As Connie mentioned, our firm launched a new website last week. In this post, I’ll share a few thoughts about the process of creating a new law firm website.

Lawyers tend to be a conservative lot, tend to set a low priority on things that don’t bring short term gain, and tend to want to be in control. That combination doesn’t lend itself well to creating a new website that may be somewhat different. It can lead to analysis paralysis, or a conservative approach that leads to either no new site at all, or one that tries to satisfy everyone.

So what is the best way to approach it? Some of this will sound like project management 101 – it is not unlike the process of building or buying a new home.

• Create a core team to run with the project that will include the CEO, the marketing/promotion manager, and others who believe in the project.
• Go to your internal influencers first at key stages to get early buy in.
• Celebrate the early adopters to get others on board. In our case showing some early examples was key for the candid lawyer photos.
• Seek input along the way – or at least keep the firm informed at key stages – but keep control in the core team.
• Decide who the audience is for the website, and what they would want to see. Depending on the nature of your firm, that could be existing clients, prospective clients, client influencers, or other lawyers.
• Look at different websites to see what you like and don’t like. Look beyond your own industry.
• Create a wish list of things you want to accomplish and what it might look like – knowing that some of those may have to be dropped or deferred for various reasons.
• Don’t forget the basics like your office location and directions.
• Hire well. Engage the right web developers and creative advisers. Check their references and body of work. Anyone can create their own site using online tools, and there are many web developers to choose from – but choosing one that understands web trends, doesn’t create sites that all look the same, and you are comfortable working with will get a better result.
• Listen to the web developer's suggestions and advice, and have regular progress reviews and discussions about direction and costs.
• Stay out of the web developer's way and let them do their work.
• Make sure the website is mobile and tablet friendly.
• Make sure the message and personality of the website matches your firm. It must be genuine.

Congratulations to law firm Harrison Pensa in London, Ontario who have just relaunched their website. While launching a new site is not necessarily newsworthy (well, unless you are a member of the firm itself), in this case HP have used some fresh thinking which makes this redesigned site stand out.

A few features of the site:

• the look of the site is bold, personable, and still professional
• rather than stock photos, they feature their own lawyers prominently
• lawyer bios include links to their lawyers on social media sites (notably LinkedIn) and also allow for readers to share the bios across the web with a social media "share" button
• they have three blogs on the site (HP Business, HP Community, and Students), again with share-ability
• they are one of the few law firms taking advantage of the popular software WordPress.

Why is it interesting that they are using WordPress? WordPress is a free, Open Source platform that has become widely adopted around the world both for blogs and for websites as an easy-to-use content management system (CMS). According to Matt Mullenweg (WordPress originator) last August in his "State of the Word" report, WordPress is running on 15.5% of all websites, and accounts for over 54% of CMS marketshare. 22% of domains registered in the U.S. are running WordPress. That is a huge adoption rate, and yet law firms have a tendency to look for something other than this obvious solution. So, kudos to HP for joining the "cool kids" in using WordPress. It makes sense to use something that is widely known, and has a community around it for support.

HP are also tying the launch of their new website in with a campaign to raise funds for the London Food Bank. For every person who "likes" their Facebook community page, they will be donating a pound of food to the food bank. Kudos on this idea to give back!

For a more in-depth discussion of why the Harrison Pensa website is significant, see also Jordan Furlong's post on the Stem Law Firm Web Strategy blog from February 1st.

On Friday I had the pleasure of speaking to an audience of lawyers at The Commons Institute's eCommerce and the Practice of Law conference in Toronto. I was given the large topic of using social media in a legal practice.

Below are the slides I started with in the discussion, but the real meat of it was the many excellent questions that were put to me by the group. I hope to blog more about those questions, either here or over on my personal blog (will let you know!). In the meantime, I hope these slides are helpful.

I read Steve Matthew's Slaw.ca column today Web Law Predictions for 2012 with great interest. I noted especially the prediction that "Firms Abandon Content, Blame Subsequent Failures on Social Media," with the implication that firms can't just by-pass creating great blog content and expect to get traction and otherwise build their reputations online.

One great start to blogging is to think about commentary that would have previously gone out via newsletter or email to clients, and make that available on the internet via a blog. However, writing for the printed text and writing for the web are two different things.

Write for your audience

First, you must consider your audience. Who are you writing for–lawyers? Or clients? Lawyers tend to like text-heavy documents, but most other audiences do not. If you are writing for clients, do not assume they will have time or the inclination to read long tracts.

Have a look at what else your audience reads and figure out what appeals to them. Perhaps video is the way to go instead with the audience you are trying to appeal to? It is very possible that clients in different industries consume content in different ways and prefer their content in different formats.

Make blog posts more readable

It can be more difficult to parse text online, and so we use a number of techniques to break up text for a blog:

• Consider breaking up a longer written article into a few smaller blog posts. You will get more mileage out of the content, and it will be easier for your audience to dip into.
• Use smaller paragraphs. I am always surprised at how a standard paragraph looks so long in a blog post. You will likely need to break these down more than you otherwise would think necessary. For example, the first two paragraphs in this blog post were originally one, but when I previewed them as a blog post, looked far too dense and so I broke them up.
• Use headings and bulleted or numbered lists inside longer blog posts to help the reader easily scan the content.
• Consider putting key words or phrases into bold to make them stand out, as I have done with this bulleted list.
• Use images to make blog posts more visually interesting. There is an interesting post today from Problogger: How to Use Images in Your Blog Posts. It is a nice introduction to using images.
• Use other media such as audio and video to lend some variety to your content. Selecting a video from another source, dropping it into your blog post with the "embed code," and then adding your own commentary to it is a nice way to change things up. If you get daring, you can try creating your own audio or video content. However, for a professional setting I suggest getting professional assistance to learn this part since it can be difficult to do well and is therefore time-consuming to get started on your own.

Vary the content

You need to keep the audience interested and engaged. Writing just commentary about recent case law is probably not going to keep them coming back for more. (I am assuming you want them to come back!) Don't forget to add a personal touch, lending a human voice with some personality. As audiences, we relate far better to other people than we do to faceless organizations.

Here are some additional ideas for content, and no doubt you can think of many more:

• discussion of newly introduced legislation
• other developments in the industry, such as new requirements from government
• what you learned at a conference or seminar
• a summary of recent surveys or report findings
• upcoming events
• a good, related article you read and your additional comments
• a review of a related book
• an interview with someone in the industry

What other types of blog posts do you like to read or write?
Image: courtesy of brainloc via stock.xchng

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of LAWPRO Magazine. All issues of the magazine can be found at www.lawpro.ca/magazinearchives.

Technology is becoming an ever greater part of our lives, both personally and professionally. On a daily basis most of us use a cellphone or smartphone, a desktop computer and the Internet. Many of us will have an iPad or other tablet device and be posting updates on Facebook, Twitter or other social media tools.

Clients expect their lawyers to be technology literate – and there are always new and improved ways for communicating with clients. Here are some newer tools that you can consider using to better serve and communicate with your clients.

1. Help clients find your office

   How often do you find yourself giving new clients directions to your office? Google Maps offers a great tool for creating a map that will show clients the location of your office. Go to maps.google.com and type your office address into the search box. Click on the link icon (look for an icon with three chain links at the top right corner of your screen). This will open a pop-up that will give you a URL link you can use to access that same map. Send that link to new clients via email and they can see the map. The pop-up also gives you the HTML code you can use to include the map on your website. Take it a step further by creating customized maps to show clients directions to other places that might be helpful for them (for example, the local court house).

2. Electronic intake forms

   In many areas of practice, collecting background information is the main purpose of an initial meeting with a client. Wouldn’t this be easier if the client came to your office with a standard intake form already completed?

   Adobe Acrobat (the Standard and Pro versions) makes this possible by giving you the ability to create an electronic PDF client intake form which you can email to your client. The client can print it to fill out a paper version or better still, can complete it onscreen and send it back to you electronically. The client just needs the free Adobe reader software.

   And don’t limit yourself to the intake process – consider converting other paper forms you have in your office. Acrobat has a form conversion tool that does a fantastic job of converting paper forms into electronic ones.

3. Virtual meetings

   Virtual meeting tools let you collaborate across the web in ways that are just as effective as face-to-face meetings, while helping you significantly reduce time and travel costs.

   These tools let you show the contents of your computer screen to multiple people via the Internet. You can create a document much more quickly when everyone can simultaneously view and comment on the draft as it evolves. In a single phone call you can draft and finalize a document that normally might take many emails and redrafts over days or weeks to create. These tools are easy to use and you can set up a virtual meeting on an ad hoc basis in the middle of a conference call in a matter of minutes.

   GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com), WebEx (www.webex.com) and Acrobat Connect (www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html) are the most widely used virtual meeting tools. Pricing for the basic versions of these products is around $50 per month. Some of them have trial or limited use versions that you can use for free. If you avoid just one in-person meeting a month, you are more than paying for them. I have GoToMeeting installed on my laptop, and it allows me to host a virtual meeting from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

4. Free long distance

   Voice-over-IP or “VoIP” phone systems can save on long distance charges, but they are expensive to buy and set up. However, if you have a high-speed Internet connection and your computer has a soundcard and microphone, you can try VoIP for free with Skype (www.skype.com) or Google Talk (www.google.com/talk).
   You can use these tools to communicate with audio and video over the Internet. While not suitable for every area of practice (and you will on occasion experience poor voice or video quality and dropped calls), some lawyers are using Skype or Google Talk to avoid long-distance charges – both improving the bottom line for their office and making clients happy about avoiding long-distance charges for calls to their lawyer. While some social media tools offer similar functionality, it is probably safer not to use them for the sake of protecting client confidentiality.

5. Find time for a meeting

   Trying to schedule a meeting with multiple people via email is inefficient and annoying – few things are better at filling your inbox with totally unnecessary messages. Next time you need to find the best time slot for a meeting, consider using online tools such as GatherGrid (www.gathergrid.com), WhenIsGood (www.whenisgood.net) or Doodle (www.doodle.com).

