Today, Adobe releases a new collaborative Presentations application for its free online Acrobat.com cloud-based office suite. This new presentation software brings Acrobat.com one step closer to being a full-fledged online replacement for Microsoft Office. Since all of Acrobat.com is still in a beta phase, none of the products are fully developed — and some need a little improvement. That said, Acrobat.com Presentations has some really cool features: Keep Reading ⇒
See our Law Technology Buyer's Guide for our top technology recommendations.
The main competitor to our favorite document scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, is probably the NeatDesk Desktop Scanner. Last week, Joel Johnson of BoingBoing Gadgets got his hands on one, and spent a few hours putting it through its paces.
His verdict: While he didn’t have any major complaints about the NeatDesk desktop scanner, it’s probably not worth it. Consider the ScanSnap s1500 instead.
My wrists and forearms feel limber and pain-free as a result of doing these exercises for a few days. These apparently work if you have RSI or carpal tunnel, but I find they just feel good, as well.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome exercises that really work | BoingBoing
The past months have been an endless parade of bad news for associates in big law firms between layoffs and deferred start dates for new hires. One recent ABA article discussed the impending collision between associates deferred from this fall and those scheduled to start in 2010.
This traffic jam, combined with the continuing financial pressure on law firms, will only worsen in the months ahead. Back in 2004, after the dot com slow down, I published an article in the NALP Bulletin suggesting that perhaps the time had come to revamp summer associate programs (PDF). It looks like the future is now.
You already know the basics of why lawyers should be using Facebook. Hopefully, you also took ten minutes to update your privacy settings on Facebook. Now that you are all set up, do you know what kind of information to share on Facebook and other social media sites?
A recent article from Harvard Business takes a look at the advantages of sharing personal information on social networking sites in addition to professional information. The article points out that “sharing personal information further humanizes people whose roles may otherwise make them seem remote or inaccessible.”
I participate in a variety of listservs and recently posted an answer about when lawyers “can ask for business” and not violate the solicitation rules. More importantly, I advised what a lawyer should say in an effort to get business.
The rule in most states is that one should not solicit “professional employment from a prospective client when a significant motive for the lawyer’s doing so is the lawyer’s pecuniary gain.” The rule usually contains the friend, relative, prior professional relationship and lawyer exceptions or something very similar.
Bottom line is that unless one falls within the exceptions, it is always unethical to “ask for the business.”
I am a rising third year student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law pursuing a certificate in Civil Litigation in addition to the J.D. In law school I focus my classwork on civil litigation, but my main career interest is prosecution. Last summer I worked at the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in their Capital Crimes Division. This past school year I worked part-time at the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office in their Child Abuse and Post Conviction units. This upcoming summer I am very excited to start working at the Chester County District Attorney’s Office. On the legal side, I also recently became very interested in the field of ethics after taking a course on it this spring.
In that magical time before law school, I went to Pitt for undergrad, and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science and Communication. I was pretty active in politics during college. I worked on a District Attorney race and two different races for Attorney General. However, the thing I loved the most that confirmed my desire to go to law school was mock trial. I did mock trial three out of my four years at Pitt and loved every minute of it. I didn’t do it my sophomore year because I was studying abroad in London and working for the Labour Party, which was an amazing experience.
I am very excited to join a talented team of writers here at Lawyerist. I look forward to contributing everything I can to the site and connecting with lots of new great lawyers, law students and legal professionals. To that end, I invite everyone to follow me on Twitter where I talk about law school things in addition to my other passion: being a nerd.
Yodle promises to advertise your law firm or business on Google, Yahoo!, and other sites, and build you a website that will get clients to call. They also promise to gather detailed information about your site visitors and callers to both help screen out low-quality from high-quality online leads, as well as to optimize their online ad campaigns to improve the traffic to your site.
But what Yodle actually does, as far as I can tell, is employ a bunch of jerks to call me (four times last week, plus an email for good measure), insult me, and try to bully me into becoming a client. Judging by the buzz on several email lists, my experience is typical.
Yodle’s hard-sell tactics do not inspire confidence. Nor does this listing they created for Chicago lawyer Barry Kreisler (trust me, you’ll love this):
It is an honor and a pleasure to be asked to be the newest regular blogger for Lawyerist. I have been a practicing attorney for over 25 years. Most of my time now is spent coaching lawyers on business development, practice management and all types of legal career issues. I also conduct CLE’s on these topics and speak nationwide. I even practice law in my spare time as a solo practitioner in the areas of employment law and marketing ethics. My clients include Minnesota Law & Politics® and Super Lawyers® , and FindLaw, a Thomson West company. My postings will primarily focus on marketing, career management and trends in the legal profession. I hope you find them valuable to your practice.
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