Archive for the ‘records’Category

What it really means to be a new grad

Law_school_bubble_infographic

There isn’t much about this infographic we didn’t know. After all, law school is becoming more expensive and riskier all the time. But as long as the number of applicants to law school continues to increase, young people continue to be gullible, school is easier to handle than real-life, and there is money to be made, law schools will continue to mass-produce graduates.

Ironically, lawyers are blame for this crater in the market. But which lawyers really brought on problem? I published my answer here in connection with the ABA’s Legal Rebels project. Enough said. You can make up your own minds, but I think I made my case.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

19

09 2011


by practicehacker
posted in ABA Jounral, analytics, Article, Blogging, business, Career and Job, careers, community, competition, current-events, employment, graph, infographic, law, law office, legal marketplace, LegalZoom, practice, practice management, research, school, startup, the business of law, tips, work
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What do you call 100 unemployed lawyers?

Sea_turtle_hatchlings_try_to_m

A good start! But seriously: according to this piece in the Wall Street Journal new law grads continue to enter the workforce faster than Starbucks can hire them. To quote the article:

According to jobs site SimplyHired.com… the hardest-to-place industry [is the] the legal field. Unemployed lawyers now find themselves in the country’s most cutthroat race for a job, with less than one opening for every 100 working attorneys.

But what makes us so hard to employ? Maybe the answer can be found in the 50 (and counting) comments to the ABA Journal’s anemic coverage of the topic, which is all of a paragraph long and is no more than a rehash of the original mention in Above the Law. Or maybe the answer is written into the Economist’s riotously off-target piece Not Enough Lawyers, which posits that we have uh, too few lawyers. But after all is said and done the truth is that lawyers are hard to employ for the same reasons we’ve known about for a good 20 years:

  • Law school costs too much and does not teach practical skills
  • Grads need to make a lot right away to pay their school loans
  • Big Law only hires a faction of grads; the rest are on their own

For the great mass of new lawyers in the market and those displaced due to the systemic shakeup in the law, the odds are lower than newly hatched turtles trying to make it out to sea. And it just breaks my heart to see that happen to such a nice bunch of baby turtles.

11

09 2011


by practicehacker
posted in Blogging, business, Career and Job, community, competition, current-events, employment, law, legal marketplace, media, outside counsel, outsourcing, practice, practice management, research, the business of law, tips, work
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Client Papers – Secure Sharing for Lawyers

Client Papers

I was recently contacted by Dan Decker, COO of Client Papers, which provides a simple and inexpensive online document repository for secure sharing of documents.

According to Dan, as a sole practitioner and owner of a software company he was disappointed with available solutions for document sharing. In particular Dan says that he was after the elusive simple, stand-alone, file sharing solution. When he couldn’t find one he did what all good entrepreneurs do – he built it. The result is Client Papers.

The site is as simple as they come, has only 3 pricing levels, and tops out at less than $50/mo. for unlimited storage, attorney and staff users, and client users.

Bonus: the first 20 readers who sign up and mention Practicehacker get an additional 2 months for free. Posted via email from practice (redux)

10

06 2011


by practicehacker
posted in business, chart, collaborative tools, community, current-events, disruptive technology, document automation, document exchange, e-discovery, enterprise, ESI, google docs, knowledge management, law, law office, practice, practice management, radical transparency, records, remote, the business of law, unbundling, web 2.0, website, websites
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Attack of the Local Q&A Sites

Bet you don’t know which pizza place in Des Moines has the best deep-dish. Bet you didn’t know you wanted to know, either. Well you do. And these sites are going to tell you where to get it. So ask yourself. Were you thrilled by location-based service Foursquare? Did you jump for joy when Q&A phenom Quora came online? If so then you’ve been waiting for these 1/2 dozen local Q&A sites.  Each one is begging to show you what’s going on in cities and countries you’ll never visit and have no business asking about:

  • Hipster – Site hasn’t even launched and it’s already hiring. How cool are these guys?
  • Loqly –   Finally, a site that focuses on what’s really important: the local bar scene.
  • Gootip – Actually knows where you are and offer local opinions on stuff. Uh, thanks?
  • Loqize.me – No idea what these guys are trying to do. I signed up for the beta though.
  • Localmind – Seems the most commercially oriented and potentially the most practical.
  • LOCQL – This is the Microsoft entry. Eh. I could go either way. But thanks for playing.

