Earlier this week, Scott Greenfield asked whether live CLE can survive in a largely online, virtual world? After all, live CLE costs more to produce (room rental and potential travel costs for a speaker) and may attract fewer attendees because a live event doesn’t have the same flexibility as a watch-it-anywhere webinar. Yet, as
Future of Law Friday: API Your Law Practice for Future Growth and Collaboration
A week or two ago, I observed that many lawyers are opting to use a combination of platforms for storage, practice management, client portals and other law office functions rather than settling on a single general solution. The rise of API’s, or application programming interfaces that enable different systems to communicate seamlessly have been driving
Sponsored and branded legal briefs: Appealing or appalling?
If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’ve often griped about 21st century advancements like attorney bidding sites or listing sites not because I’m trying to defend lawyers’ turf, but rather, because I’m skeptical as to whether these sites really expand access to law in a meaningful way. As I’ve written here, many
Logos on Spec, Revisited
More than three years ago, I wrote one of my most popular and widely-circulated blog posts, Would You Work on Spec? Why Should Your Logo Designer. My post listed several disadvantages to design contest sites like 99Designs (potentially poor quality submissions and possibility of stolen work), but mainly, I griped that it was hypocritical
Could 3-D Printing offer a new dimension for law firm business and marketing?
At a time when law firms are replacing conventional printers with scanners to facilitate a move to a paperless practice and the cloud, three-dimensional printers might seem like a step backwards. To the contrary, though, they’re rapidly becoming mainstream as the costs of 3D printing are declining faster than anyone could have predicted with home-based
The Age of the Poly-platformy
Once upon a time, a law firm committed to a practice management system for life. Whether TimeMatters, Amicus, Abacus, Needles or a paper-based numerical filing system set up by a law firm secretary, most firms opted for a single system, invested heavily in consultants to customize as needed and continued using the system for the
LegalForce: Forcing Law to Be Accessible
For me, the above LegalForce brand concept — a scales of justice anthropomorphized — encapsulates all that excites me about the launch of the exciting new LegalForce business model conceived by lawyer/entrepreneur Raj Abhyanker that I attended last night in Palo Alto, California.
For so long, images of the scales of justices have served as
Are data-driven matches between lawyers and clients always made in heaven?
With the dawning of the Age of Big Data, increasingly, we’re seeing the rise of the data-driven match. Yesterday, I came across a primitive example of this concept (primitive because it’s based on user-input rather than analytics); a new matchmaking site, Same Plate.com where users can select dates based on food preferences. Likewise, some
The Siren’s Song of the Unlaw Firm: Will Today’s New Business Models Help Solos…or End Their Careers?
Call it the un-law firm. As big law crumbles and some solos struggle to compete with national non-lawyer providers like Legal Zoom, new business models for law firms are cropping up to fill the void. From Virtual Law Partners and Rimon Legal to branded networks of solos and franchise offices, alternatives to the standard
Serving The Needs Consumers Didn’t Know They Had
So, I’m finally back to work and blogging after some highly aggressive bout of flu or sinusitis knocked me off my feet for almost five days. When my symptoms reached the point where I felt too nauseous and feverish to leave my bed, I knew that it was time to seek medical help. As has