The Greatest American Lawyer

One of my Favorite Interviews: Alan Drewsen from the INTA

As I was reading back through some old blog posts, I stumbled across this Vtalk Radio interview sponsored by my firm Traverse Legal, PLC of Alan Drewsen, the executive director of the International Trademark Association (INTA).  As many of you who follow this blog know, we specialize in internet law.  A significant portion of our practice deals specifically with domain name disputes. 

Mr. Drewsen provides an extremely cogent and comprehensible view of what the trademark community believes about cybersquatting. 

Large Law Firms Can’t Compete with Small Law Firms

Here is an interesting post from the eBiz Insider titled “Why “SMALL” is BIG in E-commerce”.  I have often said that small law firms have a tremendous advantage in the current market because the can deploy technology and rework their internal processes in such a short period of time.   Large law firms are typically stuck with their software purchases and attendant process for three to five years after commitment.  Then they have the nearly impossible task of getting everyone to buy into the new system and use it. 

Here are the seven reasons noted by eBiz Insider as to why small is big in e-commerce:

Reason #1: Now the big boys are playing by YOUR RULES!!!
Reason #2: You are more motivated…
Reason #3: You are more fluid.
Reason #4:  They never EVER have good ideas.
Reason #5: When someone has a good idea—they don’t stop until they screw it up.
Reason #6: You listen. They don’t.
Reason #7: You know the Internet shopper better than they do.

I would say that this is very interesting reading for large and small law firms as well as any e-commerce business.  As you know, we represent e-commerce companies in a variety of transactions.  It is amazing how quickly a small e-commerce company can grow and drive revenue.  Once they get to a certain size, it is much harder for them to change. 

The World's Oldest Blogger, Olive Riley, Dies at the age of 108

CNN
    
"An Australian woman often described as the world's oldest blogger has died at the age of 108 after posting a final message about her ailing health but how she sang "a happy song, as I do every day."

Story Highlights

• Olive Riley died Saturday at a nursing home in New South Wales
• She recounted life during 2 world wars, raising three kids and working as a barmaid
• In her final post, dated June 26, Riley wrote how she felt weak

Read the full story.

Finding Opportunity in Difficult Economic Times

Only about ten to twenty percent of our client base is local.  Most of our clients are located outside the State of Michigan and many outside the United States of America.  Because we are a law firm specializing in internet law, intellectual property, domain name disputes, corporate services and complex litigation, we tend to get hired by companies and outside counsel in cases where specialization is required.  Because our market is global, we are somewhat insulated from the economic downturns which shrink corporate budgets.

Fully Integrated Web/Blog: A Law Firm Website

We’ve received a lot of inquiries concerning our post last week concerning the launch of our new website.  As noted, our new website is part traditional “brochure” web pages describing our practice areas and includes nine distinct vertical blogs within niche practice areas.  Some people have noted that they could not distinguish between the blog pages and the traditional “brochure” pages on our website.  To help break things down further, here are the practice area pages with relatively static information about our legal practice areas:

• Internet Law
• Intellectual Property
• Domain Disputes
• Corporate Services
• Complex Litigation
• About Traverse Legal
• Site Map

Our niche blogs which discuss the latest cases, information and issues within various practice areas, are found here:

• Internet:  Web Law and Information Technology Update
• Trademark:  Global Registration, Monitoring & Protection
• Piracy:  Pursuing Cybersquatters Under the UDRP & ACPA
• Monetization: Defending Generic Domain Portfolios
• New Media:  Copyright, DMCA & On-Line Content Protection
• E-Commerce:  Contracts, Licensing, Policies & Deal Making
• Trade Secrets:  Non-Competes, Trade Secrets & Market Position
• Governance: Director, Manager & Fiduciary Liability
• General Counsel:  Outsourced GC Services

Because blog pages are easier to update, we have kept our attorney and staff pages as blog pages:

• Attorney Enrico Schaefer
• Attorney Mark Clark
• Attorney Brian Hall

Note that the home page at www.traverselegal.com pulls in the latest three posts from each of our niche blogs creating dynamic content.  We believe that it is no longer necessary for attorneys to host their blogs as separate websites, distinct from their primary law firm website.  While it used to be true that blogs were considered to be personal.  There is simply no reason to isolate and cast to the background your professional blog.  In many instances, your professional blog receives much more traffic than your static web page.  By failing to incorporate the same basic design as your website, you fail to capitalize on the great marketing, biographical and contact information which is found on your traditional website.  The time has come for your website and blog pages to contain the same design template as a fully integrated web 2.0 website.

