TIP: Share Useless ContentA lawyer once said: “It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.”  Following Abe Lincoln’s advice, send clients e-mail announcements on major changes regarding a government regulation, but only send the title of the regulation and a link to the Code of Federal Regulations to let them figure out the change for themselves.  Or, even better, cut and paste the entire regulation and put it in the body of your email.Taking this approach tells your clients that they are savvy enough to understand the issues all on their own.  We’ve actually seen some lawyers accidentally give clients a one or two paragraph overview of major legal changes and how that may affect their business.  Remember, useful is not annoying.

Greg and I put together a fun article on how to annoy clients with technology. It was on track to be published, but at the 11th hour was rejected. Apparently our writing style lacks a certain diplomacy. But then we had our “duh” moment and wonder why the heck we were trying to publish something in paper. The obvious response was publishing on our own blog. So over the next days we will be posting up the various tips from that article. Here’s the intro and first tip:

Using Technology to Annoy Clients

Given the ever-expanding universe of technology, there is truly no end to the ways you can annoy your clients. To help you along in this process, we want to arm you with some ‘best practices’ for aggravating and just plain bothering your clients. Remember the old adage: “If one cookie tastes good, make them eat the whole bag.”

TIP: Share the Wrong Content

Spam presents a great opportunity to annoy since it already has people annoyed. So this is an easy best practice. Every time you e-mail out an e-newsletter or event notice, send it to all of your clients. This will ensure that each client will get at least one e-mail on a topic that is of no concern to them. Less-worthy lawyers waste valuable time developing targeted lists so that bankruptcy clients only get bankruptcy content. If you want to move up the ladder another notch on this tip, make sure you send these e-mails often.

I’d been saying this all along . . . (see my post: Online Social Networking: A Fancy Word for Friendship ).

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@ Mixx: Social Networking: From Shut-Ins To Political Action To Products
By David Kaplan – Tue 23 Sep 2008 06:56 AM PST

It’s day two of Advertising Week in New York, and to keep people in their seats at theInteractive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference, Charlie Rose was tapped to bring his talk show format to a morning session with new media academic Clay Shirky. In offering a primer of social networkings evolution, Shirky told Rose that it started with with people who didn’t leave the house—“people who were confined in some way”—and then spread to others who wanted to share photos and details about their lives. It then got serious as political activists started using it, which was shortly followed by the business world.

— Almost all you need is love: In seeking to understand how social networks work, Shirky says you have to understand “household economics.” Shirky: “Economists have a tough time explaining why you feed your children. Household economics is not seen as terribly important. But it is and it explains a lot about why we do what we do, especially in social networking. Non-financial motivations are getting people to do something. People create value for each other because we’re human. We’re not self-obsessed, we like to know other people. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBaysaid the idea behind it was that people are basically good. He was proven wrong three months later when eBay nearly tanked because people were stealing from another. ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll send you a check for those Beanie Babies.’ But when the grades were added for buyers and sellers, people suddenly got good.”

We here at the Geeklawblog discuss a lot on the topics of Knowledge Management, Marketing, Research and Competitive Intelligence.  On the surface, these ideas tend to mean the “repackaging of existing data into usable information for the benefit of those in our firm.”  In other words, we attempt to create a way to make our “results” greater than the sum of our “parts”.But, when I started thinking about it, perhaps the key word in the previous sentence isn’t “results” or “parts”, but rather it is the word “create.”  To me, it is the creativity part of my job that most inspires me.  Being able to look at a problem and come up with a unique solution, and implementing that solution makes me want to come in to work much more than the paycheck at the end of the week.  And, I’m guessing, that for those of you that have jobs that ask you to be creative, you also value that creative reward more than the financial reward.I watched a talk by Sir Ken Robinson where he discusses creativity, and how something so important tends to be discounted in our educational system.  My absolute favorite portion of the talk was when Robinson defines creativity:

  • Creativity  – “The process of having original ideas that have value.”

Simple, but inspiring for those of us lucky enough who are asked to be creative in our day-to-day functions. 
When we look around at our peers, which ones stand out to you?   Is it the KM director that has installed and supports a dozen applications?  Or, is it that one KM person that created a way to use applications in a unique way, thus creating something of value??  Is it the librarian that billed 2000 hours of research work, thus making money for the firm?  Or, is it the librarian that created a system to monitor what the competition was doing, and made sure that the lawyers in the firm got that information in their hands in order to be better prepared and to make proactive decisions?  
You get the idea….  All four of these samples are “valuable”, but the creative samples are “original ideas” that not only provide value, they also generate a competitive advantage that can spur additional value on down the line.  Take a look and see if your creative side needs a little nourishment.

CBS and YouTube are petitioning the folks at Pulitzer to create a prize for video news. . . . maybe I will be able to get that Pulitzer that I’ve always dreamed about . . .

YouTube Partners With Pulitzer Center For Contest By Doug Caverly – Mon, 09/08/2008 – 2:52pm.

Poor video quality, the pointlessness of many clips, and the fact that the site isn’t profitable have all kept YouTube from earning much respect. But a new contest called Project: Report may go a ways towards changing that.

