Netlawblog

Resource for Small Firms & Solos

Law.com's Small Firm Business page is a promising new resource. The article on remote Internet access has some good advice.

Webinar on Portals & KM

Thanks to Ron Friedmann for the tip about an interesting-looking Webinar on the use of portals by law firms. The online event is scheduled for Wednesday, June 2, 2004 at 12:00 PM EST.

There has to be promise in a program that asks a question like this:

"If portals are the solution, what is the problem they solve?"

Lawyers & IM

Robert Ambrogi's LawSites comments on the use of Instant Messaging as a productivity booster:

My company, Jaffe Associates, operates "virtually" -- our staff work out of home offices located throughout the world. All that connects us are telephones and the Internet. IM is a critical piece of our corporate backbone. When I first joined the company, I was skeptical about IM. Although I'd used it to a limited extent on internal corporate networks, I'd avoided it like the plague as an Internet tool, fearing constant disruption. Instead, I have found it to be invaluable. Got a quick question for a co-worker? IM is faster than e-mail or phone. Need to steer a conference call in another direction? An IM lets you discretely send a comment to one of the participants. Miss having an office watercooler? Use IM to chat about last night's American Idol. Best of all, there seems to be an unwritten code among the people in my company not to overuse IM. I am not bombarded by pop-up smiley faces all day. My coworkers use IM sparingly and respectfully.

Bob concludes:

Although I have read of lawyers using IM with clients, I suspect we are a long, long way from IM becoming a common method of communication between professionals and clients.

It seems like the best way for lawyers to start with IM is by using it to give key clients better availability to their lawyer, as a way of adding value.

Lasica Reviews Newsreaders

J.D. Lasica has an article on RSS and newsreaders that includes some reviews, "how-to's" and "why's). Thanks to beSpacific for the link.

Friedman on The Zippie Threat

Outside the Beltway quotes NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman on "Zippies," talented, educated Asian workers in low-wage countries and their threat to the jobs of skilled U.S. workers, including lawyers:

The potential speed and scale of this outsourcing phenomenon make its potential impact enormous and unpredictable. As we enter a world where the price of digitizing information--converting it into little packets of ones and zeros and then transmitting it over high-speed data networks--falls to near zero, it means the vaunted "death of distance" is really here. And that means that many jobs you can now do from your house-- whether data processing, reading an X-ray, or basic accounting or lawyering--can now also be done from a zippie's house in India or China.

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Bloglines Tutorial

If somebody as sharp as Ron Friedmann likes Bloglines, it must be pretty good. At LawLibTech Cindy Chick has a good tutorial on using the popular Bloglines online RSS service.

Ghost-written Blogs

ethicalEsq? suggests: that "[P]ackaged weblogs and third-party-provided content -- especially if generalized to be relevant across many jurisdictions -- will be far less nutritious and tasty than a well-done, hands-on weblog created and maintained by the owner-editor, whose sweat and blood and personality are ever-present, and who is more likely to use the best ingredients."

There's no disagreement with that proposition, but a few observations are in order:

• While recognizing the limitations of third-party written materials, especially in the blog context, I believe they definitely could be part of an effective marketing program.
• Perhaps more important, we have to be careful to distinguish between tactical questions (what will work and what won't) and ethical questions. If someone wants to experiment with what may in the end turn out to be an ineffective method of marketing, let him be free to do so, but it is wrong to imply that he is unethical in some way.

As Mao would say, "Let a thousand flowers bloom." Blogs have enormous potential. We don't need self-appointed naysayers telling lawyers who want to experiment what they can and can't do. Rebecca Blood did not discover everything a blog could be.

Religion and the Law Blog

Michigan lawyer Sean Fosmire has a welcome new blog named Logos that deals with Religion and the Law. It's an excellent example of a sharp-looking, relatively inexpensive blog that was probably relatively easy to set up using TypePad.

The blog's best attraction? Fosmire's insights and inquiring mind.

This blog is a good illustration of a point made in "Blogs as a Disruptive Technology." Blogs make the mechanism of mass communicating transparent. It's easy for anyone, even a technically sophisticated but pressed-for-time lawyer like Fosmire, to come up with an acceptable-looking blog. The welcome result?

