The Colorado Bar Association recently made available a timely resource that I think anyone who has employees should seriously consider downloading, reading and saving for future reference. Pandemic Preparations for the Workplace was authored by Donald W. Benson and Katherine S. Dix. It is a nice treatment of several issues, including some that you might not have thought about. Even if things settle down for the moment, as I noted, you probably should save this article for future reference.

Here's a tighwad technology tip for those of you who are paying for pre-packaged incoporation paperwork kits from vendors. Recently an Oklahoma Bar member inquired about an inexpensive way to create stock certificates in-house when a lawyer does an incorporation for a client. I did a quick search on the Microsoft website and found a really nice Word template for stock certificates that is available for free download. Since it is a Microsoft Word template, you (or someone in your office) should be able to easily customize it to change style or colors or add any language needed in your jurisdiction. Check it out.

It is really hard to believe that Sharon Nelson and I have completed 18 podcasts in our monthly series, The Digital Edge:Lawyers and Technology. Unfortunately, Sharon lost her voice for this month's edition and so her husband, computer forensics expert John Simek, sat in for our interview with Andy Adkins. Andy authored the recently-published book, The Lawyer's Guide to Practice Management Systems Software, Second Edition. If you are a little unclear on how these basic law office software tools work, this would be a great podcast for you. Andy does a good job of giving simple explanations for technical topics. Listen to our Interview with Andy Adkins. 

Today I feel obligated to heap great praise and give an unqualified endorsement. I think TechnoLawyer’s BlawgWorld is superb. In particular I think it is a great resource for the busy practicing lawyer. Let me explain.

It can be tough being a lawyer in this, or any other, economy. Representing clients, completing projects, handling administrative responsibilities and staying current on one’s legal subject matter issues is the proverbial full time job. But in all but very large firms, where a narrow focus is still possible, a lawyer also has to be aware of technology issues, some management issues, time management, marketing and more. The days have long passed where a lawyer can be ignorant of issues like metadata, possible waiver of attorney client privilege by sending to a client’s work e-mail account, electronic discovery, the need for data backup and many other important matters.

If you are reading this blog post, you know there is lots of helpful free information about many practice management issues available online. But who has the time? That’s where the current generation of BlawgWorld fits our needs. Each Monday we can receive an e-mail with a selection of the greatest hits of technology and practice management related content selected from the last week of legal blog posts and online editions of several other publications. And that’s the first reason this is so great. In this day of disappearing newspapers and shrinking press rooms, with BlawgWorld, we can all benefit from the seasoned editorial judgment. Neil J. Squillante and his team at TechnoLawyer invest their time reading lots of blog posts and articles. And, even though you could visit the sites individually, receiving it all packed in an e-mail is very convenient.

BlawgWorld is concise, with just the post titles (or a description) and the links. There are lots of links, but you can scan all of the week’s selections in just moments. This lets the busy lawyer select and read one or two articles each week. (But don’t blame me or the Technolawyer gang if you end up reading many more.) But every week, you can painlessly devote a little time to reading about current emerging issues or how to improve your practice. You can decide if you have five minutes to invest or twenty. You can see a sample issue online here. I do have a personal interest in that I want BlawgWorld to stay just like it is—because it works for me!

I could say more, (spotlights brighten, background music rises) but you just need to believe. So….. I want you to stand up, and come forward, and click on this link. It’s time, brothers and sisters, to subscribe to BlawgWorld. What’s the risk? Just one more e-mail a week. You can easily unsubscribe after a few weeks if you wish. But as a lawyer (or other legal professional), I think you will really enjoy BlawgWorld.

The New Hampshire Bar Association issued Ethics Committee Opinion 2008-2009/4 on April 16, 2009. I've written at length on this subject and one can go here to review my take on all previous bar ethics opinions about metadata. It still bothers me that many of these opinions assume (A) that removing metadata is an expensive, mysterious and sometimes impossible process when in fact it is fairly simple to make sure confidential client information is not disclosed and (B) looking at a document's metadata is often intended to ferret out confidential client information when it is generally looking at routine things like a document's word count.

I was surprised when it was recently reported to me that half of the lawyers in a legal IT conference presentation indicated they were not aware of metadata. How could a lawyer have missed this significant issue at this point in time? I do note my general satisfaction that this opinion, and all recent ones, note that the transmitting lawyer has the clear duty to avoid sending metadata that could reveal confidential client information. And, we all now understand that metadata in evidence (like produced pursuant to discovery) is generally free to be examined.

The ironic and funny thing is that with all of the discussion in the opinion about whether metadata is "inadvertently" included with transmissions or not, the PDF of the opinion inadvertently includes an extra blank page. (Yes, sometimes i am easily entertained.)

One of the sites I showed at ABA TECHSHOW'S 60 Sites in 60 Minutes was Wordle. The producers even call it a toy. They say "Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text." But there is actually some value in examining word frequency in an easy-to-understand graphical format. Here is a Wordle of the year to date posts in my Law Practice Tips blog. LPT Blog Wordle

And Carolyn Elefant tells the story of how she used this toy—er–tool with great results for, of all things, a talk on marine renewables energy.

You can paste the text from a long document into Wordle. Try it with a brief or long article. You can also alter colors, horizontal to vertical ratio, font and other items. But to see if your trial brief emphases what you planned by word count can be a useful exercise.

I did a program for the Oklahoma State Webmasters Group on Web 2.0 last month. The paper created such interesting word clouds that I saved two of them. Click to expand.Calloway Web 2.0        Calloway Web 2.0 B

We hear it at many Continuing Legal Education programs. Someone who either arrived late or was visiting with colleagues, boots up their computer and the Windows Startup sound plays while the first speaker is talking. This is not too embarrassing unless it is really loud because you were up late the night before blasting out iTunes or some Internet radio station while finishing that brief. Here's a Law Practice Tip you can accomplish in less than a minute. Turn the Windows Startup sound off. (Even if you have a desktop machine, haven't you really heard it enough by now in your office?) Just go to Control Panel -Sound-Sounds. Then uncheck the Play Windows Startup sound box and click Apply.

I really like Readability. I used it as one of my contributions to ABA TECHSHOW's 60 Sites in 60 Minutes 2009. It actually isn't a website you will visit often because, if you take my advice, you will visit it once and install the Readability applet link on your browser links bar. Readability "is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading." If you have reached a certain level of maturity, you can also set it to make the font bigger so that it is easier to read.

Whether this helps a person with vision problems read online better or whether it is just better when you are reading from your laptop during the commercials as you watch TV, (like Tom Mighell, who referred me to the site) Readability is a nice tool to have available when you need it.