Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection by Mark Bennett

Some interesting (and fun) ideas about jury selection are contained in the feature Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection by Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett.

Lawyers and Alligators

Lawyers and Alligators is the title of a piece I wrote earlier this year about how we lawyers deal with prioritization in our lives. Most lawyers have already switched to a digital calendaring system and now it is time to focus on digital task lists.

Debate on the Free Access to Law

Apparently there is a fairly robust online debate about the state of the free access to the law. As we know the law is generally found in case opinions and statutes, which are, generally speaking, in the public domain by their nature. Scholarly treatises and law reviews provide analysis and commentary. Other research tools provide help in finding the applicable law.

A professor with long-term ties to West Publishing praised the free access to law movement for increasing competition, but also downplayed free legal research tools as being second rate. (One wonders if the esteemed professor has ever paid for legal research out of his own pocket.) Needless to say his statement provoked responses and you can find links to view his initial video and the responses here.

Well, the free access to the law movement is thriving in Oklahoma. Years ago, our Oklahoma Supreme Court decided that the law should be free and available in Oklahoma. The court's website, OSCN.net, has available to anyone all of the court opinions in a searchable format, back to statehood and even before. The online law library there includes the statutes as well as the case opinions, links to the administrative code, fee and bond schedules and many other resources. The largest counties already have their case files online and work is underway on the other counties.

Any citizen can also go to the local county courthouse and find the county law library and use Westlaw with a subscription paid for by the state.

For legal research in other jurisdictions, the Oklahoma Bar Association provides its member-lawyers access to Fastcase for the other states and federal courts. Last month OBA members had over 30,000 transactions on Fastcase.

There may be a debate about free access to the law in other jurisdictions, but not in the Sooner state. OSCN.net is recognized as our Website of the Week.

Federal Judge Rules Lawyers do not have to Comply with FTC Red Flag Rules

The American Bar Association prevailed today on its motion for an injunction and declaratory judgment that the Federal Trade Commission's interpretation that the "Red Flag" indentity theft prevention rules should apply to law firms was overbroad. More information here.

Can a Lawyer Really Use Twitter to Market a Law Practice?

Since the topic of lawyers marketing with Twitter has been discussed a lot lately in various forums, I couldn't resist giving my opinions with "Can a Lawyer Really Use Twitter to Market a Law Practice?" in the Oklahoma Bar Journal this month. I outline one plan to try to do so that a solo or small firm lawyer could use. I'm not saying this is the only plan and those lawyers who already love Twitter will find their own ways. I still believe most lawyers are too busy to use Twitter just for marketing. But lawyers who enjoy playing around with Twitter may find that they get business from it, as is true with many other activities.

UPDATE: Nearly one in five (19%) online Americans now uses Twitter or a similar service to post and share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

How to Declare E-mail Bankruptcy

"Why is my email broken?" was the title of a blog post today by my friend, Ernie the Attorney. He begins, "Almost everyone I know who uses email extensively for work is overwhelmed by email....Some people declare 'email bankruptcy,' which means that they delete all the emails in their inbox and then start from scratch.  And these are the optimists!"

Today, I'm going to give you the step by step instructions on how to declare e-mail bankruptcy in a more positive and less drastic way. Let's call it an E-mail Chapter 13 Reorganization instead of a "straight bankruptcy."

Let's restate the problem first. It is important for all of us to recognize that we are essentially powerless over e-mail. Yes, for most lawyers, it is and will remain a problem. The reason is simple. We could probably deal with processing the e-mail we receive if all we had to do was read it and then delete it or file it. But much e-mail comes with a task-- an assignment, even if the only task is replying to the e-mail. People e-mail us trying to get us to do all sorts of things from important work assignments to watch funny YouTube videos to meeting after work for a beer. You cannot do it all! You have to triage.

But today we will discuss how to do a reasonable e-mail bankruptcy. This isn't for those of you who are a little behind in your reading. This is for those of you who have over10,000 e-mails in your inbox, those who are receiving threats from the IT Department that they will delete them for you if you cannot handle it and those who are being blamed by everyone in the office when Outlook crashes or the system is just slow.

