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What a week! Twitter turned five. The New York Times announced its digital subscription plans. Air strikes were launched against Libya. Japan continued to struggle forward. And as if things weren’t rattled enough, AT&T announced its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA.

And, in no particular order, here are some interesting news items collected from our Facebook page:

• ABA Journal: Law Firms Need to Act More Like Businesses and Hire Accordingly, Prof Says. Summary of arguments made by George Washington University business professor James Bailey in the Washington Post Capital Business column. Among other things like using flat and alternative fees, Bailey argues that law firms need to hire “business-savvy nonlawyers,” or those with business and management experience, for leadership roles.
• New York Times You’re the Boss Blog: How Much Technology is Too Much? Rarely is the day we don’t see something about law firms, lawyers and technology, so we found this piece rather interesting in both its question, and the examples it provided on finding that balance of technology and human interaction. It also serves as a good reminder that technology is not always the best, nor simplest, solution.
• Law Technology News: Cloud Computing: Ethical Shades of Gray. Cloud computing is an inescapable buzzword. Its ethical considerations, indeed its ethical implications, are not. It’s tempting to turn a deaf ear to the debate now as viewpoints have been expressed often, but Devika Kewalramani doesn’t. Instead, Kewalramani reminds us where the debate started, what remain common concerns and why and what approaches can be taken to maintain, in a word: perspective. And it should be noted that Clio (Themis Solutions) is a founding member of the Legal Cloud Computing Association.
• New York Times You’re the Boss Blog: Should I Dump My Servers and Embrace the Cloud? While ethical considerations are a focal point in the legal profession, and rightly so, this article reminded us of a more basic question: keep and update existing legacy systems on servers in the office, or migrate to the cloud? It sheds some light on the thought process, and pros and cons of staying the course vs. making a change.
• The Inspired Solo: 9 Productivity Tips for Lawyers who use Evernote. Leave it to Jay Fleischman to offer up some excellent tips to get the most out of Evernote. Though we use Evernote ourselves, we found the Instant Research (Tip 3), Evidence Locker (Tip 5) and Dictation (Tip 7) tips quite helpful. Give it a read, and if you’re not using Evernote already, you might be inclined to give it a try.
• PMA Tips: How Do People Find a Lawyer? The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services commissioned Harris Interactive to conduct some public opinion research in 2010. Specifically, the research examined “aspects of decision-making when people seek services for personal legal matters.” This post provides a nice overview of the findings, with a link to the complete report.
• Ars Technica: HTTPS is Great: Here’s Why Everyone Needs to use It (So We Can Too). A good read that provides some background on HTTP and HTTPS, and discusses the challenges of “wholesale encryption of all HTTP traffic,” using the Ars Technica site as an example. It provides some useful nuggets for those who tend to surf the Web, or otherwise work from the local coffee shop that offers free Wi-Fi.
• Slaw.ca: Expanding HTTPS Support Slowly Making the Web More Secure. From Clio co-founder Jack Newton, it also discusses HTTPS. It provides a quick overview of why HTTPS is a good thing for the Web and its users, and points out that you can enable HTTPS on Twitter, in addition to Facebook and Gmail, to keep prying eyes of apps like Firesheep at bay.
• ATL Small Firms, Big Lawyers column: Why Are You a Small-Firm Lawyer? A good read from Jay Shepherd about applying Simon Sinek’s mantra, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy what you do it,” to the practice of law. Towards the end, Shepherd also talks about his experience with defining the “why” of his practice, and how it shapes his practice.
• Ignite Law: 2011 Talks. Legal tweeters were all a, well, twitter, this week as final voting took place for Ignite Law 2011, taking place April 10, the day before ABA TechShow. Last year was the first Ignite Law event, and this year looks to have just as interesting a lineup.

Until next week…

You may follow us on Twitter, you may “like” our Facebook Page, you may simply read this blog or perhaps some combination of all three. And though our Facebook postings also post to Twitter, we know it can be easy to miss things, or forget to favorite or flag something for future reference. So, we thought we’d start something new: a round up of our recent Facebook postings.

In no particular order, here are some pieces worth reading:

• Law.com Small Firm Business – Shingle-Hanging 201: Another Year, Same Approach. An open, frank, heartfelt piece from David Koller, who will be chronicling his “journey from firm life to solo life and beyond.” He uses the “recency effect” as a springboard for a discussion, and observations, on what brought him into the solo realm. It’s a good read for anyone considering going solo, just starting out or stuck in a rut.
• TechnoLawyer Blog – SmallLaw: You Can Sharpen a Pencil but It Ain’t Gonna Write You a Poem and Other Lessons From My First Year of Practice. In the same newly solo vein as Koller’s piece, but with a technology twist. Pete Armstrong discusses the pervasive misconception that “if you have technology, you have a law firm,” and offers some important lessons he learned from his first year as a solo lawyer.
• North Carolina General Assembly - S254: An Act to Allow Non-Attorney Ownership of Professional Corporate Law Firms. Big news out of North Carolina, and perhaps the biggest non-cloud related news to date. It has sparked controversy over whether or not law firms will feel compelled to make decisions based on the best interest of shareholders instead of firm clients.
• Forbes – North Carolina Bill Would Let Non-Lawyers Invest in Law Firms. In this Forbes post, Daniel Fisher does a nice job outlining provisions of the bill, and safe guards against lawyers putting investor interests ahead of clients, and also draws comparisons to erosion of patient-first medical practices in this “era of managed care.” We’d also suggest reading the comments to the ABAJournal article.
• Law21.ca – 21st Century Solo and MyShingle.com – 21st Century Solo, A Chain-Blog Post, Part II. A very good point-counter point-type discussion about being a solo lawyer in the 21st Century.
• Content Marketing Institute – 12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post. Whether you just started blogging or have been blogging for awhile, these 12 tips are helpful. They range from the obvious, like shortening the URL to the less obvious or easily overlooked, like linking to your blog in your email signature or adding blog posts to your email newsletter.
• New York Times Travel Section – How Not to Get Sick from a Flight. Some helpful tips and information to keep in mind for the next time you travel, especially with conference season approaching.
• New York Times Small Business Guide – A Small Business Made to Seem Bigger. Good article with some useful information on how to use technology to be productive and make your one-person business seem larger. Covers such areas as scheduling, organization, accounting and also offers some offline tools and tips.
• Solo Practice University – Life as a One-Man-Band — The solo Practitioner. Suzanne Meehle offers some good advice on establishing systems for assembling files, managing cash flow, task management, just to name a few. She also offers a simple tip for solos: ask yourself “How do I…?” for every task that you do. She said you can then create a list of major tasks, break them down into sub-tasks and you’ve got your system for completing that task.

Until next week…