ABA TECHSHOW 2011 closed with a large crowd in attendance for 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. Jim Calloway and Sharon Nelson joined colleagues ABA TECHSHOW 2010 chair Paul Unger and TECHSHOW planning board member Erik Mazzone for this lively presentation. Jim and Sharon just couldn’t get enough of talking about interesting and fun websites for lawyers so we decided to discuss some of the websites here, beginning with a “missing site” that was mysteriously omitted from the original 60 Sites presentation.

Listen to the 24 Favorite Sites Digital Edge podcast here with links to sites. We started with the missing site, which someone who provides too much tech support for their family and friends will really enjoy!

And by the way, Mark Unger over at the State Bar of Texas Computer and Technology Section blog, gave 60 sites in 60 Minutes a truly great review here. So thanks, Mark.

Can you spot all of the ethcial violations in the relatively short telephone conversation in the attached article from Oklahoma Bar Association Ethics Counsel Travis Pickens?  Download The Attorneys Speech – Travis Pickens – April 2011 OBJ Reviewing this very short article might give you some good reminders about keeping out of ethical hot water in your client communcations.

During my almost fourteen years with the Oklahoma Bar Association as the practice management advisor, I have planned or helped to plan quite a few CLE programs, including our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. (This year's Solo & Small Firm Conference will be held June 9-11, 2011.)  But today I want to direct your attention to what I think is an extremely important OBA CLE program this week with lots of information about your future.

Supercharge Your Law Practice will be held this week- on May 18, 2011 at the Oklahoma Bar Center and May 19, 2011 at the Renaissance Hotel in Tulsa. The May 18th program will also feature a live webcast. The live webcast will be a bit more expensive, but all of your staff can sit in and watch it with you.

There is a lot of change ahead for lawyers who want to be successful. It is not just about technology or even hard work. One of our “Supercharge” speakers, Tim Green, gave me this interesting quote from "Making It All Work," a sequel to "Getting Things Done" by David Allen:

            "[S]tudies have proven that the vast majority of all performance improvement is systemic. Additional motivation and intelligence make only a negligible difference in the long run."

Given that observation, we are going to spend some time talking about designing efficient law office systems. We’re going to talk about future trends impacting the legal profession. Some of these trends are quite scary. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read this article from this month’s The Economist– A less gilded future: The legal business has undergone not only recession but also structural change. Ever-growing profits are no longer guaranteed. Nor, for some firms, is survival.

We are going to discuss digital law practice and digital client files. We’re going to demonstrate some tools to use for document assembly in the law office. Law firms need to incorporate document assembly tools to be effective, but that impacts billing and other business matters. I will demonstrate a document assembly tool that a solo practitioner with no staff support and no technology skill can use to automate his or her own forms. This is particularly significant to estate planners. In fact the demo documents in this document assembly program are estate planning documents.

Here is the link for more information and to register for Supercharge Your Law Practice. I hope to see you there, or at least for you to see us via the Internet.

If you cannot make the scheduled dates, the program will be archived for future viewing later. But why wait? Summer is a good time to make some changes.

Delegating with Confidence is the title of my column this month in Lawyers USA. Some lawyers are not as effective as they could be delegating important work to others. This is often because "[a]ny assignment delegated to staff is still the responsibility of the lawyer and the failure of a staff person to properly accomplish a task will be no excuse to a client or disciplinary authority, which might hold a lawyer accountable for poor performance." Hopefully the tips in the article will help you delegate important assignments more effectively.

There are so many technology tools that it is sometimes a challenge to recognize all the ways that they can be used. Well, one of the neat features of the iPhone and iPad is that you can save a screen shot of whatever is displayed on the phone by holding down the power button and the Apple home button at the same time. The screen shot will be saved with your other photos. The other tool is Google Maps.

So look at how a couple of smart iPad-using lawyers have married those concepts together.

First Rob Dean at his WALKINGOFFICE blog notes how you can load the Google Map and then the Google Street View of a location and save the picture using this technique with his post Need Photos for Court? Take Screenshots with Google Maps.

Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. takes that idea and expands it by using a $5.99 iPad app called Adobe Ideas to have the witness at a depostion mark exactly where he and other parties were located on the Street View of a particular address. His post is titled Using an iPad to recreate a scene in a deposition. After the witness has marked up the photograph, you save it and e-mail it right then to all counsel and the court reporter. It is sort of amazing when you put this all together. You leave the deposition with a photograph of the scene, with the witness having marked with his or her own hand the location of parties, other witnesses, vehicles and other items of note. This would be extremely useful if a wtiness changed his or her story about the locations.

(NOTE: Lawyers without iPads can grab screen shots into their clipboard from their PC's using Alt + PrintScreen and paste the photo into a document or e-mail or other file.)