Web sites will compete less on the basis of who has the biggest wallet to hire consultants, and more on who has the best ideas--a welcome development.

beSpacific: MVP Site for April

beSpacific, Sabrina Pacifici's blog, is the Newtlawtools MVP Site for April. beSpacific is a model blog in several ways, including its demonstration of how a blog's headlines can be used synergistically with an existing site, in this case the conventional site LLRX.com, a previous Netlawtools Site of the Year winner.

Sophisticated software like Movable Type, Sabrina's choice, makes things like this fairly easy technically, but only a handful of pioneers like Sabrina have begun to explore the possibilities of blogs. Sabrina has been an Internet pioneer for years, and she continues to innovate.

Different Ideas of What A Blog Could Be

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the use of blogs for lawyer marketing. The main reason some people see this as an issue worth arguing about is differing expectations of what a blog can be:

• Some people think blogs are/should be only Rebecca Blood-type forums for the expressions of sometimes idiosyncratic personal opinion--the form in which they first attracted widespread notice.
• Others see blog software as a protean sort of platform that can be used for any number of purposes.

For what I think is a push-the-envelope effort to advance the latter proposition, here's the URL for a site I developed on a volunteer basis for the Interagency Ethics Council, a group of federal lawyers whose jobs involve dealing with misconduct by federal employees:

http://iec.typepad.com

(will be accessible at http://www.iecjournal.org as soon as I figure out Godaddy.com's arcane "CNAME" domain mapping system).

This uses blog technology, but it's not really a "blog" as most people know it. It's more like a cross between a newsletter and an extranet with private sections (also using blog technology).

Some people like the blog scene and the blog culture the way it is, and they are uncomfortable with the thought of change. My best, friendly advice to them?

Get over it.

New uses of blogs have the potential for widespread benefits that will supplement, not supplant the options currently open to us, just as commercial conventional web sites supplemented, but did not replace smaller, more personal conventional web sites.

Net As Marketing Tool

I pointed out previously the parallels of recent criticisms of blogs as marketing tools with the criticisms of conventional web sites some years ago. In a comment to a previous post on Realistic Blog Expectations EthicalEsq provides another example of deja vu questions:

Is there any demonstrated connection between the "success" of a weblog and the actual attraction of real, live, paying clients? And is that connection, if any, strong enough to warrant devoting significant time and resources in the hope of creating one of those very rare successful weblogs?

If you substitute the words "web site" for "weblog," this are exactly the same questions I would have expected to hear at a CLE program in 1995. Such "questions" displayed a lack of understanding of how Internet marketing worked back then, and that's no less true today.

In 1995 few if any law firm web sites were attracting clients in large numbers. The phenomenon was in its infancy, just the same way blogs are today.

Using a blog for marketing is not the same as running an ad for Campbell's soup, and then tracking the number of orders from grocery stories the next week. Marketing success with a conventional web site--or a blog--will seldom if ever happen instantaneously.

Lawyers are just beginning to explore the possibilities of blogs for marketing. Most will fail. Some will succeed, like May It Please The Court. A few will be extremely successful.

Serious New Internet Security Flaw

Oh how I wish this Salon story was an April Fool's Day joke:

Researchers found a serious security flaw that left core Internet technology vulnerable to hackers, prompting a secretive effort by international governments and industry experts in recent weeks to prevent global disruptions of Web surfing, e-mails and instant messages.

Ambrogi's 60 Sites in 60 Minutes

Bob Ambrogi's 60 Sites in 60 Minutes post links to his selections for Techshow 2004, and some archives from this ABA Techshow tradition.

Realistic Blog Expectations

My Shingle is understandably concerned about unrealistic expectations about blogs for marketing:

My primary concern with all of the hoopla over lawyer blogging is that I fear it may draw lawyers to blogging for the wrong reasons - for the promise of clients that is purveyed by some of the experts quoted in David's piece. The false expectations can cause lawyers to become discouraged about blogging efforts and give up too soon - which slows the spread of the blog trend rather than hastening its adaptation.