   These tools vary slightly in how they present the options for the timing of a meeting (i.e., giving you full days of available time vs. offering specific time options), but they all work in more or less the same way. Go to one
   of these sites and create a meeting event. Then indicate potential times and dates for the meeting and provide the email address of each person who needs to come. Finally, initiate an email that goes out with a link that will give all invitees a calendar showing them the possibilities. Once invitees indicate whether they are available or not, the meeting organizer can go to the calendar to easily see the best time for the meeting. Some of these tools also let you send a meeting invitation that will automatically put an entry into an Outlook or other electronic calendar.

   Use one of these tools next time you need to schedule a meeting: your client will really appreciate how quickly and easily you can tie down the date and time for that meeting.

6. I’m thinking of you

   Marketing experts tell us we need to do things to stay top of mind with clients. The free Google Alerts service can help you do this. It allows you to monitor the web for interesting new content and it will send you an email listing of relevant Google results (news, website content, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

   Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

   • being notified when your name or your firm name appears in the news or on the web;
   • being notified when your client’s name appears in the news or on the web;
   • monitoring a developing news story; and
   • keeping current on a competitor or industry.

   To create an alert, go to the Google Alerts page (www.google.com/alerts) and enter a text string that contains the name of the person or topic that you want to monitor (for example, your name, your firm name, a client’s name or industry). Google Alerts will send you an email alert listing Google news or web search results based on the terms that you specified. You can configure it to deliver the alerts to you instantly, daily or weekly. On the news side, it searches several thousand news sources that the Google News page indexes. On the web search side, it searches all the web pages that the Google search engine indexes.

   When you get an alert about something that would interest one of your clients, take a minute to send them a quick email with a link to the news item or webpage.

As the other articles in this issue highlight, regular communication with your clients is a cornerstone of a solid lawyer-client relationship. Consider how you can use the tools listed above to better serve and
communicate with your clients.

Quite a few of us in Canada have been on Google+, but we've found there are far more American lawyers trying it out. Let's hope that changes fast.

Vic Gundotra of Google announced today a number of changes. Google claims it made 91 improvements to the platform during the 90 days of operation. Today they add 9 more improvements, largely related to the Hangouts feature (including mobile video chats), as well as a much-needed search function. But the 9th new "feature" is that they are opening it up to the public. It was previously in beta testing and restricted to invites, although the number of invites appeared endless.

Of course everyone will ask (again) why they need yet another social network. The reality is that Google is still the powerhouse of the Internet, and if you trust them enough (it's not a given considering some of the privacy complaints, for example) it can be the one social network to replace them all – eventually.

And because Google is still best known for its search engine, it's no surprise that Google+ profiles rank pretty well for searches, based on a number of anecdotal experiments I've conducted for the past few months. So if you are at all interested in clients or other lawyers reading your content Google+ is at the very least just one of the platforms you should be considering.

We all suffer from social media fatigue at times, and a centralized hub – something many platforms have attempted but have not yet accomplished – is a benefit to us all. Here's to Google+ for everyone.

I agree, this is not news. Our lives are getting faster and we expect to know what is happening right now in the world, not what happened five hours ago or yesterday. For those of us who work with information and live online, television and radio are often not fast enough. We expect to hear about things as they happen.

Lawyers need to stay on top of what is happening to clients so they can help respond in a timely manner. As librarians, the challenge is pulling information together so that those we serve are up to date. In the journalism realm, reporters strive to get coverage out ever faster. When a crisis occurs, PR machines now are expected to get responses out within an hour or two. It is no longer acceptable to wait a few days to allow for crafting of messages. David Meerman Scott, author of Real-time Marketing & PR talks about this phenomenon in his video:

Real-Time Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott

Kady O'Malley, CBC report who covers the Parliament Hill beat in Ottawa, was at the recent Canadian Bar Association conference. The CBA caught this interview with her after her talk, in which she discusses real time reporting and its affect on politics:

Kady O'Malley

One thing she doesn't address in the video is the growing prominence of citizen journalists, people without journalist training reporting on things they are seeing. Citizen journalism really comes into play on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube when people mention things that are happening to them or near to them. For example, when we hear of natural disasters it is usually first seen on Twitter now, especially when it comes to earthquakes. This past week for those of us on or near the east coast has been particularly exciting in this regard, with tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes (oh my!).

For myself, I appreciated Kady O'Malley's real time reporting of the Jack Layton visitation in Ottawa last week via Twitter. Some of us who attended his funeral in person (I was on the street outside Roy Thompson Hall), shared photos, video and impressions of what was happening around us. I noted, watching the coverage on TV later, that it dulled in comparison with being right there. The citizen journalistic efforts were not about getting the facts correct, but about sharing impressions and feelings. It was not about a political agenda (at least, in my case) but about becoming more engaged as a citizen with the story at hand and, in some cases, feeling more a part of a community. We see this when people post tweets from events such as last week's ILTA conference.

So, not only is real time news and information allowing us to consume more individually, but also it is allowing us to feel more connected to the story and perhaps even become a part of it. Lines are increasingly blurring in this regard: consumers are not just consumers, but also reporters.

Where does that leave us? As librarians we can no longer wait for requests for information to come our way, and then take a few hours to pull sources together as far as day to day information goes. We need to think about what sources are important, find their related real-time feeds, and pull those together automatically as much as possible (ideally with RSS feeds if available), filtering and sorting according to the interests of our clients. Especially those of us in law firms need to know what is happening so that responses can be made in a timely fashion. No longer can responses wait a week or sometimes even in a day. It is a real challenge to figure this out and get it working, but once in place it can fill that need for immediate information. From there it is a matter of tweaking the results, adding or subtracting to improve the content over time.

What are the challenges you face with looking for real time information? How are you meeting these challenges?

Google's venture capital arm, Google Ventures, is intent on disrupting the legal market.

First, it invested in LawPivot, a Quora-style Q&A platform for providing legal advice to businesses. LawPivot has now opened its platform to the public, allowing lawyers to answer businesses questions in a venue visible to the public.

This new twist on LawPivot's business model will build up a valuable and publicly-accessible knowledgebase of legal advice for businesses to leverage. LawPivot will also provide lawyers a high-visibility platform to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients.

Google Ventures has also recently invested in Rocket Lawyer, an online legal document service. Users of Rocket Lawyer's service can easily generate legal documents – ranging from divorce agreements to incorporation documents – and optionally pay an additional fee to have a lawyer review the document.

While the Internet has certainly had an impact on the legal market (by way of clients finding lawyers through Google search, for example), the Internet has not yet truly disrupted the business model of running a law firm or, for that matter, being a lawyer. Google Ventures is betting that day is coming, and it clearly wants to be in the thick of the disruption.

The Canadian Bar Association's National magazine has just released an article in the July/August 2011 edition, The Best in Digital Marketing. Compiled and edited by Luigi Benetton, the article surveys opinions from Marni Macleod, Allison Wolf, Connie Crosby, Carol Fitzwilliam, Warren Bongard, Jordan Furlong, and myself.

Leadership and innovation was recognized for the following firms:

• Osler for best design
• BCF for best recruitment outreach
• Goodmans for best client outreach
• Hull & Hull for best use of video
• Miller Thomson for best national website
• Brazeau Seller for best regional website
• Foster LLP for best small/solo website
• Hyndman Law for best social media presence
• Torys for best mobile

You can read the complete article on the CBA National website.

These are notes are from a panel discussion session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Friday, one of the Solo Day 2011 talks. Panelists included Charley Moore, founder of RocketLawyer, San Francisco, CA; Carolyn Elefant, solo practitioner and blogger (see MyShingle.com), Washington, DC , and Jay S. Fleischman, consumer bankruptcy lawyer at Shaev & Fleischman (see NewYorkBankruptcyHelp.com and BankruptcyLawNetwork.com) and online legal marketing consultant at www.LegalPracticePro.com . Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

The Virtual Law Office

Charley Moore provided a case study of a young solo practitioner as an example of someone who might be setting out to set up a virtual law office. He went through a series of advice for starting out:

• Having profiles on high profile websites will help build your reputation. You want to be on more than two sites; when potential clients Google you, you want them to find positive profiles that you have curated. For example: LinkedIn profile and a Facebook page for your practice
• "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Moore is a believer in "one big thing," i.e. figuring out your niche, what you are very good at.
• Organize your practice and know how to prioritize: blogging, LinkedIn and other social media presence
• Setting up a virtual practice means: cheap overhead (no office!), and convenient for your clients.
• If you don't need to print, you don't need paper storage.

Jay Fleishman on going virtual:

• you only need a cell phone and computer to provide legal services (a means of communication, and a means of storing and disseminating information).
• everything lawyers needs practice is in their brains
• "those pretty books sitting in your library are quite frankly garbage…those books are costing you money with real estate."
• he has not had an office phone since 2004; his local clients have a local phone number for him that takes them to an automated attendant. It rings to either his cell phone or his Skype line on his computer. He uses Grasshopper.com which costs him a lot less than traditional phone bills. It also sends him the messages as MP3 file attached to an email.
• if you go on vacation and you are solo and your client does not get you, "that's bad practice" – "you can either skip your vacations or you can use technology to allow you have work life balance. You can serve them better."

Moore:

He uses Google Voice (free service). On this trip he forgot his phone at home in error; he got a new Android phone in Toronto, threw in a new simcard and added one more number to Google Voice from the Internet, and successfully rerouted all calls to the new phone.

Clients actually love to hear he is learning and at conferences, tweeting what he is learning. This is client engagement.

Fleischman:

Advertising online gets things going online quickly. "All it's costing you is money." "It's getting you on the map incredibly quickly."

It is easy to get online fast, there are any number of services, for example:

• RocketLawyer
• Avvo
• Google Adwords

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Moore: You are thinking about search engine optimization. What are the optimizing elements on your website http://www.newyorkbankruptcyhelp.com/ ?

Fleischman:

A good web presence requires both marketing and promotion. Pure marketing moves people from one place to another on the site and only provides pure information. However, an information gatherer is very different from a do-it-yourselfer.

Site also has email updates and Consumers Guide to Bankruptcy. Both only ask for an email address to request them. The less information you ask for, the more likely you are to convert somebody. Once they sign up, you put them into a marketing database. He uses AWeber.

Moore: he uses Marketo

Elefant: a lot of people use MailChimp which is a free service; AWeber has extra spam protection.

