These days, it’s a given that within its collection of web properties, a law firm must have its own website. Every year, the legal industry spends a pretty penny hiring consultants, designers and copywriters to produce a website that will serve as the firm’s online headquarters. 

Much attention is given (at least we hope it is…) to the aesthetics: colour and font choices, graphical images, photos, etc. And if the firm is smart, the actual content of the website is given just as much consideration. But what about the site’s most basic, fundamental element: the domain name? How much thought . . . [more]

For the record, I don’t intend to buy one. At least, not for a few more years and not until the inevitable upgrades, improvements, fixes, and content distribution changes have run their course. But well before the iPad 3.o arrives, the original version will have had a serious impact on the computer industry, on the production and distribution of content, and yes, on the legal profession.

I won’t recap everything that’s been said about the iPad in the mainstream and legal communities — Reid Trautz and The Wired GC have two solid takes — but it’s worth noting that the . . . [more]

Rise Up. Creating your own stable financial future

My column this month is dedicated to personal finances. I greeted the New Year like so many other people I know – with a financial hangover that no aspirin was going to cure. Instead of the doctor I called my new neighbor on Salt Spring Island, financial planning guru Karin Mizgala, MBA, CFP, to share her best tips on how to put money woes to rest for good. Karin co-founded the Women’s Financial Learning Centre and has a financial planning column with the Financial Post.

The foundation to a stable financial future

What is it about lawyers and librarians that we spend so much time thinking, talking and trying to change the way our professions are perceived? A search through the literature of both disciplines reveals what amounts to an obsession. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, given that “client-focused” is a key characteristic of both groups. We worry about how we are perceived because otherwise we run the risk of losing business. If we don’t articulate our value, we’re expendable. 

SLAWyer Jordan Furlong has taken on the task of articulating the value of the legal profession in his Law 21 . . . [more]

Or, perhaps more importantly, where is your client’s stuff? Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a hot topic for a lot of businesses, and the legal profession is not exempt from its impact. It can be defined in a variety of ways and is part of what is commonly known as cloud computing. At its essence, you license access to software that is installed on a computer outside your office and you access it over the Internet. All of the data you enter into the software – e-mail, appointments, letters, depositions – is stored on that remote computer. SaaS services are accessed through . . . [more]

A new year, a new decade, and the twenty-first century is fully underway. What has crept up on me this year is a new sense of the digital age’s full weight. There’s been enough of this sort of reflection about, surely. If my case is any different, it is because it is not about the tremulous future of the book. Sure, I am struck by the relatively frequent Kindle sightings I find myself making as I walk back up the aisle on one flight after another. But those Kindles are only leading to more reading of books, to judge . . . [more]

At the end of each year, I try to find some time to consider growing trends and how each might play out the following year. I’m just beginning that process now, and honestly, I’m not even close to a complete list. For those items I do have, however, I thought it might be interesting to present them in the form of predictions. And then with any luck, others here at Slaw might consider adding an item or two of their own!

So here we go:

More Social in our Enterprise Software: We know some of these features are in . . . [more]

Just 20 short years ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to go to a bookstore. If you wanted music, you had to visit a record store, and if you wanted to read the news, you had to buy a newspaper. Then Amazon.com debuted in 1994, Google was incorporated in 1998 and Napster emerged in 1999. Soon enough, people stopped buying newspapers because news articles were accessible online at no charge, stopped buying records because they could get music from each other freely, and stopped walking into bookstores because they could buy books with one mouse click . . . [more]

It is bound to happen. In trying to move an idea like open access (to research and scholarship) forward, you can reach a point where it seems that such efforts are contributing to the problem, rather than being part of the solution. It would be overstating it to observe that when Moses demanded, “Let my people go,” in ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh’s heart only hardened. Let me just say that at times just before the dawn, there can appear to be little hope of light.

Or so it seemed to me, when the editor at Educational Theory emailed me with . . . [more]

The issue of e-mail management is now old hat for anyone involved in the practice of law. Rather than asking whether lawyers use it, it is a story when lawyers choose not to use it. The world has grown more complicated, though, as we try to figure out where to place our energy integrating new technologies, like Twitter or Google’s Wave, into our work. Even our choices about how to use e-mail have expanded.

E-mail often reminds me of books. It is a technology that, for all its faults, remains a tremendously useful way to share information. More importantly, there . . . [more]

Law firms are deserts of positive feedback. At so many of our law firms no news is good news and critical feedback is the only kind going around.

As a lawyer coach I am a woman with a mission: To help make our law firms better places to work. One of the most powerful tools for accomplishing this is something called positive acknowledgement.

Positive acknowledgement is about giving the gift our attention by recognizing when someone has done something well. Positive acknowledgement works when you notice someone’s strengths or what they have accomplished and you tell them that you have . . . [more]

At the end of September, four members of the Ontario Government Libraries Council (OGLC) presented a workshop at Showcase Ontario, the Ontario government’s enormous technology and information conference. The session was about how to use non-traditional media such as blogs and Twitter for current awareness, and included two practical case studies from the Office of the Fire Marshal and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Registrations for the session topped 400. Since then, various members of the panel have been asked to make presentations to other audiences, to contribute content to articles reporting on social media use in government, and . . . [more]