David J. Bilinsky has entered the blogosphere  with his new weblog, Thoughtful Legal Management. This brings up several questions. The most obvious is whether the term "thoughtful legal management" is an oxymoron. The second is why a very well respected gentleman who is already busy as a Practice Management Advisor and staff lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia and the Editor-in-Chief of Law Practice Magazine would want to further complicate his life by starting a new blog? David, I should know the answer to that one because I hear (ask myself) similar questions with each new project. But I don’t.

David is a towering intellect. Davis is a friend. He’s also a perfectionist. So I want to warn him publicly that every blog post doesn’t have to be perfect. Just toss them up there because we know you have a lot to share. I’ve had several really nice blog posts that died in the draft mode waiting to be perfected. Then a month or so later I review the draft and decide it just isn’t that timely anymore or I’m just tired of thinking about it.   Besides if you aren’t aiming for perfect, mistakes are then just a part of the business plan. So that’s my blogger mentoring moment.

David is also a former ABA TECHSHOW chair. I’ll let you review his other list of accomplishments here. There will be some great information about law firm management on his blog, so stay tuned. And, congratulations, Dave. Starting a blog is half the battle won already.

Here’s a sad story. A law firm received a great deal of offensive and pornographic spam. They had a spam filter, but a lot was still slipping by. Some offended employees complained. Even though this is not the fault of the law firm, I’m sure the complaints struck a nerve. You don’t want your employees exposed to something that offends them and one wonders if the situation could give rise to a hostile work environment claim. So they dial up their spam filter and then miss an e-mailed court notice of a hearing. As a result the judge hit them with an order requiring them to pay the costs and the fees of the opposing counsel who appeared at the hearing, a sum thought to be several thousand dollars.

A stunning thing about this story was a quote from a lawyer-technologist who disdained the use of whitelisting tools because they had to be "manually maintained." As most readers know, a whitelist feature would allow e-mail for certain users to go through to the recipient, no matter what it triggered in the spam filter. All federal bankruptcy and district courts now use CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Filing) and notices of filed pleadings go out via e-mail.

OK, here’s a law practice tip you can take to the bank, folks. if you practice in any CM/ECF court, your spam filter needs to have a whitelist feature and you need to use it for every court that may send you an e-mail notice. Like it or not, once you have "agreed" to receive notices via e-mail, you just can’t plead "my spam filter ate my homework." If your spam filter cannot do that, then you need a new one. Sometimes it might be as simple as adding a sender’s address to your contacts to get it whitelisted.  I’m not saying it will be that easy for everyone. I about blew a gasket the other day when my spam filter told me there was a limit of 250 and I had to delete someone to be able to add someone. But you don’t have a choice. The argument that it is too big a burden to manually maintain a whitelist was not persuasive to this judge nor will it be to others,

There was a discussion on Solosez today about adapters for AC power in your car to power your laptop.

I certainly hope no one would try to drive and use a laptop. But as more people start using the wireless Internet cards, it won’t be long before more lawyers facing long car trips figure that they can recruit a driver and then work all during the trip on their laptop. It sometimes is hard to see a laptop screen in daylight when operating only on battery power. We know that the monitor is much brighter if the laptop is plugged in. Amanda F. Benedict, a lawyer from Del Mar, CA, caught my attention with her recent purchase from Staples.com, it is a Targus inverter plug with a surge protector built in that fits into the cup holder so it doesn’t pull out accidentially. Maybe it is just me, but those plugs seem to pop out of the car’s power adapter (f/k/a cigarette lighter) easily and often. I have no idea if you actually NEED a surge protector when plugging into your car, but if you are buying one primarily to use with your laptop, you might as well get one, I’d think.

Tulsa lawyer Jody Nathan showed me something that looked like one of these at our recent OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. But it turned to be an auto adapter that had two USB plugs. Check it out. It is compact and very inexpensive and you can charge two USB devices at once.

I understand some of the hybrid cars come with AC power plugs. So you’d better get your adapter quick if you want to be on the cutting edge. Soon everyone may have one.

I stumbled across Mashable last night looking for something. Mashable is a news blog about online social networking trends. (How’s that for focused content?)