Now pardon me while I track down a dry-cleaner in Nome, Alaska. Awesome!

Posted via email from practice (redux)

07

06 2011


by practicehacker
posted in business, collaborative tools, Foursquare, geolocation, Glympse, Google Places, location-based, mobile, Opzi, Quora, research, review, search, social media, social media tools, social networking, startup, tips, website, Wisdom of Crowds
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The Hosted Apps Dilemma

This recent piece in ComputerWorld highlights the growing interest in hosted Microsoft Exchange. No surprise; but why now? And if you use Hotmail or Gmail, you may even ask why hosted Exchange is worthwhile at all. If so, consider this:

First, hosted Exchange offers full-featured contacts, calendaring, and e-mail in tight integration, just like the Outlook on your desk. Meanwhile, it spares users the typical pain in the ass features of a self-hosted Microsoft product: compatibility issues, upgrades, backup problems, disaster-recovery, smartphone support, spam filtering, patching, etc. In effect, with hosted Exchange you get your own “virtual e-mail server” in a secure, faraway datacenter, but only pay for what you use, usually on a monthly basis. Microsoft has been using this deployment model for some time in the educational market and it has worked.

Second, whereas Microsoft takes a top down approach to security, Google generally works from the bottom up. For instance, Google generally starts with consumer-facing products and scale them upwards until they can work in an enterprise environment. Thus Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, and a host of Google consumer toys has been integrated and reborn as Google Apps. Microsoft on the other hand usually starts with enterprise products, makes an obscene amount of money via licensing, and scales down to smaller business and consumers. This was the genesis of Outlook.

Third, consider that the gap between Google Apps and Microsoft Office is getting narrower all the time. And with its Office 365 product Microsoft is blurring the line between it and Google even further. Office 365 retains the look and feel of MS Office, while saving the organization tons of money and virtually eliminating the need for beefed-up IT departments (sorry IT guys).

As with all technology, lawyers are the last to know. Once the cat is out of the bag though, news spreads fast. Your opponents are going to take every advantage they can, so you should too. Ultimately hosted applications such as Exchange and web-based applications like Office 365 and Google Apps are the future. And why not: law firms are about serving clients, not endlessly fiddling with their IT infrastructure.

24

05 2011


by practicehacker
posted in alternative, archiving, business, calendar, collaborative tools, competition, cool stuff, current-events, disruptive technology, e-mail, enterprise, Gmail, Google, Google Apps, google voice, law office, management, Microsoft, Microsoft Outlook, Office, Operating System, outsourcing, practice, practice management, research, review, SaaS, school, software, storage, technology, the business of law, tips, tools, Windows, Word
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ABA TechShow 2011

As most readers know, I write a column for NYC-based TechnoLawyer called SmallLaw (formerly known as, no joke, “Crazy Mazy”). Anyhow, as TechnoLawyer’s intrepid Chicago reporter I’ve written about the ABA TechShow since 2008; and before that for this blog.

Here are the 12 videos we shot at this year’s TechShow. Feel free to subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more legal tech news and check out my TechnoLawyer pieces as well.

13

05 2011


by practicehacker
posted in ABA, ABA Jounral, Amicus, blackberry, calendar, clio, community, competition, conference, cool stuff, current-events, document automation, document exchange, e-discovery, e-filing, e-mail, enterprise, ESI, FastCase, FindLaw, Google Apps, great conversations, knowledge management, law, law office, legal marketplace, legal research, Lexis-Nexis, lists, litigation, LPM Section, management, Marketing, mass customization, mcle, media, Meeting, Microsoft, Microsoft Outlook, Mobile device, new media, Office, old media, online TV, outside counsel, outsourcing, PCLaw, PDA/SMARTPHONE, PDF, Podcast, practice management, records, research, review, rocketmatter, SaaS, search, security, SEO, software, startup, storage, tablet pc, technology, Telephony & Voice Over IP, the business of law, tips, tools, twitter, Video, web 2.0, website, websites, Westlaw, Word, work, youtube
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