Fleischman:

From the email updates, subscribers get an update each time he puts up a new blog post. If they opt in for the guide book, on a 3-4-3-4 day basis, they receive an email (pre-programmed). It is a pretty good bet they will be in front of the computer at the same time on the same day the next week; 7 days later, but you want communication before then.

Everything on the website is not high promotion, high sales. You want to make the offer in a very human way; you want to make the offer in a way such that you would not be offended by it if you were to receive it.

That is the process of turning a stranger into someone who has a sense that you know what you are talking about in your practice area, you are a nice person, and you have some authority.

Moore: Larry Rice is a good model of a practice that is a real expertise; that is why he is called on by CNN and CNBC. Get an area of expertise and blog about it, tweet about it. Write about your ideas and others' ideas. That will build your reputation and your authority. Search engines Google and Bing are supposed to direct someone to the best authority for something they are looking for.

Fleischman: BankruptcyLawNetwork.com – consumer bankruptcy site created four years ago. Over 125,000 visitors every month. All it is is a blog, 6,000+ individual articles. It has taken a lot of time but has only cost them time. The definitive sense of what an authority site should be. He gets clients coming to him who have read his blog extensively.

Question from the audience: are his fees posted?

Fleischman: No, but he doesn't think it would matter.

Moore:

By becoming an authority by blogging and podcasting, you start getting others linking to you. Fleischman's reputation has grown because he has done the work gradually every day over time, with more and more people linking to his site. Virtuous circle: "the more well known you get, the more well known you get."

Over time you will get more followers and more links; if you stick with it, you will build good reputation. But you have to do it every day and expect that it is part of practice. Keep doing it even if nobody is listening.

Carolyn Elefant on MyShingle.com

She has a widget for printing for each blog post so that posts print as one consumable piece.

She has a national practice, markets to other attorneys rather than to consumers. On her firm website she has videos and links to ebooks. Hers is based on a talk that she gave. When land owners call a particular agency, they print out her book and give it out to people because of the quality. Having somebody else market your information is very useful.

The site allowed her to create a micro-niche very quickly. Research the area, write an ebook about it, put it online, circulate it with a press release, send out to clients and it is a quick way to expand into a different area, target different people.

Her MyShingle.com site has a YouTube channel.

Solo practice can be isolating; she uses some tools just to learn about them and finds this enriching, even if they might not necessarily advance her practice. Twitter is not just for marketing, it is also a way to keep up to date. It's not just a marketing function.

She also started a trade association – OREC - Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition

Q&A

Moore: Currently RocketLawyer does not yet deal with Canadian lawyers.

Comment from audience member: You need to start.

Q: What about meeting in person?

Fleischman: being able to meet only electronically "is a hurdle"; he meets all of his clients face to face. He does not believe initial consultation needs to be face to face, but having a place to meet is important, even if it is a business centre. He is not big on meeting in coffee shops, but some do make it work. He often meets at client offices.

Elefant: because she has a national practice, she cannot always meet face to face; many clients are not on Skype yet. She will talk with them and answer as many questions as possible for them to make them feel comfortable. Virtual firms do not mean that you are always online, but having the ability to keep in touch online is a supplement to meeting in person. For some clients it is more convenient not to have to meet. She is also rigorous about follow-up, giving a weekly report and followup on what is being done.

Moore: Clients expect they can go online and see the data and documents online. This is a growing expectation.

Q: What about clients who want to know where my office is, and if I can scan in and fax them?

Moore: He didn't see this as an issue. This is not just for young people; 60+ is a growing demographic on Facebook

Q: How do you deal with Facebook?

Elefant: She suggests starting a Facebook page for your law firm so you don't have to friend people you don't know.

Fleischman: He takes the opposite approach; he will never put anything online that will embarrass him. He has no photos of his son on Facebook. Any photos where people tag him, he removes the tag. If someone friends themselves with him, they are not "outing" themselves as a bankruptcy client. No one needs to know why they are there. They are less likely to follow a firm page.

Elefant: If you take that approach, you can limit what certain people see.

During this session the General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division of the ABA ("GP Solo") launched their Smart Soloing Center with tips and research sources. They will also be putting out an ebook shortly.

Note: This session was also recorded for the Legally Easy podcast (the RocketLawyer podcast). I will add in a link once that becomes available.

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included Dominique Shelton, Wildmon Harrold, Beverly Hills, CA, Prof. Teresa Scassa, University of Ottawa, Research Chair of Information Law, Ottawa, ON, Dr. Ann T. Greeley, DecisionQuest, and Nicole Black, Rochester, NY . Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

Dominique Shelton - Overview on what is social media

Social media often involves the creation of "user generated content", which often takes bits and pieces of things created by others. This is why social media often gets into intellectual property issues.

Types of User Generated Content Sites:

• Blogs
• Wiki sites
• User generated advertisements e.g. Doritos and Pepsi MAX "Crash the Superbowl" contest; Lipton Brisk's Facebook account teaming up with rapper Eminem "Anti-ad"
• In the mobile sphere: Twitter
• authorized and unauthorized mashups such as photographs, video, music put together without permission clearance. Serena software often includes mashups on the back end
• MMOG ("massively multiplayer online games") and virtual worlds e.g. Starbucks site within Second Life virtual world. In online game World of Warcraft and others there are over 13 million participants. Exchange of money in these sites can mean some litigation. In 2014 this market is expected to reach $96 billion.

FTC Privacy Report, December 2010: Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers [pdf]

Online behavioural advertising (OBA)

• Online behavioural advertising (OBA) uses tracking to determine what kinds of advertising to serve up to the website viewer.
• The Privacy Commissioner of Canada's definition of "behavioural advertising" is particularly helpful. [Connie's note: see Report on the 2010 Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's Consultations on Online Tracking, Profiling and Targeting, and Cloud Computing, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, May 2011]
• The lawsuits are happening are around "flash cookies" and HTML5 code; cannot use the browsers to disable them because they are hard-coded in and almost impossible to identify.
• Types of claims in the US: behavioural lawsuits e.g. NBC and Warner Bros Records sued due to tracking widgets; there are also mobile class actions pending and some of the ad servers are being sued.

"Privacy by design"

• Concept was created in Canada
• Gives users notice that tracking of their movement on the Internet is going on
• In-Ad notices or "hyper notices" are implemented so that it is not just covered in a blanket user agreement; people are specifically notified when being followed.
• The European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) also has some best practice material around this: EASA Best Practice Recommendation on Online Behavioural Advertising
• Will tracking users online be considered infringement of personal privacy?

Things to do:

• Find out whether the client is using flash cookies
• Sensitize them to the issues
• Be up to date on industry standards
• Ask questions of your vendors

Prof. Teresa Scassa, University of Ottawa - Social networking: Privacy and Trademark Issues

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada does a lot of work in this area.

Civil litigation in Canada:

• do not have the same volume of litigation in Canada as in the US
• courts have ordered access to metadata regarding the amount of time or use of social networking sites; also content from social networking sites has been ordered to be disclosed
• On pages that are considered public, there are no privacy issues.
• 2 lines of jurisprudence in Canada: if there is content on the public pages that infer there may be content of interest on the private side; some people use the features of Facebook to reveal private information to only certain people

Sparks v. Dube raised interesting issues around preservation orders

• Court considered ex parte motion for preservation order
• defendant sought court order to compel plaintiff to download the content of her social networking site under direct supervision (rather than just not update the site)
• there were photos on the public side of the site that showed activities that contradicted injuries she was purported to have;
• court granted the order with some adjustment

Trademarks & social networking:

Use of trademarks on social networking sites has risk:

• the risk of use of another's trademark in a user name or sub-domain; impersonation of celebrities
• borderless Internet and national trademark; there can be many people entitled to the same trademark
• things can go viral very quickly; some companies have found in over-reacting to what they see as trademark infringement can create a backlash against the trademark owner
• there are unlimited variations on marks. It is not enough of a solution to buy every domain name you want.

Facebook and Twitter:

• both have policies on intellectual property protection (for registered trademarks; not unregistered)
• suspected trademark infringement can be reported to Facebook
• Twitter does not permit non-parodic impersonation, but does allow parody

Suggested:

• Monitor use of their trademarks
• Develop an appropriate and considered response in advance.

Dr. Ann T. Greeley, DecisionQuest – Social Media in the Courtroom

Through social media, we now have unprecedented access to public's conversations, attitudes and opinions. Jurors can't help themselves: just like all of us, they take in as much information as they can. The use of social media during a trial has become an issue. This is not surprising: 6 out of 10 US citizens get news from the Internet; online news is now more popular than newspapers or radio. In the US, jurors can talk about trials after the court case, and there are starting to be people creating blogs after the fact.

Researching potential jurors

Social media now allows us to find out what people are thinking; in the US they can do research on the potential jurors before the trial.

Best practices for researching a potential juror:

• determine the most influential sources
• determine if someone is pro-plaintiff or pro-defence
• qualitative analysis of attitudes, opinions and beliefs
• conduct quantitative analysis of readers' comments
• prepare strategic recommendations for jury research, voir dire questionnaires, witness preparation, etc.

People can creating personas for blogs, and creating fake reviews. How can you know what is true? In researching jurors, looking at social media sites, public records, court materials, news sources, and others.

Accessing information by jurors outside of the courtroom

There are "stealth jurors" – people who wish they were jurors or talk as if they were jurors.

Search "jury duty" and "guilty" or "jury duty" and "innocent" on Twitter – you can see general comments on what people are saying when they are waiting to be chosen for jury duty or are on a jury. Can do similar on Facebook.

Nicole Black, Rochester, New York – Ethical pitfalls of social media

Social media can be used by lawyers in a lot of positive ways, but there are pitfalls.

