Here's an article that both I and your professional liability insurance carrier wish you would read: "To Dabble or Not to Dabble." 

With a tough economy, more lawyers are being tempted, or forced, to branch out into new practice areas. This is not a bad thing. Many lawyers have found their practices evolved into areas that they did not anticipate. In fact, I recall being at a superfund defendant's meeting many years ago when our newly-hired lawyer started off by saying something to the effect of "I'm a trial lawyer, not an environmental lawyer, but I know how to learn." It wasn't too many years before he was known as a leading environmental lawyer.

But there's a big difference in making a decision to expand into a new area of law (with plans for mentoring and any needed education updates) and taking a thousand dollar fee for something you really don't do because you need the thousand dollars. You may think you will spend the time to get up to speed and ultimately most all lawyers will. But this is an area where dangers lurk, such as being unaware of local rules or local customs or the time it takes to prepare or crucial recent rulings. Adrian Baron makes the point with a witty Shakespearian touch.

The latest version of the e-mail/forged bank check scam targeting lawyers involves scammers posing as potential clients seeking to collect back child support or alimony. Some of these say they have already worked out an agreement, but want the lawyer to process the check for a healthy share of the proceeds. Of course, any time someone wants to pay you five figures to serve as a check-cashing service, your internal "too good to be true" alarm should go off.

Many lawyers are not aware of how long it takes the banking system to recognize and notify depositors of the forged checks. The scammer just hopes they can convince the lawyer-victim to wire out the money before getting the news that the check is worthless (or maybe now much worst than worthless.)Bad Check

As a service to its members, the OBA has scheduled a free webcast on this topic on December 15, 2009 at noon. While you may think you understand how this works, are you sure everyone in your office does? We anticipate more variations on this theme. OBA members can enroll now online for this free webcast.

I think even replying to the e-mail may have generated a FedEx delivery of the check, figuring the scammers may still catch a phish. Several local lawyers here are holding the checks. Alabama Bar Association Assistant General Counsel Samuel S. Partridge even managed to snag one after his phone was answered "Alabama Bar Association." (See illustration.)  Read his story here.

One of the easy tip-offs is that the e-mail will refer to your jurisdiction or your city, but not by name. It would be way too much trouble to customize them with a reference to specific city or state. Don't get scammed. Enroll for our free webcast.

Fixed fees needn’t mean working more for less (or for free) is the title of my new column in Lawyer's USA. It is interesting to note that this year the term "Alternative Billing" has changed to "Alternative Fee Arrangements." That is fine by me. The new term is more accurate and the acronym AFA is more usable. The column addresses the concern of many lawyers that fixed fees will have them working for free. Honestly as the systems go into place, that may be true sometimes. But this column addresses ways to limit that possibility.

Earlier this week, Corporate Counsel had an article about a new AFA survey titled, The Bell Is Tolling for the Billable Hour: 'Change Is Here to Stay.' You really want to read this article, too (after reading mine, of course.) It contains links to some other features and a nice pop-up chart of the survey results.  The most notable result was that of 587 general counsel and chief legal officers surveyed, 39 percent said they paid law firms more money this year under alternative fee arrangements than they did in 2008.

Mark Robertson (co-author with me of Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour 3rd Ed.) and I are also working on a new article about Alternative Billing aka AFA. Look for it in about two weeks.

I also strongly, strongly, strongly suggest you read Jordan Furlong's piece Beyond Billing.

Most of us have a lot of passwords now. I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to how many passwords I have for various websites. There's a great temptation to use the same password for several sites. Experts will tell you that this is wrong, and it is. But most of us have a generic password for sites that don't matter and hold no personal data, like online newspaper registrations. A surprising number of people just use password recovery every time for sites they only access occasionally.

But many passwords absolutely have to be secure, such as online banking, every computer workstation, any site holding your client information, web-based e-mail and any site where you have or might use a credit card (even if you didn't have the site save any info.)

The best way to keep your passwords secure is to use a dedicated password manager like Roboform. Lifehacker has a post on the five best password managers here. Hopefully no one still keeps their passwords on PostIt notes by their computer and hopefully everyone understands that a password simply cannot be a word that is found in the dictionary. (Brute force dictionary password cracker tools are pretty easy to locate.) But a lot of people still keep a written list or a file on their computer. If you do that, I urge you not to write down the entire password there. End them all with something like 3W$ and never write that last part down.

But a lot of non-dictionary passwords are common and easy to guess, such as pets or children's names. Star Trek fans like NCC1701 as a password and there are a lot of Star Trek fans. Here's a site listing the 500 Worst Passwords of all Time, but be warned that a lot of those common bad passwords are obscene words.

If you are still puzzling over proper passwords, here's a nice online feature on choosing good and bad passwords. But for most lawyers, a password manager is the way to go, with a copy on your computer and a copy on a flashdrive for remote access.

One great weakness in the system is online password recovery tools with their standard questions to prove you are you. Remember when the guy cracked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail? She chose the recovery question of "where did you meet your true love?" and the fact that she met her husband in high school was all over the Internet, Pretty easy crack for even a beginner hacker. A lot of people choose "mother's maiden name" for their recovery question. Well, between genealogy sites and onlne obituaries, that is pretty easy information to discover online. In fact when I am trying to figure out how to locate contact information for a woman who changed her name when she married, I search for her maiden name (no quotes) and the word obituary to find her current name.

So no disrepect to your mother is intended, but you should probably come up with a fictional maiden name like tbiff339$ and go change that security answer in all of your webmail accounts and others with personal or important information to that name.

I never blogged about my Home Sweet Office article due to some technical issues here. But it is clear more and more lawyers are considering an office-based practice. I find it interesting that many of the success stories involve an established lawyers leaving the firm and "moving home," taking his/her existing clients and charging them a lower billing rate. Certainly it is easier for some lawyers to operate out of a home-based practice, such as a lawyer who only does appellate briefs and can met with clients in the trial lawyer's office when hired. Frankly I cannot imagine building a new family law practice, for example, out of a home unless it was part-time and limited. But I know some have done it.

I hope you enjoy the article.

Here's a shout out to Chuck Newton and his Ride the Third Wave Blog, where he has long championed the concept. You should visit his blog and I'm selecting it as my Website of the Week. (A even greater honor since I don't manage to do one every week.  :-)  )

In a move with possible profound implications, Google Scholar has added a dedicated search for legal journals and court opinions. Check it out here. Apparently they have the entire Heinonline database included as I located a couple of articles I wrote back in 2005 that I didn't know were available on the free web. My first guess is that this will not convince many lawyers to move from their current legal research tools, especially since so many now enjoy free legal research via their bar associations. But for those who pay for a limited plan, there may be a way to find cases outside of the plan for free. Many may now find that they have access to legal journals previously not available.

In a related note, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has just released a free full-text online law review/law journal search engine that searches the free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals as well as other document repositories.

I cannot believe they are already playing Christmas music in the malls! But the change of season also brings two great online resources for ideas for gifts for lawyers (or just for yourself if you have been good.)

Sharon Nelson and I have posted our latest Digital Edge podcast, High Tech Toys for the Holidays. While a few of these have some business use, most are just fun. Listen to the podcast (about 20 minutes) and then click on the links in the attached show notes section to visit the product websites. This is our 25th podcast!

Our friend Reid Trautz has also posted his 2009 Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers with lots of interesting gift ideas. This is his fifth year for the Holiday Gift Guide and I certainly saw a couple of items there I need.

If you do your holiday shopping online with the help of these resources, then maybe you can spend Black Friday at home watching football instead of shopping.