Traverse Legal is proud to have launched one of the first fully integrated website/blogs of any law firm.  If anyone is aware of any other law firm that has fully integrated the design of their website onto their blog, or vice versa, let us know.  We would love to take a look. 

Imagine a University Which Teaches You How to Become a Solo Practitioner?

Many lawyers started out there careers as solo practitioners.  I started my law firm traverselegal.com, which is now three partners, and numerous other virtual workers, in size as a solo practitioner.

There is a relatively new blog out there called Solo Practice University run by Susan Cartier Libel.  Here’s the blog description which you should definitely check out:

Central Florida Paralegal Opens Virtual Assistance Company

February 2008 – ChampionsGate, FL

Paula Matthews, a central Florida paralegal with over 20 years’ experience  working with several top rated attorneys, recently started her own Virtual Assistance (VA) company, i-Administrative Services, LLC.

i-Administrative Services, LLC will be providing small law firms and sole practitioners with virtual legal assistance, specializing in, but not limited to, civil litigation, corporate law and contract review and negotiation. The goal is to provide accurate work product in a timely manner to maximize clients’ productivity and save clients’ money.

A Virtual Assistant is not a temporary employee but an independent contractor who establishes long standing business relationships with clients who do not require a full-time employee. The benefit to the client is no overhead expenses, no cost in paying benefits, taxes, workers’ compensation, sick and holiday pay.

For further information, contact:
i-Administrative Services, LLC
www.i-Administrative.com
mgr@i-Administrative.com
(863) 398-3840
(407) 997-2931

What are the Benefits of Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO)?

There is an interesting discussion going on over at the LinkedIn Intellectual Property Message Board concerning legal process outsourcing (LPO).

There are some who argue that legal process outsourcing - essentially using virtual worker - could save up to fifty percent of costs.  There’s also an indication that law firms such as Clifford Chance, Smith Dornan, Dean, LLP have already set up captive outsourcing operations in India and that other large law firms will be following the trend.

One commenter indicates that outsourcing creates the potential for a loss and control over the project, difficulty in enforcing outsourcing agreements in countries where legal recourse is unreliable, confidentiality concerns and taking away legal services from American attorneys. 

I always find the commentary concerning the use of virtual workers to be somewhat strained.  First off, it has always been unclear to me why anyone would send outsource services to India when there are thousands of virtual law clerks and paralegals right here in the United States at virtually the same rates (or less) as being charged offshore.  I would much rather have a Harvard law student performing law clerk tasks, than someone in India.  Chances are the United States-based law student will work harder for less. 

One comment is worth exploring a little further.  There is a risk of losing control over the tasks being performed unless there are active management systems in place.  We use an extranet system in order to manage projects.  Every project is defined as a small task in the extranet.  The background information is provided into the extranet.  Most of the content is dictated into the extranet, making it extremely easy for any attorney to impart their thoughts on a virtual worker.  If a task isn’t being done properly, the cause most of the time will be inappropriate management by the attorney involved.  An extranet can help you break up the project into small enough pieces that they become essentially “idiot proof” and manage the tasks effectively towards defined deliverables. 

One of the First Fully-Integrated Blog/Websites for any Law Firm

We have just completed phase one of our redesign for www.traverselegal.com.  Because we started our blogs a long time ago using typepad.com, we had to face a difficult choice.  We could either export our TypePad feeds into a brand new blog under the traverselegal.com domain or stick with TypePad.  If we launched a brand new series of blogs, we would have essentially lost all our incoming links.  We decided to stay with TypePad and design our law firm website around our 9 niche blogs.

If you navigate our website now, you will notice that the static/brochure style web pages have the exact same design as the blog pages.  Navigation is perfectly seamless between blogs and the website.  Even cooler, the last three blog post from each of our niche blogs are pulled onto our homepage as news feeds.  The result is a professional website with dynamic content in each of our practice areas.  We believe that the design at www.traverselegal.com represents the future of law firm websites.  There should be no distinction between the dynamic content that is generated by blogging and the primary website of the law firm.  After all, blogging is just an easy way to post great professional, expert content.  While many attorney blogs are completely separate from the main website, or are accessible off the main website but incorporate a distinct design, colors and logos, it is quite simply no longer necessary to separate a professional blog from the firm website.  They should be seamless in design and navigation. 

Check it out for yourself at www.traverselegal.com.  You will see the blogs listed along the right-hand margin.  Welcome to the future of law firm website design!  As always, your thoughts, feedback and input are welcome.

