Writing this from my iPhone using the Wordpress app. I like the ability to write quick posts fe anywhere, but like email on my phone, anything that will require a lot of typing will have to wait until I’m at a keyboard!

On the other hand, this is a great way to handle comments, I can approve pending comments, delete spam comments or even reply to comments quickly, just so long as I have my phone with me.

So, if the trend for 2010 coming from LegalTech is toward efficiency, can we assume that law firms, finally, are starting to realize they are just like every other business?

Also, does the fact that the legal industry is just now starting to look at using technology to be more efficient prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that law firms typically lag behind other businesses? I think it does, after all the entire tech/internet revolution is about communicating and sharing information more effectively. Believe it or not, law firm IT departments don’t put in new infrastructure and tech tools just to make you uncomfortable, it really is to help the attorney’s they support work more efficiently. Other industries have implemented tools in the name of working smarter. law firms have typically lagged behind in that regard.

Then again, as someone who works with technology, I do have to wonder if we are keeping that priority at the forefront of our minds? Our job is not to limit the amount of network congestion, or make sure no possible harm can come to the PC’s that sit on the desktops of our users. It’s to make those users more efficient. I do wonder sometimes, when I talk to other IT pros, if that’s their first priority.

As I spend much of my time trying to come up with ways to market the Litigation Support services we provide to the attorneys in our firm, I keep coming back to this idea. How do I convince them not just that the tools we have are solid, and useful, but that they do, in fact, help them be more efficient in their work? It’s a tough sell, but one I have to make if I’m going to get any of them to reconsider how they practice and how technology might help them. If anyone has had some rousing success with that, leave a comment and let me know what you did! I can always use the suggestions.

In several recent conversations on Twitter, and elsewhere, I’ve been noticing a bit of a trend. Seems like some of the “add-on” services that use Twitter to piggy back the social aspects of their own service, FourSquare being a prime example, seem to have an interesting effect on how followers interact with some of the folks in their tweetstream. I’m seeing many more people start to unfollow users of these services, because they don’t use them, and just don’t care.

Case in point, I don’t use any of the geolocation services. I have somewhere around 900 followers, and my rough guess would be that maybe 100-150 of them are actually local to me. That means that if I were to start tweeting all of my FourSquare “check-ins” they would be totally irrelevant to 80% of my followers. They aren’t local, they aren’t going to be meeting up with me, and they likely aren’t looking for reviews to every single place I eat out, or get a haircut. So, for me, and many others who are using Twitter to interact professionally with people who work in my industry, as opposed to people who are local to me, these services make no sense.

To many others, it seems like they really are trying to be local in their tweets. There’s a lot of meeting up, sharing local places of interest, etc., and that’s not exactly a bad thing. On the other hand, if you’re one of those folks, especially if you’re not local to me, please understand why I don’t want to follow you. The value your tweets bring me is diminished by the number of geolocation tweets you post. You and I are trying to accomplish different things. I think, as twitter grows, you’re going to see more of this. There are lots of different people using hte service now, and there is likely to be some segmentation of it’s users. I happen to think the use of geolocation services is one area where you’re going to see this, and Twitters new “local trends” is going to exacerbate this. Again, I, for one, don’t care about local trends, because the vast majority of people I interact with on Twitter aren’t local. If they were, I might care about that, but I’m not primarily looking for what’s happening in Columbus, I’m looking for what’s happening with the legal industry and ediscovery.

So, if you want to be local, and also be universal, perhaps you should consider leaving your foursquare interactions over there, instead of bringing them all to twitter? It’s going to be awfully tempting to unfollow you when you try and mix the two. You might want to decide which is more important to you, and then your followers can decide for themselves too. Soon, we might just see very distinct groups forming on twitter, folks who want to be local and are posting constant location updates and yelp reviews, and those who aren’t, and don’t. Shall the two ever meet again? I have my doubts.

So, as you’ve probably noticed, the blog is now running on Wordpress, and the blog home page is now being redirected to the main page of the site. There is still much work to do, to tweak the layout and work on pages, etc. but I think this is pretty much where we’re going to stay for now. I managed to pull in all of the blog posts and comments in from Blogger, but also decided to leave the static blog pages in place so as not to break 8 years of links from outside sources. Of course, I turned off the ability to comment on those too. If I can ever get a decent redirect solution in place I might take those pages out, but I’m not holding my breathe on that one. The existing RSS feeds, however, have been updated, so if you’ve been getting the full blog feed, or the tech, litigation support, or photo only feeds you should continue to see everything you were before.

