ABA TECHSHOW 2008 takes place next week. The latest edition of our podcast, The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology, is the ABA TECHSHOW Preview Edition. Sharon Nelson and I interview Tom Mighell, Chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2008. For those who are attending TECHSHOW, it is a good warm up. Even if you are not attending, you will hear about some hot technology trends Tom finds important. Sharon and I freely admit that we are not objective about this topic, having both previously chaired ABA TECHSHOW.

Reference sites abound on the WWW. Finding things online is not just about skillfully using the search engines. Courtney Kennaday and I may have written our best "Sites for Sore Eyes" column ever for the March 2008 GP|Solo Technology eReport with "Sites For Sore Eyes: Fun and Handy Reference Sites That Rock!" By that I don’t mean that it is the most well-written or clever. I just mean that we cover a number of great online reference sites like dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference guides. These may sound mundane, but that is only until you really need one and don’t know where to find it. Check out our article and add a few more important sites to your favorites.

Well, maybe I should say instead "the most important button that you may not be able to find."

I refer to the mute button on your mobile phone. It is often not well marked. If you don’t know where yours is located, take a few minutes today to examine your phone or the book that came with it to figure out which button is the mute button. As I assume everyone understands, the mute button turns the phone mouthpiece off temporarily so that you cannot be heard. That lets you have a private conversation with someone seated next to you, for example. That may be useful.

But that’s not the real reason I want you to know where your mobile phone mute button is. I’m  being selfish. I want you to know where the button because some day I may be involved in a conference call or three way call with you. Lawyers are busy people and our schedule may force us to participate in a conference call while using a mobile phone. But do not do this again without knowing where your mute button is and using it. It’s really easy. After being connected and introducing yourself, you push the mute button so that the background noise from your phone does not disturb everyone else. If you are asked a question or want to make a comment, you push the mute button to activate the mouthpiece and talk. When finished, you mute again.

Mobile phone speakers are very sensitive and unless you are in a totally quiet room with no heat or air running, you will send annoying noise into the conference. You may think your car is very quiet, but it is not. We hear the wind and the road and the motor. And it is very frustrating to those using landlines to have to deal with all that racket! We had a conference call with a fairly large group recently and a very critical participant called in from a Starbucks. She could not get back to her office and needed to use the Internet, so she stopped by Starbucks. It was a crowded Starbucks and the background noise was deafening. None of the rest of us could understand the others and I rapidly got a headache trying to participate. Finally one of the participants became so frustrated he asked her for the model number of her phone and searched on the Internet until he was able to find a diagram and describe the unmarked mute button to her.

Don’t let that happen to you. Determine where your mute button is on your own and practice using it. Some day soon you will be really glad that you did, as will others.

I’m going to be participating in an teleconference CLE program on Thursday, March 6th, 2008. The title is Pumping Up Your Online Presence with a Blog and we will cover all aspects of blogging. My co-panelist is ABA TECHSHOW 2008 chair Tom Mighell. Tom publishes the Inter Alia weblog. The moderator for the program is Ponca City, OK attorney Brian Hermanson. The program is produced by the American Bar Association General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division.

Tom and I have done similar programs together before, including Marketing your Practice with a Weblog at ABA TECHSHOW 2006. We both believe that blogs are powerful tools. Unlike some proponents of blogging, we do not believe that blogging is for everyone. We’ll discuss the pros and the cons of blogging. We’ll also provide all attendees with a list of representative blogs and an overview of many blog-related tools. If you are interested in starting a blog, this may be a great seminar for you.

Get more information here.

When my hard drive crashed, I ultimately lost no data. But it was a real pain because I was under a number of tight deadlines. The interesting thing was how much I missed all of the little utilities, tweaks and customizations that were on my old PC as I borrowed a non-customized standard PC. So I put my first story idea on hold and wrote What’s in My Electronic Toolbox?  Long-time followers of my Law Practice Tips blog will have heard of some of these products. I knew I used some of these tools a lot, but the combination of losing both Dragon Dictate Naturally Speaking ver 9 Preferred and X1 desktop search at the same time suddenly made it impossible to keep up with my e-mail!  Who knew? So what are you taking for granted in your electronic tool box? I’m happy to give you a peek into mine.

For some time now I’ve wanted to do a thoughtful and impressive blog post on PowerPoint. As many of you know, I create PowerPoint presentations pretty much every time I do a presentation.  I think PowerPoint can enhance any presentation. OK, I will admit the PP show with 53 slides on "Introduction to Fantasy Football" for our 12 year old boys and their dads FFB league meeting wasn’t that well received. But I probably just needed to tweak it a bit more.

By now you have already figured I that I rethought writing that "thoughtful and impressive blog post idea." Instead, I decided to clean out the "potential blog posts on PowerPoint" file. So I have to lead off with a link to a You Tube video, Life After Death by PowerPoint featuring Comedian Don McMillan. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Trust me (and the 500,000 other people who have watched it.)

It’s really trendy to criticize poor PowerPoint presentations. We’ve all seen them. More and more lawyers are using PowerPoint presentations in court. That creates some responsibility on their part. It’s one thing to treat your friends to 158 slides of your summer vacation pictures or to include the entire text of a dozen federal regulations on the slide show for your Continuing Legal Education presentation. But if your client is paying you to show a PowerPoint to a jury, it probably should be good. Evan Schaeffer rides to the rescue with a post linking to several examples of PowerPoints used at trial, including Dave Swanner’s offer (now over two years old) to send a CD packed with over 100 PowerPoint examples to plaintiff’s lawyers. Dave does ask you add to wealth by contributing your own examples for the next edition of the CD either now or when you figure out PowerPoint.

But you need not be a plaintiff’s lawyer to check out this collection of 70+ PowerPoint and Presentations Resources and Examples. Hat tip to Matt Homann.

