TechnoLawyer: Law Firm Marketing/Publications/Web Sites

You don't have time to track 100 business and technology magazines and blogs. We do. Below you'll find our latest discoveries.

Review: Two Weeks With An iPhone

Defending Avvo’s Right to Provide Information and Guidance to Consumers

Ball 6 on EDD: Six Articles on Electronic Data Discovery

Autonomy Buys Zantaz

Juris Joins LexisNexis

What's In Your Printer?

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming July 24, 2007 to TechnoFeature: Blogs may serve as your daily dose of entertainment, news, or information — but have you ever thought of what the blogger gets in return? In this article, attorney Dean Kirby explains why he decided to enter the crowded field of legal blogs (or "blawgs") in addition to maintaining his firm's official Web site. He discusses how to select a blog platform and use your RSS feed beyond your blawg, and also shares his tips for attracting an audience. In short, Dean explains how he uses his blog as a modern marketing tool — and how you could do the same.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Think Zagat for lawyers except that Avvo uses its own algorithm in conjunction with publicly-available information to generate its ratings. Personally, I think a combined Zagat/Amazon approach would generate more reliable results and better protect Avvo from lawsuits.

Speaking of which, Steve Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro has filed a class action lawsuit against Avvo even though the site just launched earlier this month. Talk about jumping the gun. See Browne v. Avvo.

Berman has a point. I just take issue with his method. A class action lawsuit comprised of a bunch of whiny lawyers is not likely to generate much sympathy.

Wake up class — it's 2007. Like it or not, you can no longer completely control what the world thinks of you. And the answer doesn't lie in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit lists criminal lawyer John Henry Browne as the representative plaintiff.

Like I said, he and Berman make some valid points. For example, Avvo's CEO Mark Britton has an 8.2/10 rating. That's like us giving us one of our TechnoLawyer @ Awards. Britton should pull his listing from Avvo.

Also, my rating is 6.4 (Good) whereas Browne's rating is 5.5 (Average). I practiced law for 4 years before jumping ship to start PeerViews whereas Browne has practiced for 35 years. Can an average lawyer remain in business for that long and represent high-profile clients like basketball stars and police chiefs?

But the biggest problem is that Avvo cannot possibly take into account a lawyer's work product since much of it never becomes public.

Case in point — I wrote some pretty amazing research memos in my day, including a 50 state survey for a celebrity CEO about how he could legally spy on his employees. This memo was was a top secret project. As far as I know, the memo had an audience of just three people — me, the partner who assigned the project, and the CEO. I was told not to discuss the project with my colleagues. During those 3-4 weeks, I was shielded from other assignments.

How could Avvo possibly rate me on this research memo?

But be that as it may, I think we need Avvo. Or more precisely, those seeking legal services need Avvo. It's just that consumers need an Avvo with a more transparent Zagat-style rating system driven entirely by clients and ex-clients — plus Amazon-style reviews to go along with the ratings.

That's my take. What do others think? Check out the June 18, 2007 Lawyer to Lawyer podcast in which hosts J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi interview Browne along with Carolyn Elefant and Denise Howell.

For his part, Browne lists some amusing errors on Avvo (e.g., deceased lawyers), but he weakens his case by dishing out over-the-top pronouncements (e.g., "The people that run Avvo completely lack integrity because the system is basically a joke.").

But at least Browne showed up. Avvo was a no-show despite an invitation. Then again, Avvo is facing a lawsuit thanks to Berman and Browne. If you watch enough Larry King, you'll note that plaintiffs typically want to discuss their case while defendants typically shun the media.

The two stars of the show are Carolyn and Denise who make many excellent points, including the following:

• Most state bars do not provide lawyer ratings or reviews so you can't blame Avvo for seizing an opportunity.

• If Avvo shuts down, it should be the result of market forces, not a lawsuit.

• Google doesn't disclose its algorithm because doing so might enable people to game the system so why should Avvo?

• You cannot opt out of Google so why should you be able to opt out of Avvo?

• A site like Avvo could help raise the profile of outstanding lawyers in small firms.