The contest is being backed by Sony VAIO and Intel, so the prizes are sure to create some excitement. More important is YouTube’s partnership with the Pulitzer Center, which lends quite a bit of authority to any matter and leads to Project: Report’s journalistic focus.

“[N]on-professional, aspiring journalists” are being encouraged “to tell stories that might not otherwise be covered by traditional media.” In the first of three rounds, participants should “profile someone in your community, in three minutes or less, highlighting a story you think deserves to be heard by a wide audience,” according to a post on theYouTube Blog.

Then, following the October 5th end of the submission period, judges will narrow the field to 10 finalists, and more information about the second and third rounds should be released. The overall winner will get grants, gear, and the opportunity to work with the Pulitzer Center on an international reporting project.

Project: Report won’t turn YouTube into some beacon of truth overnight, and to be honest, such a beacon probably wouldn’t be half as popular. YouTube’s at least demonstrating a sort of ability to be mature, though, and taken in conjunction with all of its recent political coverage, this development may be part of a trend.

Tomorrow, version 5.6 of InterAction will be released. On Friday, I was able to preview a demo of one of its new features. 5.6 has an optional LinkedIn function set. The default on installation has this turned off, but a simple admin effort will turn it on.

Once enabled, the function set takes the contact names and company names in InterAction and runs them against LinkedIn’s list. Matches are then given a LinkedIn icon which allows users to see their LinkedIn connections with the contact. The first time you click a LinkedIn icon, you are asked to allow access. This is a one-time effort which is reversible from the LinkedIn account management menu.

Once access is granted, LinkedIn then provides you connection lines with the contact record. In the demo, I saw the LexisNexis reps connections to me (3rd level) and how he could connect through his own connections to contact me. This is just the LinkedIn functions we’re used to.

The LinkedIn icon will also show in an Outlook view, if you have the Web client and open a contact through the InterAction access button.

In talking with the rep, LexisNexis is planning further integrations, like co-mingling InterAction “Who Knows Whom” with the LinkedIn connections. They are looking for ideas on how to expand these functions, so feel free to contact them.

As previously posted here, this new tool-set appears to be moving LinkedIn into a higher value category. LinkedIn is interesting and has potential, but now we’re actually seeing some of this potential in action.

A nifty tool for reporters, writers and news junkies, Google is cooking up a new tool that lets you compare quotes on people of interest on a variety of topics. Right now, you are limited to 20 political figures in the U.S. Edition (other people of interested are selected for Canada, UK, and India).

They have some popular issues already defined but you can also run a search on any topic you choose. It pulls the quote, cites the sources and gives a link. There is also a “spin” feature which randomly selects other results on your search.

As my esteemed colleague has commented on some Ike IT frustrations, I feel compelled to comment on some Ike IT stars.

My firm’s IT group road out the storm and kept our systems up and running. As the ‘main’ office for our firm, all of our critical systems reside here in Houston. Of course we have an off-site backup, as all firms should.

Even though our building sustained some damage, our systems never went down. IT staff was on-site and at our backup location monitoring things and making sure we stayed live.

The result, I never stopped getting emails (and working) and we had critical infrastructure available for lawyers and staff that needed it.

Kudos to our IT group!

The writing was on the wall for this one.  Heller Ehrman is going to dissolve on Friday.  Legal Times posted it, and additional information was published by Cal Law.

Some of the background information is found on the Heller Highwater blog.

There are RUMORS, that Thacher Proffitt and Seyfarth Shaw are looking to merge with someone to prevent the same fate.  

First off, I’m going to let you know that I am very biased on this topic, and believe that it is the goverment’s express duty to make its laws known to the people they affect.  So, when I was at the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and managing the court’s public website, OSCN, we made every effort to make whatever writings came out of the court available online.

But, there are a number of governments, from local to state, that attempt to put a copyright on any and all of their publications, and use that as leverage to either sell access to the information via their own publications or through publishers like Westlaw and Lexis.  Oregon just recently backed off of their attempt to sue for copyright protection once there was a public outcry against them.  My good friend Bonnie Shucha, up in Wisconsin, blogged about that case back in July.
I read today on CNET that Carl Malamud is trying to take on any government that he can by copying their published works and making it available on public.resource.org.  Great idea, but pretty hard for one man to do.  But, I do like how he is putting the web to use by also hosting the Pacer Recycling website where you can upload your old Pacer documents to his site, and others can then use them rather than going back to Pacer.
Getting governments to contribute to the public domain shouldn’t be a difficult task, but it can be.  Even when I was at OSCN, we offered the free use of our database to house the court decisions and statutes of other states.  We only had one state to take us up on the offer (good ol’ Wyoming!!)  We even helped digitize some of their older cases and put the whole thing in Universal Citation System format, so that the big boys at the major legal publishers didn’t try to sue for the pagination rights.  I was truly surprised when other courts didn’t take us up on the offer to house their cases.  There were actually a couple of them (who shall remain nameless Western Mountainous States) that were actually pretty hostile to the idea because they thought it would cut a revenue source for them.  
I wish Carl the best of luck, and will be watching to see if he finally gets under the governments’ or publishers’ skin and they sue him for copyright enfringment.