LexConference : LexConference : Legal & Law Conferences : Brought To You By LexBlog

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

In 1999, Ed Walters co-founded a legal research company in his living room.

“We grew to the point where the only place in my house that there wasn’t a desk was my bathroom. And that’s when we decided we needed to move,” Walters said.

Fast forward 10 years and Fastcase has 400,000 subscribers, works with 17 state bar associations and just debuted a hot new iPhone app.

Walters, the CEO of Fastcase, and Bar Relations Manager Christina Steinbrecker were on hand at the trade show during Fastcase’s first trip to ABA TechShow.

“The thing about this show that is so great is the people are so curious,” Steinbrecker said. “Usually you’re grabbing people and giving them the overview, but to be able to get into the meat and potatoes of what the service actually does has been really fun.”

What Fastcase does can be narrowed down to two things, Walters said: democratize the law and make research smarter.

“It’s an easy company to get behind when I get out to things like this and talk about how great we are,” Steinbrecker said. “It’s a really important issue in my mind—access to legal research and making it easy and affordable to everyone.”

In the future, Walters wants to expand the number of state bar associations Fastcase works with, continue offering high-touch customer service and expand the company’s mobile services.

Fastcase recently launched the first legal research application for the iPhone. The app is free to everyone and has been hugely successful, he said.

“Free is a very powerful price," Walters said. "For the month after we launched it, the Fastcase app was more popular in the iTunes store than Bing, which I didn’t expect.”

Walters anticipates reaching out to other mobile markets, including Android and Blackberry, in the future. He knows competitors will jump on the mobile bandwagon soon, but he’s confident Fastcase has the edge.

“The future is much more mobile and I want Fastcase to own the mobile market. I want to be the 800 lb. gorilla of mobile," he says, adding, "We were here first.”

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Nicole Black is Of Counsel to Fiandach & Fiandach, publishes four legal blogs and writes a weekly article on law and technology for The Daily Record. Carolyn Elefant is the founder of the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant and the creator of MyShingle, a blog focused on solo and small firm practice. Nicole and Carolyn co-authored “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” and presented sessions at TechShow.

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Carolyn Elefant: I’ve been coming the past three years. I spoke three years ago on tech issues for solo and small firms and this year we were invited to speak on topics related to social media. We both spoke about online presence and then I had another track on eMarketing.

Nicole Black: This is my second year and it’s probably my favorite conference to attend. It’s a great convergence of all the people in the legal tech space.

KB: What was your inspiration for the book you co-authored, “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier”?

NB: We wrote the book because we both participate in social media and think it can be a really effective tool for lawyers to use in their practices. We set the book up so it would be approachable for both a novice and someone who has a basic understanding of social media.

CE: We also thought it was important to have a book that’s written by attorneys. There are a couple social media books and there’s some excellent websites about social media that we both follow, but lawyers tend to be very hesitant about borrowing ideas from other professions, often to their detriment. If we could break down a barrier by showing it from the perspective of lawyers, we thought that would be more effective.

KB: How do you both use social media in your own work?

NB: I primarily use social media to interact with other people and to learn and to disseminate information on the topics that are of interest to me, which is law and technology. It’s just a tool to connect and network with other people and I find it to be really a great tool.

CE: I do a lot of blogging so that is my main way of communicating through social media. I use it sometimes to disseminate information about either my blog site or sometimes if there is a decision of interest in my field of practice I will send out information about that. Also, again, to connect with colleagues in different places and interact, because as a solo I don’t have any people that work on site with me. To be able to have conversations throughout the day or interact with people kind of made a case against the isolation of being solo.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Mark Rosch is the Vice President of Internet for Lawyers, a company that aims to teach lawyers how to search the Internet more effectively. Mark presented two sessions at TechShow, including Find Info Like a Pro, Volume I and Google Tools for Lawyers.

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Mark Rosch: I’ve been coming to TechShow since 2003. I come to TechShow as an author of books for the Law Practice Management Section primarily. In June, we expect the Section to publish “Google for Lawyers,” which is essentially an extended version of the presentation we did at TechShow today. It looks at all of those tools, search tips, etc. for using Google more effectively to coax out the information that Google has found on the internet that’s going to be useful to the attorney as a searcher. Most people, particularly practicing lawyers, they don’t have time to click that button—the “more,” the “even more”—to see what these things do. I like to say I waste 10-12 hours a day on the Internet so they don’t have to.

KB: Do you find yourself learning new things at TechShow?