The site does have some really nice resource collections and one article that I wanted to pass along to the cutting edge technology types among my readers. The articles include Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources, Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers, The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources and Google vs Everyone: 10 Markets Where Google Wants to Win. Comments posted by readers add even more resources.

Several tech-smart lawyers and consultants were asked what technology magazines one should read to stay up with technology issues. I thought you’d be interested in the variety of titles mentioned. I’m sure good publications were omitted, so don’t take any ommision as significant.

Law Technolgoy News is a no-brainer. It is free in either a print or electronic version. Subscribers have access to the searchable archives. Readers get to enjoy the words and editorial decisions of its Editor-in-Chief Monica Bay. Some have called her the most influential person in legal technolgoy matters. I’ll just say I wouldn’t know how to judge that, Monica, but you are certainly in the Top Ten.

Smart Computing in Plain English was mentioned as a great publication for all levels of technology understanding and expertise. I hate to sound like I am selling the magazine, but you can try three months at no risk, cancelling if you don’t like the publication or paying $29 to get the remaining nine issues if you do. Subscribers get access to the online archives, a messsage board to post questions and answers, a Personal Library to organize favored articles and "free online access to Smart Computing’s sister magazines: PC Today, Computer Power User, First Glimpse, and Reference Series." The first two of these magazines were noted in our discussion as well.

I did have to note that like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Law Office Computing is still dead. RIP. But even after a year the site is still up and there is still access to some archived articles.

PC Magazine and PC World were both mentioned, with those expressing a preference giving the nod to PC World.

Maximum PC was mentioned as well.

Well, of course, this discussion was focused on magazines printed on paper. But I can’t move on without again noting the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s two great, free e-zines: Law Practice Today and Law Technology Today, which I mentioned earlier this week now has a really cool new podcast on legal technology.  Plus the ABA General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division has the Technology eReport. And did you know that TechRepublic now boasts of over 25,000 articles?

Finally, Catherine Sanders Reach of the ABA’s Legal Technolgoy Resource Center noted that, in addition to the magazines and e-zines, there were sites you had to have handy for those "need-to-know" moments. Her "big three" in this category were Webopedia, How Stuff Works and Whatis.

My friend, Sharon Nelson, and I are now podcasters. It is a part of the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s webzine, Law Technology Today. Sharon was ABA TECHSHOW chair in 2006, the year after me. The podcast name is The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology. Right now the plan is to make it a monthly podcast and to list it on iTunes.

Issue number one is Electronic Marketing: Harnessing the Web’s Whizbang. We have also included a set of links to various lawyer marketing resources and articles online. The link is here: http://www.abanet.org/lpm/ltt/articles/vol1/is4/digitaledge/index.shtml 

You do not need an iPod or MP3 player. You can click on the link and listen to it over your computer speakers. It is a bit long for a podcast at just over 30 minutes, but we hope you will find some valuable information and tips in it.

The 2007 Oklahoma Bar Solo & Small Firm Conference 2007 is over, which means I don’t have to think about conference planning and details until about the middle of August, when we start gearing up for intial 2008 planning. We had a great turnout this year at Tanglewood Resort, about 200 attendees and another 200 guests, vendors, staff and family members. Our out-of-state guest presenters included Jay Foonberg, author of How to Start and Build a Law Practice, PracticePro’s Dan Pinnington (who was chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2007) and Alabama Bar practice management advisior Laura Calloway, who is also on the ABA TECHSHOW planning board.

Our local lawyers gave lots of great presentations geared for the solo and small lawyers as well. We had lots of law practice management information, along with more substantive sessions such as jury selection, depositions, DUI defense, estate planning and paternity determinations. You should check out the photo highlights from the conference.

There are more and more of these conferences each year. In my spare time, I planning next fall’s ABA GPSolo National Solo and Small Firm Conference with Deb Matthews and Ross Kodner. You can find more information on that at http://www.abanet.org/solo .

OK, this has nothing to do with law practice, but the other day I was trying to tie two cords together and I realized I hadn’t done that in a long time and had just about forgotten how. Then I went to Refdesk.com to look something up tonight and found "How to Tie the Ten Most Useful Knots" featured on the front page (with illustrations, too.) So I took it as a sign I should bookmark it and pass it along. Quite possibly the oldest Website of the Week that I have featured, but you can’t improve on some things.