Bottom line — Avvo launched prematurely and needs to fix its ratings system, or better yet, replace it with Zagat-style ratings and Amazon-style reviews. Plus it should slap a "beta" disclaimer on its Web site. And Berman and Browne should drop their lawsuit.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers two new online services that can help law firms with marketing and public relations, and a software program for working with deposition transcripts. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Frequent Flyers
By Dennis Kennedy

Designing and publishing marketing materials is time-consuming and committee-intensive, resulting all too often in endless debates about color or word choices and unopened boxes stored in closets for years after being printed.

vFlyer has created an online marketing and distribution platform that could help you put an end to all those committee meetings — and with better results to boot. It offers a simple, template-driven way to create brochures, flyers, and other marketing materials, and an easy way to distribute your materials to a variety of online and offline audiences.

vFlyer offers many channels to reach your audience. You can distribute PDF or HTML versions of your flyers by email (vFlyer can import your email lists). You can print your flyers to send by mail or hand out. You might also take advantage of new online channels and distribute your flyers through Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio, and more, or post flyers to Craigslist and eBay.

VFlyer's Flyer Creator makes it easy to quickly create professional-looking flyers. Flyer Creator provides a choice of standard templates or you can customize your own. You can add photographs and embed URLs. In the paid versions, you can even embed videos. vFlyer also offers custom templates for eBay and Craigslist.

You can output flyers in a variety of delivery formats, including PDF (for printing or emailing) and mobile or text messaging formats. You can also create RSS feeds.

vFlyer also offers a number of "widgets" that you can use to place your flyers and other ads on your Web site or blog, or even on social networking sites. These widgets come in Flash and JavaScript formats. You simply generate the code you need and place that code on your site or blog.

vFlyer is available under a subscription model with pricing based on features and numbers of flyers that you can create. A free, ad-supported version gives you 5 active flyers. Paid subscriptions start at $9.95 per month and go up to $79.95 per month with discounts for annual subscriptions. Learn more about vFlyer.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 8, 2007 to Fat Friday: Kelly Lupo shares her tech support experiences as a Dell small business customer, Jeffrey Franklin explains how to securely send faxes via email, Peter Summerill explains how his firm went paperless without adding anyone to the payroll, Josh Friedman provides his take on the predicted "death" of the Yellow Pages, and Anita Evans alerts us of a new law school opening in Dallas and what she hopes it means for the legal profession. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 1, 2007 to Fat Friday: Sarah Laracy reviews the redaction capabilities of Acrobat 8 Professional, Don Angus shares his experience with Apple's Mighty Mouse plus a tip to keep wrist pain at bay, William Kelly compares the Treo 650 to the BlackBerry 8700, Charles Tievsky reviews Canon's DR-2580C scanner, and David Amkraut weighs in on New York's Lawyer Advertising Rules. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

As you know, we applaud law firms and vendors that incorporate video into their marketing plans. While online video doesn't make sense for everyone, you would think that every vendor specializing in demonstrative evidence would use video to showcase their services. But a YouTube search pulls up just one company — Truly Media.

Now, perhaps other vendors have videos on their sites and rely on Google to drive traffic there. But increasingly, when people search for videos, they turn to YouTube, which is owned by Google. In fact, Google now lists YouTube videos on its own site. Plus YouTube is free so why not take advantage? More than 3,600 people have viewed Truly Media's video. Not a huge number of people, but the company has paid nothing. Watch the video (click here if you can't see the video below).

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Publishing seems so glamorous ... to non-publishers. As many lawyers turned bloggers have learned, publishing is a grind in which you're only as good as your last article. While blogging software has dramatically reduced the amount of grunt work, it hasn't eliminated it completely. Therefore, I present to you my top five unglamorous legal blogging tips:

1. Write your posts in an HTML or text editor, not in your Web browser. Most of us post to our blogs using a Web browser. But browsers don't enable you to save your work with a quick Control-S, which means most bloggers don't save their work frequently. If you accidentally close your browser window, poof — all gone.

Instead, use an HTML or text editor to create a template for your blog posts. Write your posts there and use your browser only for posting. As an added bonus, you'll automatically have a backup of every post on your hard drive.

2. Consider using recurring features. Or as I call them — the difference between amateur and professional publishing. Recurring features provide personality and structure to your blog, and make it more likely you'll connect with people and build an audience. Give each feature a clever name and provide an explanatory blurb in the footer beneath each post (another good reason to use templates).

TechnoLawyer is, of course, a perfect example — we publish 6 different newsletters, and in our blog we have recurring features such as Ad Watch, Coming Attractions, TechnoEditorials, etc.

Over at the Databazaar Blog, which we ghost-write, we have Printer News, PrinTips, Review Roundup, DoubleSided, etc.

Obviously, you'll want to retain the ability to post outside of this structure. I refer to such posts as "freeform."

3. Grammar and spelling do matter! While you may want to use a casual tone in your blog, that doesn't mean you should ignore grammar and spelling (another good reason to use an HTML or text editor). In fact, consider having someone at your firm serve as your editor and/or proofreader. This person can check your posts not only for technical errors, but for more serious problems as well. Thanks to blog search engines like Technorati, it can be difficult to retract a post once published.

4. If your titles need to cover a lot of ground, help them out by using a subheading. Search engines pay most attention to titles so limit them to the essential keywords. If you need to convey anything else, do so in a subheading. You can also use a subheading to repeat very important keywords. We use this technique in every post on Databazaar Blog. For example, a recent post used the following title and subheading.

Title:
Matthias Wandel Wanted a Dot Matrix Printer So He Built One MacGyver-Style

Subheading:
DoubleSided: A Classic From the 1980s: One-Pin Homemade Dot Matrix Printer

5. Design your blog to accommodate photos and videos. Anytime someone in your firm has a public speaking gig, try to photograph or videotape it so you can post it to your blog. YouTube videos have a width of 425 pixels so give your blog a width of at least 500 pixels just to be safe. This width will also enable you to display photos at a size that won't require squinting.

Happy blogging ... and sorry to be such a bore.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers software that enhances and adds features to Outlook, integrated network security software, and an online client development application. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Take Client Development to a Higher Level
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers often focus on cases and matters. But before a case or matter comes into existence, you must deal with people — both existing and prospective clients. The traditional address book doesn't give you enough horsepower for sales, and high-end customer relationship management software is overkill for most law firms. So where do you turn?

37 Signals designed Highrise as a new Web-based approach to capture the middle ground between address books and the big CRM packages. The focus lies in giving you just the tools you need to manage people and projects and nothing more. With Highrise, you can share contacts, assign tasks based on those contacts, maintain a contact history, and, most importantly, group together related people, companies, notes, and other information in a "case," a term that should appeal to lawyers.

You can use Highrise for your own contacts or search for contacts across your firm. Highrise also helps you move from contact list to action. You can act on your contacts by setting follow-ups, calls, meetings, thank you notes, reminders, and more. Highrise can even send reminders to your mobile phone. You can log calls, conversations, email, and other communications with your contacts. You log email by simply forwarding or copying Highrise.

You can also mine new information from your contact lists. See all communications with a group of people. Build a list of all the experts on a given issue. Generate a list of your clients with whom you have not had contact in the last year. Etc.

Highrise comes from the same company that produces Basecamp, a popular online project management tool that we use to write this newsletter. Highrise is available in a free version with limits on the number of cases and people you can set up, and in five other versions ranging from $12 to $149 per month. SSL security kicks in at $49/month, which most law firms would probably deem necessary. Learn more about Highrise.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Not that anyone asked, but below I've placed my top five dos and don'ts for online legal video:

Do:

1. Write a screenplay or storyboard before you shoot any footage. It's no different from a deposition — you need to prepare.

2. Use quality microphones. Sound is more important than video quality, especially on YouTube, which uses an inferior Flash format that makes everything look blocky. If people cannot make out what you're saying, nothing else matters.

3. Shoot your footage in locations that have lots of light. Nothing looks worse than underexposed video. Better to use a cheap camcorder with lots of light than a high-end HD camera in low light conditions.

4. Hire a director/editor even if you're an avid hobbyist. A professional will provide insights that will improve the project.

5. Provide useful information or tell a good story. Otherwise, what's the point?

Don't:

1. Convert your PowerPoint presentations to video. They don't translate well. If you do, at least add a voiceover to discuss each slide. Remember, silent movies went out of vogue some 80 years ago.

2. Rely solely on your 30 second television commercials. If people fast forward through your commercials on TV, what makes you think they will watch them on YouTube? Instead, do upload them since it's free, but create companion videos with more information.

3. Use video just for the sake of using video. Use this medium only if the visual component will enhance your message. No brainer examples of when to use video: someone in your firm appeared on TV, you have a good-looking and media-savvy lawyer in your firm who can serve as your public face, you handle cases with lots of visual evidence, you have brand new office space to show off, etc.

4. Make your video public unless it's ready and you're ready. People like me regularly scour YouTube for legal videos. On several occasions, we have sent thousands of people to videos that the creators then pulled because they weren't ready for that large of an audience. You can keep your YouTube videos private for purposes of obtaining feedback from colleagues.

5. Rely solely on YouTube. If you regularly create videos, set up a podcast feed and make your videos available through iTunes. Also, post them on your own site.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.