Some ethical pitfalls:

•  Lawyer Advertising rules – the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 was created to address online issues
• If you think what you are putting up might be advertising, a disclaimer may be required. When in doubt, put up the disclaimer (e.g. for informational blogs)
• inadvertently creating an attorney-client relationship; for example, from her blog she gets a lot of inquiry email. There is a need to take care if responding; she recommends responding generally, pointing them to other information rather than advice, and using disclaimers.
• disclosing confidential information
• improper contact with other parties. There should be no deceptive Facebook friending; you can't have your paralegal friend somebody to find out information about them. Always disclose who you are.
• improper client solicitation – when responding for a request for information, that is not a solicitation. But there should be no "ambulance chasing" on Twitter!
• on LinkedIn, stating a "specialization" – in a lot of jurisdictions in the US, you cannot specialize in your law practice, this could violate your rules
• for LinkedIn and other profile sites – in South Caroline, once you claim your profile, you are responsible for what is put up on your site including recommendations from clients
• No ex parte communications – In Florida judges cannot friend lawyers with hearings in front of them; however, they are in the minority

You need to balance the benefits and risks. You also need to learn about social media.

See also Omar Ha-Redeye's writeup of this same session, also here on Slaw.ca

In this ten-minute video, best-selling author Seth Godin talks about a fundamental shift in today's business world that includes marketing, social media and a move toward openness. He says: "You are going to have to change if you want to be there too."

Yahoo! Futurist: Seth Godin

Some food for thought. A quick summary:

1. Marketing needs to be responsible for the product.
2. You need to measure interaction.
3. The only asset that gets built online is permission to talk to people.

I wonder about the first point and how it can be applied to a law firm? I almost think it needs to be turned on its end; instead of making the marketers in charge of the product, perhaps those in charge of the work product should be doing the marketing and (along with it) the listening to the clients. What do you think?
Some additional points he made on innovation:

1. Innovation is an invitation to failure.
2. Innovation requires solving an interesting problem.

He says that innovation takes place only if these two factors are in place. In other words, there has to be a problem to solve and the organization (or individual) has to prepare for failed attempts before having success.What do you think of Seth Godin's discussion? Anything that strikes you as particular relevant or irrelevant for the legal industry?

Hat tip to Mitch Joel for a link to the video.

The South Carolina Bar Association just released an Ethics Advisory Opinion on the use of Groupon by SC lawyers.This interesting opinion dealt with the question of whether it is ethical for SC lawyers to use Groupon. The answer: Yes, but proceed with caution. Read SC Ethics Advisory Opinion 11-05 here.

♬ Whatever I do I'm under the influence of you…♬

Music, lyrics and recorded by James Morrison.

Klout

Legal marketers and others who advise lawyers (myself included) have been gently prodding lawyers to start using social media in marketing their practices with such services as: Twitter, Facebook, blogs and others. Oftentimes, we are asked: "How do you know if this is effective or just a waste of time?" Well now all of us can start gauging our effectiveness via a growing number of websites that seek to place a quantitative assessment of your clout (or Klout as it may be) in social media circles.

The granddaddy in all these ranking services would have been Twitaholic ("tracking the most popular users of a certain social networking tool") which is free, and the newer Twittercounter, which is a paid service. Twitaholic will provide you with your ranking and general stats in your local geographic area as well as your ranking generally on Twitter. For example, @LadyGaga is currently #1 in the world; @BarackObama is #3 and surprisingly, @Oprah is #11 (@TheEllenShow – Ellen DeGeneris outranks her at #8)! Twittercounter, on the other hand, for a small fee, will provide you with more businesslike stats.

According to their web page, Coke, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook and others are clients:

“The dashboard makes it easy to compare ourselves with to our competitors, showing us the effectiveness of our social media campaigns. The yearly stats are perfect for long term insights.” per Sophie op den Kamp – @claqueur

While the Twitaholic rankings are interesting, reading them is rather like eating a Twinkie – you get the immediate sugar fix but feel like you missed out on the entree. So what is the solution?

Klout.com (@Klout) is one of a growing number of sites that try to aggregate your social networking presence and determine your "Klout score". But it does more than just assign a number between 0-100 to you.

It also looks at your:

"Network Influence":

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content.

"Amplification Probability":

Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. The ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.

as well as your "True Reach".

Now we are getting somewhere! You can also determine the Topics for which you are an influencer as well as those who you influence (and their Klout score).

Now you can get some quantitative and qualitative indications of where you stand!

What was most interesting to me what the "Klout Style" matrix that shows where you fit along several axis:

Klout Style Matrix

Klout is a great way to determine whether your social media message is strongly focused, whether it is reaching your target audience and whether you are seen as an influencer or not. Or as they would put it, do you have Klout?

There's been something of a buzz lately among the law marketing crowd about putting QR codes on business cards — typically on the back, because they are ugly. (See, e.g. Shatterbox, Larry Bodine, ABA Journal.) It's taken a while for this technology to percolate down to lawyers:these pixelated squares have been around for a few years now and mentioned more than once on Slaw: QR Code; Possibilities of Barcodes; QR Codes & Mobile Marketing. The thought is that a contact need only snap a photograph of your QR code to be provided with whatever data you wish, typically the essential contact information that replicates what's on the printed card.

It seems to me that, ugliness aside, there's no harm in this and possibly some value; though, it's a relatively cumbersome way to move data, even across the big divide between print and digital. There's something obviously kludgy about photographing a business card — 20th century decoding of 19th century photo of 15th century print. But this might have to do until something better comes along such as RFID chips for cards and readers for smartphones, for instance.

Speaking of smartphones, if your client or contact happens to have one, you may even now be able to transfer critical information from your mobile to theirs in a much more efficient way, at least if the phones are iPhones or Android powered. The application Bump (brilliant URL: bu.mp) lets you swap data by actually tapping your phones (or fists holding them) together, provided you have an internet connection at the time. Apparently the data goes from your phone up to Bump's server, where it seeks out another phone that bumped at the same time in the same location, to which it sends your data. According to Bump, they're working on extending the app to other operating systems, which will have to include RIM if lawyers are to be able to take advantage of it in any number.

The features on professional networking site LinkedIn change frequently, so it is worth spending some time periodically to update your profile.

Earlier this month I attended the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) annual conference. I took a bit of extra time to attend one of the pre-conference workshops put on by Scott Brown, owner of Social Information Group, on using LinkedIn. It was good to have a current, detailed look at the network and its current features.

Allow me to share a few things I learned:

• some of the formatting options are hidden under unrelated sections in the Edit Profile view.
• add additional keywords under "Interests" that you believe people looking for you will be likely to search for. You can edit Interests by clicking "edit" for your websites list.
• add descriptions to your current and past positions. You can especially add wording (key words) that might be searched by others when they are looking for people. If you write proposals or resumes, you may already have some of this wording on hand.
• include your volunteer positions, such as committee work, in your profile since these demonstrate experience and skills attained in addition to your day job.
• to format the text in your profile summary as you might have seen others do: while formatting features such as bullets are not available inside the LinkedIn system, you can copy and paste from elsewhere for a better look.
• you can add a Publications section to your profile, to which you can add any books you may have written, articles, and blog posts. You need to add these in the order you would like to see them as you will not be able to rearrange them later.
• if you are organizing an event, it is a good idea to add it to LinkedIn so that others can indicate they are attending.
• use the status message to link to items that might be of interest to your followers.
• a third party tool such as TweetDeck or HootSuite allows you to post status messages to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other sites, giving you control of where you send any particular message.
• including a professional profile photo is a good idea. Without it, your name in listings looks incomplete. Also it gives others a visual reminder of who you are when they view your profile, for example someone who you met only once at a meeting or conference.

An additional tip I picked up during the conference:

• to see information on who has viewed your page, you need to allow permission to view yours; you will want to change this setting back to show less about yourself.

Michael Carabash, the founder and CEO of Dynamic Lawyers, was recently featured on the television show Dragon's Den, where entrepreneurs make a a business pitch to a panel of potential investors.

Carabash was selling an interest in his website and legal forms, which seek to provide legal services in a cost-effective manner to the public. The Dragon's turned down his proposal, but Carabash feels the experience was still worth it.

You can catch a clip from the show here.

Nominations for the Law Society of Upper Canada's 2011 Bencher Elections closed on February 11, 2011. A complete list of candidates can be found here.

Although there was some discussion about having this election entirely paperless, the law society has opted to have both Internet and mail-based voting in place.

We're already starting to see some heavy campaigning online.

Mitch Kowalski has endorsed Monica Goyal of My Legal Briefcase today in the Financial Post. Of course Mitch is running for bencher himself.

Constance Backhouse and Emir Aly Crowne have an election site up, and Julian Falconer has updated his bencher election site, but many of the other candidates still do not have a dedicated site. Then there are the confusingly undated websites like Allan Rouben's, apparently a campaign page from a previous election.

For those struggling to get some coverage, The Law Times launched a website today for the 2011 Bencher Elections, where candidates can submit profiles and purchase ad space.

But the move that really caught my eye was this one:

Now I don't know Mr. Robert Wadden, but the fact that this targeted ad popped up on my LinkedIn profile did make me curious enough to check out his LinkedIn profile, and eventually his website.

There are plenty of well-known names running for bencher this year. Let's see how social media helps them gain even further notoriety. If existing online personalities continue to assist each other in campaigning, it may prove even more interesting.

While Q&A sites have been around for as long as the web, the last year has seen a tremendous surge of innovation in this space. Quora is one of the hottest startups in the valley right now, and has experts in various fields answering questions on everything from "Why is Dropbox more popular than tools with similar functionality?" to "Why is honey dangerous for babies?".

LawPivot brings the Quora concept to legal advice, allowing companies to confidentially ask legal questions of lawyers that have registered with the site. LawPivot employs a recommendation algorithm that will match the company and the question it has with the best lawyers best suited to answer its question, and the company will have the benefit (or the curse) of receiving answers to its questions from several lawyers.

The startup promises to deliver companies high-quality legal advice at a lower cost via its crowdsourcing model. Given the tremendous success of Quora, I see no reason to think they won't succeed. Google appears to agree: Google Ventures has just invested in the company.

LawPivot promises to provide a new and innovative way to connect lawyers with clients. While the offering is currently limited to California, the company plans to roll the service out to other parts of the US – and perhaps Canada – in the future.

For a short moment, we had some innovative law firm marketing going on with Blakes flash mob dance! The Youtube video was here. That is until lawyers for the Black Eyed Peas called copyright foul. Youtube is now displaying the infringement image below:

I say boooo to the Black Eyed Peas and Will.I.Am. It's tough enough to get lawyers to leave their offices and walk down a couple flights of stairs for a fire drill. Can you imagine getting close to 50 of them dance in the middle of a shopping mall? Unheard of.

