Category «Legal Marketing»

Publishing for Profit: Selecting the Best Publisher

Jerry Lawson offers his expert advise on how lawyers (and other ambitious people) can profit by publishing. One method is to begin by focusing on your desired result. What are the best publishers for you and your work product? Lawson offers a couple of ways to identify the potential publishers likely to provide the most benefit.

Subjects: AI, Book Reviews, Communication Skills, KM, Search Engines, Social Media

The 2024 ‘Burning Issues’ Confronting Firm Leaders

At the end of December 2023, Patrick J, Mckeena and Michael B. Rynowecer presented 200 Firm Leaders with a selection of over 40 timely and potential ‘Burning Issues’ – and asked of them “what do you anticipate as the highest priorities occupying your leadership agenda going into the new year?” The team received responses representing firms from 200 to over 2000 lawyers in size. This paper distinguishes the challenging issues for firms in 2024.

Subjects: AI, Communication Skills, Leadership, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Management

AI and the Organized Bar: Lessons from the eLawyering Project

The Internet changed the way lawyers communicate, but it otherwise made only modest changes in the nature of legal work. Generative AI will be a tsunami. Can or should the American Bar Association and other bar associations attempt to influence the development and regulation of AI, to steer it in particular directions? Since the past can be prologue, it’s worth considering a previous attempt by the organized bar to grapple with another revolutionary technology. Jerry Lawson benchmarks this discussion using his participation in the American Bar Association’s eLawyering project that attempted to help lawyers use the Internet to achieve social benefits. The project tried to influence various governmental entities as well as the actions of lawyers. How well did these efforts work? How can the organized bar better steer the use of AI to benefit society?

Subjects: AI, Communications, Continuing Legal Education, KM, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession

The Motivation of Manipulating Data and Information to a Desired Outcome

Some recent headlines have reported disturbing news about respected and respectable scholars falsifying or just ignoring data conclusions in scholarly papers. This is another example of the skepticism many of us have with the shifts in misinformation flooding our inboxes and newsfeeds, compelling each of us to exercise our critical thinking skills. And the examples we’re referring to aren’t even results of AI. It is human error, strong bias at play, or manipulative intention for one purpose or another. This leads us to another topic in our continuing explorations of human motivation. Why do we lie? Why do we cheat? Kevin Novak takes a deeper dive on this discussion about the issues and the people and actions that have been in the news recently.

Subjects: Business Research, Communication Skills, Competitive Intelligence, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, KM, Leadership, Social Media

How book-banning campaigns have changed the lives and education of librarians

Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina, identifies the significant and socially charged work of librarians who are defending the rights of readers and writers in the battles raging across the U.S. over censorship, book challenges and book bans. Cooke states, “as long as there have been book challenges, there have been those who defend intellectual freedom and the right to read freely. Librarians and library workers have long been crucial players in the defense of books and ideas. At the 2023 annual American Library Association Conference, scholar Ibram X. Kendi praised library professionals and reminded them that “if you’re fighting book bans, if you’re fighting against censorship, then you are a freedom fighter.”

Subjects: Communication Skills, Education, Free Speech, KM, Legal Research, Librarian Resources, Libraries & Librarians

Brevity is the Soul of Profit: What Lawyers Need to Know About Executive Summaries

Elizabeth Southerland writes that Jerry Lawson’s essay Plain English for Lawyers: The Way to a C-Level Executive’s Heart has some good ideas about the best ways to communicate with senior executives. However, there is a key imperative that is not addressed: The purpose of an executive summary is to boil this down to a few sentences that tell the leader what they want to know.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Communications, KM, Leadership, Legal Profession, Management

The Digital Psychology of Persuasion

Kevin Novack, digital strategist and CEO with extensive experience digitizing disparate collections at the Library of Congress, discusses the increasing importance of acknowledging and incorporating social proof into your marketing strategies to showcase the power of your brands and services. The recent wave of digital tools that are built to influence decisions have come under increasing scrutiny as we have learned, they may not be all that trustworthy. Examples include TikTok and its power to influence and even change the behaviors of impressionable next gens. Or Instagram’s role in enabling body shaming and mocking others. And more recently the overwhelming impact of ChatGPT, and the fascination with and growing use of thousands of apps and services built on OpenAI. Novack asks – but can you trust it? And responds – probably about as much as you can trust all online listings and crowdsourced input, which are the sources of GPT’s recommendations. From the user perspective, discerning fact from fiction, when interacting with your organization, is only becoming more critical.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Ethics, Internet Trends, KM, Social Media