March 25th, 2011 by Gwynne Monahan
Weekly Roundup from Clio’s Facebook Page 3/24/2011
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…