Happy holidays! :)

Careful readers of Slaw's Linkblogs may have noticed Steve Matthews post on adding RSS feeds.

While that's very useful, I also want to point Slaw readers' attention to the new website Attorney at Work on which Steve's post is published and to an invitation to receive "One Really Good Idea Every Day".

The project is the brainchild of Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, and Joan and Mark Feldman who were responsible for many years for the excellent Law Practice magazine of the American Bar Association. So I must declare an interest. You'll see a number of members of the Slaw community listed as advisors.

“One Really Good Idea Every Day” is the tagline as well as the mission for the venture.

“We make a promise to our subscribers that we will keep the noise down,” says Feldcomm’s Joan Feldman. “Our concept is simple and elegant. Each morning, a single item will appear in your inbox. It will be an easy and quick read, rich with practical and doable ways to make things better.”

The brief daily items will be written by any of over 100 experts who will provide sharp, savvy and timely information on
marketing, career development, technology, time management, money matters, life balance, health issues and more.

More voices – welcome to the blogosphere.

Stem Legal has relaunched the Canadian Law Blogs List at Lawblogs.ca started by Steve Matthews in September 2005. The List is an open directory of Canadian blogging lawyers, law librarians, marketers, IT professionals and paralegals (essentially anyone blogging in the legal industry in Canada).

Along with a new look, the new site features:

• browsing by practice area, by province, by industry topic, and latest additions
• subscription to LawBlogs.ca by RSS feed or by email to be notified of blog additions to the site
• a sample of recent blog posts from the various blogs on the front page of Lawblogs.ca
• a submission form for blogs not already listed on the site

The question arose in "Twitterville" as to why this particular list is embraced by legal bloggers whereas other similar lists have not been successful. I believe there are a number of reasons for the success of Lawblogs.ca:

• Steve Matthews started the List as a contribution to the legal blog community when he was still in-house (it was not started as a business venture)
• Steve is respected in the law blog community
• many members of Stem Legal are themselves law bloggers
• owners of the blogs listed are respected
• the site does not re-appropriate content from the blogs listed. The site says: "Blog posts shown on the site are temporarily displayed but not stored; the content in each post is owned by its respective author."
• there is no fee to be listed
• bloggers are invited to have their blogs removed if they do not wish to have them listed

I like the new look of the site and what they have done with it. The new site is considered to be in beta, and we are invited to take the beta survey.

What do you think of the updated look? Are there are any other features you would like to see?

Congratulations to Bennett Jones LLP, 2010 Platinum winner of the Intranet Innovations Award from Step Two Design, announced Wednesday at KMWorld 2010 in Washington, DC. They won for a number of innovations on their intranet BenNet. Based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), their intranet includes features such as an improved Precedent system, a "find the children" feature that locates documents using the parent precedents, and BenNet Books.

From the Step Two Designs announcement:

Bennett Jones, the 2010 Platinum Award winner and the first law firm to win this award, has created a highly sophisticated site that allows users to find vital legal Precedent information quickly and easily. ‘BenNet’ is also a ‘social intranet’, replete with site-wide commenting, user-generated resource development in the form of BenNet Books (legal books created on specific topics), and more.

I happened to be at KMWorld and took the opportunity to interview Brian Bawden, National Director of Knowledge Management of Bennett Jones, for Slaw.ca about the award (we were in the press room but you can still hear how busy a conference it was!).

Special thanks to James Robertson, Managing Director of Step Two not only for presenting the award, but also for graciously acting as our camera man!

And here is the awards presentation by James Robertson and Martin White, filmed and posted by Kurt Kragh of IntranetTeam:

The big news from London is that Norton Rose is taking over Deneys Reitz, one of South Africa’s largest firms – and African firm of the year in 2006 – and the Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. The expanded firm will fly under the Norton Rose flag.

The two firms will formally join the Norton Rose Group on 1 June 2011. This will raise the firm's head count to over 2,500 lawyers spread over 38 offices.

Norton Rose Chief Executive Peter Martyr commented

This is a very exciting move…Canada and South Africa are increasingly influential economies for our clients in the energy and natural resources, infrastructure, technology and financial institutions sectors.

It's an aggressive and gutsy move given the weakness of sterling and the strength of the Canadian dollar and the Rand.

According to The Lawyer, the arrangements with both firms will mirror last year's Deacons deal with the Australian firm with all three operating separate profit pools. Which means this is more about a brand than about money.

Here is the Press Release:

Ogilvy Renault and Deneys Reitz to join Norton Rose Group

15 November 2010
Creating a top 10 global legal practice

International legal practice Norton Rose Group today announced that leading Canadian law firm Ogilvy Renault and leading South African law firm Deneys Reitz will join Norton Rose Group on 1 June 2011.

Together the enlarged Group will be a top 10 global legal practice by number of lawyers with more than 2500 lawyers in 38 offices worldwide.

Peter Martyr, Group Chief Executive, Norton Rose Group, commented:
“This is a very exciting move for the Group and constitutes a significant step towards realising the Group’s global ambition of becoming one of the world’s leading providers of legal services, with offices in the world’s principal business and financial centres.”

“Canada and South Africa are increasingly influential economies for our clients in the energy and natural resources, infrastructure, technology and financial institutions sectors. Ogilvy Renault and Deneys Reitz give the Group increased strength and depth of resource and expertise in these sectors. We are seeing a considerable increase in the amount of business flowing between Canada, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia; the enlarged Group will be ideally positioned to target this business growth and to provide our clients with the highest quality of legal services connecting these regions.”

John Coleman, Managing Partner of Ogilvy Renault, commented:
“As our Canadian clients become increasingly successful on the international stage, we need to be able to support their international growth. Norton Rose Group is a global leader, with a highly compatible business focus and client service ethic. Equally importantly, our firms have a similar culture and values. As soon as the initial discussions were underway it became clear that we shared a common global vision particularly as it relates to emerging markets such as Asia Pacific. We have strong synergies with the Group, including practice areas, industry sectors and geographic expansion. This is a tremendous development for the firm and our clients.”

Rob Otty, Deputy Chairman of Deneys Reitz, commented:
“The combination of our years of experience in Africa and Norton Rose Group’s increasing involvement in African business will provide the Group with a springboard to become the premier legal practice in Africa. The global markets are increasingly interested in Africa, which is one of the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions. As part of Norton Rose Group, we expect to be at the forefront of developing Africa’s business ties with the rest of the world and in particular with Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas.”

The Managing Partner of Ogilvy Renault, John Coleman, and the Deputy Chairman of Deneys Reitz, Rob Otty, will join the Group’s Executive Committee.

The two new additions to the Group follow the inclusion of Norton Rose Australia on 1 January 2010.

Have you come across a QR code yet? See this as an example:

All you need is a QR code reader built into your mobile phone – either natively within Android phones, or a free QR app for the iPhone. Then scan the code, and instantly your phone will execute one of a number of predetermined tasks:

• hotlink the phone's browser to a URL – scanning the above image, for example, takes you to the homepage our blog at Stem;
• initiate a phone call;
• display an image, business card, etc;
• download a v-card;
• or display a simple text message, to name a few.

These 2-dimensional bar codes are becoming a rising standard for delivering digital offerings from the physical world. You can find them when flipping through magazines and newspapers, or maybe on a billboard in the trendy area of the city. In the digital space, it's not difficult to imagine a future of advanced functionality: allowing us to endorse or friend via social media, register for an event, or develop interesting promotional messages.

Generating these codes, by the way, is also easy; with a number of free web-based QR code generators available online. Google 'QR generators' to see a selection of free websites that might help.

I'm only hitting the tip of the iceberg here in terms of what QR codes have the potential to deliver. And obviously, there's a big question as to how fast this technology might go mainstream. However, considering the incredibly fast adoption of smart phones, and the rise of mobile marketing generally, it's not inconceivable that QR Codes might become a valuable mobile tech-tool that lawyers and firms may employ.

And if not, there's always the ability to share "a good lawyer joke" with your friends:

LinkedIn has just announced that users can add new sections to their profiles. New boxes will be available for certifications, publications, and even patents, reflecting the broader types of users that LinkedIn has experienced beyond the business and IT communities. For example, I can now add my (American) nuclear medicine technology licenses, and my numerous speaking engagements, important to an aspiring litigator claiming some background in healthcare.

One new section might be of particular interest to lawyers. The Martindale-Hubbell Ratings, which provide scores based on client satisfaction and peer-reviews, are also available as a section feature. The two types of scores cover different types of practice which reflect that the client base for some lawyers tends to be other lawyers.

Displaying the rating allows other LinkedIn users to rate the lawyer right on the site by clicking directly on the profile. The company also states that articles and blogs will be profiled in the future.

Although this Lexis-Nexis product is used far more extensively in the U.S. than in Canada, the integration with LinkedIn could help make it the premeiere rating site for lawyers online.

With Small Claims Court in Ontario now able to deal with claims of up to $25,000, the actions aren't so "small" anymore. And the increase in the number of people affected by the generous cut-off has spawned a variety of self-help websites and businesses.

For an example of a pro bono self-help site, check out the series of seven videos on the Small Claims Court by lawyer James Morton, part of an initiative by the Advancement of Legal Education and Research Trust (ALERT), the charitable arm of the Ontario Bar Association (OBA).

My Legal Briefcase is a brand new business — launched today — that offers to help you get your papers in order for your application to Small Claims Court. For a penny under $25, you'll be presented with an online questionnaire to fill out with the details of your claim. The program will then merge your answers into the requisite places in the necessary forms, offer them to you for printing, and then tell you what the steps are that you need to take to pursue your claim.

MLB is planning two further levels of service for increased fees. The top level, Performance, for a buck under $250, would provide

• 1 hour consultation with a lawyer ($99/hour for each additional hour)
• Documents tailored to your case by a lawyer
• A letter, sent by a lawyer, to the person you are suing
• Professional, filled-in legal forms that show all the relevant details of your claim
• Step-by-step instructions on how to proceed with your lawsuit
• Free booklet – "How to Win in Court"
• Email reminders

I'm reading Patrick McKenna's new Slaw column offering advice to the newly minted law firm support professional. His three points, I think, are all spot on; and I say that after spending more than 12 years in-house. Generating respect as a non-lawyer within a law firm isn't easy, but it is entirely possible.

