with something in the column and sends me a link to an article, I might do a follow up with some links. I don't host comments on my blog. So to so that you will have to use —- EMAIL!

While zero inbox is a great goal for e-mail management, it seems to be an unattainable goal for many of us. Even those who claim success at this usually do it by moving e-mail from the Inbox to other Outlook folders, some of which may be pretty full. So this video tip is very brief (just over three minutes) and it shows you how finding a particular e-mail or group of e-mails in Outlook folders is almost always more easily done by search rather than any other method. (Note: You will want to view this video with the full screen view to see the details)

 

To learn lots of really great Outlook tips, you can purchase these nice books from the ABA by my friend Ben Schorr: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2010 or The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft® Outlook 2007. The Outlook 2007 book is actually cheaper on Amazon.

As I told a group of law students last week, the practice of law is an honored profession and an essential part of one of the three branches of government. But, at the same time, a law firm is a business. It has income and expenses. One goal is to make a profit for the owners (or partners.)

Given the tough economic times, the July/August 2012 issue of Law Practice Magazine, the "Law Firm Profitability Issue," should be required reading for about every lawyer in private practice. The cover story is The New Normal: Restoring Profitability by Arthur G. Greene, who has spent much of his professional career consulting with law firms.

Arthur G. Greene is our guest on our new Digital Edge podcast "The New Normal." He discusses how to address today's economy by using existing resources, the importance of determining your firm's revenue capacity and the rise of alternative billing. Arthur is a soft-spoken individual with an immense store of knowledge. I will admit to being a bit skeptical when he discussed revenue capacity as it is somewhat of measure of perfection that cannot be reached. But he did convince me and he may prove convincing to you. We hope you enjoy the podcast.

Sometimes a theme issue of a magazine may reflect a cover story and another feature. The Law Practice Profitability issue has five articles directly relating to profitability, two on alternative billing and others that indirectly relate to profitability. These include Increase Profit by Decreasing Costs by K. William Gibson, Accelerating Receivables for Greater Profitability by Kevin C. Harris and Allison Renaud, 15 Proven Profitability Techniques by Joel A. Rose and Profiting When the World Is Flat by Karen MacKay and Stephen Mabey.

I also note two articles of special personal interest to me: A Case for Alternative Billing is by Mark A. Robertson, a fellow Oklahoma lawyer and my co-author on the book, Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, 3 ed. and Choose the Right Case Management Software by Erik Mazzone, the director of Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar. It is going to be an ongoing challenge to be more efficient in the upcoming years and I think getting case management software or signing up for a cloud-based alternative is critical.

We have now set up a YouTube Channel for the Oklahoma Bar Association Management Assistance Program and will be doing some regular Law Practice Tips in video format. One of our early offerings is Getting Started with the iPad2, featuring Dave Owen of ImageServe.com. If you just picked up an iPad and started using it without much training, you may not be aware of different techniques and shortcuts, like the "four finger swipe." The video is not short at over 14 minutes in length, but most every lawyer iPad user who has watched it has said that they picked up something useful.  

Earlier this year, I wrote a column for Lawyer's USA about Rethinking the roles of your law firm’s support staff. In many small or medium-sized law firms, the staff is divided between secretaries and legal assistants, with perhaps a receptionist or billing clerk. With the many complex tasks that are required in a law office today, having employees who gain deeper expertise in certain tasks may be a great benefit to the law firm. So read this article and see if your law firm should be rethinking some job descriptions and duties.

Lawyers USA also has a free resource available if you would like to read more about law firm staffing. As noted on the website:

"Brought to you by the editors of Lawyers USA, this FREE e-report contains the latest techniques for finding, motivating, keeping and developing your most valuable resource.  We’ve consulted some of the most prominent experts in the field of law firm management including Nancy Byerly Jones, Jim Calloway and Ed Poll to bring you a comprehensive report on this hot topic." Signing up to receive that will also register you for Lawyers USA’s free daily email alert. (You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Visit http://lawyersusaonline.com/free-white-paper-support-staff/ for this fine white paper about getting the best from your staff.