There are a number of large law firms that have officially sanctioned blogs, and we’ve compiled a list of those that we could find. Out of the National Law Journal 250, we found 136 141 blogs from 53 56 firms. Now, let me explain what we mean by “officially sanctioned blog.” We are stretching this phrase to mean that the blog was mentioned somewhere on the firm’s website. Some of the blogs are featured jewels of the firm, and are proudly displayed. Others, are hidden so deeply, that you might think that the firm tolerates some of their attorneys having personal blogs. We’ll follow up with some additional blog postings to break out the firms that are blog-proud vs. blog-tolerant. [click here to see Blog-Proud v. Blog-Tolerent Firms]NOTE: We looked at each of the firms’ websites to see if they listed any blogs in their publications or other obvious places.  We’d also use the search function to see if we could find any blogs listed by the firm.  If we missed some blogs, please let us know.

NOTE 2:  Kevin O’Keefe just put out an AmLaw 200 blog list that is great.

Akin Gump

ClimateIntel
SCOTUSBlog

Alston Bird
Baker Hostetler
Class Action Blawg
Butzel Long
Florida ADR Law
The Cochran Firm
The Cochran Law Firm Blog
Dechert/Jones Day
Drug and Device Law
Jackson Walker
HIPAA Blog
Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro
Class Action Defense Blog
Hotel Law Blog
Jones Day/Dechert
Drug and Device Law
McGlinchey Stafford
CAFA Law Blog
McKenna Long
RFID Law Blog
Pepper Hamilton
IP Spotlight
Powell Goldstein
Export Law Blog
Proskauer Rose
Privacy Law Blog
Sutherland Asbill & Brennan
LNG Law Blog

The evolution of the Internet has pushed the ideas of smaller, faster, lighter, and cheaper.  For the relaying of personal knowledge via the Internet (which I’m shortening to RPK for this post), the same model seems to apply.  The evolution of dissemination of personal knowledge currently has us using Twitter as the medium of choice.  

I asked one of my Twitter mates (Kevin O’Keefe) the question this morning of whether Twitter is the final evolution of Blogging, and his response was yes –  “Unless we get to to mental telepathy via the keyboard.”So, that got me pondering where we go from here.  Which, in turn, got me trying to recall how we got to this current part of the RPK model?  
My personal memories take me back to the Gopher days (skimming over the Archie and Veronica period).  I’m thinking that the first generation of “blogs” probably started out when you used to put the “~” sign in front of your web address to show that this was your “personal page.”  I didn’t become aware of Blogs until around 2002, and didn’t start really paying attention to them until a couple years later, and didn’t start contributing for another couple of years.  Once, I jumped in, however, I was hooked, and was enjoying contributing to the RPK using my blog.  

