From the blog: "Various Ohio Rules of appellate, civil, criminal, and juvenile procedure become effective today. The Ohio Supreme Court's Press Release outlines the changes, which include an addition for service of process on limited liability companies, enhancements to rules on electronic discovery, and other changes. Click here to read a more detailed summary of the amendments, together with the text of all the new rules."

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Source: Cleveland Law Library Weblog, 1 July 2009

In the news: "With all the lateral movement over the past few months, we'd like to believe all the partings have been amicable, but we know breakups aren't always easy. The Am Law Daily asked McDermott Will & Emery partner William Schuman, chairman of the firm's professional responsibility committee, how to make a graceful exit. Schuman says, "The first thing to remember is you're not allowed to solicit clients or the associates of your firm while you're still there. You can't take stuff that doesn't belong to you."

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Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 1 June 2009. Copyright 2008.  ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe <http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw>.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi: "Two major legal publishers announced initiatives this week to help laid-off lawyers keep their heads above water and make the transition to new jobs. Coincidentally or not, both West and LexisNexis announced their initiatives on the same day.

 West's initiative is a two-pronged effort built around two new Web sites. The first prong is Between Cases, a new site intended to serve as an online resource for displaced legal associates seeking employment and networking opportunities. The site includes job search tools, legal education offerings from West LegalEdCenter, information and resources for setting up a private practice, and special offers from Westlaw and other West services.

Between Cases also offers free resources for displaced attorneys who want to use their transitional time to perform pro bono work. To that end, the second prong of West's initiative is something it calls Do Justice. In cooperation with the Pro Bono Institute, West is contributing over $12 million in free Westlaw access to law firms to support pro bono work they do. Read more about both of West's initiatives at the Thomson Reuters blog Legal Current and in this news release.

LexisNexis is calling its initiative Lend a Hand. It is offered to U.S. attorneys who recently worked for a law firm with more than 50 attorneys and who are currently unemployed. The program offers free marketing services, networking opportunities and employment resources. These include:

• A free profile on Lawyers.com and Martindale.com.
• Free access to Martindale-Hubbell Connected, the company's professional networking site.
• Free access to the Martindale-Hubbell Career Center, where attorneys can search for legal jobs in their areas.

These freebies from Lexis will last for six months. To get them, you need to qualify, as described above, and sign up by the end of August."

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Source: Legal Blog Watch, 1 July 2009

In the news: "The mean proportion of women at large firms remains close to one-third, and while the ranks of female partners have grown steadily, women still account, on average, for fewer than one in five big-firm partners, with the greatest numbers of female lawyers remaining concentrated at the associate level. Those are among the findings of The American Lawyer's first Women in Law Firms study. The results show clear progress in gender diversity -- though not as much as one might hope for."

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 Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 3 June 2009. Copyright 2008.  ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe

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From the blog: "The Ross-Blakley Law Library has complied this list of online resources for fast and easy online legal research.

From Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog"

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Moritz Legal Information Blog, 1 July 2009

Posted by Allison Shields: "Earlier this week on the JD Hacker blog, Will Geer posted "Do You Really Need Practice Management Software?" His answer was no, but I'm not so sure - I think his post missed some of the big reasons to have practice management software.

Geer opines that most lawyers purchase practice management software for document management, but that this is a 'ridiculous' reason for making this purchase. He sets out a system for storing documents in your operating system, which is the default method for most solos and small law firms (and even some mid-sized firms). He goes on to describe this system, complete with folders for each client and subfolders for individual document types, as well as his naming system for those folders.

While this system sounds logical and can work for a while, as a practical matter, it has a number of pitfalls which I have, unfortunately, witnessed first-hand both in the law firms I worked in as an associate and as a partner, but also in the law firms I work with as a consultant.

...

Practice management programs integrated with time and billing programs can help you not only create and assemble documents using information stored in the system (rather than constantly re-typing the same information over and over), but can help you track and bill your time for those activities as they're being performed (if you must bill hourly).

Is practice management software an absolute must? Probably not, but the advantages in productivity and efficiency and the time and effort it saves is well worth it - especially if you're not a true solo and you need to share information with staff and other attorneys.

Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Ease Blog, 2 July 2009

From the site: "In this first edition of Legal 3.Oh!, co-hosts and legal technology consultants,  Adriana Linares and Debbie Foster offer their insights that can unravel some of the complexities of technology for lawyers. Hear three good reasons why practice management software might help. Adriana and Debbie welcome special guest Dan Berlin, President of Software Technology Inc. to talk about what you need to know about practice management software and how it can work in your law firm.

Podcast: Play on page | Play in new window | Download

Related Podcasts

• June 11, 2009 -- Job Insecurity at the Firm
• March 3, 2008 -- Legal Software Magic Bullet?

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Talk Network, 1 July 2009

Posted by Tom Kane: "It should be no secret that web site content continues to be king for purposes of search engines. Keywords, title tags, etc. are just additional jewels on the crown. So, keeping your web site fresh in terms of new content, fresh tags and keywords is important.

Further, according to SEO expert Tom O'Leary at The Attorney Marketing Blog in a post today, smaller firms have an advantage over BigLaw when it comes to search engines. It isn't that they couldn't overpower the smaller firms with their extra people power, it's just that they don't.

According to Tom, solo's and small firms dominate search engine results in various markets and categories. He says it has something to do with BigLaw's "complex, database-driven web sites," which are not search engine friendly, managed by outside vendors without SEO experts, and burdened by fear of change due to their "huge investment" in their current site. And, too few large firms have blogs (although individual lawyers in some of these firms have very good ones), which search engines do like.

Tom's advice to smaller firms: "keep adding content and posting to your blog." This will give you a competitive advantage when it comes to Internet marketing." 

The active links are available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Marketing Blog.com, 30 June 2009

Posted by Allison Shields: "Last week's  Legal Business Development Blog entry was part 16 on a series on alternative billing, entitled, "Alternative Fees (Part 16) - Win-win or win-lose?" The article opines that firms who are talking about their success with alternative fee arrangements may be over-stating their success, particularly in the short term.

The article suggests that some who have begun using fixed fees are not seeing additional profits above their hourly work. There was some discussion on one of my legal list serves last week pointing to this article as an example of why fixed fees won't work, particularly in litigation. I'm not sure that conclusion was valid - even based on this article.  There seems to be a lot of information missing. For example, how are these firms calculating profits? Are they basing profits on hours? Are these firms staffing and working files the same way for hourly work as for fixed fee work? Have they implemented project management, technology and other productivity and efficiency boosting measures? Are their calculations taking into account the benefits of fixed fees with regard to time records and billing and collections issues?

When firms say that most of their non-hourly work is 'less profitable' than their hourly work, are they comparing non-hourly and hourly work on the same kinds of matters or on different kinds of matters (are they comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges)? What kind of fixed fee or non-hourly arrangements are we talking about here? None of these issues seems to be directly addressed in the article.

It doesn't surprise me that the article indicated that the larger the firm was, the less profitable the reported non-hourly work. Large firms were built and staffed for and are used to working on an hourly basis, and they may not have adapted their processes to a non-hourly system.

It's also telling that the article points out that, "Lawyers have been rewarded for their entire careers for putting in extra hours to analyze every risk from every possible angle.  Most lawyers will have a hard time delivering the quality they are comfortable with when they must work within hourly limits." Placing 'hourly limits' on a matter isn't the same as creating a true non-hourly billing system and fee structure - it's merely capping the hours (or capping the fee and then trying to fit that into an old hourly mindset). That's trying to change only half of the system - the way the client pays, rather than changing the whole system, including the lawyer's reliance on hours as a basis for value.

In the news: "Balancing the risks and rewards of using alternative billing, such as fixed or contingent fees, is a strategy many firms are employing in today's uncertain economy, based on responses from the 74 firms that completed Texas Lawyer's 2009 Salary & Billing Survey. Other strategies include holding hourly billing rates stable and requiring higher front-end retainers from new clients. The survey shows that average billing rates and employee salaries rose less than 4 percent when compared to 2008 figures."

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Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 1 July 2009. Copyright 2008.  ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe <http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw>.