There’s an interesting article today on Law.com about what impact the recession is having on the situation of law librarians in the United States. “Law Librarians: ‘No More Sacred Cows’” by Alan Cohen is based on the 2009 American Lawyer survey of law librarians. To see the actual findings of the full survey you’ll have to be a subscriber, but Cohen hits the high spots for you.

Library budgets have shrunk in 46% of cases, compared to 9% in 2008 / The expectation from the firms is that every resource must show a decent ROI. / New software

The increasing influence of social media has not just been noticed by traditional print publications.

CNW Group (formerly Canada News Wire) is Canada’s largest source for press releases and media information. They’re also known for their audio and video webcasting abilities, so they’re always on the cutting edge for technological developments.

One of their more exciting projects recently has been the Social Media Release, which allows for text to be augmented by more rich content including hyperlinks, dowloadable images and logos, audio and video.

You know the time has come for law firms to adopt social media when they . . . [more]

Michael Carabash, a recent Osgoode graduate who has set up with his own practice and marketing services, just released a free online book for legal marketing.

I’ve been sharing some ideas with him and Garry Wise recently, and there are a couple of projects in works that may be interesting.

Although Carabash’s book covers what many of us would consider the basics, there are still lots of lawyers coming up speed. The U.K. government is paying £160,000 a year for these specialty services.

You can get the book for free here. . . . [more]

Another year of interview insanity has come to an end and my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has happily matched with an outstanding candidate who we have very high hopes for in the 2010-2011 articling year. While this fact on its own is likely of little interest to Slaw readers, the technophile lawyers who follow this blog on a regular basis may be intrigued to hear how twitter – for the first time in our firm’s history – became unwittingly a very central part of our interview process.

Having started a legal twitter feed some months ago (www.twitter.com/prutschi), I . . . [more]

Having just passed the halfway point of 2009, we crunched the numbers on the most popular year-to-date article and resource downloads from the LAWPRO and practicePRO websites. There are a few new additions to the top ten, and past favourites have swapped places. The updated most popular LAWPRO/practicePRO downloads list appears here.

It looks as if more lawyers are looking at their firm finances, as the always popular sample law firm budget spreadsheet jumps up to become the most downloaded resource over the last six months. The sample law firm business plan came in at #9.

Peg Duncan’s amazing . . . [more]

The latest issue of Law Practice Today (www.lawpracticetoday.org), the ABA Law Practice Management’s webzine was published today. This blockbuster issue has all sorts of great articles for the “suddenly solo” lawyer. This is new lawyer starting out as a solo because they didn’t get a job at a firm, or someone leaving a firm to continue a practice on their own. Many of the top names in law practice management have contributed articles to this issue: Dennis Kennedy, Jim Calloway, Andy Atkins and Mark Robertson.

Read the Law Practice Today “Suddenly solo” issue here.

Law Practice Today is the . . . [more]

For a limited time, ABA Publishing is offering a special 20% discount on all ABA titles. Do your shopping before July 24, 2009 as this offer expires on that date. To get this special pricing order online and enter source code PEP9MJPM

The 20% discount applies to all ABA books and you can find a complete listing of them at www.ababooks.org. Non-ABA members get 20% off of list price. ABA Section members get 20% off the special reduced member price of any section they belong to, and 20% off the list price for books from sections they aren’t members . . . [more]

I have been “gone fishing” for the last few days so most of the week’s developments were in a catch-all post that ranged from Sanofi’s further branching out into generics to a Dalhousie study on global fisheries management.

There were a couple of big catches this week: 

• Venture-captialists seem to have reeled in some new funds — the bills in Congress to reauthorize the SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) program allow companies backed by VCs to participate.
• And Ogilvy Renault (my home-away-from-home) landed the Golden Law Award as Canada’s best law firm for the second year

June’s issue of Canadian Lawyer just came out, with a great article by Glenn Kauth on using web tactics for client development.

There’s a few familiar faces (including yours truly), and some familiar platforms.

But what’s interesting about the piece is the rationale provided for why more big firms are not jumping into it. As a cost-effective strategy, some of these firms indicate that most of their clients are not heavily utilizing social media.

In my opinion, this misses the point slightly. Not only do bigger firms have the ability to produce more comprehensive and polished approaches to social media, . . . [more]

Rupert White of the U.K. Law Society’s Gazette has a couple of articles on law firms’ use of Wikipedia: “Top 50 firms that get Wikipedia – and those that don’t” and “Why the world’s favourite encyclopedia matters.” His basic position is that a law firm should have a page on Wikipedia and should groom it regularly to make certain it’s accurate, full (definitely not “fulsome,” as he has it!) and up-to-date.

I’m less convinced that a Wikipedia page is a necessity. After all, if your firm comes up top in a Google search for key components . . . [more]

Take the opportunity to read Dennis Kennedy’s May piece in the ABA’s Law Practice Today, Legal Technology Trends for 2009, this year’s version of his annual predictions and advice. I’m stealing none of his thunder if I tell you that his eight trends are:

1. Technology budgets get decimated
2. Making do with what you have or doing more with less
3. The mobile phone as platform
4. Looking to the cloud
5. Using tech to get the word out and the money in
6. Focus on client-focused technology
7. E-Discovery in still waters
8. The perfect storm for collaboration

For one thing you’re going to want . . . [more]

Thanks to a Law Times Tweet, I learned that the entertaining peek into the lives of summer students at Cassels Brock & Blackwell is back in business. You may remember this blog from Connie’s post last summer.

Having summer students spend time blogging about their experiences probably seems like a crazy thing many. I think this is a great marketing initiative, both for attracting potential students, and also to the wider community. How many of you saw the tweet from Law Times – a main stream publication? How likely is it that this news will show up in . . . [more]