MR: I learn things at sessions all the time. Sometimes I learn things at sessions I’m presenting, which is a good thing. I think one of the things that people need to remember is no one knows everything. Very often in this kind of crowd at TechShow, there will be someone who knows more than you do on a particular topic. These are very smart people. And there’s no embarrassment in that. There were one or two questions that we got from the audience today that were very specific questions. I’ve never heard the questions before or anything like that in the dozens of presentations we do.

KB: What advice would you give lawyers to more effectively use the Internet?

MR: First, if they’re using Google or any major search engine, look at the advanced search page because you’re going to get the option to create more sophisticated searches.

Second, as great as Google is, as much as we’ve talked about it and written about it, it’s not the be all and end all to research. It’s not even the be all and end all to search engines. Every search engine finds different information. Be familiar with more than one. My top three: Google, Bing, Yahoo.

Third, when you’re on the internet and looking at websites, search engines in particular, don’t be afraid to click a button that you don’t know what it does or what it means, because you can’t break the internet. People have tried and clicking a link on a site is probably not going to do it. If you’re looking at a reputable site, feel free to click around.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Ben Stevens has been practicing law in South Carolina for 15 years. He publishes three blogs, including The Mac Lawyer, and will be debuting an iPad for lawyers blog soon. Ben presented two sessions at TechShow: Mac Software for the Law Office and iPhone Tips for Lawyers.

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Ben Stevens: I speak a lot on using Mac technology for attorneys so it’s kind of a good fit for me to plug in with these guys. I was one of the first speakers at the first Mac sessions three years ago and we’ve grown from Saturday morning with a couple Mac sessions to a full day Mac track this year. Hopefully there’ll be more programming next year.

KB: What is your fascination with Macs?

BS: It’s more or less just the ability to get things done effectively and enjoy doing it. I used to look at PCs as something I had to use. I look at Macs at something I enjoy using. We work together. The stability and simplicity of the operating system. The fact that it just works and it works quickly. My wife still uses a PC so we’ll go and look something up on the Internet. She’ll open hers and it’ll take two minutes bumping and grinding and fans coming on and it’ll eventually start up. I just open my lid and I’m typing away.

KB: You’re launching an iPad for lawyers blog in a few weeks. What do you envision the impact of the iPad will be on lawyers?

BS: I think the iPad, just from the Internet connectivity standpoint and the form factor, is going to be great for attorneys to have something more usable than a netbook. I’ve had netbooks before and the problem was the keyboard was too small and cramped to type on. So having something bigger, but not too big, that’s light and that’s intuitive, like the iPhone is. Just to be able to use the Safari component will be one thing but then when you integrate the ability to view and edit .pdfs and mark them up and documents and emails and all the other things. Before you get into all the apps that are out there now, I think it’s going to be a game-changer for attorneys.

KB: Do you think the iPad will be a technology that will be readily embraced?

BS: I do. If you think back to when the iPhone came out, there was this big question about, “Is it going to be as good as they say?” or “Are people going to buy it?” And then when it came out, people are standing in lines and camping out overnight and now everyone’s got one. Now the only complaint is the network’s not great. It’s not the phone’s not great. It’s the coverage. You take that same technology and put it into something a little bit bigger. I really think it’s going to change the way people practice law.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Business litigator Ernest Svenson of Svenson Law Firm has practiced law for more than 20 years and started blogging as Ernie the Attorney in 2002. Ernest presented two sessions at TechShow, including “Digital Workflow: Developing the Paperless Habit” and a session on Acrobat.

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Ernest Svenson: I’ve been practicing law for 20 plus years. I’ve always liked technology. I wasn’t a techie in college. I was a philosophy major. But I just thought computers were kind of cool and had the potential to change the way we looked at things and worked, so I was always playing with them. I got a Mac in law school, the first one that came out in ’84...Now the problem is which tool do you use and how quickly will it grow. That’s a good problem to have.

KB: Can you talk a little about your blog?

ES: I started this blog in 2002. There wasn’t anyone I particularly wanted to talk to but I was interested in technology so I said, “Okay, I’ll try it.” And I did. There was a magistrate in federal court where I worked when I got out of law school that used to call me Ernie the Attorney and I always liked that because, even though I didn’t call myself Ernie, I just thought it was a good way of confusing and lowering that barrier that lawyers have when encountering people. If you tell them that you’re Ernie the Attorney they immediately kind of laugh and say, “You must be a cool guy.”

