This may be one of my most valuable Website of the Week posts, so don’t stop reading early.

I have been a member of the Association of Legal Administrators for ten years now. We have a great local chapter in Oklahoma City. It is too bad I often have conflicts and have to miss their monthly meetings. If your law firm administrator does not belong to this national organization, your firm is missing out on lots of resources, training and (in the cities for certain) a peer support group. Check out ALA’s Website for more information.

But that’s not my Website of the Week. I’m highlighting a subpart of that site. Legal Management magazine is the ALA’s publication and one of its member benefits. It is a very nice publication. My Website of the Week is the ALA’s Legal Management archives. There you can download many articles from the prior issues of Legal Management. You will find a wealth of information there on all aspects of managing law firms. ALA would have been well within its rights to lock up these archives as a member’s only benefit. But instead they are available to all of you online.

And, no, I’m not just touting Legal Management this month because I was the co-author of the cover story on mobile technology security (July/August 2007.) But here’s a link to the current issue of Legal Management.

David Pogue’s New York Times Circuits column this week is on "The Next Generation of Online Shorthand." So this is new suggested shorthand terms, past LOL, AFK, and BRB. It is good reading for right before a three day weekend.

Some favorites of mine:

* GI — Google it

* GGNUDP — gotta go, no unlimited data plan

* 12OF — twelve-o’clock flasher (refers to someone less than competent with technology, to the extent that every appliance in the house flashes "12:00")

* MBLO — much better-looking online For the entire column, click this link. (Free registration may be required.)

BTW, I subscribed to the e-mail version of this so I get it every week in my inbox and don’t miss one. That is also free. I like it, but YMMV.

The American Bar Association publication Your ABA recently highlighted a program that had me as one of the panelists at ABA Annual Meeting. Read this nice article about our Business Boot Camp for Lawyers. We had a nice audience and my co-panelists were great.

In Oklahoma, it is time for lawyers who are either in the process of opening or thinking about opening a private law practice to register for The New Lawyer Experience. This free program will be held September 28, 2007 at the Tulsa County Bar Center and October 2, 2007 at the Oklahoma Bar Center. Oklahoma lawyers can see the schedule and get more details online here. We’ll cover a lot of the basics that you may not have learned in law school, but we’ll also have some cutting edges concepts to discuss.

While we schedule this program to take place a few days after the admittance ceremony for new lawyers, we always have a good number of experienced lawyers who are either changing careers or just updating/refreshing their information. I hope to see many of you who follow this blog at the program. However, you don’t have to be an Oklahoma lawyer to benefit from this program in one way. Our Starting a Law Practice Web Directory has lots of information for you to read and review.

I used to practice family law. I concur with one lawyer’s observation that family law gives you the opportunity to interact with a lot of good people at the absolute worst time in their lives. It can also be a very rewarding type of practice. Here is a great idea from the American Bar Association Family Law Section to better serve your clients and perhaps make some children’s lives better in the process.

The ABA FLS makes available “handbooks for your clients and their kids." If you buy these in bulk, they are at such an affordable price that you can give one or more handbook to every divorce client. Titles include My Parents Are Getting Divorced, Frequently Asked Questions about Divorce, What Your Children Need…Now, Coparenting after Divorce and Surviving Your Divorce and Beyond. If you buy over 25 copies of a particular handbook, the price drops to four dollars each and if you buy over 100, they are three dollars each (plus S/H.) What a great client service!Many lawyers have been doing this for years.

This offer is not limited to members of the American Bar Association.

Here’s the webpage for these client handbooks, with the cover photos and the tables of contents as well as the links to order online.

Here’s the downloadable order form in PDF format that I feel is more clear on the exact pricing than the ABA Web store. However, for the next week, you would probably want to order through the ABA Web store because shipping is free to all U.S. destinations for orders placed through that method during August, 2007. Even when shipping is no longer free, this is still a great bargain and a way to make a positive impact in the lives of your clients and their children.

I listened to a great webinar the other day and almost forgot to share the quite useful materials with you. Adobe’s Rick Borstein and Tim Huff did 30 Dirty Tips for Acrobat 8 and I certainly learned some new tips.  If you have Adobe Acrobat 7 or 8, this is worth your time. As regular readers of my blog know, I have now come to the conclusion that Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is a "must have" tool for the modern law office. Here’s Rick’s blog post with the link to download their materials, in PDF format, of course. The file is pretty big  (1.83 MB) and so I’d suggest that when you get to the blog post you use "Right click- Save target as .. " rather than opening in a browser window.