This is not a good system for filing e-mails. But it will clear out your inbox and it is something lawyers can live with because we all have the fear of deleting that critically important e-mail. The solution requires either Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader) or Nuance's PDF Converter Pro. The details below are for Microsoft Outlook.

Depending on your backlog and personal level of paranoia, this could take a hour hour or two.

1. Note the number of e-mails in your inbox, so you can feel good about your accomplishment when you stop. Look at the oldest e-mail to see the month and year.
2. Right click on Mailbox at the top of your Mail Folders. Select New Folder and name if for the month and year of your oldest e-mails (e.g. 2007 February or February 2007)
3. Go to the bottom of your inbox and select that oldest e-mail. Then scroll up until the last e-mail of that month. While holding down the Shift key, click on that e-mail. You should now have selected all of the e-mails in the oldest month of e-mail in your inbox.
4. Move these e-mails to your new February 2007 folder. You can either drag and drop and right click on the selected list and move all of the e-mails there.
5. Now that all of your February 2007 e-mails are in one folder, here is your chance to scroll through and see if there are any important client e-mails that need to be filed elsewhere. Note: Be careful with your time here or you will kill the whole project. You can find them later if you need to do so.
6. Now create a New folder on your network somewhere on a drive that is backed up regularly. Call it Archived E-mail.
7. Here's the good part. Now click on the Adobe icon at the top of your e-mail client and create one single PDF from all of the e-mails in that folder in one easy step. This may take a while to process, but this one step can combine hundreds (or thousands) of e-mails into one single PDF file. You can glance at this PDF to see how nicely organized they are within this file.
8. Now delete your February 2007 folder.
9. Create a March 2007 folder and repeat the process. You can decide how far to take this. But your inbox will certainly have a lot less in it as you do this and the IT department will be happy.
10. If it happens that you actually do need to see or print an e-mail that you have archived through this process and you know the date you can open the correct folder and look for it. Otherwise you can use Adobe's search function or some other desktop search tool to do full text searches of your Archived E-mail folder to locate e-mails.

The next step is the hardest. You need to come up with an improved plan to review, delete and file e-mails so you don't have to file bankruptcy again. But if not, you now know how to mass-archive.

Site of the Week: Trial Lawyer Tips Blog

Mitch Jackson has been really turning out some nice tips on his Trial Lawyer Tips blog. I don't do jury trials any more, but I wanted to pass along this nice resource to my readers and encourage Mitch and co-blogger Lisa Wilson to keep up the good work.

Magazine Subscriptions from ABA to Improve Your Practice

I'm a member of the American Bar Association, but many lawyers are not.

I want to mention two magazines from the ABA that many of you might find useful. You can subscribe to even if you are not an ABA member. One is Law Practice, published by the ABA Law Practice Management Section. You can subscribe to it for $64 per year. Here’s the link to subscribe: https://www.abanet.org/lpm/magazine/mag_subscribe.shtml

The other is GPSolo magazine from the ABA General Practice, Solo and Small Firm Division. You can subscribe to it for $48 per year. Here’s the link to subscribe: http://new.abanet.org/divisions/genpractice/Pages/GPSoloMagazine.aspx

You can also review the articles from past issues of the magazines online. The online versions are posted some time after the physical magazines are mailed to subscribers. You can find links to the archived or past issues at the above locations. But, I'm still a little old fashioned and like the physical subscription. I can read it when waiting for a meeting to start or other times when I am away from my computer.

Where does all your time go?

So many things to do, so little time. For a profession with a long tradition of recording time task-by-task as the day goes on, we still seem to lose time during the workday. Every lawyer has had the experience of working hard all day and noticing completed time sheets total far less than hours worked.

David Whelan does a review of three time-tracking products in his "Lost in Time" piece in Law Technology News. I've been hearing a lot lately about Chrometa, one of a class of these programs that can record everything you do on your computer for help in recovering lost billable time. It was good to learn more about Chrometa, along with Nestersoft's Worktime and Black Hill Software's TimeSprite.

