- Be More Productive

- Go Paperless

- Online Marketing

- Presentations

- Save Money

So, go there.  Prosper.  (You’ll be glad you did.)

Say hello to the new adobe air acrobat.com services agreement, paragraph 5.1 regarding “Your Content”:

…By maintaining your Content on the Services, you grant to Adobe a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and fully paid license under all intellectual property rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, and reformat your Content solely to deliver the Services to you. Adobe shall make commercially reasonable efforts to block the uploading of Content to the Services that contains viruses detected by using industry standard virus detection software.

(Attorneys, especially) Yes, that was the hair on the back of your neck standing up. If a file service of any type reserves the right to “copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display” your communications or work-product, please re-consider. As always, a little due diligence goes a long way; read the services agreement.

*Update: see Erik Larson’s (from Adobe) comments (below) in response to this post (thank you Erik), as well as his interview by Scoble, later the same day:  http://tinyurl.com/67otq8

Recall Jeff Goldblum as Ian in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so pre-occupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.” I’m not suggesting we should not practice online, but I do know folks (especially folks like me who love to discover “look what this software can do”) who get so caught up in making it work, watching it work, and telling how it works that we forget to talk about why we’re doing it. I would invite some folks who have their “boots on the ground” in the cutting edge of online law practice to tell/remind the rest of us of the many benefits and opportunities this venue makes possible.

Enter Grant Griffiths and Stephanie Kimbro. Grant has developed an exceptional expertise and following in the legal blogging world. (If you’re here you likely already know this, but…) He is Home Office Lawyer, Home Office Warrior and G2WebMedia, among other things. Stephanie is a North Carolina attorney and catalyst who provides legal services online via Kimbro Legal Services. Stephanie has worked with G2 to develop the website and blog at VLOtech (virtual law office technology) “with the purpose of providing a secure, software as a service, web-based product that connects solo and small firm law practices with the online consumer.”

With the combination of their unique expertise, who better to answer the question, “why so great?” Perhaps you can already imagine some of the benefits to attorney and/or client, but if these two do not delight you with at least one new nugget, I will be very surprised.

So Grant, Stephanie, do tell.

This is a test. It is pass/fail. You are an attorney. You are about to backup client files to online storage. As you actually read the pop-up terms of service agreement, you come across “provider reserves the right to share metadata about your files with partners…”.

Do you –
a) “accept” and go forward;
b) pause a minute to call your nephew to ask “what is metadata”; or
c) close your web browser on the service wanting your metadata.

If you chose “a” you should go ahead and call your nephew, then call your insurer and ask something like “is it okay if I post privileged client information on my website, just in case someone might find it useful?” Because guess what, the difference is only one of degree.

You use computers in your practice, so metadata is a fact of life. Start learning about it. You are a fiduciary.

In any event, he’s posted (yesterday) something that gave me pause –a simple message and it is this: take a step away from your career (it will be there when you return) and spend, invest, value your time with your kid(s).

A snippet:

…No serious blogging today. Just basking in the warmth of victory, and the love of a child.

With that, I’m off to coach 6-year-old soccer. Be fulfilled. Be a parent. And Rick…thanks for the reminder…our kids should all be so lucky.

…there can come a point where you have too many points of contact.When you have…

…a cell phone, land line, Skype number, and backup VOIP line for people to talk to you

…and a number of email addresses where people can leave you more detailed messages

…and several IM clients

…plus Twitter

…augmented by online project and team management sites

…and various videoconferencing platforms…

suddenly you’ve transitioned from accessible coworker to frustrating obstacle course.

If your customers and colleagues are spending several hours downloading clients, setting up accounts on various systems, and otherwise initiating specialized ways of reaching you, your technology has become more of a problem than a solution.

So far as I can tell, this is fairly universal advice (perhaps aimed at folks like me; confession — in addition to my “Contact Dan” page, my Skype availability is on my private family blog); so “Thanks” to the folks at Web Worker Daily.

#1 Have you found a nice balance of these? Comment and share if you have a tip for how you found the right blend of availability and down time.

As of late, I’ve put some effort into not only being available, but being available by a variety of methods — both very common (office phone, e-mail and cellular) and somewhat less common (jaxtr: internet link which connects caller’s cell phone directly to my voicemail and emails me the voicemail; meebo: instant messaging (IM/chat client) aggregator which not only consolidates my various IM/chat/ICQ identities, but also indicates my online availability and allows either interactive chat or quick method to leave me a brief message; and gmail-google talk which integrates a blend of online availability indication, chat, e-mail and voice-mail to e-mail functions.

So #2 While I’ve put all of these options out there for receiving client communications, my clients (and this is not a complaint) end up — guess — yes, calling my office during office hours, e-mailing when it’s a bit late, and dialing my cell only on rare occasions. Do they not believe me; is there a reluctance to sample the newer technology; has anyone experienced their clients adopting additional communication methods? What works for you (I notice HomeOfficeLawyer Grant Griffiths shows his online availability via Skype on his sidebar), or should I stop worrying on the theory that contacts from clients (regardless the medium) are contacts from clients … and that’s a good thing.