This year, I’ve been hooked on latest RPK tool, Twitter.  In the era of instant gratification, Twitter has to be one of the best tools.  I post, I follow, I get followed, I create searches, I follow some more.  All using 140 characters or less, and I view hundreds (if not thousands) of little messages each day.  I’m able to make connections with interesting, and sometimes influential people in my profession, that I might never have been able to before.  After a short period of time, it feels like you are truly friends with some of the people you’ve never personal met or talk to before.  As strange as it sounds, it is pretty exciting.
Of course, this all brings me back to my initial question of, “Is Twitter the Final Evolution of the Blog?”  Where in the world could we advance the RPK model from here?  It doesn’t seem that we could advance any further on our basics for Internet evolution of “smaller, faster, lighter, and cheaper.”  
“Smaller” – Twitter is 140 characters (SMS limitation is 160)
“Faster”  – As far as I can tell, it is pretty instantaneous
“Lighter” – It works on any Internet medium (even my wife’s old cell phone can Twitter via SMS)
“Cheaper” – Free (although, I’m wondering if that will change)
What other options are there out there?  What adjectives am I missing on my list that could influence the evolution of RPK?  
“Better” seems to be too subjective – Is Blogging Better than Tweets? – that seems to be dependant upon what your goals are.  More “Interactive” doesn’t seem to work either.  Proper use of URL shorteners, such as tinyurl, allows you to link out to what you want the Twitter community to see.  So, interactive seems to be already there.
After a couple of minutes of meditating on the idea, I could only come up with one adjective that hasn’t taken hold in the RPK arena – “Predictive.”
Now, before we get all carried away on “artificial intelligence”, I want to step back and explain what I mean by Predictive.  I also want to concede that a tool like Twitter may be the final evolution for “pushing” RPK out to the public, but it is not the end of the end of the evolutionary chain when it comes to receiving RPK.  
Back to Predictive — Currently, we can track trending on Twitter by viewing what are the hot phrases being discussed on Twitter.  But, unless I’ve missed a tool out there that can do this, we cannot trend specifically those that we follow, or specific groups within those that we follow (let me know if there is a tool that does this already.)  At this time, I use tools like TweetDeck to monitor certain phrases that people Tweet about.  This has allowed me to stumble upon a few people with some interesting Tweets, but 99% of the results I get tend to be relevant to what I’m tracking.  When I focus the search on those that I follow, the relevancy rate goes way up, but it is still limited to my search terms, and I wouldn’t say that any type of search that I could set up in TweetDeck could give me any trending details.
In order to be Predictive, I’m thinking that there has to be a mash-up of different tools to get us there.  Some type of combination of the vary tools we’ve reviewed here on this blog, combined with blogs and tweets, that can first establish trending data, and then help us predict what these trends are leading to.  Something that will expand our perception of when, how, where, who and why the RPK is being disseminated.  There are some tools out there that do portions of these tasks, but nothing that seems to pull it all together in a way to help track or predict trends.  Based on the resources that I’m familiar with, I’ll try to explain what I mean:
1.  When – 

I reviewed an Outlook plug-in product called Xobni a few months ago that does the “when” portion of email pretty well.  There should be a tool that can show you when you are posting, and when those that you are following are posting, so that you can see the details of the time of day that is most active for your community.  I would like this expanded to include both Tweets and Blog postings of those that I follow.
2.  How – 

Dovetailed with the “when” portion, I’d also like to see what tools people are using to post their RPK.  If using Twitter, how are they posting — if blogs, what tools are they using.
3.  Where – 

By this “where” I am talking geographically.
  I love Twittervision, but think that there should be a tool out there that takes the Twittervision concept and produces a TweetDeck type environment for it to live it.  
That way, I can get a global look at those I’m following, and be able to add that additional piece of information into my reading of their RPK.
4.  Who – 

Of course, we usually know “who” we’re following, but what I’m looking for is a way to quickly match some of the information that those that I’m following either post on their own bios, or allow me to add some metadata to their bios based on what I know about them.  Then, when I start looking for trends, can I also match up some trending information based on “who” is posting.
5.  Why – This is probably the most difficult portion on my wish list.  But, not impossible if you look at it from the perspective of “why is this trend occurring” rather than “why is this person posting this RPK.”  
Now that I’ve laid out the guide to the perfect world of relaying personal knowledge, I task some ingenious programmer and thinker out there to pull it all together for me. 

As you probably know by now, I like to see different approaches to the way we normally do things on the web. This weekend, I was doing some searches on my favorite new addiction (you know it as Twitter), when I came across a search tool called Quintura. I thought I’d test it out and see what it has to offer, and I came away fairly impressed with the concept.

