Also, please welcome Megan Zavieh to Lawyerist. She’s already written a few posts as a guest. They were pretty darn good, so we invited her to keep on writing. Megan handles ethics complaints for lawyers, and you’d probably call her practice a virtual one. So she’s got some interesting things to write about.
Megan’s posts will go up Wednesdays around 11, starting this week.
Our legal-writing mavens, Andy Mergendahl and Matt Salzwedel, will be presenting a 2-hour webinar on legal writing at 9:30 a.m. (Central) on April 12th. They will cover the basics of brief writing and contract drafting, and give tips on appellate and district court practice.
You can watch online, although you won’t get to see their pretty faces; just their slideshow.
The registration fee is $45 (discounts for law students and public interest lawyers), which supports legal aid in Minnesota.
You have just over 3 hours to win a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 in our giveaway. If you already entered with a haiku, you an even enter twice, with a Vine as your second vote. At noon Central, Sam will pick the winner at random, and Fujitsu will put it in the mail.
So far, we’ve probably got a few less than 100 entrants, and none have taken advantage of the option to enter twice. Them’s pretty good odds. And for what?
We’d like to know a bit more about our readers, so we will be publishing a series of quick polls. The more we know about you and what you come here looking for, the better the content on Lawyerist will be — so thanks in advance!
Young attorneys face all sorts of challenges: from dealing with opposing counsel, to starting their own law firm, and that minor distraction of having children.
Unexpected moments of “WTF” are also more common than anyone likes to admit.
A lawyer’s reputation is the best advertising. This is how it should be—and, I venture to predict, how it always will be, in spite of the relatively new online lawyer marketing and social media paradigm we have before us. Whatever new thing comes our way, be it online or off, we will find ourselves as lawyers ultimately staking our practices and livelihoods on that one thing: reputation. Now, I leave it to you to consider your own reputation, and how it could be your best advertising.
Got some holiday money or an Amazon gift card burning a hole in your pocket? Ross Guberman‘s book Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates is worth every penny. It currently retails for less than twenty dollars on Amazon. If you’ve got a Kindle it’s only $3.79, although some reviewers criticized the e-book formatting.
The book repeats advice we have all heard before: don’t use block quotes, don’t use legalese, tell a good story, etc. But Guberman doesn’t just give advice. The value in this book comes from numerous examples from real briefs filed by writers like John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barack Obama, and others.
The process of determining which products to use, which office functions to move to the cloud, and how to implement different software options into your practice is not necessarily an easy one. There are a number of factors in play when you make the decision to use cloud-computing services in your law practice and you must carefully consider your goals and options before you dive in. Your specific choices and your roadmap for implementation will vary depending on whether you are just hanging out a shingle or already have existing software programs (“legacy systems”) in place.
Sending email is arguably the most popular Outlook task, one you learned as soon as you installed it. What a lot of Microsoft Outlook users haven’t learned, though, is how many options exist for maximizing outgoing emails. Before you hit that Send button, consider whether any of these features might help you get more out of that outgoing email.
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