There are many ways to fail and sometimes few ways (or one) to succeed. Many lawyers tend to view the whole concept of legal project management with some suspicion and wariness. They view themselves as creative problem solvers and do not want their thought processes to be limited to following a flow chart. Besides, just how professional could following a flow chart be?

Every now I then I want to say PLEASE read this article everyone. Today is such a case. The anonymous curmudgeon Otto Sorts has posted an article on the AttorneyAtWork site titled Life Is Complex and Uncertain which contains an easy six point approach to project management. (Go ahead and read it now. I'll wait for you.) Great work, Otto. I have no idea why your editors called you "Strange" in the bio section.

But at the risk of incurring some curmudgeonly disapproval, let me suggest that this is only the first part of the roadmap for law firm success. I have mentioned before how I think lawyers would benefit from reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Otto Sorts has outlined project management for a particular project. Atul Gawande encourages us to then take that work product and, at firm expense, build a template (aka checklist) to institutionalize this thinking process to benefit the firm and the next client for the next similar project. We should let the project plan/template/checklist evolve just the way our standard form documents are modified when the law changes or unexpected difficulties are encountered.

Last week I was a guest on the Lawyer2Lawyer podcast.  Here's their description: "As law firms slowly climb out of this recession, have their legal practice management skills changed? Lawyer2Lawyer co-host and attorney J. Craig Williams welcomes Rudy Bazelmans, Regional Director of Expense Reduction Analysts andLawyer-2-lawyer Jim Calloway, Director of the Oklahoma Bar Association's Management Assistance Program, to explain the current state of the legal industry, new law practice management skills, what attorneys have done to cut costs and how to keep costs down in the future."

It is certainly an interesting and timely topic. So take a few minutes to use this link to listen to a discussion of Cost-Effective Law Practice Management.

The clock is ticking. March 1 is your deadline. Most lawyers with Google Accounts will want to read and act on this ABA Journal article: Want to Delete Web History Before Google Gathering Takes Effect? EFF Shows How. After reading the article, I logged into my Google account and was frankly amazed at the data that Google had collected on me at https://www.google.com/history. So many searches. And I thought I rarely watched YouTube Videos, but my history sure has a lot.

The thing that I think I have learned today is any time I am logged into GMail or any Google service, then Google saves information that I wouldn't have anticipated. While I still do not believe this infromation will be shared with advertisers in ways that compromises client confidentiality, any benefit I might get is not worth the history being saved. A lawyer who does an arraignment for a high profile client that has media coverage may not want any record outside of his office that he did a dozen searches on the Twinkie defense that week. You can come up with your own examples.

I'll still use Google services, but most lawyers will make the decision in the future that they will log into Google, do what they need and log out rather than staying logged in to Google all day. That may mean finding an alternative for Google Reader for example, because most users will stay logged into it all day. And it may mean that Gmail will be reexamined again as an appropriate office tool by those still using it. I already expressed my frustration with this change in my post Et Tu, Google? 

Pass it along to your friends and colleagues. The last few days of February 2012 should be known as Google History Deleting Days.

The Early Bird Deadline for registering for ABA TECHSHOW 2012 has been extended until February 24, 2012. This is a really good year to attend ABA TECHSHOW.

As ABA TECHSHOW Reid Trautz notes in his TECHSHOW blog post, Why ABA TECHSHOW is About Your Future, there are many changes impacting the legal industry. Some of these changes are the result of the adoption of new technology, while technology is the key to responding to others. An ABA Journal article this week quoted law professor Brian Tamanaha as writing that law schools produce 45,000 new graduates each year, while only 25,000 job openings are projected each year through 2018. Surely we all have to recognize that trend impacts many practicing lawyers, not just the newly minted lawyers who cannot find a job.

Read Mr. Trautz's post. This is a critical time for us all. I'm excited about ABA TECHSHOW and my Saturday morning presentation, The Future of Law Practice: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings. I hope to see you at ABA TECHSHOW.

ABA TECHSHOW is my best learning experience every year. No other legal technology conference has so many of the Who's Who of legal technologists because of the number of presentations that are offered. The Early Bird deadline is February 17, 2012 and the savings are significant. You can register and get more information at www.techshow.com. Just take a look at this great lineup of timely presentations. Many of you may be a member of a bar association that is an ABA TECHSHOW Event Promoter and provides you with another discount.TECHSHOW 2012

I am extremely excited about my two presentations at ABA TECHSHOW 2012. My first presentation is with Diane Ebersole, who is a practice management advisor for the Michigan Bar Association. Our topic is “Magic in Minutes: Effective Use of Document Assembly." This is truly a hot topic. With three cloud-based practice management systems announcing new document assembly tools in the last several weeks and a new generation of tools that operate as Microsoft Word plug-ins, there have been a lot of recent developments in this area.

“The Future of Law Practice: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings?” is the title of the plenary session that I will do to kick off the final day of ABA TECHSHOW. Doing a solo plenary session at ABA TECHSHOW is a great honor and responsibility. I will not claim to have the reputation and expertise of Richard Susskind, who addressed ABA TECHSHOW 2009 on a similar topic, but I have a list of ideas to share about preparing for your next decades in law practice. Here is an article I wrote for the Oklahoma Bar Journal that you can download to give you a preview. Download OBJ 2012 Jan14 – Preparing for ABA TECHSHOW

The world is changing. Attend ABA TECHSHOW to master these changes, As a tweet from @emyth observed recently, "If you're waiting for change to happen to you, it will, but probably not the change you want." I hope to see you at ABA TECHSHOW.