Still, running Wordpress now opens up some new possibilities, so I’ll be looking into some of those, and experimenting along the way. First, though, I’ve got to clean up some of the loose ends that the transfer left behind this week. Then we’ll get into some of the new things!

In all of the recent discussion about creating a certification for Litigation Support professionals to measure their proficiency in working with electronic discovery, I’ve always felt a strong push against the idea, but could never really articulate what about it bothered me.

Today, in reading Chris Dale’s blog post about it, it clicked for me. Here’s the relevant part to this discussion, but you should go read all of it, and the post he links to that started this conversation as well.

My own contribution to the article goes more to the distinction between education and the need for a piece of paper to show that you have been educated. I see it as a costly barrier to entry in an area which needs recruits (nursing is the obvious parallel in the UK) and as something which aims at the wrong target. It is not the litigation support people whose actions or inaction cause the problems, but the lawyers.

I’ve seen Chris write about it being a barrier to entry and thought that, while I see his point, and it’s something that will need to be addressed, it didn’t quite hit me where my gut was on this, but the second part of this paragraph definitely does.

Here’s the situation as I see it. There are folks who work in this industry who want to be taken seriously by the rest of the legal industry. Of course, other areas of the legal industry have certifications, so we should have one too. Let’s put together an ediscovery certification to prove that we’re experts in this new and exciting area.

There’s just a couple of problems with that. Chris points out the first one, many times in a law firm, it’s not the Lit Support folks who are advising clients on collection, or writing ediscovery requests, it’s the lawyers. Yes, in a perfect world they are including the Litigation Support folks in that process, but we are far from a perfect world. The real world contains plenty of lawyers who don’t actually know enough about ediscovery to even realize they should be looking for technical expertise. Having a certified ediscovery person working in Litigation Support doesn’t mean anything if the lawyer above them is clueless about ediscovery and doesn’t get them involved. From a clients perspective who do you want to deal with, the outside firm that has a Litigation Support person who’s certified, or the firm that has an attorney who’s an ediscovery expert? It’s the attorney who’s going to be appearing at conferences, writing your requests and responding to requests, advising you on proper collection, representing you to the court, etc. The Litigation Support folks may have some input into these things, but I know which one of the two I’d want to be an expert! Unfortunately, the push for certification seems mostly to be aimed at the Litigation Support people, which is not where it will have the most impact.

The second thing the post brought to mind, for me, is that ediscovery is not the end-all be-all of working in Litigation Support. In fact, how much of the day-to-day work is dealing with ediscovery can be very, very different from law firm to law firm, or between different corporate law departments. In some firms, a litigation paralegal might be much more involved with helping the attorney with case management, and the Lit Support folks may do the heavy technical lifting, while in other firms, it’s the Litigation Support folks who are doing the work with ediscovery strategy while the paralegal works on more administrative things, and the IT department does more of the heavy lifting in terms of handling data. It’s not a one-size fits all discipline. I know, speaking for myself, that while I do deal with handling ediscovery and getting it into review platforms and production sets put together to send to opposing sides, etc. that its not the only thing I need to know about to do my job well. My job also involves quite a bit of technical work with Excel, Acrobat, Powerpoint, etc. I do a fair amount of training, and internal marketing. I work with video and audio files, I put together presentations and setup presentation equipment. Being a certified ediscovery expert doesn’t guarantee that I’d be any good at any of these other things, which are still very much part of my job as a Litigation Support Pro. Other people in this industry are responsible for some of the same things I am, and some are responsible for doing things like programming, that I don’t do at all. It’s a real mixed bag.

Do I need an understanding of ediscovery? Absolutely. I also need plenty of other things. Are there resources out there to educate myself about ediscovery? Tons! Does having a certification program offer me anything that these resources don’t already? I’m not seeing it, outside of the piece of paper I can take back to my firm as “proof” that I have worked at being educated. Maybe that has some value, in some circumstances, but I don’t see that it’s a huge priority item for many of us. We’re already swamped with work, and do our best to stay on top of things and keep informed. Many of us hold certifications that are directly related to the tools we use, and the way we work. I don’t think adding yet another, very broad, certification is going to do more than add another expense at a time when we are cutting them every way we can. Personally, if given the choice, I’d rather spend my educational budget on something else, something specific that our firm can use right now, not on getting a certification that doesn’t mean anything to our clients.

But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s exactly what our clients want to see, the piece of paper, even if it’s not in the hands of the attorney who works directly with them!

