Last night was one of my more fun and unusual presentations. At the Hudson-Hall-Wheaton chapter meeting of the American Inns of Court in Tulsa, they combined electronic data discovery with a Saturday Night Live theme. So after giving a serious talk on EDD, I sat down to be interviewed by the Church Lady, who soon brought up the Evil One’s role in EDD. I was followed by Hanz and Franz.

Hanz was played by none other than the Honorable Sam A. Joyner, Magistrate Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma. He made us aware of an EDD resource that I had not seen before, Guidelines for Discovery of Electronically Stored Information from the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. This three page PDF file is a truly great summary of counsel’s obligations with regard to EDD. Since it is only three pages, I suggest it is worth everyone’s time to download and read, even if you are stil trying to convince yourself that you can avoid EDD and ESI for the reminder of your career.

Last week’s 2nd Annual GPSSF National Solo and Small Firm Conference in Philadelphia was a success by any measure.  We had over 230 registered attendees and a large percentage of them were members of the Solosez community from all across the country. Marion J. Browning-Baker, an attorney from Stuttgart, Germany won the "farthest travel to attend" award. On behalf of my conference co-chairs, Ross Kodner and Deborah Matthews, I want to thank everyone who helped us organize, encouraged us, presented at or attended the NSSF conference. It is not yet finalized, but looks like next year’s conference will be in Santa Fe, N.M.

I note reviews of the conference from Allison Shield at her Legal Ease Blog and Susan Cartier Liebel at her Build A Solo Practice blog.

I’ve got a presentation this morning for the statewide Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma Conference and then I rush to the airport to catch a flight to the 2007 ABA GPSSF National Solo and Small Firm Conference in Philadelphia. This conference looks to be a great success, with attendance approaching perhaps 200 solo and small firm lawyers. You can check the conference website for more information. I understand that there are still a few places available for walk-ins to attend.

It has been my great pleasure to once again co-chair this conference. My co-chairs Ross Kodner and Deborah Matthews are so pleased that the time for the conference has arrived. We are going to host many attendees who participate in Solosez. They will be enjoying the conference and meeting each other for the first time. Remember this event the next time someone tells you that the American Bar Association doesn’t do anything for solo and small firm lawyers.

Law.com has released the EDD Update blog, which will focus on "electronic data discovery news and analysis." Given the number of well-known pundits and experts that have signed on as authors, the endeavor seems destined to be a success. For a good example of the content you will find there, check out Craig Ball’s common-sense post on getting electronic evidence admitted in court.

What’s your reaction when you hear of a lawyer who still doesn’t use e-mail, or worse yet, has his secretary open and process his e-mail? It’s sort of shocking to hear of a professional who doesn’t use e-mail. You think they are backward, behind the times, a faithful follower of brother Ned Ludd or somehow just not a part of modern life.

You just have to love e-mail.  "Here let me send you that document now" and an entire brief from a colleague appears, all ready to plunder. Not interupting someone to ask a simple question. Being able to communicate on a flexible schedule. It’s free. The sense of accomplishment when you finish a project and e-mail it off.

But, of course, you also have to hate e-mail. Spam. Receiving a joke for the 10th time. Those people who cannot be trained to consult Snopes.com before passing along some silly urban legend to everyone they know. Spam. Being BCC’d when you don’t care. Starting your day with 100 new e-mails in your inbox. Mysteriously vanishing e-mail. Did I mention spam?

So today I’d like to pass along a couple of essays on this topic to you that I read this week. One is from Dan Costa, PC Magazine columnist, gives us "50 Reasons Not to Send that E-mail" and one is from my colleague, Ellen Freedman who writes on "Our Love/Hate Relationship with E-mail." (PDF File)

You see? It’s not just you!

Law firm consultant Ronda Muir’s Law People Blog has the motto "Better Law Practice Through Better People Management."  This blog addresses a critical aspect of law practice management. Larger employers, including law firms, have Human Relations departments to deal with the numerous issues that hiring people brings to the workplace. For the most part, solo and small firm lawyers are shocked by the number of personnel issues that arise. And they often just have to wing it.