One of the most significant items in technology news so far this year is Google's significant changes to its privacy policy. Google will now combine all of your data from all Google services together and users won't be able to opt out. See Washington Post Google announces privacy changes across products; users can’t opt out 

Long before I saw the movie The Social Network, I had come to the conclusion that the members of the Facebook team were, quite frankly, not good people. Facebook rolls out change after change of its privacy policy and the impact of each was that you had to make changes or your personal information would be shared more broadly than you originally intended. The average user really had no hope of maintaining control unless they were a privacy zealot willing to spend hours researching and coping with each change. My friend, Ben Schorr once said to me that you cannot look at Facebook just as a way you share information with friends. It is more accurate to look at Facebook as a giant advertising operation intent on selling your information which baits you into providing that information by letting you also share it with friends.

Google, on the other hand, had as its informal motto, "Don't be Evil." It was the company that allowed us to use the web in a meaningful way by giving us Google search. It seemed to be the embodiment of the idea that a company could do a great public service and make a healthy profit. GMail, Google Reader, Google Translate and many other services improved my life, did not cost me a thing and Google made tons of money with various advertising services. That was pre-2012 Google. Now Google is going to use my information in ways that I never intended and the nice little phrase "no opting out" can be Google translated as "and there's nothing you can do about it."

Your attention is directed to Google’s Watching You: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Google is now going to expand its practice of filtering Google search results based on what Google knows about me.

As the author notes, "Maybe if I’m from New York, I’ll see more articles favorable to the Giants for the next ten days. If I’m from Massachusetts, I’ll see articles supporting the Patriots.

"That doesn’t seem so bad… at first. But let’s dig a bit deeper.

"Let’s say I’m a political animal. Perhaps I get a lot of mail from Move On, or spend time with the Drudge Report. Google already uses this information to select what it shows me when I search. The 'Obama' links shown to the Move On reader are very different from those shown to the Drudge browser." id.

That is pretty significant. I can imagine someone working on a degree in Abnormal Psych may have some interesting sponsored links in their GMail account. Congress passed a law saying video rental stores could not keep permanent records of what movies I rent, but now Google will be doing that for what YouTube videos I watch. It is really quite Orwellian, except it turns out Big Brother isn't the government, but it is Google, which is already much more powerful than a bunch of national governments.

What can be done? Not much. European privacy laws may eventually temper some things. There will be antitrust investigations and Congressional hearings. But Google is already too ingrained in our personal and professional lives for most of us to even limit our usage. Google Reader will know your online reading habits and combining that with your YouTube viewing habits will give a significant window into your life and thinking.

What Google has proved is the truth of the cliché about online services: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Et tu, Google?

Later today I will be presenting for an online CLE titled The iPad for Litigators. Don't bother rushing to enroll as the program is now sold out. The last I heard they were closing in on 600 registered to take the class. (It will be repeated on February 3, 2012.)

My co-presenters are Tom Mighell, chair of the ABA Law Practice Management Section, blogger at iPad 4 Lawyers and author of iPad in One Hour for Lawyers and Jamie Moncus of the firm Hare Wynn, who recently obtained a $37.5 million verdict using iPad trial presentation technology. I hear more every week about how lawyers are using iPads in their practices. I am grateful for the opportunity to co-present on this topic. As is almost always the case, I have learned more preparing for this program and may learn even more during the program.

My Sites for Sore Eyes column in the just-released GPSOLO eReport is Beyond the Basics of Google. Long time readers of my blog may have seen a lot of this information before. But if you have some colleagues who would benefit from this information, be sure and send them the link. I am always surprised by the number of people who have never heard of Google Advanced Search or think it is some advanced function that they are not qualified to operate.

Here's an additional related site that wasn't in the article. If you have grown tired of people asking you questions that they could answer themselves if they would just use Google, check out the site Let Me Google That for You. (http://lmgtfy.com) The site's motto is "For all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves." Go do a quick search there and click Preview to see the short animation you can send someone the next time they ask. It will bring a smile to your face. (But do not try this with your supervisor!)



For the December 2011 Oklahoma Bar Journal I decided to pass along some interesting add-ons for a PC user. It's not like the old days where you had to cobble things together yourself with lots of customizations and add-ons, but I think you will find these additions helpful. Oklahoma lawyers who read this in the Bar Journal may still find this version useful as the hyperlinks have all been enabled (and corrected from the entire PDF version of the Bar Journal on our website.) So download this file to more easily visit the sites mentioned and install some of these useful add-ons. Download Gadgets_Gizmos_and_Apps.Calloway.Oklabaj

My recent Lawyers USA column covered Ten essential classes of websites for lawyers. You may know many of these, but feel free to forward the link to a lawyer you know who is not as current on Internet tools. I'll let you in on a little behind the scene information. The concept was to cover ten websites, combining some useful old standbys with newer tools. But as I tried to narrow it down to ten, it became obvious that there were several contenders in some areas. I hope you enjoy this piece and learn of some new online tools.