All About Information: 2010 Solo, Small Law Firm Conference
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While my blog postings are for any old musing, I try to keep news to things that I am up to - writing, presentations, etc. - and gather them here.
All About Information: 2010 Solo, Small Law Firm Conference
It is probably pretty obvious I'm a bit obsessed with information, how lawyers use it, and how they can find it. I spoke at the 5th Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference on two panels. The first was with Rick Sage, a reference librarian at the Ontario Legislative Library. We discussed a variety of free resources available to Ontario lawyers. It was interesting to notice how many resources that appear to be "free" to our Law Society members are actually funded through their dues, like CanLII and LibraryCo. A second panel discussed focused on some advanced social media concepts, including strategy and how to manage your social activity in balance with your solo or small firm practice. The other panelists were Michele Allinotte and Jordan Furlong, both well known social media users and thinkers. It was fun hearing their take - both at the session and in our preparation - on how social media can fit into law practice.
The conference had over 200 attendees in Toronto, plus another 50 or so on the Web. The Web stream caught one of the 3 tracks of content. All three tracks were recorded, though, so you can purchase access to the presentations and watch them at your own pace. I love conferences like this, for the amount and quality of information shared in such a compressed amount of time. In reality, 250 lawyers (out of 34,000 in Ontario) is a drop in the bucket as far as educating lawyers. But every little bit counts, and the demographics of the audience spread across all ages and years in practice.
For what they're worth, here are the slides I shared on finding social media information and trying to control your flood of resulting RSS feeds!
Lawyer Responsibilities in a Wired World
The Law Society of Upper Canada regulates the legal profession in Ontario and lawyers coming to practice here from international jurisdictions have to go through an education process. I was fortunate to be asked to speak to them about using legal technology in their practice, particularly to the extent their client confidential data might be impacted. The presentation discussed encryption in law firms, metadata, portable technology, and passwords.
Here is the presentation (Powerpoint converted to Flash). If you can't see the slides, click through to the posting; I'm having relative URL issues with my TinyMCE editor! Once the slides appear, click on them to advance them and show the slide builds. My slides are rarely printable, because there is overlapping content. You can click through the slides using the toolbar at the bottom (or drag along the slider) but the slides only build when you click on them.
I did a similar, but shorter session last December but this was my first opportunity to speak for a longer time to a larger group. Not many laptops in the audience, but my sense is that I could make the content more advanced and still not lose anyone.
Finding Social Media for Marketing, Business Intelligence
The life of the law librarian is never dull and for many years there has been a noticeable shift from traditional legal research to assisting in business development and business and competitive intelligence. How much a law librarian does will depend on the firm and the position of the librarian within it. An increasingly easy resource to tap are the many social media resources - from blogs and their comments to life-streaming services like Twitter or Jaiku - that are available on the Web. Not only are they available, they offer content that may be more off the cuff and informal than other corporate-vetted content. I write about how to find some of this information in this month's Web Watch in Law Technology News.
You can read the whole article, called Dowsing for Gold, at the Law Technology News site.
An information professional may not find much new there. I hit the typical highlights, looking particularly at Twitter information that you can find using Bing.com or Google. Google announced its new Replay tool and that it was going to make searchable the entire public Twitterverse going back to 2006 the day I finalized my text, so that only gets a brief mention.
I also mention LinkedIn, which is a great resource for people information and which has now started a following feature so you can keep an eye on people moving into or out of a particular company. LinkedIn actually has a nice Twitter widget now, which can help you to see your Twitter feeds.
The real innovation is happening in the real time search and of all the tools I mention, I think Collecta.com is my favorite as the resource that mines the most different things. Do a search and compare even just the Twitter results to those retrieved by Bing and Google and it seems to do a much better job.
Of course, you could buy my book and find out MUCH more about search and finding information!
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