For a variety of reasons, some law firm websites may not have reached the top slot in Google, Bing, or Ask. There is competition for keywords, and the search engines change their algorithms frequently. Without having a team of folks tweaking the site, there will likely be some ebbs and flows in visibility in search results. However, there are a number of ways to boost visibility on the web so that whether someone finds the firm or attorney through social media, a directory, the website, or a professional nameplate site, you can get the message out about the firm’s professionals . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

A small item on the CBC Books website caught my attention the other day. Entitled The life of a prison librarian, it describes the unique experience of Québec-born writer Jean Charbonneau who has been working as a prison librarian in Maryland:

It would be a strange experience for most, but Charbonneau found a calling right away.

“I had the feeling that what was I doing there as a librarian was important,” he said in The Current’s [a CBC radio show] documentary “Shelf Life,” adding, “I don’t how many inmates have told me that they have never read a book

[This column was written with the asstance of Meredith James.]

One of the challenges in environmental work is the inconsistent and erratic relationship between law and science. To be effective, environmental policy needs to be based on good science, which is why current government cuts to key environmental research are so harmful, in both the short and the long run. But even when good science exists, the law struggles to properly incorporate it, and sometimes science can’t (yet?) answer the questions the courts are interested in. What should happen then?

Criminal cases

The courts sometimes seem to have a poor . . . [more]

The more I discuss change in the legal profession, the more the same question is asked of me: what will drive the change than many in the profession agree is long overdue. And when I say “many in the profession,” I mean young lawyers. The established, older set of partners in charge of many of this country’s firms have no reason to change what they are doing and are simply eyeing the finish line of their careers. Add to that, the fact that large established firms are weighed down with legacy IT systems, as well as an antiquated partnership and . . . [more]

The issue of succession for small firms and solo practitioners has received a significant amount of attention of late in Canada. The attention stems from a demographic reality that sees the majority of lawyers in many provinces in the country in excess of 50 years old and a general recognition that a substantial amount of these lawyers have not adequately planned for succession. Concerns regarding succession are especially poignant for small firms and solo practitioners who often suffer from a lack of resources to address succession issues but who are the most at risk for negative consequences due to an . . . [more]

One of the strangest habits of traditional law firms (which really means most law firms, if we’re being honest) is the tendency to take one of the firm’s most productive lawyers out of a practice he or she loves and appoint that lawyer to manage the firm.

It’s hard to fathom why we do this. We place these lawyers into a management role for which they were never trained, a role whose long-term strategic focus is directly at odds with lawyers’ natural tendency to dwell on details and solve the present problem. Then, once the managing partner’s term is complete, . . . [more]

You might have read about LawMeets: It was profiled this week in an ABA Journal news item as the subject of a $500,000 US National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to its developer, entrepreneur and corporate and securities law Professor Karl Okamoto of Drexel University.

Professor Okamoto is also Director of the Business and Entrepreneurship Law Program at Drexel and founder of ApprenNet, which operates the LawMeets venture. The new LawMeets is an online experiential learning initiative, the virtual evolution of Prof. Okamoto’s live National Transactional LawMeet program, which – live or online – might . . . [more]

♬ Now you need to publish every movement And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish But most of us are actually quite refined
We validate each other’s insecurities And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness And try to self-promote without being caught
You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…♬

Lyrics and music by Ben Walker.

On Monday Aug 13, the Canadian Judges Forum together with the Canadian Bar Association at the Canadian Legal Conference in Vancouver BC, held a . . . [more]

First, an important proviso. Numbers don’t actually matter.

And yet we all obsess over metrics, especially law firms trying to determine some form of ROI for entering the social media space. Largely by default and in part by design, the leading site emerging for tracking social media influence is Klout. Other sites include PeerIndex and Kred.

CEO and Klout Founder Joe Fernandez  told Forbes,

Klout is basically your social credit score. Consumers should care because it affects the way employers, companies and everyone looks at your ability to spread information as a critical part of the

Now when you search Google Patents you’ll be querying a database that includes European patents. Even more useful perhaps is Google’s just-introduced attempt to find “prior art”. Here’s a description of the process from the Google Inside Search blog:

The Prior Art Finder identifies key phrases from the text of the patent, combines them into a search query, and displays relevant results from Google Patents, Google Scholar, Google Books, and the rest of the web. You’ll start to see the blue “Find prior art” button on individual patent pages starting today.

A prior art search produces Google’s pick of the . . . [more]

A number of blogs in the United Kingdom are reporting that guidelines regarding blogging by members of the judiciary in England and Wales have come down from the Judicial Office. See here for a blog article found on The Guardian‘s website that recaps the situation and provides an interesting commentary.

According to these guidelines, which have not been made available to the public, when blogging, magistrates and judges must not identify themselves as members of the judiciary and must avoid making comments that could damage the public’s confidence in the judiciary.

This last part is not particularly surprising. Judges . . . [more]