Continuing Legal Education (CLE) for lawyers is mandatory in 45 states, with each possessing its own unique set of MCLE rules and regulations. CLE rules and regs govern attorney compliance and provider and course accreditation. Many of the rules are confusing, onerous and downright wacky.
The benefits of blogging are well documented, but too many start a blog, only to have it go dark within months. If you’re going to take the plunge, you’ve got to make a long-term commitment in order to have a successful blog and rewarding experience. Whether you’re blogging about technology for lawyers or prosecutorial misconduct, here are a few general practices that can make the journey less burdensome, more productive and even enjoyable.
We do three things on Twitter—engage, broadcast and promote. Lawyers, legal professionals, law firms, we all do. It takes time, effort and consistency to maintain a vibrant presence, and analytics provides an insight into the effectiveness of that effort and an understanding of use and growth across the network.
There are myriad metrics to track and hundreds of tools available to help you monitor your Twitter use, some free, and others, very expensive. Here is breakdown of a few core metrics to gather and some of the more useful and free analytic tools to help you do so.
Love PowerPoint or hate it, the bottom line is that most presentations need to be accompanied by a visual display, preferably with choice graphics, charts and styled data. With the newly enhanced Google presentations, you can now ditch the rather expensive and memory hogging Microsoft Office product.
Although PowerPoint now has a web app for online access to files, the less than creatively named Google presentations is built for the clouds from the ground up. And we’re increasingly all about the cloud.
When I left law firm life to start an entrepreneurial venture, I learned that blogging, and not a static website, was the way to go. After a series of trial and many errors, I settled on the popular WordPress platform and never looked back. Self-taught smattering of coding made me more dangerous than useful. Help arrived in the form of plugins.
A picture is worth a thousand words. There’s an emotional reaction to images. They break up pages that are text heavy making for a more visually appealing and easier to read blog post. Tagged correctly, images can also help with search engine optimization.
But it can be a struggle to find images to legally use on our blog posts. And as legal professionals we certainly don’t want to be running afoul of copyright laws. No one should.
A few bloggers have asked me recently where I find low cost or free images. Low cost is fine if you write an occasional post, but if you churn them out consistently, that cost is not so low after a very short while. I discovered this when I first started blogging and thought nothing of spending a few dollars for a royalty free image. The total cost after a few months was not cute. So here five sources I go to for free images.
From lawyers to librarians, we’re all asked to shoulder more responsibility as prior staffing levels become relics of bygone economies. We are also becoming more mobile, working remotely, traveling to meetings and speaking at conferences.
In this environment, applications that aid in our productivity have become increasingly important as evidenced by the popular 60 apps in 60 minutes drills we see at many conferences. Last week I was involved in a similar presentation at the ABA Annual Meeting, and although I’m not a fan of the shallow, rapid fire format, it spurred me into sharing a few of the apps I’ve come to rely on.
Law firms use newsletters as a marketing tool. It’s distributed via mail and email. Some firms publish the articles on their websites, often as a PDF document. Others are abandoning the newsletter altogether for blogs.
Blogging promotes trust and enhances the reputation of lawyers and law firms as experts. It’s good for business development, with the SEO juice driving traffic to the firm’s website.
Most of the 45 state that have a mandatory continuing legal education requirement for lawyers award credit for published legal works.
At least 35 states specifically lay out the qualifications for awarding writing credit. Each state has its own unique set of regulations which I’ll broadly summarize and juxtapose a blogging platform as publisher.
There’s been increasing talk about Facebook Pages replacing websites and blogs. This conversation does not add to that debate. It instead focuses on an important and coveted aspect in this increasingly socially networked world—interactions. The consistent engagement that builds community and credibility.
Why? Because people buy from those they know and trust.
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