It was a shock to me to realize that one of the secretaries breaking up with her boyfriend would be a drain on the productivity of the entire office for a week. Then there was the staff person who seemed to have "24 hour stomach flu" on Mondays much more frequently after the divorce.

Check out Rhonda’s fine blog. She does post a few of her press releases there. But we all understand how Google works. She has periodic links to interesting essays on HR that lawyers will like and some really nice first person posts that she writes. Write more of those, Rhonda. Good stuff. I encourage readers to visit this week’s Website of the Week, the Law People Blog.

P.S. Here’s an unsolicited (but related) plug for ABA Retirement Funds. They have been coming to our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference as a sponsor for several years. They have signed up a lot of our small firm lawyers to do retirement plans for themselves and their staff. Why? They make it easy. You don’t have to be an ABA member to participate. You can offer a great benefit that encourages staff to stay with your firm to increase their retirement. ABARF does all the paperwork and filings. All you have to do is send them a check. If your staff person quits or gets fired, they deal with the person, not you.

The latest edition of The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology podcast is titled "Better than Batman’s Belt: Our Favorite Utilities." My podcast partner Sharon Nelson and I covered a dozen of those essential and useful small software packages that can make your life easier. Long-time readers of this blog will recognize some utilities that I have mentioned here, but there will likely be some that you have not heard of before.

I failed to mention here previously that our July podcast was on the topic Courtroom Technology: Lawyers Go Hollywood. We covered lots of ways technology can be applied to trial practice. As readers know, this is an area where rapid changes are taking place.

I have been thinking destructive thoughts recently. Last month (August 4th, 2007) in the Oklahoma Bar Journal I wrote an article titled "Closing Files, Destroying Files and Making Money." I was proud of this article and the focus on the interplay between file closing and file destruction policies. But some more related materials crossed my desk after my deadline and, when it was published, someone noted that I really didn’t discuss much about the mechanics of destroying old client files. And, I had not touched destruction of digital client materials at all.

So this month (September 1, 2007), I followed it up with Closing Files, Destroying Files and Making Money  (Part 2) How to Shred Almost Anything. This article turned out to be fairly long and it covered many more topics than just the physical act of shredding files. I cited some utilities to aid in digital file destrcution as well. I hope this pair of articles is useful to a broad range of lawyers in all sizes of firms as a fairly good treatment of the topic. Noted author and lecturer Jay Foonberg also gave me permission to reprint his "Implied Consent to Destruction Letter" as a useful form.

Extraordinary effort should be noted. Blawg Review provides a weekly round-up of the previous week in law-related blogging through the efforts of a guest host. The host for this Labor Day edition is George Lenard, who writes George’s Employment Blog.

George’s Labor Day Special Edition Historical Edition of Blawg Review (#124) is noteworthy for several reasons:

  1. The Labor Day historical theme is extremely well-executed with fourteen (!) different sections, including such historical notes as the Haymarket Square riot of May, 1886 and 1902-1949 States Adopt Workers’ Compensation Laws. It is truly a multimedia history lesson as well as a Blawg Review.
  2. It’s huge. George just didn’t limit himself to culling through the submissions from the bloggers and blawg fans. It is clear that he spent a lot of time "blawg surfing" and found a huge amount of content and, surprise, he found a lot of blog content that fit well into his theme.
  3. You will find something of interest here. You may not care about the history of working or the number of worker’s comp or employment law blawgs on the WWW. But, I believe every reader will find something useful here if you can take the time to review it all. (In fact, the only negative about this collection is the huge amount of content.) I’ve been hoping someone would do such a broad and comprehensive Blawg Review for a while and there’s a lot of content of interest here.

I imagine this site will be heavily visited this month, but I wanted to direct my readers to George’s great collection as my Website of the Week for this week.