I agree completely, which is why I concluded an Internet Roundtable panel discussion last August with this assessment:

Blogs have enormous potential, but it’s important to keep the phenomenon in perspective. I think we’re going to see another instance of the “80/20 Rule.” It will probably shake out something like this: About 80% of all lawyer web logs will fail. The remaining 20% will have greater or lesser degrees of success, mostly modest. One per cent or so, maybe less, will be extremely successful. However, some of that 1% will be so successful that they will make their owners very, very glad they got into the blogging game.

Does that sound discouraging? It wasn't meant to. It's meant as my best objective judgment.

Here's the interesting part, though: By my standards, the failure rate for conventional lawyer web sites is much higher than 80%, and the "extremely successful" rate is even lower than it is for blogs.

In other words, it's not so much that blogs (or web sites built on sophisticated blog technology) are a guaranteed route to marketing success. Quite the contrary. It's just that they are much more promising than conventional web sites.

Dangers of Google Ads

Economist Brad DeLong has some comments on problems with Google ads that could raise ethical implications for lawyers.

Skeptical About Lawyer Blogs?

EthicalEsq has some questions about the use of blogs for legal marketing (Bag and Baggage has more):

1. Is it unethical for lawyers to use marketing material written by third parties on blogs?
2. Do blogs actually generate new clients?
3. Are blog-for-lawyer vendors overstating their services' effectiveness?

The first question is particularly easy: It is not necessarily unethical for lawyers to use materials written by third parties in their marketing efforts. Paper versions of such materials have been around for many years from a variety of vendors, including the American Bar Association. If lawyers can use such material in the form of paper newsletters, then there is no apparent reason why they can't be used on blogs.

The other questions can best be understood by putting them into historical perspective. They are merely new versions of the same questions that were raised in the 1990s about lawyer marketing via conventional web sites. In the mid-90s many lawyers, probably most, felt exactly the same way about marketing via conventional web sites that today's skeptics feel about marketing via blogs.

The conventional wisdom today about conventional web sites is that a good law firm web site is an asset. Many view them as a necessity. As lawyers gradually come to better understand the advantages of blogs, we will probably see a similar sea change in attitudes toward them. This is particularly true as lawyers discover the much lower out of pocket costs of blogs, which cost only scores or hundreds of dollars, by contrast with the thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars many law firms spend on conventional web sites.

There is one difference about the way today's skeptics are disseminating their message, and it is quite instructive. The skeptics I heard in the 90s expressed themselves in low tech ways, like asking questions from the audience during presentations, with the more sophisticated ones posting occasional mailing list messages. By contrast, today's skeptics have found a powerful megaphone--blogs.

Today's blog skeptics are better able to get out their message, precisely because blogs are cheap, easy, and effective at distributing information.

These are exactly the reasons why blogs have such great potential as marketing tools.

There is much, much more that could usefully be said on this topic and I'll be returning to it later.

When Is Unselfishness Rational?

The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Free Rider Problem are two classic issues that crosscut the fields of economics, game theory and other academic disciplines. They both deal with the relationship between cooperation and selfishness:

When it it rational to behave unselfishly?

My work on two team blogs, eLawyering Blog and the IEC Journal has caused me to think about these issues in the context of organizing and motivating teams of volunteer contributors. DennisKennedy pointed me to an article with some like-minded thoughts from David Maizenberg of Airblogger:

Why does all this matter to lawyers? Well, with all the various forums and groups everywhere beckoning for attention, some lawyers might be asking themselves: Is it a worthwhile use of my time to participate in volunteer, uncompensated knowledge sharing? ...

Which brings up one other issue: freeloaders. What stops people from reaping the work of others but contributing nothing in return?

I'll be writing more about these issues as I further develop my thoughts.

Blog vs. Conventional Web Site

Jeff Beard has a typically well-thought-out summary of the reasons why a lawyer might want to use a blog instead of a conventional web site.

How Appealing Snatched Ul

The American Constitution Society Weblog notes that Howard Bashman is moving his How Appealing blog to the web site of Legal Affairs magazine.

Calpundit was similarly snatched up by Washington Monthly. This trend makes a lot of sense for both sides. Popular bloggers can attract audiences that dwarf those of most paper publications, exposing them to a whole new market. I expect to see more such mergers.