Category «Legal Profession»

The Case for Law Practice Management Software

The software that lawyers relied on to run their firms used to be premise-based, but as reported by Nicole L. Black, in 2021 cloud computing software is the most prevalent. In fact, even before the pandemic, lawyers were adopting cloud-based legal software at higher rates than ever before. According to the 2020 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, 59% of lawyers surveyed were already already using cloud-based software pre-COVID. Notably, the results of another survey conducted by MyCase in mid-2020, showed the social distancing requirements of the pandemic have only served to accelerate this trend.

Subjects: Case Management, Communications, Information Architecture, Information Management, KM, Legal Technology, Technology Trends

Review: Dennis Kennedy’s Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law

Jerry Lawson is a lawyer, speaker, author, advisor and leader in the field of legal technology. If you are looking to get better results from your organization, whether a law firm or other legal organization, Lawson believes you can’t do better than letting Dennis Kennedy’s recent book be your guide.

Subjects: KM, Law Firm Marketing, Leadership, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Management

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 14, 2021

Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services; Rep. Suzan DelBene’s New Bill Aims to Protect Privacy in US; Experts Find a Way to Learn What You’re Typing During Video Calls; and America, Your Privacy Settings Are All Wrong.

Subjects: Big Data, Congress, Cybersecurity, Ethics, Health, Healthcare, Legal Research, Legislative, Privacy, Social Media, Technology Trends

Microsoft OneDrive Explained

There are many ways to store and share documents online. Box, Dropbox, ShareFile, and Google Drive are but a few of the popular products. For firms using Microsoft 365 Catherine Reach Sanders describes how you already have an online document storage tool built in – MS OneDrive. What can you do with OneDrive, what are the pros and cons, what is the difference between it and SharePoint? Sanders provides the answers!

Subjects: Case Management, KM, Legal Technology, Product Reviews, Software, Technology Trends

The Next Social Media Frontier For Lawyers: Clubhouse

Clubhouse is an audio chat platform that is available as an iOS app and is invite only for now. It consists of user-created drop-in audio chat rooms. You can form your own chat room or join rooms created by others. These chat rooms can be created spontaneously or scheduled ahead of time. Nicole Black identifies how the app provides lawyers with opportunities to showcase your expertise, connect with professional colleagues who might be potential referral sources, and generate exposure for your law firm.

Subjects: Communication Skills, KM, Law Firm Marketing, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Social Media

Top 5 legal technology stories of 2020

Nicole L. Black discusses the wide ranging effects on the legal technology space from the pandemic across all corners of the legal technology world. The shift to remote work had a dramatic impact on both the practice of law and the business of law, resulting in the rapid—and singularly remarkable—adoption of technology at rates never before seen. In some cases, the transition was a smooth one, and in others, it was a spectacular disaster. Good or bad, the results of the pandemic’s impact were undoubtedly notable—and newsworthy. In her article Black focuses on a few topics that especially resonated with her tech savvy readers and colleagues.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Communications, Conferencing Software, Gadgets/Gizmos, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Legal Technology, Technology Trends, Telecommuting

2020 in review: Legal software for working remotely

Attorney and legal technology expert Nicole L. Black has written throughout 2020 about cloud-based legal technology tools and their relevance to legal practices. Whether your law firm has already begun the shift to a cloud-based law practice or is planning to do so in the new year, you’ll undoubtedly find some or all of the software Black has covered over the past year to be useful. This article is a timely and actionable roundup of all of her articles on this topic from 2020.

Subjects: AI, Case Management, Communication Skills, Communications, Email Security, Legal Marketing, Legal Technology, Presentation Skills, Technology Trends

3 reasons for information exhaustion – and what to do about it

An endless flow of information is coming at us constantly: It might be an article a friend shared on Facebook with a sensational headline or wrong information about the spread of the coronavirus. All this information may leave many of us feeling as though we have no energy to engage. As a philosopher who studies knowledge-sharing practices, Mark Satta calls this experience “epistemic exhaustion.” The term “epistemic” comes from the Greek word episteme, often translated as “knowledge.” So epistemic exhaustion is more of a knowledge-related exhaustion. It is not knowledge itself that tires out many of us. Rather, it is the process of trying to gain or share knowledge under challenging circumstances. Currently, there are at least three common sources that, from Satta’s perspective, are leading to such exhaustion. But there are also ways to deal with them.

Subjects: Ethics, KM, Social Media

A Time to Act: Putting Awareness into Action

Wendy L. Werner’s call to action is clear: “lawyers have a unique opportunity to intervene on behalf of those with fewer resources, and people who have been under served and under-represented. Many of us have been impacted by the growing knowledge of racial inequities, and recognition of disparities. This is a moment to intervene and no one group has more power to make a difference than lawyers. Now is the time.”

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Continuing Legal Education, Free Speech, Leadership, Legal Education, Legal Profession, Legal Research