I often tell lawyers that it is a great idea to join organizations and be active in your community. These activities can help you build your reputation and build your law practice. But I also caution them that they should not join organizations for the purpose of marketing their law practice. If you are committed to a cause or activity, the time invested is fun and beneficial. If you are just in the group to sell yourself, it becomes obvious to everyone much sooner than you might think. Lawyers tend to be busy people. So if you are not really committed, it can be easier to let a project or deadline slide. The last thing you would want is to invest your time in an organization and then for people in that organization to tell others that you did not get your assignments done. Demonstrating competency and helping with a worthy project will bring benefits to you. It is better never to have participated than to leave a bad impression.

I was reminded of this principle as I read a recent blog post by Rick Horowitz titled The Patch. This is not a marketing concept that most readers will specifically follow. Rick is a motorcycle rider. He's not a member of a motorcycle club, but as you see from his post, he knows a lot about the culture of motorcycle clubs. He participates in charity "poker runs," and when others learn he is a criminal defense lawyer, he is sometimes asked for business cards. He details how he decided to create a patch that would promote his practice when he was riding with groups. Of interest to me was his lawyer's attention to detail as he determined his plan. (And some of the considerations were quite serious!)

The point of this post is not to convince you to buy that shiny new motorcycle you have been lusting for. The point is for you to think about what is meaningful to you. For Rick, it is motorcycles. For you, it may be water gardening. There may be a service opportunity out there that will let you work on something you enjoy and also allow a whole new group of people to learn who you are and how competent you are. Thanks to Rick for sharing his "Patch" story with the rest of us.

Last week I wrote about using a Windows 7 keystroke shortcut to make your two monitors appear as four. (Yes, you can do the same split screen thing with one monitor.)

I have to say that I am a big Windows 7 fan. So I want to direct your attention to The Wonders of Windows 7: Is It Time to Upgrade? which was written by Jim Calloway and Catherine Sanders Reach, Director of the ABA's Legal Technology Resource Center for the March/April 2011 edition of Law Practice Magazine. There are many reasons to upgrade to Windows 7, but I urge you to consider this strongly. Many lawyers have agreed with my comment that I never really cared that much about operating systems, but this one makes a difference in my day-to-day activites.

I recently was a co-panelist on a webinar and I had four different items I needed to have in my view on my monitors. These included my e-mail to receive questions from the attendees, the browser showing the actual program being broadcast, our joint notes on who was doing what portion and the actual PowerPoint so I could see the upcoming slides. Four items to view on only two monitors! Well, I could have printed part out or manually resized the windows to split the monitors. But that wouldn't make for a good blog post.

The week before I had been at ABA TECHSHOW where I presented a program called Getting the Most from Windows 7 with Ivan Hemmans. Since I use a Windows 7 machine, handling this was a Snap–literally. This is because Windows 7 has a feature called Snap. You can snap a window to half the screen size simply by dragging it to the left or right of the screen. But the dragging method doesn't work as easily with dual monitors. The best way is to use the keybpard shortcut, which is holding down the Windows key while tapping on the right or left arrow key. So I grabbed one screen, held the Windows key and tapped the right arrow. Grabbed Outlook and did the same but used the left arrow. Then repeated on the other monitor. (Tapping the arrow repeatedly allows one to toggle between half-screen right, half-screen left or full screen view.)

In just a few seconds I had the equivalent of four almost equal sized monitors with the four items I needed to see. Features like this are why you need to consider getting a new computer with Windows 7.

(UPDATE: After my original post, I received this tweet from  Shawnee, Oklahoma lawyer Edward Terry, "Used my iPad in an all-day custody trial for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I love it." I also learned of another iPad for lawyers blog, Walking Office, and added it to the list below.)

 The 2011 ABA TECHSHOW was a great experience. I'll be writing more about that later. But one of the really remarkable things about the ABA TECHSHOW this year was the number of iPads in evidence. In some sessions there were more iPads than laptops being used for note-taking. But of course, the iPad is perfect for a conference or convention when you might be changing rooms every hour and the light weight really makes a difference.

It seems pretty clear at this point to most anyone paying attention that the iPad is a real game-changer in the same way that the iPhone was. Certainly other manufacturers are now attempting to catch up and produce similar devices. But for now, the iPad rules.

Tom Mighell just released his new book, the iPad in One Hour for Lawyers, published by the ABA Law Practice Management Section.  It is a short read and at a great price $34.95 (even less for section members.) He also launched a new blog, iPad 4 Lawyers.

Sharon Nelson and I are both iPad owners. So we decided to have Tom as our guest for this month's Digital Edge Podcast and our topic is… you guessed it … iPads for Lawyers. You can listen here and hopefully the podcast is also available on iTunes again after some technical problems. Our show notes include some of Tom's favorite apps.

