practicehacker

Social Media Law Student

Change in the profession is more likely to bubble up from new lawyers than to descend from partners at law firms. To start with here is a list of law schools that have decided to join the national dialogue on Twitter – let me know if you know of others:

Harvard

Marquette

New York University

Pace

University of Chicago

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of San Diego

Washburn

Yale Law Library

law firm layoffs continue ...

I just discovered a blog (I refuse to say “blawg”) called Lawshucks that’s done a really impressive job of tracking the carnage created by big-firm layoffs (now a weekly announcement). Here is a set of quick links to their well-designed graphical representations

• 2009 Year-to-date Charts
• Rolling 12 Months
• Top Ten Firms by Layoff Count
• Chart of all 2008 Layoffs, chronological, grouped by month
• Methodology
• Raw Data
• Credits

Follow this link to see the whole post.  Once you sneak a peek you may wonder, as I did, whether these high-profile layoffs are merely normal attrition; or the result of outsourcing; the economic downturn; an excuse to shed sub-standard performers? Or were there really just too many lawyers to begin with? Maybe these big firms have really been bottom-heavy, lumbering organizations and law schools should have applied the breaks years ago when everybody in the industry saw this coming? Any chance of that?

Today's Assignment ...

As many of you know I write a column for TechnoLawyer with Ross “the Boss” Kodner.  SmallLaw, previously “Crazy Mazy” … long story, is designed to highlight small firm and solo practice issues. I have always contributed based on what I thought readers  ought to know and assumed that, being a sole-practitioner myself, I was qualified to do so. But what do small firm and sole practitioners really want to know? I’m asking for your feedback. Thanks for taking a minute to give me your thoughts. – MH

Courtesy of my colleagues on LinkedIn and the geeks at interactive insights group comes this handy list of websites designed to help measure the “value” of social media (is there any?).

What do you expect from social media such as FaceBook, Twitter, and the rest? Can the reality live up to the hype?

This weekend at LegalTech the makers of practice management suite Clio launched ClientConnect, a secure portal that will enable attorneys to share documents, collaborate, bill, and take payments in a secure evnironment on the web. And oh yes – it’s free to every Clio subscriber.

ClientConnect very nearly solves the universal problems that plague asynchronous multi-party communication. In other words, with ClientConnect there are no more e-mail roadblocks, mixed signals, or convoluted conversation-threads in the way of attorney-client communication. As a result lawyers can now make files of any kind, as well as time-sheets, notes, and case details available in seconds just by  recording them in Clio or uploading them to Clio’s super-fast collaboration-servers.

The highlights of ClientConnect include

• document exchange and collaboration
• clients can audit case activity anytime
• case notes are now instantly available
  
• clients can pay bills in seconds by PayPal
  

All told both clients and lawyers will benefit from the ability to collaborate in an open, secure, round-the-clock system that requires no software and has a virtual 0 learning curve. For those lawyers still on the fence, the advent of ClientConnect makes it hard to justify not trying Clio’s 30-day free trial.