A tweet this morning from Heather Colman alerted me to the Building Smarter Organizations event happening today in Toronto.

If you are like me, and you are not in Toronto attending this event, you can still participate through the web.

There is a Linked In Group and a #smartorg twitter stream. There are plenty of concepts being shared through tweets that will make you think. Examples:

Mark Federman ‏@MarkFederman
Great Drucker quote: Mgmt mostly consists of making it difficult for people to do their work. #smartorg

Heather Colman‏ @HeatherColman
More bureaucratic mgmt= less engaged staff #smartorg

It is worth your . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I've developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Keeping on top of e-mail on your smartphone helps you maximize productivity during "down time"on the road and minimize the amount of time you're spending managing your inbox when you're at the office. A smartphone keyboard, however, is only really suitable for composing short messages, so you want . . . [more]

It's astonishing how much has changed in my five years of attending ABA TECHSHOW.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2008, Rian Gauvreau and I launched the beta of Clio, which at the time was not only the first of a new generation of web-based practice management systems, but the one of the first of any web-based product to be exhibited at TECHSHOW.

At this first TECHSHOW, Clio prompted both admiration and fear among attendees: half the visitors to our booth were thrilled about the prospect of putting their data in the cloud (by the way, back then "the cloud" wasn't even a . . . [more]

There's not much that the large law firms have as an advantage over mid-size and small firms. Their bloated overhead, high-priced rent, and unnecessary bureaucracy, all translates into higher operating costs passed on to clients.

There is one thing which does hold large law firms apart from the rest, and that's the decades of institutional knowledge which is internally accumulated. As much as the law is constantly changing and evolving, much of it still remains the same, or is easily updated from precedents that have recently become obsolete. This realm, of internal legal memos and precedents, is the area where . . . [more]

When signing up for online services or newsletters, most of us feel some level of anxiety about handing over our closely-guarded e-mail address to an unknown and potentially untrustworthy third party. To work around this problem, some create "throw-away" e-mail addresses that can given out indiscriminately, but having to deal with multiple e-mail addresses can be a significant headache.

Gmail (and Google Apps) offers support for a more convenient solution to this problem: an instant "throwaway" e-mail address can be created by appending a "+" sign, followed by any combination of words or numbers, to your e-mail address. E-mails sent to this address . . . [more]

There's a series of three articles over on Law.com's Law Technology News that you might find interesting. D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel for Kia Motors America, came to the realization that the billable hour was often spent in . . . well, unnecessary ways. Particularly:

[T]echnological incompetence is endemic to the [legal] profession; and the quantity of resources wasted on busywork is shameful.

As a consequence he devised a test, an audit, of potential outside counsel for Kia, and has run it nine times. His articles (The Origin of the Outside Counsel Tech Audit, Kia Motors Tests Outside . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I've developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Most months I spend at least a few days the air, traveling from Vancouver to one of the many destinations Clio's business brings me. Surprisingly, I find the time on the plane to be some of my most productive, as I'm without the myriad distractions of the office . . . [more]

The methods for producing the results of research have been on the top of my to-do list. Perhaps my knowledge management hat is shading my outlook. I believe that an efficient, sustainable and reusable work product is a very important aspect of legal research.

My staff and I create memos to document our research output – not memos analyzing legal issues as that is a lawyer task, memos that contain a report of what information we find, how we found it, and often permanent links to that information. One problem that has evaded solution is the ability to link to . . . [more]

Chris Dale, a lawyer-turned-eDisclosure-consultant based in the UK, has taken my two-post series from December on search inside the legal organization (see here and here) and applied the thinking specifically to eDiscovery. In his post Why Don't We Just Use Google for eDiscovery? he suggests that the complexity of using litigation support tools–with concept searching, de-duplication, e-mail threading, clustering and predictive coding–has lawyers asking why not just use Google, or something like Google?

He gets to to the crux of the problem in this notion:

If the primary point is that Google does not purport to give you everything

. . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I've developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the second in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

We've all done the favour of making an introduction over e-mail. What often follows is a string of e-mails that bear no relevance to the introducer:

Jim: Bob, please meet Alice. You should definitely get to know each other; please take it from here!
Bob: Alice, . . . [more]

David and I both touched on Google Glass in April of last year, the company's new project to push computing technology into our eyewear. A new video, released yesterday, offers some additional insight into what it might be like to wear such a product. [embedded below]

These video clips are obviously targeting the capture of lifestyle moments, but with respect to lawyers, I've been wondering if there could be any value in the courtroom? In particular, whether enhanced "team communication" could be had when larger teams are involved. We sometimes see the second chair role using laptops, exchanging email, . . . [more]

I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I've developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the first in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

First up is creating a "Robots" folder. This is a nearly foolproof system for easily separating e-mails sent from real humans from machine-generated e-mails sent by automated systems (including newsletters, alerts from software systems, Twitter notifications, etc.)

To determine which e-mails should be sent to your "Robots" . . . [more]