Quintura uses the Yahoo XML search results and does some visual markup of the results, which it calls the Quintura Cloud. There are a number of ‘Cloud Results’ tools out there, but I like the method that Quintura uses to view some of the verbiage that appears in the initial results of your search. The idea behind the cloud results is that you can see how the words in your initial search produces words or phrases in the results lists, and you can then begin visually adding or subtracting the results to further define your search. Pretty cool idea.
I picked the search of: “knowledge management” “semantic web”
The search results appear on the right-side of the p age, and the cloud results on the left. In the cloud, I get this look:
I can hover over each of these words to expand my search by including the words, or I can click the (-) sign next to the word to restrict my searches to results that specifically do not have the words or phrases in them.
If I click on “metadata” for example, my search changes automatically and adds “metadata” to the search. thus, I’ve been able to refine the search on the fly, so to speak, with the assistance of Quintura.
I do like the concept behind this, but it still has a way to go before it is ready to come out of beta. One problem is that it is not the most intuitive product to use (but, I’m usually pretty forgiving on that one because sometimes advance searching isn’t always easy.) I really didn’t like the fact that there are times where the cloud gets into an endless loop. In other words, there can be specific words that lead to words already in the cloud, and then those words lead me right back to my initial word, and that keeps going and going.
Despite these couple of minor quirks in the way it is set up, however, I do thing that this type of searching, where you have visual as well as text results, is a wave of the future. For a product like Quintura to succeed, the developers are going to have to team up with the major search engines (or be bought out by the search engines.)
Give Quintura a try. I think you’ll like the concept of visual search results to help better define your search queries.

Google added a new search results feature to its search results page: ranking, deleting and commenting on search results.

Now, thanks to the brilliant folks at Google, ( you can read more about it on their blog), all the hard work that your web team has poured into your search engine results will be all for naught, if the search engine user doesn’t like your site.

See, thanks to a nifty new tool next to each site on the search result page, a searcher can either delete a site that shows up in the search engine results or push his preferred site to the top of the search engine results. The searcher can also comment on a search result, indicating that site is “super cool” or “not so hot”. These comments can either be made private on a personal Google Search Wiki, or made public on a public Google Search Wiki.

True, Google makes it clear that a searcher’s modifications are only viewable to his own personal Google account.

But since these preferences are set in the searcher’s account, no matter how well you optimize your site over his preferred site, your fully optimized site will never top his preferred site. The searcher’s ranking will forever skew the search results for him.

Which only forces the sponsored links and non-organic links to get even better billing. Of course, Google doesn’t mind; they get to make more money.

Yes, these selections only appear on a searcher’s personal search results but you can’t tell me that Google isn’t measuring these deletions and rankings so that if everyone starts deleting spam farms, Google might drop these sorts of pages even lower in the rankings. Conversely, if everyone is picking the same site over and over again for a search, I could only imagine that Google would give this site higher preference.

So the Machiavelli in me thought, “I’ll show them! I’m going to delete all of our competition from our target search terms! Then I’m going to select my site to the top result. Ha!”

But I refrained. Perhaps to my own detriment, because I know that there are others out there who are not so nice.

I envision that people are going to abuse this feature. Call me a cynic, but mark my word . . .

Now I have to worry about yet another factor when optimizing our site.

Bother.

Knowledge Management (KM) in the UK has meant something different than here in the US until recently. My top-line assessment has been that the UK gets the human aspect of KM and the US gets the technology part. We’ve both been working towards the middle with varying degrees of success.

In the UK, the human implementation has manifest most times as a Practice Support Lawyer (PSL). PSLs are SMEs (a.k.a. subject matter experts) on steroids. When a regular lawyer has a question about the law, about a contract clause or about any detailed legal issue, they go ask a PSL. The PSL is completely immersed in their subject of law and need to know it better than anyone else. So though the client interacts with the regular lawyer, the PSL is the holder of the high-value knowledge that will ultimately serve the client. In contrast, in the US when we want an answer about the law we query a system.

This week I saw an online demo from Practical Law which has taken the PSL concept, married it to technology and is offering it as an online service. Thus the post title, PSL SaaS. Under an annual subscription fee you can run searches, browse subjects, compare international laws and even generate quality first-draft documents. And when you hit the wall and need assistance they have a team of PSL-like lawyers available to help you. They’ve termed this approach “know-how” services, which is a UK KM term of art.

