practicehacker

We're the ABA Damnit! We own you!

This was my 10th year at ABA Technology Show in Chicago. This year was particularly cool.  Here’s why:

Meeting The Heavies: To me, seeing people like Dennis Kennedy, Tom Mighelle, Bob Ambrogi, Jim Calloway, Kevin O’Keefe, Brett Burney, Andy Atkins, Jay Foonberg (!) and the rest of my pretend blog friends … I mean pretend LinkedIn friends … is like reconnecting with long lost relatives. Exciting and a little intimidating. But all of them were really great and down to earth. Except that Kennedy. Such a prima donna. I kid, I kid.

Meeting Canadians: Who can forget meeting the Great Librarian of Upper Canada! Beat that. Then there was Phil of the Future (my name for him), Steve Matthews (nice guy), Brett Burney (I think he’s Canadian), Dominic Jaar (vive la Quebec libre!), the boys from Clio (or as I called them, the Booth Babes), and a host of other talent from the Great White North. It was great to meet you all: now go back where the ice doesn’t melt until July.

Technology Becoming Accepted: This year for the first time in memory I noticed a preponderance of grey hairs and the careful gait of partners scoping out potential buys for their offices.  This was not the brash, flash-in-the-pan TechShow of the late-90′s in which the Internet was decried as a fad.

SaaS, Saas, and more Saas: Software as a service was all over the place, and by next year it will be pervasive. This year I was knocked out by the number and variety of kick-ass SaaS providers at the show including Clio, RocketMatter, and VLO Tech. Clio was my hands-down favorite for a number of reasons – I intend to use it in my own practice. Whatever your cup of tea, the idea of throwing away the IT department in favor of the Cloud is gaining traction fast.

Less is … Less: One lamentable fact about this  year’s show – there was less of it than I’ve seen in a long time. Another casualty of the economy I’d say, but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that many legal technology vendors have been slaves to profit instead of boosters for innovation and the slow economy is making it painfully apparent what a royal screw job they’ve been giving lawyers all these years. Many players couldn’t make it ? Good riddance to bad company.

Other than that however, it was a great experience as always and one that I heartily recommend to one and all. If you haven’t been to TechShow, go there. If you have, come back. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

For more coverage see my SmallLaw Column in TechnoLawyer.

Check out Twitter coverage of TechShow.

As always, I’d love your thoughts. E-mail me at mhedayat[at]mha-law.com or tweet me @practichacker.

ttyl

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.

Who says lawyers can’t get good work these days? Take this piece for instance from the ABA Journal:

And you thought the economy was having problems!

Ever feel like your online marketing time and money is going straight out the window? I’ve spent thousands on web-based marketing over the years, only to come to a few basic but inescapable conslucions. So why make the same mistakes I did? In this feature for TechnoLawyer I tell you how to get the biggest bang for your buck and compare the big 4 online marketing tools for lawyers to separate hype from fact

• directories
• search engines
• match-makers
• blogs

Which of these marketing staples is worth the effort and which one is a wast of precious dollars? Read this excerpt then download the article to find out.  Of course if you think I’m all wet let me know. Hey, I’ve been wrong before …

The mere mention of online marketing makes solo and small firm practitioners cringe — and you can’t blame them. Besides being famously overworked, over-regulated, and underpaid, small firm and sole practitioners are easy picking for marketing “consultants” that promise more than they deliver. It’s no surprise that most of them think of online marketing the way they do Yellow Pages ads, but see the risks as much higher. Oh, and did I mention the breathtaking inconsistency in state rules about advertising? Good luck getting any guidance on that point. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s take real-life examples from a mid-sized firm and the a group of solos at the bar association.

Read the rest of the piece here, or download your PDF copy.

Happy reading!

As promised here, below are my Tweets from the Chris Anderson presentation entitled The Future of Free. You can also follow me on Twitter to stay plugged in or to see more updates.