Speaking of apps, a great session that I had to miss at ABA TECHSHOW due to speaking at the same time was 60 Apps in 60 Minutes. Reid Trautz, Josh Barrett and Jeff Richardson highlighted many great apps for attorneys using an iPhone or an iPad. They had an overflowing crowd, as you can see. And readers, you can see the entire list of apps right here via iPhoneJD.

I've now been to a couple of presentations about using the iPad in the courtroom and have done a presentation myself with another slated for later this week. In my opinion, the reason why iPad's are rapidly catching on with trial lawyers is that a laptop, netbook or even the “traditional” convertible tablet PCs are useful at counsel table, but cannot be carried in the courtroom easily when the lawyer is standing at the podium or addressing the jury. Essentially, the iPad is just a little heavier than a paper legal pad in a holder and not nearly as heavy as the lightest netbook or laptop.

I just had one of many "Aha" moments when I wanted to make comments and notes on a PDF file and realized that the easiest way for me to do that (since the comments needed to be e-mailed back) was to put the file in Dropbox, open it on my iPad make make the notes using iAnnotate PDF ($9.99 at the iTunes App Store.)

I got to spend a good amount of time with Ian from TrialPad at ABA TECHSHOW. At first I was a bit put off by the $89.99 price tag, but TrialPad certainly makes courtroom presentations of documents and photos on the iPad simple and easy. When version 2 comes out in a few weeks and adds the ability to do "call-outs" from documents on the fly and other features, it will certainly be a contender. (See this review comparing TrialPad and iAnnotate with lots of reader comments.)

The iPad is elegant and fun to use. It is not a desktop replacement, nor is it intended to be. As one critic noted, if your practice is being tied to your desktop generating documents all day, it is not the tool for that purpose. But most lawyers I know are "on the go" quite a bit and to have your e-mail, the web, dozens of useful apps and much more all at the ready in an instant is a great tool for efficiency, whether you are waiting for your case to be called or waiting in a doctor's office. And if at the end of a long day, you blow off some steam with Angry Birds, that is fine too.

I'll make one prediction. In the next few years, you will be seeing a lot more iPads and other tablets in public places than laptops. I'll still take my laptop on road trips and it will sit in the hotel room if I need to work on a document or tweak a PowerPoint. But when I head out of the room to meetings or classes, my iPad will be in my hand.

If you want a list of blogs focusing on the many ways a lawyer can use an iPad, here's a list for you:

• Tablet Legal (http://www.tabletlegal.com/)
• TechnoESQ (http://www.technoesq.com ) 
• MacsinLaw (http://www.macsinlaw.com )
• The Mac Lawyer (http://www.themaclawyer.com
• Hytechlawyer (www.hytechlawyer.com)
• iPad 4 Lawyers (http://www.tommighell.com/ipad)   
• WalkingOffice (http://www.walkingoffice.com/)
• iPadmania (http://almipad.wordpress.com ) is also a worthwhile site to visit, not legal specific.

As readers of my blog know, I love Dropbox. It is growing in popularity, as it makes many, if not most, lists of  "must have" apps for iPad.

I do mourn the loss of Drop.io. It was a fine place to set up a one-time document repository for group to post and exchange documents. Some months after everyone quit using the drop, it quietly self-destructed. At first I thought that Facebook had bought Drop.io to add that feature to Facebook, but it appears maybe not.

Our friends at the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program did not just mourn the loss of Drop.io. They did some research and gave us a nice resource in Drop(site) Like It's Hot: Alternatives to Drop.io. Then yesterday Makeuseof.com  posted 3 New & Superb Ways To Share Files Online. That post pointed out that the introduction of HTML5 not only makes it easier to build web-based online document repositories, but also to do other "amazing" things with web pages.

Noted blogger Carolyn Elefantmentioned to me that the demise of Drop.io made her a bit uneasy about putting anything in the free cloud. I understand that. But we all like free. Maybe the key to using free cloud services is to pick those which have a premium or paid component. Hopefully while you use the free service,  others will be paying to support it and when you need more space or new features, it will be much easier to upgrade to the premium service than to move your files elsewhere. Of course you could always maintain duplicate sets of files on two services, but unless you set them up to synchronize automatically, that would defeat the "quick and easy" nature of these cloud services.

Ultimately the goal of a free cloud-based service of this type is almost certainly to make money. So they intend to be acquired, or convert to paid subscriptions only, or hope the service is so good that the free(up)loaders upgrade to receive more. But with more people relying on smart phones, iPads and other mobile devices in addition to their computers, we tightwads will hope that all of the free data clouds do not fade away.