Sure it will take you some more time to review the data from these, but if you just capture an additional half hour of billable time (or a single completed task under an alternative billing mode) each day, it would be a nice return on the review time.

(And it was good to hear from David Whelan, too. You can read more of his work at his site. He is someone we never should have exported to Canada!)

Social Media for Lawyers

I got a chance to meet Gerry Riskin and hear him speak last week. As many of you know, Gerry is a principal of Edge International and shares his wisdom with us through his Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices blog.

Gerry discussed Social Media as it related to the legal profession. Social Media suffers in our legal community by its name. It sounds more like a dating service or chat service than something a hard-nosed lawyer would have time to deal with. Gerry showed us a video that I'd like to share with you. Please trust me not to waste your 4 minutes and 33 seconds. It is a great video with good production values. But it is full of the kind of statistics that a good lawyer would use to prove a case. Be sure and view it in full screen mode.

A Bucketload of Technology News and Tips

Every now and then you get backed up. In my world right now, it is having too many things you would like to blog about when I have three or four major papers due in the next few days. My friend Dennis Kennedy dealt with that problem by starting a Dennis Kennedy Microblog. Well, I'm not ready to go there yet. But today I am going to try a microblogging exercise as I clean out my "to blog about" box and also pass along several interesting things that I learned about today. So hang on for today's tech news and tips with a load of links for you to follow, if you desire.

Lifehacker's Exhaustive Guide to Saving Your Smartphone's Battery

Ben Stevens gives us 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches

Oh, boy. iPhone users will soon be able to make free calls with Skype

Google Blog: Quickly View Formatted PDF's in Your Search Results (like the IRS online forms)

Technology Enables New Work-Life Norms

YouLaw: If Pixar Created a Law Firm Video

Why Companies Are Switching From BlackBerry To iPhone

ABA TECHSHOW Blog: 5 Great Feature Enhancements to Expect in PowerPoint 2010

Larry Bodine's Checklist for Law Firm Associates

Dan Pinnington: Lawyers as Targets of Fraud: The Common Misconceptions

Ethics of Metadata Comparison Chart Updated to Include Vermont

Free Exhibit Stamps from Adobe Acrobat

As courts move more toward e-filing and greater use of digital documents, lawyers will want to be able to use electronic exhibit stamps instead of more cumbersome methods. Rick Borstein of Adobe Systems Incoporated has created some nice exhibits stamps for you to download and use in Adobe Acrobat. They are really easy to use. Earlier this year he provided the simple exhibit stamps here and just a couple of weeks ago he provided these fancy two-line exhibit stamps here for those states that require a case style on the exhibit stamp (or lawyers who just think that looks better.) There are detailed explanations at the links above.

Once you download and install both sets of stamps from the links in the posts noted above, then you just use the stamp feature of Adobe to place them on a document and you are prompted for the exhibit number (and case style on the two line version.)

If you've never done this type of download before, the download actually opens in a browser window with the instructions on where to save it and you use "File - Save as" to save it in the right place on your system. If you cannot see said "right place," you may have to go to Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) to make all folder settings visible, including those that Microsoft says by default most mere mortals should not see.

Thanks, Rick Borstein, for this free tool. And, let me note again that the law firm that wants to better use Adobe Acrobat in the office should make use of Rick's free Adobe Acrobat training videos focused on law office operations.

Web Watch: Sea of Possibilities

When Law Technology News decided to let Bob Ambrogi go on vacation, they let me guest author his Web Watch column, which is a bit intimidating since Bob is knowledgeable and well respected in his field. I decided to take a new look at an old topic: Internet search. The result is Sea of Possibilities, where i came to the perhaps not-so-startling conclusion that even basic Internet searching has evolved quite a bit the last year or so.

150 attend OBA Tech Fair & TECHSHOW Roadshow

We had a great time at the OBA Tech Fair this week. Thanks to Tom Mighell, Debbie Foster and Adriana Linares for taking the time to come teach our members. I have gotten lots of great feedback. And for those of you who didn't attend, from Oklahoma or anywhere else, please consider attending ABA TECHSHOW 2010 March 25-27, 2010 in Chicago.