In light of last week’s announcement of changes at Blogger, I’ve decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I’m going to be converting this blog over to Wordpress. Of course, with over 8 years of customizations to the site, it’s not going to be a simple process to convert everything, so just be aware that it’s going to be going on if/when you see some things looking wonky around here. In fact, the site will probably disappear for a few hours sometime later this week, as I move it to a different server in preparation for the Wordpress install.

Of course, since I have to be in court tomorrow, nothing starts until I’m comfortable with the knowledge that I won’t be spending any of my evenings and weekends working, at least long enough to see this transition through. Given the industry I work in, you’ll forgive me if plans change and I have to put this off a little bit.

Last week, I was fully prepared to be working long hours for the entire month of February, and things changed suddenly. It’s the nature of the business really. You never know when, or if, a case that you’re preparing to go to trial, will settle. It often ends up with us doing a whole lot of prep work, only to find that it never gets used, but you still have to do all the work the same way for every case, because some of them don’t settle and you have to be ready to go in court!

Anyway, consider yourselves warned, and hang on. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for a bit, but I think we’ll all be better off in the end for it!

I didn’t realize those wireless mics you use in office conference centers, churches, etc. could become illegal soon if they are broadcasting in the 700MHz band. I posted the details over at the Friends in Tech blog.

Google’s Blogger platform rolled out another new feature this week, one that many users of Blogger have been waiting for, and once again, one I can’t use.

See, ever since Blogger rolled out “new” templates a few years ago, the ones that support widgets, and began building all sorts of cool widgets for their users to use on their blogs, they have pretty much only worked on adding new features to those templates.

The problem is, if you, like me, use Blogger to publish to your own site through FTP, and not to Blogspot, you can’t use the new templates, and thus, all of the new features of Blogger, are not available to you. The Blogger team over at Google seems to be blissfully unaware that, long long ago, many folks actually used Blogger, and continue to use Blogger, so that they could publish static HTML blog pages to their own sites, at their own URL, with their own hosting, without the Ad bar being added to their templates.

As I think about it, the last time Blogger added a feature that we could, you know, use, was categories, or maybe comments? (Upon further review, scheduled posts were available regardless of where you are publishing within the last year) Any way, it’s been awhile. Almost all of the innovation at Blogger now seems to be around widgets, and other tools for use with Blogspot hosted accounts. Those of us who don’t have those, get nothing. I can’t help but wonder if the fact that Blogspot hosted accounts have ads on them is the reason?

It’s almost enough to make me switch this blog to Wordpress too, except I don’t have nearly the time to move 8+ years of stuff to a new platform!

Update: Seems I posted this a bit prematurely, as Rob Fahrni has pointed out that Blogger is actually going to eliminate support for using FTP to publish to your own site.  So, it appears I’m going to be spending my time moving this to Wordpress or using some sort of Google hosting/redirect, which doesn’t really interest me at all.

Using ReadTwit the last couple of weeks has been interesting. It’s enabled me to see more of what people I follow on Twitter are linking to, and that’s not always a good thing. It seems that by occasionally looking at Twitter, I might be missing the fact that some of the people I follow actually spend a lot of time sharing stuff I don’t care about at all.

So it was with that in mind, that I found myself nodding my head in agreement with this.

You’re Pissing Off Your Twitter Followers — Stop!

I’ve already mentioned my complete disregard for all things FourSquare, and how using ReadTwit helped me realize just how often some people “check-in” for no apparent purpose other than to become mayor of their dentist office, or something equally strange. It’s also helping me realize that some people I follow have a tendency to promote the same stuff every single day, or just link to hollywood gossip stories that mean nothing to me. In essence, it has helped me see some the things that are normally hidden by the shear volume of tweets. 

Of course, if you read the article, you also know they have  huge problem with people feeding their blog posts to Twitter. I actually don’t mind that, and I do it so I hope most people don’t mind it. If you only have one link to your blog posts, and aren’t posting 4-5 times a day, it’s easy enough to skip on by without too much difficulty. On the other hand, if you repost the link for days on end, well that’s just annoying.

 
So what are your biggest Twitter pet peeves? Do you think if you saw more of the details of what was in the firehose that you would be pretty quick to unfollow. I’m finding the unfollow button a lot more often myself.

The event to raise money for Haitian earthquake relief through the Red Cross is being held tomorrow, at the Ohio Historical Society, and through online donations.

You can find out all the details, and how you can help, from the press release.