Practical Law has been up-and-running in the UK for some time now. This week they launched their first US product lines: Corporate & Securities and Finance. It’s more of a soft launch as they are in the process of rounding out the US offerings.

What impressed me about this offering is that it bridges the UK-Human and US-Technology KM gap. As a devotee of KM and a longtime fan of SaaS (f.k.a. as ASP), I am encouraged to see this development and hopeful for its entry into the US market. When I asked about the market demographics they describe them as quite broad; from solos to in-house counsel. Time will tell if this type of tool falls in the trend category or not.

RegulationsAs I was riding in on the bus this morning, I was reading the paper (over one of my fellow passenger’s shoulder, of course) and saw an article in the Houston Chronicle titled “Skip the cuteness on e-mail.” Being too far way from the paper to read the details, I started making up the story in my head about some of the “cute” things I’ve tried to do in e-mail, blogs, and on Twitter that have backfired on me. When I started thinking about why it backfired on me, I realized that it was because:

  1. I wasn’t clear on my message
  2. I thought everyone that reads my message knows me personally (and my personality)
  3. I forgot that sometimes sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek comments don’t translate well to text (even with cute smile icons!) 😉

So, when I cross the imaginary line, I’ve found that there are some pretty, shall I say – “un-shy” people out there that will quickly call you on your faux pas and I’ve found myself typing out an apology for my lax in social web protocol. This type of self-regulation of the social web keeps honest people honest, and reminds you that your message is hitting a broader audience than you think.

Since I’m not too ashamed of some of my screw-ups and immediate dressing-downs, I’ll list some examples of what I’ve done, and a couple of other “self-regulated moments” that I’ve seen from others. I’ll start with the benign and work my way up to the more malignant goofs:

The “Joss” vs. “Josh” Whedon Mistake:
I’m a huge Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible fan, and was so excited that Joss Whedon has a new show called Dollhouse coming out next year. So excited that I wanted my Twitter friends to see the new wiki that was out there about the show. So, I fire off a tweet, but made the fatal mistake of typing “Josh” instead of “Joss”. Well, any fan worth their weight knows this is a major mistake in the Whedonverse, and it didn’t take long for someone to step up and let me know that I was obviously an idiot and must not be a true fan. Of course, being a true fan, this made me feel a little sick at my stomach that I made this typo. So, I quickly over-geeked myself with an apology to the Whedonverse and hope that they can forgive my mistake and let me back into the fold.

The “Spying” Joke Blows Up:
Okay… if you take anything away from this posting, remember this, “INSIDE JOKES TEND NOT TO BE FUNNY.”

Case-in-Point – I’m a Competitive Intelligence professional, and I do a lot of public speaking on CI as it relates to law firms. Well, one of the things that we joke about is the fact that some people think that we are basically spies, and that there is a certain ethical gray area that we work in. Of course, we are not spies, and it is something that we fight all the time. Well, my friends and I are always joking about this misconception, and bringing it up during our presentations, and we try to make light of the situation by injecting some humor. Unfortunately, I was welcoming a new member on Twitter, and made the mistake of joking about other CI professionals being in here “spying.” Doh!! Well, it didn’t take long to get a full-force rebuttal from another person explaining exactly what CI professionals do, and that spying is not one of them. I know better, I know better, I know better. But, I slipped up and tried to be cute, and it ended up making me look like I didn’t know what I was talking about. So, another self-regulation that worked. I immediately apologized, and promised myself to watch out on the “inside jokes” via Twitter.