Drop me a quick comment.

Tags: attorney+availability, jaxtr, meebo, gmail, google, skype, Dan+Hull, Allison+Shields, Grant+Griffiths

• New York Small Business Law: read Imke – very practical
• Joplin, Missouri Business Blog: get Penny’s review of latest in Missouri
• Massachusetts Law Notes: practical client info from Stephen A. Evans
• BizzBangBuzz: by strategic business lawyer Anthony Cerminaro
• Inhouse Blog: Geoffrey G. Gussis shares news and jobs for Inhouse Counsel
• Andrew Ewalt’s Law Blog: understated and excellent
• Business Law Prof Blog: provided by Dale Oesterle, Ohio State University

After that, what else is there? Honestly. No more secrets … do you know any good ones?

Tags: business+law, blogs, business+lawyer

If you’d like to get a good survey of the big picture and trends in electronic discovery from a variety of perspectives, let me recommend that you check out a new podcast (and downloadable transcript) that Xerox has posted on the Big I, little t Blog. It’s a fascinating discussion that I was invited to participate in, but, unfortunately, unfortunately was not able to attend.

Here’s a representative sample from the transcript:

Mike Maziarka: It seems to me that something that we haven’t touched on is that there’s also employee training that’s necessary here. That, you know, I think part of this is we’ve become reliant on tools such as email as a conduit for communication rather than a truly what it is, a document creator. And that I think training needs to happen in organizations to say realize that when you use email and when you use some of these tools, you are creating a document that, you know, if you don’t want that to be read at some point in the future should never be created to begin with. And it’s not just true of email, but also IM is another area that we really haven’t touched on today that as you start to use these tools, you’re creating a record of something that has happened. And I think that that’s something that organizations are also going to have to address is we’ve become very reliant on these tools and maybe we need to back-off a little bit to the degree to which we use them.

Xerox’s Craig Freeman certainly asks some excellent questions that the rest of us should be look for answers to. There need to be many more of these kinds of conversations. The blog offers a place for continuing the discussion through comments. Highly recommended for both the content on this topic and an example of how companies can use blogs effectively.

My only quibble is that I wish that the podcast was available as a downloadable mp3 file, but providing the transcript is an excellent idea. [UPDATE: Thank you Xerox for making the mp3 download link available at the podcast link.]

Speaking of roundtables, it’s always interesting to go back to the granddaddy of all electronic discovery roundtable articles, A Gold Mine of Electronic Discovery Expertise: A Conversation Among Veterans of Electronic Discovery Battles, and see how it has stood the test of time as it approaches its third birthday. Quite well, I think. I’ve been toying with the idea of revisiting that article and doing a roundtable with the same people and adding even more experts. Let me know if you might be interested in reading a new version of that article or becoming one of the participants.

Tags: electronic+discovery

What if the services sector competed for clients on the basis of “ease-of-use”?
Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts to pure services? Our clients’ services? Our services? Sure, and why not?

Consider for a moment just products. Cincinnati-based The Folgers Coffee Company, a P&G company with extensive operations in New Orleans, has been awarded an Ease-of-Use Commmendation by the Arthritis Foundation for its AromaSeal™ Canister. If you’re a Folgers drinker, you notice that Folgers added an easy-to-peel tin freshness seal (no need for a can-opener), a new “snap-tight” lid and even a grip on its plastic red can.

Great companies many of us represent do spend money and expertise on making their goods, equipment and products usable. Think about your car, your luggage, your TV remote (well, strike that one), your watch and even grips on household tools. Think about Apple, Dell and Microsoft. Each year they think through your experience with their products and try to make it better. Continuous improvement models for “things”. Folgers did it for coffee cans. IBM and CISCO have Ease-of-Use programs for the products they sell.

Develop and apply ease-of-use concepts to pure services? Our clients’ services? Our services? Sure, why not? It’s probably coming anyway, even while it will be infinitely harder to do for services than for products. WAC? has noted before that even corporate clients that sell goods see themselves as selling solutions and not products. In 2004, services sold alone or as support features to the sale of good and products accounted for over 65% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the US, 50% of the United Kingdom’s GDP and 90% of Hong Kong’s. Even products sold by IBM and CISCO, now chiefly service companies, are part of a services-products mix in which the services component is the main event.

Law firms, of course, have always sold services. And we are a small but powerful engine in the growth of the services sector. We strategize with and guide big clients every day. While that’s all going on–day in and day out–what is it like for the client to work with you and yours? Are clients experiencing a team–or hearing and seeing isolated acts by talented but soul-less techies? Do you make reports and communications short, easy and to the point? Who gets copied openly so clients don’t have to guess about who knows what? Is it fun (yeah, we just said “fun”) to work with your firm? How are your logistics for client meetings, travel and lodging? Do you make life easier? Or harder? Are you accessible 24/7? In short, aside from the technical aspects of your service (i.e., the client “is safe”), do your clients “feel safe”?

What if law firms–or any other service provider for that matter–”thought through”, applied and constantly improved the delivery of our services and how clients really experience them?

And then competed on it…?