Unfortunately, I was not able to be one of the 337 people who listened to the Creating Acrobat Forms for Legal Professionals seminar by Rick Borstein and Mark Middleton a few days ago. But you can go here to download the seminar materials, links to lots of good information on the topic and some samples. In particular, the sample document with buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons and electronic signature fields is interesting. Gee, Rick, I wish I already knew how to do all of that.

ABA Journal staff writer Jason Krause wrote the cover story for the July 2007 ABA Journal. His story was titled "Law Hacks – 101 tips, tricks and tools to make you a more productive, less stressed-out lawyer."  Jason is a very good writer and he has covered a wide range of sources to compile his list of hacks– from ABA TECHSHOW to the Lifehacker blog. ABA members probably have already checked these out, but I’m sure you will find something of use to you with the 101.

I get a fair number of calls from Oklahoma Bar Association members about destruction of old closed client files. Can they destroy these files? If so, when? What are the requirements and pitfalls? So, for the August 4th, 2007, Oklahoma Bar Journal I wrote "Closing Files, Destroying Files and Making Money." One important point is that if you ever hope to properly destroy client files, you should probably examine your current method of closing files. I hope you enjoy the article.

Here’s an e-mail I just received from Cindy Howard at Corel that I thought I should pass along.

"Recently, the WordPerfect team here at Corel has been getting questions about Windows Vista–specifically asking whether or not WordPerfect Office X3 works on Microsoft’s new operating system. I’m pleased to report that yes indeed, Corel WordPerfect Office X3 has ‘works with Windows Vista’ certification.

"Most boxes on store shelves (and all those purchased from Corel’s eStore) are already enabled to run on Windows Vista. Copies of WordPerfect Office X3 purchased before the release of Windows Vista are automatically updated when you connect to the Internet after installing the office suite on Windows Vista. Users can also download a special patch from www.corel.com/support to make WordPerfect Office X3 work with Windows Vista.

"Most users on previous versions of WordPerfect Office, Microsoft Office or other Corel software are eligible to upgrade to the Vista-compatible WordPerfect Office X3 for as little as $159. If you or any of your contacts need more information about WordPerfect or other Corel products running on Windows Vista, please visit www.corel.com/vista. For more information about Corel WordPerfect Office X3 or to download a free trial version of the suite to test on the new OS, please visit www.corel.com/wordperfect ."

When you compare blogs with law reviews, they seem to be polar opposites. Blogs are online and, with the exception of a few pioneers, law reviews are still largely paper-based. Law review articles reflect months of careful research and writing. They are carefully vetted and meticulously proofread. There is generally some level of competition to even get published. A blogger can do a blog post in minutes, without any sort of oversight, editorial constraint or control. A blog post can be made in anger, emotional pain or while intoxicated, and due to the magic of RSS newsfeeds, it can’t even be taken back when you rethink your post.

So you may be surprised to learn that many prestigious law reviews now have online companions sites that often look a lot like blogs. Ken Strutin’s Guide to Short Form Open Access Legal Publications, recently published on LLRX.com lists a significant number of these sites. Professor Gordon Smith of the University of Wisconsin Law School wrote in his post on Conglomerate, Online Companions to Law Reviews and the Future of Legal Blogs :

  • "Enter the ‘online companions’ to traditional law reviews. How do they add value? In my view, the primary value added by these new publications is not their timeliness or their supposed ‘polish,’ but that they (1) link thoughtful responses to long-form legal scholarship, and (2) act as a gathering place for a variety of pieces of short-form legal scholarship on the same topic (online symposia). In short, the law reviews have an organizational advantage over individual bloggers, who organize via cross-linking, which is often haphazard."

The online symposia view is compelling. If fully realized, it combines the best of both approaches, with the painstakingly researched and vetted law review article at the center of a collection of reactions, news items and off-the-cuff comments. Of course, for this to be fully realized, the centerpiece law review article has to freely available online. We shall see how soon that happens.

Professor Lawrence B. Solum, of the University of Illinois College of Law, examines "the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today’s world of peer reviews to tomorrow’s world of open access legal blogs" in Download It While It’s Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 10, p. 841, 2006 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=957237 He notes that "intermediaries (law school editorial boards, peer-reviewed journals) are being supplemented by disintermediated forms (papers on the Internet, blogs)." While this trend produces a wider range of opinions, I’m not sure this complete end result would be a positive one. My writings improve with a good editor, review and contemplation. Vetting reduces the chances of outright error.

What’s the take-away point for the practicing lawyer, who is not really interested in this academic discussion?  Bookmark Strutin’s article and be aware if you find a good law review article "on point" in your research, it may have an online companion with even more, or more recent, information.