Cliff Atkinson has made quite a name for himself writing about PowerPoint with his Beyond Bullet Points books and Beyond Bullets Blog. Recently he has decided to transition away from the free blog to a new user subscription website, BBP Online. At some point he says this will cost $25 per month, but for now charter subscribers can sign up at a rate of $25 per year.

If you want to think in depth about your presentation skills, you can always visit the Presentation Zen blog. For an example of a PowerPoint tips there, check out this post.

The American Bar Association Midyear Meeting in early February in Beverly Hills had some aspects that might be of interest to readers. The ABA Midyear Meeting is a working meeting, so I spent a fair amount of time in committee meetings and workships.

I attended several good presentations, including a motivational talk from sports figure Terry Bowden.

Daniel J. Siegel, Havertown, PA lawyer and law office technology consultant, gave a technology tips presention to bar executives that was very good. He started with a discussion of scanning and moved on to several other areas. One of his suggestions was one I had heard before. But this time I think he convinced me. He advocates moving the Windows taskbar from the bottom of your desktop to the left side. After watching his use of it in that position, I think he may have something. You have to turn on auto-hide, so it doesn’t cover up icons; but you can read a lot more about the open apps and docs that way. Here’s a brief tutorial on how you can set it up that way. I think I’ll give it a try when I get my new computer.

Another good speaker/entertainer was Sean Carter, humorist at law. I’ve talked with Sean at other bar events and I introduced him to Nerino Petro at a reception. We three had an entertaining conversation and  I figured some of Sean’s funny observations were from his presentation the next day. But, no, his program was all original and different from what I’ve heard him do previously. The group of assembled bar executives greatly enjoyed Sean’s program and lined up afterwards for autographed books. You can have a few laughs and see about booking Sean for your bar event by visiting his website, Lawpsided.

The presentations I gave at ABA Midyear were about bar associations better serving lawyers. I was on a panel entitled Cutting-Edge Electronic Communications: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with Mark A. Tarasiewicz, the Director of Communications for the Philadelphia Bar Association and John Sirman who is Manager, TexasBar.com, and Technology Editor, Texas Bar Journal. The preliminary version of the slide show can still be downloaded here if you are interested. Given that title, I had to invest $.99 with iTunes for some appropriate mood music to start the program. Texas has started the first bar association-sponsored members only social networking site for lawyers, TexasBarCircle. (Although Oklahoma Bar’s OBA-NET tends to have a lot of social networking as a by-product.) I also did a solo program for the National Council of Bar Presidents entitled Continuing Legal Education Technology Trends and Barriers. (Yeah, I’m sure you are sorry you had to miss that one.)

As noted, there were lots of other committee meetings I attended and I serve on the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s Council, which also met. But I wanted to give a special nod to Dan Siegel and Sean Carter for jobs well done.

When a lawyer tells me that they are using an Apple Mac computer, I always direct them to visit and bookmark Apple’s Small Business – Legal website. They do a good job of providing links to law office specific software for the Mac as well as links to events, news items and other sites.

Pete Roberts, Practice Management Advisor for the Washington State Bar Association gave me a list of some other sites for Mac lawyers, some of which I had heard of and others, I had not. Of course as you check these out, you will stumble across others. So here goes…..

Ben Stevens’s The Mac Lawyer blog is not to be missed. I just logged into it today to check the URL and I find news of an update to Mac OS Leopard, a link to the Mac Tips and Tricks blog showing how to use Mac’s Spotlight for quick calculations, a list of more Mac-related law blogs and a post linking to the Top 100 Essential Mac Applications. Wow. Who knows what I might have found had I taken time to search past the first few posts. Ben will be a speaker on ABA TECHSHOW’s new "Mac Track" this year.

Jeffrey Kabbe’s Apple Briefs is another site full of information for the lawyer who uses a Mac.

A Mac Lawyer’s Notebook is a more recent addition to the Internet, chronicling one lawyer’s experiences with changing to the Mac Environment and the choices he made.

Criminal Defense Law with an Apple is about as self-explanatory as a title can be.

And, of course, you had to know there would be a Mac Law Students blog.

You’ll find links to other Mac lawyer sites on the official Apple site and all of the others noted above.

A New York Times article, Pushing Paper Out the Door, suggests that it may be much easier to convert to a paperless home than at the office and you may be much closer to being able to do this at home than you think. No one at home sues you for malpractice if you can’t find a receipt. If you often can’t find things under the present system anyway, what’s the risk for trying something new at home?

On the office front, here’s a paper by Catherine Sanders Reach, the Director of the American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center, Paperless Office Hardware and Software. I don’t think this is a recent paper, but it puts forth the basics nicely.

Here’s a recent blog post, Moving Toward Paperless, from John Heckman’s Does It Compute? blog. John covers the main points and outlines the three major document management systems. I do have to note that a lot of lawyers in smaller firm settings are avoiding the DMS entirely and just using their practice management systems or Adobe Acrobat to organize their scanned images. It does depend on how many images you have and whether they need to be OCR’d or not. John also mentioned Ross Kodner. If you have time go to Ross’s website here to scroll down to download his latest set of PaperLESS(tm) materials.

It’s now the second week of February. How are you doing on all of those New Year’s resolutions? Are you still keeping them all or is the better question whether there any still unbroken?

For those of you who subscribe to the RSS newsfeed, you might have thought this post was somehow delayed. But, actually I intended to wait a bit to bring my January Oklahoma Bar Journal piece, For 2008, I Hereby Resolve …, to your attention. I figured you might have heard too much about resolutions in January. This column is not about personal resolutions or improvement, but rather about goal setting for law firms. It’s very short so that you can spend your time setting goals rather than reading about setting goals.