10:00AM Sitting in the front row listening to The Future of Free; Chris Anderson discussing supply and demand on the Internet and how to get value by giving things away

10:09AM Our language reflects what we think of the concept of free in that there is both “good” free (liberation) and “bad” free (come-on) but there is no “free” lunch (so to speak)

10:14AM The different types of “free” that make up the freeconomy

Cross-Subsidy: see King Gillette and the disposable razors. It’s about loss leaders; give-a-ways; disposable products

Too Cheap To Meter: See Moore’s Law of Diminishing Costs – ever-cheaper inputs yield ever more complex products that can be made for next to nothing; telephones, gas, electricity, computer memory, computing power, Internet bandwidth

Ad-Supported Free: This is 3rd party subsidization – i.e. TV, Radio, Internet – and it is the model of the 20th century (the one we all know)

Allen Kay > developed graphical user interface at Xerox Park > used by Apple and MS Windows > lead to Tim Berners Lee and HTML > gave us the WWW >  what’s next?

10:38AM Moore’s Law leads to novel and “wasteful” ways to use technology – which can change everything – the Internet is all about waste, new ideas, frequent failure, occasional successes, and the cycle

Technologists have only one legitimate job >> make it cheap and fast then get out of the way and let the crowd decide how to use it. Don’t try to tell us what to do because you can’t see the forest for the trees.

10:48AM The rule in the “free” Internet economy … marginal cost = zero, so in order to make money you must give it away in exchange for the new currencies of attention and reputation [the Internet leads the way here]

Attention = links

Reputation = page rank

The new paradigm: give away 100 to covert 1 and still cover your costs

10:57AM In the Q&A session Mr. Anderson answered my question about converting groups of professionals and other scarcity-based “knowledge workers” like Attorneys, CPA’s, Physicians, etc.

law firm growth rates

As anyone who’s worked at one will tell you, law firms are designed to push work downward and grow by doubling the number of staff for every associate, and adding an associate for every rainmaker. Firms can keep this up as long as those at the top generate business. As a result  the classic law firm pyramid doesn’t “grow” so much as it expands in all directions at the base.

That wide base makes for a stable structure; not only that, but minions are notoriously good at billing, overstaffed offices make clients feel secure, law schools fawn over big firms, and the obscene profit margins prove that doing things this way is an absolute good.

In fact even auxiliary players favor this approach: from Westlaw and Lexis to office supply stores, everyone makes out when clients foot the bill. ‘But,’ you ask, ‘what about lawyer satisfaction … staff retention … client service?’ Grow up. Firms are too timid to change, billable hours punish efficiency, rainmakers would rather find cheap employees than leverage information; and the type of client that can afford such services is either cost insensitive or doesn’t know they’re being taken. Then again no-one ever got fired for hiring IBM, right? It’s win-win baby!

Ironically, the ones motivated to change the system are so buried in it that they’re rarely seen or heard from. But that may be changing thanks to the big 2.0 – Web 2.0, Law 2.0, whatever 2.0. The point is that applications like Digg, Flickr, Blogger, and Twitter could become the nimble alternatives to the standard bloatware spewing from Microsoft and IBM. If so then the Gen-Y users of these apps could very well level the playing field at many firms or just jumpish ship altogether. The result is that more and more the hierarchy of the firm is giving way to the mesh of relationships we might call the un-law firm.

Of course there is a wide gulf between theory and action, but real change could take place soon; and for all we know may already be happening. The question is, given the opportunity would we support  these kinds of changes or resist them? To answer that question I refer back to my first year in business school when were were taught about the “Buggy Whip” industry at the outset of the 20th century.

the un-law firm

It seems that when cars were introduced in the late 1800′s the companies that made carriages and whips laughed out loud. They had a track record going back to the golden age of Western civilization, while cars were loud, uncomfortable, complex, and quite frankly dangerous. Who would want one of those they reasoned? I guess we know how that one turned out.

Better still, e-mail me at mhedayat[at]mha-law.com with your thoughts.

Cheers.