No matter which role you play, the big challenge will always be to select the right projects. And the curve ball, is that it doesn't matter if you believe that your selected projects are important or valuable. What matters is if those projects deliver value to the key stakeholders within the firm — see Patrick's advice point #1. More critical yet, is if those stakeholders can see that value. Even with full business case support and numbers at your back, there will be times when "the perception of value" trumps all. If you don't have "buy in" for those projects, simply put, you'd better have killer metrics coming out of the firm's accounting software.

The impact points in law firms don't stop at stakeholders though. If we're layering up our analysis here, the firm's management structure must also be taken into account. Two worthy additions to our list would be the firm's management committee/group (however it's structured), and the firm's practice leadership. The later, in my view is absolutely key to delivering value. Practice chairs or practice leaders are not only stakeholders – which never hurts – but they are also charged with leading the firm's business units. That means they have to create business value themselves in the form of tactical objectives with measurable deliverables. Sound familiar? Like someone you can align yourself with? Or better yet, like someone you could align your work with?

In my view, practice leaders are fundamental; and if the firm is doing any kind of business planning at the practice group level – that's your gold mine. I used to visit each of our practice leaders prior to their planning period and see if we could get some KM or website oriented objectives into their plans; preferably something measurable. For the groups that took me up on it, they not only had an additional deliverable for their annual group plan, they also had someone that would make it happen, and measure it.

Most of the time, practice plans are closely aligned with the firm's overall business plan (or at least they should be). But unlike the firm's general business goals, practice plans are the translation of those goals at a tactics level. In turn, when I say tactics, your best bet is to think projects. Because if you want to pick the right projects… they should be close to be the same thing.

We all run into design-related questions when creating a web page. Questions like "Should this button be red or green?" or "What would the most effective headline for this paragraph be?". While these decisions may have a dramatic impact on the overall effectiveness of a website, they are often the product of subjective judgement calls by an individual, or worse, a committee.

What if, instead, we could approach such design decisions scientifically? A/B testing makes this possible by treating a web page design instance as an "experiment" where multiple variations of a webpage are randomly presented to page visitors; data measuring the web page's effectiveness, based on visitor behavior, is gathered, and the best-performing design is selected based on this data.

To make this concrete, imagine your website offers a free newsletter for which a visitor can subscribe. You'd like to maximize the number of visitors signing up for the newsletter. Your existing signup form uses a green button, but you wonder if a red or blue button might perform better. A/B testing allows you to test each of the three variations and to measure which results in the highest number of signups. Each visitor to your website will be randomly presented by one of the three designs. Over a given period of time, say one week, you'll be able to gather information on each cohort – the "green", "red" and "blue" visitors – together with their associated signup rates to the newsletter. Here is the outcome of this fictional experiment:

Based on the A/B testing data, we're able to see that both our red and blue signup buttons generated more signups than the baseline green signup button. Additionally, the red button outperformed the blue button by a significant margin.

A/B testing can deliver tremendous benefits to your website. Simple changes – from changing a button color to tweaking headline text – can increase conversion rates and engagement by an order of magnitude.

A wide variety of tools are available to help with running A/B tests on your website. Google's Website Optimizer makes it easy to add basic A/B tests to your website, although it requires some level of technical know-how. Performable and Visual Website Optimizer offer easy-to-use, powerful tools for performing A/B tests and require less technical expertise than Google's Website Optimizer.

If you're not already using A/B testing on your website, consider giving it a try. You'll be surprised how high-impact small changes can be.

I sat on a legal project management panel at the CBA conference on Tuesday. It was moderated by Barbara Boake of McCarthy's. Andrew Terrett of BLG (and Slaw) provided the PM expert's perspective, Brian Armstrong of Bruce Power spoke from the internal counsel's perspective and I provided the practitioner's perspective.

We had a very enlightening discussion, and spent a good deal of it talking about the challenges of planning for and pricing litigation (meaning any form of representation in an adjudicative process). I'll follow-up on the discussion later, but thought I'd first lay some groundwork with a short and very informal survey.

Please take a moment and give some input. I don't intend this to have scientific rigor, so please resist the "it depends" answer and click away. Even better, supplement your survey answers with a comment!

[polldaddy poll=3641016]

[polldaddy poll=3641015]

[polldaddy poll=3641008]

Following my customer service post last week, I had an experience on the weekend where store clerks were so intrusive that it was annoying. So much so that it makes me wonder if I want to go back to that store again. It's a reminder that while we need to be attentive to customer / client needs, it's possible to cross the line from good service to annoying and creepy. And it's possible to try too hard to sell our services.

I went into a new store, and was immediately asked by a greeter if they could direct me to something. He sent me in the right direction, where I was met by a sales clerk. The sales clerk helped me decide between some options (a wireless N router in case you are wondering). Once I had it in my hand, he asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I said no – thanked him for his help – and that I might just look at a couple other boxes on the shelf to satisfy myself that I made the right choice.

So far, so good – but that's when it fell off the rails.

He started to try to sell me an anti-virus product, but continued even after I said I was happy with my current anti-virus product. He told me he had to stay with me and walk me to the cash register. I asked if he was on commission (thinking he wanted to make sure he got credit for the sale) - he said no. I asked why he had to do that – he said he didn't know – it was a management rule. Frankly, it felt like I was being stalked or mistrusted. (I briefly considered wasting his time on a tour of the store to see how long he would stick with me – but I didn't have time for that myself.)

So he indeed walked with me right to the cashier and stood there until I paid and walked out the door.

And to continue the irritation, the cashier asked for my name and address. I asked why – he said if I lost my receipt and had to return it, they would have a record of the purchase. I wasn't satisfied with that answer, and saw no advantage to being in their database, so I politely declined. While he didn't say anything, that of course flustered and miffed the cashier.

So give our clients the attention they deserve, and make efforts to sell our services where appropriate to clients and potential clients – but don't cross the line into pester and peeve territory.

I ran across this today while on a search for something else. At first, I just found it amusing. Now I'm thinking it's a brilliant bit of viral marketing for Paul Pearson's firm, Mulligan Tam Pearson.

In addition to the 4,000+ views, Pearson has been featured in a Victoria Times-Colonist article. And now a mention here. Who could ask for anything more? :)

An article by Michael Moyer in this month's Scientific American reinforces that crowd-sourcing approaches towards rating sites are inaccurate, and do pose a risk to lawyer's reputations. We've discussed lawyer rating sites on Slaw before, here and here.

Moyer cites Eric K. Clemons of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who points out a couple of inherent biases in rating sites:

1. people using a service have already made a choice, and are pre-disposed to liking it
2. people do not tend to rate things they find satisfactory

What this means is that rating sites represent the extremes – those that love their purchase, and those that hate it. Although it would be great to get raving reviews of legal services on rating websites, there's a much higher likelihood that discontent or even opposing parties will make an impression instead, especially where no controls against anonymous reviews are in place.

Moyer also cites a 2009 study by Vassilis Kostakos, Is the crowd's wisdom biased? A quantitative asessment of three online communities, which quantitatively assessed 20,000 reviewed movies on Amazon, Imdb, and books on BookCrossings. Despite the large community size of the websites and controls against anonymous voting, significant biases were observed for user voting and rating behavior .

There are several key findings in the study of interest. First, Kostakos presents a confirmation of the long-tail hypothesis, popularized by Chris Anderson's 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Although obscure items will be of interest to a small group of people who make minor purchases, the crowds who only buy a few times are more interested in mainstream popular products.

The study also found that users who are inconsistent in their ratings contribute to a smaller bias, while more consistent users contribute to a more significant bias. Moyer states,

“There is nothing to say that these people are good at what they do,” Kostakos says. “They just do a lot of it.” What appears to be a wise crowd is just an oligarchy of the enthusiastic.

The existence of super-reviewers has one unassailable advantage, though: they are rarely shills. The deliberate manipulation of review sites by people directly involved with a product—the author of the book, say—is one of the oldest and most difficult problems for online-rating communities to solve.

But what is the relevance for legal marketing?

Repeat users of legal services are not (always as) commonplace, so there are some limits to transferring crowd-sourcing theory to the legal industry.

Perhaps infer that those who utilize rating sites generally will be more likely to rate their legal services online as well. It is becoming increasingly recognized that offline purchasing behaviour is significantly affected by online consumer-generated reviews, as in a 2007 survey by The Kelsey Group:

What was even more significant about this survey was the premium customers were willing to pay for what they perceived as a superior legal service, a more significant "lift" than any other industry examined:

In other words, online perception of a legal service not only affects client acquisition, but also perceived expectation of cost and willingness to pay more. As Anderson says on p. 99,

For a generation of consumers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company's brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is. The new tastemakers are us. Word of mouth is now public conversation, carried in blog comments and customer reviews, exhaustively collated and measured. The ants have megaphones.

The "traditional" method of legal marketing, which is often subversive and relies exclusively on professional successes known only to fellow professionals is doomed to fail, especially since consumers are looking for evidence of competency first-hand.

Anderson shares this strategy on p. 217,

The secret to creating a thriving long tail business can be summarized in two imperatives:
1. Make everything available.
2. Help me find it.

♫ Into the spotlight and out again
Come and get your 15
Your 15 minutes of fame…♫

Lyrics and Music by: Tommy Shaw, Jack Blades, Ted Nugent.

Andy Warhol

Ahh fleeting fame. It seems that advertisers are pouring over themselves to add accolades to lawyer's resumes, blogs, web sites, CVs and bios. Consider this excerpt from an email from one of those 'who is' directories:

We are pleased to inform you that your candidacy was formally approved June 20th, 2010. Congratulations.

Of course the only minor problem with this is that I don't ever being asked to submit an application. Ever.

Similarly with a notice from one of the national newspapers in Canada. It seems:

WHO ARE the leading lawyers in Vancouver?

Don't miss out on this print-advertising opportunity to promote your legal specialties to clients in Greater Vancouver as well as right across the country.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Other lawyers have already confirmed their participation in this section, and so should you!