KB: What do you think is the next big thing, akin to blogging?

ES: The latest one is Foursquare. I’m on a podcast called This Week in Law with Denise Howell. One of the topics that keeps coming up are social media gaps and the fear people have of doing things. There’s a lot of fear about releasing too much information. When people first hear about Foursquare, they say, “Well, I don’t want people knowing where I am!” And you don’t have to. Then don’t say where you are and nobody will know. All these things are just tools and they’re all configurable. We have to get over some our social habits and one of the habits is that we’re afraid of new things because the first thing we think about it is what could go wrong.

KB: How do we get over that?

ES: Be like a kid. Just be exploratory. Try things out. If you play with some of these things, you’ll find they’re pretty cool. All these things are inevitable. You watch kids. If kids use them, it’s inevitable that other people will use them, too. Not in the same way, because kids use them in what adults regard as frivolous ways. It’s a tool. Taylor it and use it the way you want to use it. Why wouldn’t you try them? But I’m not a special person. I don’t have any super human powers. I was a philosophy major.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Edward Poll has practiced law for 25 years and has consulted and coached lawyers for the last 20 years at LawBiz Management Company. West Publishing Company recently published his latest book, “Grow Your Law Practice in Tough Times.”

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Edward Poll: I’ve been coming to TechShow since its beginning and I don’t remember when it began. I like to stay current with what’s happening in the industry because I consult with lawyers. If I don’t know what’s happening in the industry, I cannot do them a service.

KB: What kind of consulting do you do?

EP: I can’t believe I’m celebrating my twentieth anniversary doing this, but along the way I’ve helped a lot of lawyers change their practice, improve revenue, improve their profit, reduce their stress. Because for the first time, they had an ally. Lawyers are, I don’t care where they are, they’re solos. There’s generally not anybody that they can relate to that can support them as a mentor, someone they can be really honest with. I become an objective, experienced ally for them that they can spill their guts to.

KB: Can you talk a little about how you got into blogging?

EP: I had a website and Kevin started talking to me about reaching lawyers in a different way through the new social media. In the last six months, I have been doing other social media, too: Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Youtube. Every week, I have a Youtube vignette and that goes on the blog as well.

KB: What do you think blogging has added to your work?

EP: It is a vehicle for me to reach people. It’s a vehicle for me to help people. It’s a vehicle for more people to know who I am and if they perceive that I’m providing value to them, for free, then maybe they’ll give me a call. Another thing it does for me is keep my writing skills wet. Like any other habit, if you get into the habit you will continue to write. When wrote my first book in ’93, I said, “Okay, that’s it.” And each book I’ve written since then, I’ve said, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve got nothing more to say.” But because I’m in the habit of doing this, then other ideas come to me.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Will Hornsby is the Staff Council for the ABA and currently staffs the Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services. He deals with issues of legal services marketing and the extent to which policies govern those activities. Will presented two sessions at TechShow, including “Going Virtual with Web Applications: New Forms of Practice” and “Beyond the Ethics of Web 2.0—What’s Now, What’s Next, What If…”

Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?

Will Hornsby: I’ve been involved in issues of legal services marketing and the extent to which policies govern those activities. The policies are many times reflected in the rules of professional responsibility. We have different workshops here that are dedicated to ethics issues. Obviously people that are dedicated to ethics issues are exposed to the technology. That’s part of the problem—getting people with the different skill sets to come together and be on the same page.

KB: What are some of those issues involving ethics and the Internet?

WH: There are a lot of questions that have emerged because the rules were propagated before the Internet became a viable vehicle for communicating legal services. Some of these rules need to be re-examined and the ABA is in the process now of doing that with a project called Ethics 20/20. Hopefully we’ll have some solutions that give lawyers a sense of comfort that what they do is proper, give them some clarity in what the boundaries are, and make sure these services are in compliance with the intent of the rules.

KB: Is compliance the biggest issue right now then?

WH: Yes, because there’s clearly a need for lawyers to advertise their legal services. There’s a need for people to get lawyers. Lawyers have a need to get clients. So marketing endeavors are the obvious nexus to make that match. The new media, social networking, all of these things have aspects that create concerns.

KB: What’s an example of one of those concerns?

WH: Part of the problem is when you use a template. So if a social network has “friends,” the concept of friends on a social network is different then social friends. Some states have a rule that says you can solicit in person or by live telephone people who are friends. Well, are the people who friend you friends? So see, sometimes the templated nomenclature is inconsistent with the rules.