practicehacker

Take a minute to wish Firefox a happy 5th birthday.  Can you believe? It’s been 5 glorious years since Firefox made it fun again to get on the Internet. Sure Chrome has been a noble experiment and Safari is as elegant as Apple itself, but Firefox is the original bad boy of browsers and it can still makes a geek’s heart flutter.

OCR Terminal is an online application that converts

• .pdf
• .jpg
• .tiff
• images

files into searchable, editable formats such as

• .doc
• .xl
• .rtf
• .txt

Users can also choose to convert just part of a document.

The price for the service ranges from $.04 to $.09 per page (the more you use it the lower the cost per page). Up to 20 pages/month can be converted for free. The application is available for online use or can be downloaded for desktop use. Documents can be dragged and dropped into the desktop version of OCR Terminal and converted on the fly in about ½ the time it would take to convert using a conventional OCR application.

Prism Legal’s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009.  Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:

Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.

Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7.  Deal with it.

Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the  a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.

E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.

Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.

Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual.  Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.

Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.

Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.

Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.

Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.

Once you snatch the pebble from my hand ...

I recently published this guide for the involuntarily solo to help out the swelling ranks of attorneys displaced from law firms or newly minted from law schools only to find themselves flat on their assets.  To my surprise, months after publishing my piece I found this entertaining post called  The Number One Reason My Startup Failed. In it web developer Fred Jabre describes going through some of the very experiences that solo’s enjoy every day:  edge-of-your seat excitement, being your own boss, triumph, and ultimately tragedy as our hero scores a near miss but still ends up working for The Man. Brother I’ve been there. Not only did this post parallel my struggle with the practice I started, it managed to dredge up bitter-sweet memories of my own dot com escapade - a $250,000 money pit eLawCentral;  like the Tucker Torpedo and the Apple Newton that site was the answer to a question nobody asked. Thanks a lot teaBUZZED. Now I’ll have to spend another 3 years in therapy.

Thought I’d share some choice video from TechShow 2009 featuring all 4 of the Best of Show winners that I wrote up in TechnoLawyer, plus interviews with some of my heroes such as Bob Ambrogi, Jay Funeberg, and Kevin O’Keefe, as well as sightings of legal blogging all-stars like Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle. I’m still excited.

See related videos here and find me on YouTube as practicehacker.