Twitter is undeniably the social media darling of 2009. From celebrity stalking to Oprah coverage, the monopoly of micro-blogging is now pushing 10 million active users. The legal profession is equally aboard this bandwagon, with adoption numbers rising fast. Where tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook have traditionally helped to create value from existing relationships, Twitter is fast gaining its reputation as a tool to help generate new relationships. 

So Twitter gets your foot in the door? A great tool for business development, right? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is a very lawyeresque ‘it depends’. While deriving business value . . . [more]

If I was honest with you, I would admit that I read with glee the flurry of news reports noting that Facebook and other Web 2.0 media (such as Twitter, Yammer, and Friendfeed) had surpassed email as the preferred form of communication particularly for teens and young adults today. If you pardon the pun, the inner geek in me let out a loud Yahoo!

For years I have been struggling with the notion that email had become the place to work for many lawyers. It seemed that a bad technology had taken root to the point that it would be . . . [more]

….and so once again, best wishes from all of us on the faculty to you, the class of 2012, as your journey through law school begins.

Before I yield the microphone, I have some news to share both with you and with my colleagues: that little lottery ticket I bought on a lark at the corner store last month turned out to be the sole winner of the $6.7 million jackpot. When the dean returns to her office, she’ll find my graceful letter of retirement on her desk.

And so, as this is my last official function here, and as . . . [more]

As we move deeper into 2009 one thing I know for sure is that many lawyers, law firm staff members and clients are facing deep uncertainty. So many of us feel we have lost control; that larger forces are at work. At this time more then ever it is important to come to grips with what we can influence and impact.

We all have a leadership role to play in our organizations. When we catch ourselves complaining about the system, about how decisions are made and how things are done it is a good time to come to grips with . . . [more]

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the American Association of Publishers had sent a letter [PDF ] to then President-elect Obama in December opposing the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, which requires any NIH-funded researchers to deposit a copy of what they have discovered and published in a publicly accessible archive. The AAP publishers association holds that the NIH Policy infringes on their business rights, insofar as it grants the public a right to this publicly funded work, and in support of their objections, Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, has reintroduced into Congress the questionably entitled . . . [more]

One of the more interesting transitions the web has brought to legal marketing communication is the greater acceptance of informal lawyer commentary. Where formal business writing and legal analysis were once considered the only output for marketing materials, the advent of blogging, and now micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter), has allowed lawyers to create more approachable online personas and to simplify legal writing in a way that appeals to a wider demographic of readers.

This trend of informal communication, while liberating in many respects, doesn’t come without a few pitfalls. One that has become more evident recently, occurs with the automated routing . . . [more]

Last summer, I was asked by a client at a small administrative tribunal to help with an interesting project. Over the organization’s 20-year history, it had accumulated a number of “issues files”, which document the evolution of its thinking on a range of questions and problems which had arisen over time. The collection was a valuable store of corporate knowledge and history, but it was difficult to know where to look for a particular piece of information or to know what questions might be answered by using these files. Could we recommend a way of cataloguing the contents of these . . . [more]

My legal research career has taken me to several different settings in different cities or jurisdictions, and one thing I have found interesting is that there has always been a stronger emphasis on some tools in each of my workplaces. For this reason, I decided to write a series of columns that will address particular research materials or sources of law or legal information that, for one reason or another, I found myself using more in some settings than in others and that generally might be otherwise overlooked as excellent resources. This month, the column addresses law reform bodies and . . . [more]

“Are we looking at a second Depression? I don’t think so,” said Paul Krugman, NewYork Times columnist and Nobel-Prize-winning economist, during his luncheon address to the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association’s World Summit [PDF] last week in Vancouver. Then he added: “A month ago, I would’ve said, ‘Absolutely not.’ But today, I’m going to say, ‘I don’t think so.'”

That was the standout quote for me from an economic assessment so pessimistic that at its end, Krugman admitted: “I wish I had some positive things to tell you.” But aside from, as he said, having “people in Washington I can now . . . [more]

Enough doom and gloom already! The New Year had barely started when the business section of my local newspaper offered readers a cynical New Year’s message: “The good news is that 2009 is only 12 months long.”

Many of my friends and colleagues have been remarking that the recession and ensuing panic is only being made worse by the media’s endless barrage of negative messages and news stories.

I have been searching for a positive spin to this negativity and found the answer in a blog post by Marshall Goldsmith, business coach: “We all need to think like entrepreneurs.”

I . . . [more]

Open access is an initiative that seeks to find ways of making the journal literature published online freely available to readers. It is having the effect of not only taking us a step closer to the ideal of universal access to the knowledge needed to advance knowledge, but it is also altering, if every so slightly, the traditional means by which reputations are established and maintained within academic life.

About twenty percent of the research literature published today ends up open access, whether through authors archiving their published work in their library’s open access repository (with the publishers’ permission) or . . . [more]

“Will there be food?” is the usual response to any invitation to attend a library event. Attendance always seems to be higher if it is promoted as having refreshments. My column this time is devoted to the various ways in which libraries gain attention by literally dangling cookies in front of their audiences.

I remember putting together a library open house some years ago. I deliberately chose Valentine’s Day as the day of the event, which I called the Library Love-In (yes, I know). The invitation went out via e-mail, with the subject line: “Chocolate”. Attendance was remarkably good, and . . . [more]