The “If it was offensive when someone else said it – You probably shouldn’t repeat it” Regulation
Earlier this week, a well-known Legal Marketing guru retold an elevator pitch that a partner in a law firm uses, but probably should never have been used in the first place, and definitely shouldn’t have been repeated. I won’t repeat the pitch here, but let’s just say that it didn’t go over well with his readers, and it quickly got out via Twitter, and the posting was removed and replaced with a heart-felt apology. So, here’s a rule that you should remember before posting something. If you were to say the same thing out loud to one of your colleagues, and you have to look both ways to make sure no one else hears the joke, then don’t post it!! Inappropriate comments get ratcheted up exponentially on the social web. If you intend for a dozen people to read your post, expect that there are a dozen times as many that will, and if you post something inappropriate, start multiplying that number as well.

Social Web Self-Regulation is not the Political Correctness Squad
Some of you reading this are probably rolling your eyes and thinking that this is the PC Police gone wild on the Internet. Well, it really isn’t. You can have sincere disagreements with your fellow social webbers all the time. In fact, it is actually encouraged. I’ve seen many a good battle out on the social web and have enjoyed even chiming in a time or two arguing my point. But, when you make mistakes, it is kind of nice to know that others are out there ready to point it out to you, so that you can either clarify your position, or as in most of my cases, apologize for letting your fingers get ahead of your brain. I’d rather have someone let me know than have my comments sitting out there waiting to come back and bite me later. So, “Regulators, Mount Up!!”

NOTE: No sooner did I post this, than I found out that I messed up again! I incorrectly credited the wrong author of a social media blog posting last night. And, the correct author just clued me in on my mistake. Here’s to Gerry Heidenreich for setting me straight!! And to Craig Niedenthal for saying he’d still take the credit for Gerry’s article. I’m sure this isn’t the last time (today) that I’ll be corrected!!

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I just had to go ahead and try it. 3D-Xplorer just called to me when I saw the posting on CNET this morning that Avatars to run Altadyn business meetings. Then when I saw that Mike Elgan also reviewed this product, I knew I had to go out and test it.

Take a look around and let me know what you think. Use your mouse and arrow keys to move around.  NOTE:  The app runs in your browser using JAVA.  It may take a while to load the first time you try it.  You can cancel the user login, or login anoymously by picking an avatar gender and entering in a name (such as Guest) if you want to see what the avatar looks like in the room. 3geek VR-Room

(click image to launch 3 Geeks VR-Room)

My take is that it is that I like the fact that you don’t need to download anything to use it – although it uses JAVA to do all the hard work; it works in the web browser without any special ports (at least that IT has found to block yet); and it isn’t all that difficult to play with (although, if you really want to play, you have to pay to get the really cool tools – around $49/month for the online meeting tools.) So, for the time being, I’m playing with the free version, and having some fun.

There have been a few law firms out there that have taken a slow approach to Twitter, but I ran across one today that has taken Twitter straight to its homepage and says “Follow Me!!”

Jackson Walker, a 300+ Texas-based law firm has created a number of Twitter accounts based on the type of law that someone may want to follow. Here is what they have so far:

Jackson Walker(News about the firm)

JW Law(Legal updates in all categories)

Entertainment Law

ERISA

Financial Recovery Solutions

First Amendment

Health Care Law

HIPAA

Intellectual Property Law

Labor and Employment Law

Litigation Alerts

Media Law

Real Estate Law

Tax Law

I have to say that I’m impressed with JW taking the Twitter bull by the horns (or would it be the Twitter dove by the tail feathers??).
I’ve run across a couple other firms that have Twitter accounts, such as @fulbright, @weilgotshal, and @WCSRtwit but none have made the leap like Jackson Walker. It will be interesting following this to see if JW finds this to be a way to bring in new business.  (Here is a growing list of big law attys on Twitter – thanks to @SecuritiesD.)
Toby and I presented on the topic of Privacy and Technology at the Houston Area Law Librarians (HALL) 2008 Fall Conference.  I’m pretty sure that after we were through scaring the bejesus out of those who attended, they all went home, disconnected themselves from the Internet, and are now living in a commune somewhere in the Idaho panhandle.  
For those of you that missed the presentation (that would be you, since you’re obviously still connected to the Internet) – we’re posting the PowerPoint slides here on the GeekLawBlog.