Virtual Worker Job Board For Law Firms

Every week, we receive dozens of resumes from individuals who want to be virtual law clerks, virtual lawyers, virtual paralegals and general virtual staff.  Clearly, there are a tremendous number of incredibly talented people out there who are offering their service as virtual contractors. 

The Greatest American Lawyer Blog is proud to announce that it has purchased and launched a free virtual worker / job posting board at http://virtualworkers.greatestamericanlawyer.com/.  Virtual workers can upload their resumes in order to seek employment from law firms, corporations seeking to supplement their in-house legal staff and other people and entities interested in contracted workers. 

If you are a virtual worker looking an employer match, feel free to create a profile and upload your resume here. 

If you are an employer who is seeking virtual workers within the legal services industry, upload your job posting here.

At Traverse Legal, we believe that virtual workers will be a significant part of the labor pool for law firms, lawyers and other companies looking for legal professionals.  To all my fellow bloggers out there, we would appreciate if you would announce and link to this new service as we continue to promote the virtual worker model as THE BEST singular alternative for law firms and in-house legal staff to solve the problem of knowing when to hire that next worker, the constant fluctuation of workloads and obtaining specialized workers within niche practice areas.

Finally, Dictation Software for Your Cell Phone

What is the one piece of technology that you carry around with you virtually everywhere?  Of course, the answer is the cell phone.  I have been clamoring for years for an integrated dictation devise for my cell phone.  For those of you who own a Blackberry, your prayers are now answered by developer Shape Services and their software application VR+. 

Not only does the software work seamlessly with your Blackberry, routing your dictation via email or the network to your staff, it is the first piece of Blackberry software to receive a 10 out of 10 rating review from Berryreview.com.

Case Management Solutions for Law Firms

There is an interesting discussion and a number of link resources over at the LinkedIn business networking questions and answer section.  A variety of attorneys have suggested different software tools for case management.  Of course, basecamphq.com is included.  Two new ones which I have not seen before are Open Practice and Serengeti Legal Matter Management and E-Billing System.

Has anyone had any experience with either Serengeti or Open Practice?  Does anyone have any other case management software tools which are web enabled to add to the list?

No Woman Who Behaved Ever Changed History

I saw a t-shirt the other day that said “A woman who behaves never changes history.”   The t-shirt struck me for several reasons.  First, because I have had the pleasure of representing three amazing women who started a Digg site for women, now called Kirtsy.com. The website quickly exploded with traffic much to the surprise of the founders who now run one of the highest traffic women-centric portals on the internet.

Technology Lets You Work from Anywhere

Technology allows you to work from anywhere.  Most of our clients are not local companies.  But we connect to those clients through our Extranet, GoToMeeting and related applications.  Here are a few things about where I live in Traverse City Michigan.  Last week, I had to slow my car to avoid a family of porcupines crossing the road and several deer bounding across both lanes of traffic.  The people here are amazingly genuine and friendly, unlike the big cities where most lawyers toil.   Every time you go to the grocery store, you see people you know. 

Most lawyers are stuck practicing for big-law in the big city.  Don’t they realize that technology would empower them to successful working from paradise?

Creative Commons Licenses Fail To Protect Bloggers From Content Theft

Susan Cartier Liebel has a great post called "Shouldn't You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog's Feed For Your Profit?" She notes that:

This has been troubling me for a while.  And it just may go over like a lead balloon for some of you. We all work really hard on creating quality blog content, building our readership, creating trust in order to sell our legal services.  We publish it on our blogs, some under a creative commons license.  But when we started publishing did we automatically implicitly give any one person or company the right to gather our blog's feed and present our feeds in an aggregated format so they may profit off our reputation and work....without our permission?

The Creative Commons license which most bloggers choose is the "attribution non-commercial no derivatives work license 3.0."  However, this license is inadequate in several ways. First, commercial use is hardly the touchstone since most sites include Google adwords at this point.  It is the legitimacy of the web site which is using your content that is the core issue.  Illegitimate web sites which simply harvest thrid-part content are easy to spot.  In order to protect against sites which merely accumulate feeds or copy content, we reworked the creative commons license to include the following language:

2008 Report on Law Firm Billing Practices

Raintoday.com has published a report analyzing law firm billing practices.  The 2008 Report titled Fees and Pricing Benchmark Report: Law Firms & Legal Services Industry 2008, outlines the key elements for growing your law firm.  It provides keen insight into what the most successful law firms are doing with regard to hourly billing rates, alternative billing methods and other related billing practices.