Of course careful reading of the soliciting email didn't seem to support any qualification to be classified as a 'leading lawyer' other than the ability to pay. I also cringed on the use of the work 'specialties' since that phrase, more than perhaps any other, is looked upon with disdain by most, if not all, of the Law Societies across Canada.

It seems that there are no end of opportunities for lawyers to find their 15 minutes of fame…

To date, LinkedIn has only offered a handful of sidebar applications that users can install. They've been very picky, and only a few are aligned with vertical industries. Even then, it's obvious that industry apps must have a broader application and be applicable to the general business community. Late last night, the rollout began for Legal Updates on LinkedIn and it's a huge win for my friends at JD Supra.

We've written about JD Supra before here at Slaw, so I won't spell out their core offering for law firms. They are, however, a company that's been built around constructing web-based channels for content delivery. With 70 million business members, the embedding of JD Supra functionality into LinkedIn – not sure how else to describe it, it's quite seamless - has to be their biggest win yet. Looking at past partnering, and the LinkedIn effect for companies like Slideshare and Tripit, the future must seem limitless in San Francisco this morning!

I'm going to offer a bullet point summary below, but I'd like to point out Bob Ambrogi's post this morning. It's a thorough review, complete with screen shots.

Here's my 'reader's digest' summary, including some notes from the preview Jordan Furlong and I had on Monday:

• JD Supra and LinkedIn accounts are tethered – you can upload and distribute from either location.
• Without any promotion last night, signups were rolling in fast. This is going to be big.
• You can display your JD Supra collection on your LinkedIn profile for free.
• It's also free to follow the content of others, and sharing your documents within your network's homepage update stream.
• Distributing documents towards targeted professional groups across LinkedIn costs: $75/mo. Account upgrades are possible in LinkedIn or on JD Supra.
• Current premium accounts at JD Supra will be grandfathered, and distribution included at current pricing.
• The LU application smartly uses the meta-data from both websites – so content is automatically matched to users by industry or profession.
• LinkedIn looks like it might target more vertical industries in future.
• It's an exclusive arrangement. So this will be the only searchable, browsable repository of legal information on LI.
• With 70M LI users available, JD Supra is likely the largest legal content distribution network.

"[5] I have reviewed the time spent which is 15.9 hours and frankly, I am surprised that so few hours are being claimed …. " (2010 ONSC 3935).

A round of applause for the successful party's lawyer, please.

In somewhat the same vein, put up a hand if you're in favour of a new rule of lawyer's professional conduct which states that lawyers acting for the winning side in a law suit are allowed to comment on the merits of the result for the media - print, electronic, and otherwise – only if the lawyers concede, on the record, that the decision is wrong on the facts and the law, and that they were surprised (nay, astonished, flabbergasted, etc) that any of their arguments were accepted by the judge. (There would be an analogous rule for the lawyers on the losing side.)

There could be an exception for the case where the lawyer is not and will not benefit from his or her work, beyond the moral reward of taking on a brief where there is wrong involved that requires correction.

One of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms is "There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about." This is sometimes paraphrased as "there is no such thing as bad publicity." The "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right" statement is apocryphally attributed to P.T. Barnum.

Writing for law and other professional magazines, and law tabloids such as The Lawyers Weekly or the Law Times, is a not-expensive (at least to the writer) way of getting publicity and, perhaps, of educating the readership. I have no idea how effective it is on either score. However, the errors that I've seen in some of the articles I've read over the past few years, just in in my areas of expertise (and in my view the situation is getting worse), suggest to me that accuracy of the content is not foremost in the writer's mind.

But, then, perhaps I'm too demanding in expecting all lawyers, or even most lawyers, to care (enough) about the accuracy of what they write for trade publications when they're not getting paid for the piece, where it's as likely as not that only another expert in the area will spot the error, and where they're not giving advice upon which they can be sued. Of course, the publications care, but we can't expect them to police the content of articles the way refereed journals do.

Addendum: June 12, 2010

This link will permit you to download a PDF file that contains my correspondence with The Lawyers Weekly about the flawed article I discuss in the comments, what I asked TLW to publish, and a longer piece providing more detail about the issues the published article got wrong, and related issues. DC

Many of you will likely have picked up the news yesterday of the cross-Atlantic merger between Sonnenschein and UK-based Denton Wilde Sapte. One element of the media push I found interesting was the use of a dedicated website, or microsite, to explain things.

It's not so much the content of the website that I found effective, but rather that the firms chose not bury the information on their respective websites. They could have each created dedicated internal pages on their websites; or, they could have taken the new combined firm domain name and started their transition process. Indecently, the domain SNRDenton.com was registered by Sonnenschein back on March 15th – so despite a June 8th Partnership vote, one would have to suspect this website is for media & client consumption, and not intended to persuade either partnership.

All in all, however, I like the approach: one topic with a defined purpose and audience, and one corresponding website that aggregates everything associated. It's faster to obtain an overview of the new operation, easier to convey the location of this information to others ( a domain name -vs- a subpage on the firm websites); and from a design perspective, allows for a simplified navigation. And in terms of change management and internal politics, I see a lot of value to using a single combined website. When we speak of balancing cultures, and business mergers generally, the sooner the two firms see themselves as a single operation, the smoother the transition (at least that's the theory…).

The dedicated website approach obviously isn't new or innovative; we see it every time the film industry launches a new movie. In the legal field though, there's a tendency to overextend the purpose of the firm website. If this was a case of a firm acquisition, perhaps the firm's media pages or press release pages would have been the better location. But in the case of two firms merging, and more importantly creating a new business entity, I think it makes complete sense.

Our friends over at Stem Legal have rolled out a new Media Strategy service for law firms. The aim is to develop with the client "a customized strategic plan for using the media (including social media) as a business development tool." What makes this particularly interesting is that it's headed up by the estimable Jordan Furlong. I can easily imagine how relieved some firms will be to have Jordan guide them through the fun-house halls of Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. I wish Stem every success in this venture.

[Disclosure: Stem Legal's principal is Steve Matthews, who is a central member of Slaw; and Slaw is lucky enough to have Jordan Furlong as a columnist.]

Over on 3 Geeks and a Law Library, Greg Lambert makes note that yesterday at the Law Marketing Association conference, Joe Calve, the new CMO of Morrison Foerster mentioned he had moved their Library department into the Marketing department. Lambert questions the change, but does say, "From what I'm hearing from the Librarians at MoFo, they are excited about the change and are looking forward to the transition." MoFo is known for doing things a bit differently than everyone else, after all.

I do think it odd, but perhaps no odder than having the Library report to IT as in some organizations. I see the Library ideally as a parallel department supporting Marketing as well as other departments. But it likely depends on the organization and culture of the firm as well as its overall strategy. What I can think of to support this move:

• if the Library is doing competitive intelligence as a major initiative
• if the Library is doing a lot of proactive business intelligence research to support business development
• if the Library is involved in website development and maintenance
• if the Library contributes substantially to the extensive Client Alerts and Newsletters put out by the firm
• Marketing often has better financial support in a firm than the Library or even IT so it can help secure better resources for the Library

Embedding a librarian or two in the Marketing department would be ideal, but I'm not sure about moving the whole department there. What happens to the whole research function and the administration of resources to support areas other than Marketing?

Greg Lambert is going to try to find out more about the change to help flesh out the reasoning. My question for Slaw readers: does this change make sense to you? What other reasons can you think of for/against this move? I still need some convincing.

Photo: Explore by Kevin Dooley – made available on Flickr under Creative Commons.

CaseStudiesOnline.com is a new web site with hundreds of social media marketing case studies, all fully indexed and searchable. The site was created by Tod Maffin, a well-known strategist, consultant, speaker and thought leader based in Vancouver. The site is currently in beta with more case studies being added each day. Maffin also plans on interviewing both thought-leaders in social media marketing and the people in the trenches who are putting these tools into action.

Here's a short video by Maffin showing how CaseStudiesOnline.com works:

I took the opportunity to interview Tod Maffin over the phone last week to find out more for the Slaw audience:

Connie Crosby: What inspired you to put this website together?

Tod Maffin: I do a lot of consulting work and presentations for a number of clients, primarily independent professionals such as lawyers, accountants, realtors and so on. I have always been racking my brain to find a really good source of case studies. There are lots of articles on the web where people have said, we did this phenomenal YouTube campaign and wasn’t it great, we had 4,000 views. But 4,000 views don’t necessarily translate into dollars in pocket. So it was really difficult to find true case studies where you could see the bottom line value.

What I had started to do was just collect a bunch on my own. I had originally just bookmarked them, then I built a little bit of a database so that I could just type in a couple of keywords like legal, Twitter and it would pop up with some case studies. And then I thought I built this database now, I might as well let other people use it. That’s where it was inspired.

CC: Are you thinking of creating a business model around it, or are you going to keep it free for everybody?

TM: – I’m going to keep it free for everyone. The business model is that I’m going to be doing some in-depth interviews with folks who have planned these campaigns and I’ll be doing hour-long interviews, sometimes video and I’ll have the complete transcript available. You’ll be able to download it and listen to it as an mp3 and for those ones I’ll charge a small fee for people to download and access. But by far the vast majority of case studies are going to be 100% free for people to access.

CC: I noticed on the site it says “welcome, guest” on the top. Are you thinking of having people sign in to something like a “my case studies online”?

TM: What you see right now is the first phase. There are a couple of things that are coming in the next few weeks. One is a ratings system so that people can flush out the exceptionally good case studies. Another is exactly what you are suggesting which is a “my case studies online” version of the site, where you’ll be able to identify the categories or tactics or demographics that are specifically of interest to you.

In the meantime there will be sort of a sub-version of that where you’ll be able to specify, just by typing in the special URL, you can narrow down specifically to the type of category you are interested in. So, for instance, you’ll be able to type in legal.casestudiesonline.com and it will take you to all the case studies that are around law. That’s not in place yet, but it’s coming. If I could only have the legal case studies there right now! But the same thing will apply for anything, such as moms.casestudiesonline.com or youtube.casestudiesonline.com and it will take you directly to those searches.

CC: What types of case study contributions are you looking for?