One of the best things about writing a blog, is that one posting can stimulate a conversation in a way that not even the writer expects.  Take Toby’s post from Tuesday, Good Technology Is Magic.  Toby’s discussion of e-discovery and semantic searches got a comment from one of the readers who actually works on a product that does semantic pointed us to his product called Cluuz.  Well, any one that has read my postings knows that I’m a search fanatic (I am a librarian, you know…), so I thought I’d take a look at Cluuz and see what I could do with it.

Cluuz is Clean
The first thing you see when you visit Cluuz, is that it has a clean user interface.  Much like the simplicity of Google’s search page.  Right away, I like this approach.  I try a few simple searches at first (basically Googled, er, `Cluuzed` myself and added in the phrase “competitive intelligence.”)  What I got back was pretty interesting.
First of all, I see from the URL that it seems that Cluuz is using Yahoo search to do the initial search, and then Cluuz itself is using its front-end to display the results.  Here’s a link to the results if you want to follow along: “Greg Lambert” “Competitive Intelligence”
The results page also looks very clean (I know I’m sounding like a character from the Beatles’ Hard Days Night with all the “it’s a clean page” talk, but I think that describes it best.)  I get a brief overview of the following:
  1. Number of results (First 10 of 41 results)
  2. Top Clues – A snapshot of what key terms seem to be mentioned the most in the results.  I personally think they should be a little more geeky and rename these “Top Cluuz”.
  3. Top Linked Entities – The to 10 most linked words in the results page.  This is a pretty good result since it names my workplace, my associations, and my blog.  You can click on any of these and add this to the search terms.
  4. A Semantic Graph – This is the bread and butter of Cluuz.  The graph is definitely brain stimulating, and is a nice way of laying out the information found in the results page in a way that can display a tremendous amount of information without getting too overwhelming for the user.
  5. Results List – This seems to be the basic Yahoo results list, along with a few things that Cluuz has added on: There is a “Cluuz It” link that opens the page with a Cluuz frame at the top.  Not really sure what value this adds, in fact some of my results wouldn’t show up because it would give me a Yahoo Search Page Error.  So, at first look, this doesn’t seem to do what I think they are trying to get it to do. On some of the results, there are Key Terms from the results page that you can click on to add these terms to the search string.  This is actually a good idea, plus it allows the user to see some of the key terms without having to open the page itself. Next, there is a Cluuz Ranking using 5 connected puzzle pieces.  This is interesting, but I’ll need to dig a little deeper into Cluuz to see what they use to rank the results.A synopsis of the page is listed.  I think this is pretty much straight from Yahoo. Finally, there are pictures from the results page.  I like this as well, because it gives the user information from that page without having to actually open the page.
More on the Semantic Graph

As mentioned earlier, the Semantic Graph is the crown jewel of Cluuz.  I think a lot of users will like the visual representation of the results, and will be able to interpret the information quickly.  The graph opens very quickly, and doesn’t use Flash or Java to display, so it easily displays in IE, Firefox and Chrome.  One of the things I would like to see is the ability to shrink the graph by levels so that it doesn’t become to unwieldy.  But, overall, it produces a great visual.
What’s the Potential?
Cluuz is in beta right now, so I know that Michael and the others over at Cluuz (and the parent Sprylogics) would love to hear comments about what they should do with this product.  Here are a few from me:
  • Make the graph collapsible
  • Perhaps give the user the ability to use Google results rather than Yahoo
  • Better explain what the “Cluuz It” option is supposed to do for us, and make sure that it works with the results
  • Offer this as a product I can use inside my network.  I think Toby mentioned this in his comments.  Perhaps this could be a pretty good e-discovery tool, or at a minimum, a good desktop or network enterprise search solution
  • Keep it clean!  
Overall, it is a pretty good looking product with a lot of potential.  I look forward to seeing it roll from Beta to production!  Good luck!