Here are a few key insights from the report that may be of interest to your firm:

What is a domain name worth? Just back from the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference in Orlando

I remember when I first launched this blog about three and a half years ago that the whole concept of blogging was still relatively new.  How far we have come in such a short period of time…

Our law firm has been built around blogging, first amendment rights, technology companies and, beyond all else, the domain name market.  This includes the registration and trademark issues related to domain names, domain valuation, transfer contracts and cybersquatting disputes.

The amazing domain name game would probably shock many people.  From PPC advertising on parked pages to the sale of domain names such as iReport.com for $750,000.00 or the current auction for America.com where the price is already hovering somewhere north of $1 million.

Battle of the Blog

Kevin O’keefe over at the Real Lawyers Have Blogs site recently posted that "lawyer blogs are not advertising." Several commentators, chipping in on this issue, point out that blogs are a way for lawyers to voice their personal opinions. Despite the overlap with traditional notions of "marketing," blogs take up a unique space on the Internet. Web sites are oftentimes clearly advertising. But the primary function of blogs is to provide information. That information is provided from the viewpoint of the author of each post. The author provides information and a viewpoint (bias) about that information. It is extremely personal. Here’s what David Curtin, chief disciplinary counsel of the Rhode Island Supreme Court Disciplinary Counsel in the Providence Business News:

An attorney has a right, just like anyone else, to publicly express his or her opinion, and without government regulation. Whether a blog is [considered] an advertisement would depend on the content of the blog.If an attorney’s blog were to bolster his firm’s services in a particular area, that might be considered advertising......If a potential client contacts a lawyer after reading a blog, there is nothing wrong with that.

This interesting issue keeps popping up in the blogosphere. Those who say that the ethics rules should control lawyer blogging either fail to realize or intentionally want to keep information from the general public. We have to remember that most firms are built around the concept of secrecy. They would never want mass information to get out to the public. For heaven sake, that’s free legal advice!

Take one of my sites over at Traverselegal.com. I have a domain name dispute blog that provides tremendous amounts of free information to anyone wanting to learn about cybersquatting.

While there is a marketing component to my site, the thrust of the content is to provide information. The overwhelming majority of people who visit this particular blog simply use the free information and opinions of the author (me) for their own purposes. In many instances, these blog visitors may decide not to retain an attorney because they already have the answer to their question.

There are certainly lawyers, law firms, and professional organizations out there who see this model as a threat. There are firms that want an educated client. There are firms who want to keep their client in the dark in order to bolster their own expertise. Regardless, blogs are far more about information than they are marketing. If a client decides to retain an attorney after visiting their blog, all the better. But that doesn’t change the essential nature blogging.

Dividing Profits Among Partners: A New Approach

Our firm is now a three partner entity.  We are fortunate enough to be in a position to disburse profits throughout the year, in addition to our salaries.  Like everything else at Traverse Legal, we did not blindly follow the path of other firms in deciding how profits would be shared.

I have been involved with law firms who had very simple formulas for profit sharing.  Many of them simply add up all the collected billable hours and thereafter provide a multiplier based on origination.  The incentive in most firms is to bill as many hours as you possibly can and originate work which is billed by other lawyers in the firm.  While this approach is relatively simple to apply, it hardly provides the correct incentives from either the firm’s point of view, or the client’s point of view.

Blogging Trends

Dominik Mueller at the Domain Name Blog has a fascinating post on “Blogging Trends” which is definitely worth reading and includes a video from ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse.  Blogging is still the easiest way to generate content on the web.  Those of us who have been around a long time certainly realize that blogging takes a lot of time and energy.  It will be fascinating to see how blogs continue to develop and evolve.  My prediction is that someone will come up with a much more cost-effective way to generate category-killer content within the blogs niche area (actually, we have launched a company which achieves these exact goals. The launch is scheduled in three weeks).

Just watched an interesting video post from ProBlogger on the future of blogging. ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse was asked what he thought would be emerging trends in blogging. He said that there were five important trends he had been observing, namely:

• Multiple-author blogs
• Multi-topic blogs
• Blogs converging with other types of sites
• Portal-like design
• Indirect monetization

As you will see, the bigger domain industry blogs are already following some of these trends. For example, DomainNews.com and DomainNameNews.com are multi-author blogs, most domain blogs are converging with web 2.0 sites too, and a couple of bloggers are indirectly monetizing their blogs by offering their own services and expertise to readers.

Here's the video: