TechnoLawyer

Coming May 17, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Doug Jacobs compares Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, and AbacusLaw, Anthony Vrsecky shares how his firm uses QuickBooks Pro for trust accounting, Jeff Lisson offers some advice for choosing a Web hosting service (having learned the hard way), Yvonne Renfrew discusses multiple monitors, pivot monitors, and online forum etiquette, and Steven Loble reviews Concordance for discovery documents. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming May 18, 2007 to Fat Friday: Blake Bailey shares his thoughts on Preservation Demand letters and other issues associated with amended Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, Ruth Sternglantz responds to a recent post on practicing public interest law, Charles Beach laments about the shortcomings of smartphones and proposes an alternative, Kevin Svec explains how to end the Word v. WordPerfect debate once and for all, and Peter Shafran provides an update on the saga of criminal defense lawyer Joseph Caramagno. 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 May 15, 2007 to TechnoFeature: Hiring a new employee for your law firm is a daunting process. The same goes for those seeking a job. In this article, legal management consultant Wendy L. Werner discusses what law firms and potential employees can do to ensure that they provide an accurate presentation of the firm and themselves during an interview. No matter what side of the process you're on, Wendy gives you the tools to achieve an effective and informative interview that results in the best possible match.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a new yet familiar e-discovery service, a financial news resource, and online service tailor-made for law librarians and other book lovers. Don't miss the next issue.

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

The E-Discovery Hostess with the Mostest
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers beginning to delve into the world of electronic discovery often express surprise at how even simple cases can involve large amounts of electronic data. "Help" is usually the first word that comes to mind.

LexisNexis Concordance's Hosted FYI aims to provide that help by combining "state-of-the-art" data hosting and security with e-discovery tools built on the familiar Concordance platform — priced a la carte based on your needs.

With Hosted FYI, you and your team can review, process, store, retrieve, redact, and share documents in a secure, centralized, and always-accessible environment. Rather than task your IT staff with daunting security and management requirements, Hosted FYI enables you to take advantage of the capacity, experience, security, and staffing of LexisNexis. As a result, you reduce your internal staffing and infrastructure costs, keep important data in an environment equipped for disaster recovery, and free your firm to focus on winning cases, not worrying about IT and security issues.

You can also take advantage of Hosted FYI's project support teams, including project managers and technical support representatives. These litigation support professionals can help ensure the integrity of your discovery data and, most importantly, track chain of custody. Thanks to this neutral stewardship, opposing counsel will likely consider using Hosted FYI as well, streamlining the discovery process. Even better, you can move cases midstream into Hosted FYI that you're currently handling internally or with other vendors.

Hosted FYI uses the well-known Concordance platform, a litigation environment familiar to many law firms and one used for many of today's biggest cases. Law firms that already use Concordance can easily move to the Hosted FYI environment seamlessly and without retraining their litigation support staff. You can quickly review and redact information, search, organize, and annotate email and other documents in their native file format (including metadata). The Web-hosted approach enables lawyers, paralegals and others to work simultaneously whether in the office, home, hotel room, etc. with access to only what they need to see.

Hosted FYI also provides you with financial controls. You can avoid building out infrastructure or hiring additional staff. Instead, Hosted FYI's a la carte pricing options means that you pay for only the services you need. The billing is also simple as you receive a single bill for what you use. Learn more about Hosted FYI.

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 May 11, 2007 to Fat Friday: David Ventker discusses how he reduced overhead expenses in his litigation boutique by going paperless, Daniel Fennick reviews CD ripping service Ready to Play, Thomas Beltran reviews his experience getting his Dell laptop repaired, Rob Howard reviews his Treo 700p and compares it to the iPhone, and JP Siou sets the record straight regarding Outlook's advanced search function. 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 May 10, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Erin Baldwin compares PCLaw and Worldox for document management, Mike Millen reviews his experience using Kodak Imaging for Windows (now G360) to manipulate TIFF files, Edd Schillay reviews Windows Vista after using it for a month, Frank Brancato reviews PaperPort 10 for converting PDF files to WordPerfect documents, and Gray Strickland offers up a few solutions to rendering a hard drive useless to snoops. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming May 8, 2007 to TechnoFeature: Simple ideas and processes are usually simple to explain. Complex ones  — well, that's when a flowchart comes in handy. In this article, technology consultant Seth Rowland reviews allCLEAR's FlowCharter (for building complex process diagrams with a simple text editor) and Analyzer (for adding data to that diagram and evaluating multiple paths in the process to determine the optimal one). Seth explains how it all works, and shares what he likes, dislikes, and wants to see in future versions. How does allCLEAR's suite stack up? Read on to find out.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers software for managing client trust and escrow accounts, online sticky notes, and a free service for sending files too large to email. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Stop Losing Sleep Over Client Trust Accounting
By Dennis Kennedy

A surprisingly large percentage of disbarments and disciplinary actions against lawyers arise out of the mishandling of client trust funds. The rules for handling trust funds can seem arcane — especially for bookkeepers and accountants not experienced with law office trust accounting and ethical rules. To make matters worse, many general business accounting programs either do not handle trust accounting or provide only rudimentary or limited options.

Easy Soft's Easy Trust software enables you to take charge of your firm's trust and escrow accounting needs, and comply with the applicable rules in your jurisdiction. Easy Trust can track and reconcile receipts and disbursements for each of your clients separately while providing tight controls and an audit trail.

Thanks to a "simple, elegant interface," you can easily set up client ledger cards and enter transactions. You can create as many bank accounts or client ledger cards you need. Most importantly, Easy Trust prevents common trust accounting mistakes from occurring. For example, by default it guards against client ledgers having a negative balance.

Easy Trust also provides security and control. You can set up an account for each user with its own set of permissions limiting what that person can do in the program (e.g., transaction "entry only" permission without the ability to "print checks" or perform "bank reconciliation"). Other helpful features include overdraft alerts, bank reconciliation, and three-way reconciliation.

Easy Trust generates a variety of useful reports designed to simplify the audit and review process. For example, you can view the prior month's reconciliation reports, enabling you to easily match the reports with the corresponding bank statements. Various bank and client ledger reports can be produced with a single click. Also, users of Easy Soft's Easy HUD RESPA program can import settlement transactions directly from HUD-1 forms.

Easy Trust costs $499. Licenses for additional computers cost $199 each. Learn more about Easy Trust.

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.

Does Your Law Firm's Mission Statement Date Back to the Ostrogothic Empire?

Many law firms take great pride in their legacy — especially the pearls of wisdom handed down by the founding partners. For example, Paul Weiss proudly displays its original Firm Principles on its Web site — written by the late Judge Simon Rifkind in 1963.

But what happens when such lofty principles date back centuries rather than mere decades? You might need to selectively quote only those pearls of wisdom that pass muster in today's world. Take a look at Cadwalader, a send-up of just such a scenario by Trophy Dad, a comedy sketch group in New York City.

Finally, some trivia about the video. Trophy Dad chose the name "Cadwalader" for the fictitious law firm featured in the video because one of its members, John Phillips, worked at the real Cadwalader as a paralegal for 1.5 years after college.

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.