TM: I am really looking for examples where an organization did something in the realm of social media and received some knowledge back from it. So there are plenty of websites that you can go to where they will tell you how many hits they got to their website or how many Twitter followers they got. I’m not really interested in that so much as finding out specifically what we learned from that. How will we apply our brand in the future as a result of this marketing campaign that we did using social media?

So I want it to be a little bit more of a rich value. That said, those are harder to come by on the Internet. It’s going to require me and my contributors to do a lot of legwork, interviewing a lot of these folks. In fact, as we’re speaking right now I’m on my way to Toronto to do a bunch of interviews. One of them is with the ad agency behind the Doritos campaign, the one where they did a brand handover and they essentially gave the brand to bloggers and to the public to re-shape as it went. So, to be able to drill down into those specific case studies is where a lot of the value is going to be.

CC: If a law firm or other legal organization wants to contribute something they need to think about what they are willing to share in that regard?

TM: That’s right. There are some industries, the legal industry being one of them, that have in the past been rather sensitive about what they let go in terms of both their successes and failures in marketing campaigns and branding endeavours. I really hope by having some of these things out there it will provide more interest, certainly more value, for a lot of organizations to build that kind of knowledge internally and share it. You know, it’s sort of in the spirit of “co-opetion”. You hear that phrase quite a bit and the idea that you raise the tide and it floats all boats. I’m a really big believer in that.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get more independent professionals on board; my role and the role of my contributors is to provide that knowledge. Now, that said, that’s one approach for getting information and that’s really if I or some of the contributors just stumble upon it online.

There is a secondary way if your law firm or associated kind of company has a good example of something that you want on this website: that’s what some of the revenue model for this site is as well. If you want to appear on the site guaranteed and get interviewed by me and put together one of those packages, then that can be done for a fairly low investment.

Thanks to Tod Maffin for the interview. For more information, please visit the website CaseStudiesOnline.com.

Remember Steve Matthews‘ Web Law Predictions for 2010?

Mobile Web Becomes Important: The mobile web made some major inroads in 2009, but I expect it to become a priority in 2010. By year’s end, expect to be sick of iPhone application launches from the legal industry – both from vendors and law firms. Also expect an increase in law firms launching mobile versions of their website, mobile friendly extranets, and hopefully in all this – something innovative and useful!

Earlier today Torys LLP launched a free app for iPhones and iPads:

• get our latest news
• read our publications on current legal issues
• access our directory and profiles of lawyers, IP agents and paralegals
• view and share our videos
• find us via GPS and receive live directions to our offices

In conjunction with their videos which have proved to be an international hit, this might be the first move of its kind by a major Canadian law firm as far as I can tell.

The GPS features might be useful for visitors to Toronto, or the hapless OCI student trying to find their way to an in-firm interview.
The app might even be useful for that cocktail party where you know the lawyer across the room works at Torys, and quite embarrassingly cannot remember their name. We actually pulled that stunt last night (with a different firm).

I'm not sick of these apps yet, so keep them coming.

We're used to seeing law firms breaking new ground in deploying technologies for marketing purposes, but I hadn't seen a law firm sponsoring a television channel – and one devoted to matters legal.

What's even more remarkable is where it's coming from. Not some US powerhouse, or a tech-savvy firm in rural Canada.

No this news comes from Bucharest, (which as Simon reminded us Romania outranks Canada in its electronic infrastructure), where Juridic TV, the first television channel dedicated to public legal information, was launched online on February 8 and will broadcast an around-the-clock daily programme.

Among the shows to be broadcasted by Juridic TV are: People’s Court reality show – “the only show in Romania that presents real-life court trials” and Juridic TV Specialists, a programme where people’s queries regarding different fields will be answered. Plus “What should be done?,” where free legal advice-opinions are provided, “Dissatisfied with justice”, “ECHR Cases” and “Headline Trials.” At the same time, a Juridic news show will be broadcasted every Tuesday and Thursday.

It's funded by Coltuc law office to the sum of €150000. The website (courtesy of Google's Romanian to English translator) says:

We continuously monitor several key milestones:

a) LEGAL TV knowledge helps free the judiciary in Romania.
b) LEGAL TV checks increasing abuses of justice
c) LEGAL TV brings legal order through its broadcasts to every citizen in the house.

Coltuc blogs here.

I'd like to share a new website we soft-launched today for our client Jonathan Rosenfeld. As you can probably guess from the URL, the site is US-based and provides State-by-State collections of Nursing Home injury laws.

Our approach to this website was a bit different than we normally take. Right from the outset, we considered it a collection rather than simply another lawyer website. On the design side, the interface is very browse-centric, with a map graphic driving the homepage navigation. Once you drill down into the State pages (See Illinois as an example), the site identifies negligence and wrongful death laws, and whether there is an applicable Statue of Limitations or Damages Cap for each State. These pages also include links to State laws, general resource links, and any related posts from Jonathan's blog.

This is project we've been working on for a few months now, and stemmed from Jonathan's wanting to do "something different". He already had a blog, along with one of our FAQ collections, and wanted to carry forward with a similar approach. As many Slaw readers can guess, personal injury law can be a very difficult practise to market. Especially when the goal is to avoid digital 'ambulance chasing', and to promote oneself in a professional manner.

Like most websites, this offering will continue to be a work in progress. If you have feedback on features or content that might be added, I'm happy to hear suggestions.

Here's a screen capture of the homepage:

Jurriaan de Reu recently mentioned the implications of Google Social Search for SEO. The new Google feature will provide higher results based on the reviews and commentary of your friends on various social media platforms.

Essentially this is the same concept as the traditional word-of-mouth marketing, but conducted online instead. When someone mentions their experience with a specific product, brand or service (including lawyers) on a social media platform, their contacts will get those informal reviews at the top of their searches when looking for similar topics.

A video of how it works can be found here.

The feature will only work if you are logged into your Google Profile account, but as the company increasingly becomes the one-stop shop for everything, including e-mail, calendar, video, maps and more, that will almost become standard practice.

De Reu concludes,

The new Google feature will therefore not only have a great impact on SEO itself, but also on a company’s online reputation. Connections on social media platforms will be even more influential in the information we use to make decisions as whether to book a flight with airline A or B, or to trust our savings with bank C or D. Yet another reason to start listening what these contacts are saying online and built relationships that help to give them the best online customer experience you can offer.

Updates

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google might be getting into the social media game directly:

Google Inc. is taking a swipe at Facebook Inc. with a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates shared by their friends.

Google could announce the new Gmail feature as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

Plastic grenades alarm clients. That's one of the examples in this interesting Dallas lawyer's blog about some (U.S.) law firm marketing campaigns that pushed the envelope, perhaps a bit too far…

Most law firms are telling the same story, according to this article, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one from the other.

Developing a unique, identifiable and distinct voice is not easy, but it begins and ends with your ability to conceive and communicate a credible story that resonates at some level with your audience. Unless you can do that, you’ll never be heard above the din of the crowd.

So why can’t most law firms do this?

No reason at all. But when it comes to law firms, there is a negative assumption that partnerships do not agree on much. Or rather, making decisions is too hard – too many opinions, too many egos.

My own firm, Watershed LLP, is new, but we have really worked hard at developing and communicating a story of our own. Time will tell if we have. We are not, of course, alone. Visit Exemplar, Shepherd Law Group and Valorem and you’ll see some excellent examples of how a unique story told with passion, honesty and commitment can resonate.

Of course, being “different” from the crowd gets you labeled a “rebel” as in the case of Patrick Lamb of Valorem and Jay Shepherd of Shepherd Law Group. If by "rebel" we mean someone who resists convention, then I figure it's a fitting label.

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently completed their annual study of the Inc. 500, the fastest-growing private corporations in the U.S.

The Center claims to provide one of the few statistically-significant studies on the use of social media by corporations. The findings show that social media adoption by the Inc. 500 outpaces that of the Fortune 500.

If we can extrapolate the findings into another jurisdiction and the legal industry, this might provide yet another clue about how social media can offer leverage to smaller and mid-size firms. It also suggests an increase of technology, privacy and Internet-related legal issues by clients.

You can download the study for free in Word and PDF.

I was reading Connie Crosby's recent Slaw.ca post National: Canada's Best Law Firm Websites. It described an article in the Canadian Bar Association's National magazine about the best law firm websites in a variety of categories, including blogs.

And then, I came across an article in Legal Blog Watch on Law.com:

As the world goes to hell in a handbasket, the blawgosphere is abuzz with a debate over whether big firm blogs are boring. Blame it on the ABA Journal's Blawg 100, which listed but two blogs from Am Law 100 firms. Not surprising, opines big-firm blogger Mark Herrmann, because big-firm blogs lack voice and are boring. No they're not, responds Kevin O'Keefe, who happens to be in the business of selling blogs to big firms. Yes they are, counters Scott H. Greenfield, adding that it's a good thing, because it weans out the weak blogs and allows the strong to thrive. Yes they are, agrees Carolyn Elefant, because big firm blogs lack palpable passion.

You be the judge.

The December issue of the CBA's National magazine has been released, and includes the article "Canada's best law firm websites" [pdf] by Luigi Benetton. Nine "legal technology professionals" were asked to rank and comment on law firm websites in a number of categories (including yours truly).

I encourage you to read the full article for the analysis, discussion and quotes, but here is the run-down of winners and honourable mentions with links in the various categories:

Big Firm (multi-jurisdictional)

Winner: Ogilvy Renault LLP
Honourable mentions: Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP

Small Firm/Solo

Co-winners: Hyndman Law and Neff Law Office

British Columbia

Winner: Bull, Houser & Tupper LLP
Honourable Mention: Clark Wilson LLP

Prairies

Winner: Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP

Ontario

Winner: Torys LLP
Honourable Mentions: Hicks Morley Hamilton Steward Storie LLP, McMillan LLP

Eastern Canada

Winner: McInnes Cooper
Honourable mention: Cox & Palmer

Quebec

Winner: Legault Joly Thiffault
Honourable mentions: Bélanger Sauvé, Lavery

Blogs
(law blogs created and maintained by law firms)

Co-winners: Davis LLP and Clark Wilson LLP

Multimedia

Winner: Hull & Hull LLP
Honourable mention: Torys LLP

Congratulations to all those selected!