I have been following an interesting blog and twitter feed (@LawSync) prepared by LawSync out of Sheffield Hallam University. LawSync has put the “wow” back into law school and is a project of that university’s Department of Law, Criminology, and Community Justice. According to its website:

The name of this project reflects our desire to see a better synchronisation between law as an academic discipline and professional practice, the expectations both of legal professionals and users of legal services, and regulatory influences. Law schools, law students, and legal professionals need to keep in sync with market needs and

Hell hath no fury like a scorned Internet, as Charles Carreon is finding out the hard way.

First, Carreon sued online comic the Oatmeal on behalf of his client FunnyJunk.com over a blog post published a year ago wherein the Oatmeal’s founder, Matt Inman, criticized FunnyJunk for hosting copies of his comic without proper attribution. Carreon and his client accused Inman of defamation and demanded $20,000 in damages.

Inman’s response was, predictably, to publicly mock Carreon and FunnyJunk in a blog post detailing the ludicrousness of Carreon’s accusations and. Furthermore, Inman responds to the demand of $20,000 in damages by . . . [more]

There is so much talk these days about the business of law: rainmaking, marketing, business development, etc. All of this in pursuit of landing “clients”. Truth be told, it is actually quite easy to land a client. Many lawyers find to their surprise months or even years later that some casual encounter is actually deemed to constitute a “solicitor-client relationship” or at least the makings of one.

This has huge ramifications for a lawyer in terms of the law of conflicts of interest, the ethical duty of confidentiality and the client’s substantive right of solicitor-client privilege. It can also be . . . [more]

The vast majority of web searches continue to be conducted through Google, estimated at about 66.4% of all searches in early 2012. Google is understandably concerned about losing its market dominance. In December 2011, Microsoft’s upstart search engine Bing surpassed Yahoo and become the second most used search engine worldwide.

The only way Google can retain its lead is by continuing to provide the most relevant information to users, so it constantly rewrites its code, as with the new Penguin update that I mentioned here. Although Wikpedia has over 365 million readers and is ranked one of the top . . . [more]

Google makes up to 500 changes a year to its algorithm. The newest Google Algorithm change was released on April 24, 2012 and was dubbed Penguin. This update focuses on webspam and eliminating black hat SEO tricks, but it’s likely that other changes to the previous Panda algorithm this year will also be referred to in pop culture as Penguin as well. Web analysts have been closely watching the effects of these changes over the past few weeks.

Entire industries are thriving primarily off of search engine results, and it’s only a matter of time before law firms . . . [more]

On Friday online legal services provider LegalZoom filed for a $120m Initial Public Offering. For those unfamiliar with LegalZoom (likely only our Canadian readers, shielded from the ubiquitous LegalZoom advertising in the US), Richard Granat has authored an excellent series of posts on his eLawyering Redux blog.

As with Facebook’s S-1 filing from a few months ago, LegalZoom’s S-1 filing offers up a wealth of information on the company’s progress to date:

• LegalZoom has served approximately two million customers over the last 10 years;
• In 2011 consumers placed 490,000 orders on the site;
• 2011 revenues were $156m, up

Legal marketers must have a little common ground with those who do public relations in Universities — taking important (yet questionably dry) material, and making it both understandable and interesting. And perhaps more important, fine tuning the message presentation for each intended audience.

Case in point, a recent study that came out of Wake Forest comparing pupil dilation response on left-side vs right-side photos (for those interested — your left side is always golden according to the research).

Let’s start with the PubMed link above, and look at the title: Emotive hemispheric differences measured in real-life portraits using pupil diameter . . . [more]

This past week Dr. Michael Rachlis launched Doctors for Fair Taxation, calling for the top wealth earners in Canada to be taxed even further. Given that physicians are often prominent members of this tax bracket, the initiative attracted lots of attention.

Rachlis suggested to Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom that this could inspire a “Lawyers for Fair Taxation.” Walkom responded with skepticism, which to me was incredibly telling of the way that lawyers continue to be perceived in society.

The rationale behind Rachlis’ group is that income inequalities lead to poorer health indicators, and that the decline of . . . [more]

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 . . . [more]

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.