The end of the month means it’s client roundup time again. And despite February being a short month, there’s no shortage of news to share!

• John Hochfelder, our newest client and New York injury lawyer, wrote some helpful posts for clients involved in injury cases. He described how to prepare for a deposition, how jurors are selected for a trial, what a contingency fee is, and how this type of fee arrangement works.
• At his Nursing Homes Abuse Blog, Jonathan Rosenfeld writes about a little-known law passed toward the end of the Bush administration. The new law means that plaintiffs must now obtain court orders to get access to nursing home records and inspections. February also saw Jonathan hold his first readership survey.  It’s now closed, but we’re looking forward to seeing the results soon.
• Hissey Kientz LLP launched another new microsite, Mesothelioma Lawyers Help, which focuses on asbestos-related illnesses such as mesothelioma and lung cancer. The site includes information on causes, symptoms, and types of mesothelioma, and explains the lawsuit process. It also monitors the latest news on related litigation.
• Stem Legal’s Lawyer Addiction Blog, sponsored by our client The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center, has gotten off to a great start. Lately, we’ve covered lawyer assistance programs in California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Delaware as well as in Ontario. Even more encouraging, we’ve been getting some great feedback from LAP folks—stay tuned for more roundups and sites of interest.
• Over at JD Scoop, Adrian Lurssen wrote a provoking post entitled “Social Media Perspective: Be a Lawyer”. Adrian’s point: with so many tools for lawyer marketing available (JD Supra’s legal document sharing service being one of them), it’s important to remember that web tools should make your job easier, not harder.
• Clark Wilson LLP announced a new firm newsletter: BC Business Litigation Report. The publication provides readable summaries of current business cases in British Columbia, and is available by email, hardcopy, or RSS. Also noteable, my friend Nigel Kent, head of Clark Wilson’s insurance group, was profiled in a Canadian Insurance magazine article entitled “Meet Trusted Counsel”.
• West Palm Beach attorney Ronald Chapman wrote a pair of posts on police searches, discussing when consent to a police search is invalid, and why an objection to a police search has to be made at the time of the search and not after the fact.
• Legal practice management software client Clio had an amazing experience at the New York LegalTech tradeshow. They wrote a series of posts about how they effectively used Twitter to connect with existing and potential clients, and a great cross-section of industry leaders (Kevin O’Keefe, Bob Ambrogi, Carolyn Elefant, Solo Practice University). Clio was also named one of Bob Ambrogi’s “10 Tech Stars” – check out the video, where Clio President and Co-Founder Jack Newton discusses the SaaS model, Clio’s security guarantee, and its latest feature, Clio ClientConnect.
• New Jersey criminal attorney John Marshall has posted on a number of interesting topics lately. His commentary on the legalization of marijuana, social host liability, and the interlock ignition bill (“Ricci’s Law”) is available at John’s New Jersey Criminal Defense and DWI Blog.
• Contingent fee litigation lawyers at McClanahan Myers Espey LLP continue to be quoted in the news. Randy McClanahan explains why their client, ClearCorrect, filed declaratory judgment against Invisalign over a patent dispute. Mike Myers commented on a new bank-owned life insurance case the firm is handling.
• And lastly, IP lawyers at China law firm King & Wood have posted their analysis on copyright due diligence investigations. As Wang Rui explains, Chinese copyright laws and implementation regulations have produced the twin concepts of “legal entity work and “occupational work” for assigning rights to works made in the course of an employment relationship.
• King & Wood’s China tax group also published on a new regulation which sets out procedures for “withholding enterprise income tax for non-resident enterprises“. See: China Takes Action on Non-resident Enterprises Withholding from the firm’s official blog, China Law Insight.

Great work on all counts — we’ll be back next month with more successes and noteworthy news.

I’m with Nick Holmes, lawyers should know better than to drop comment spam, or let their SEO company do so on their behalf. To be even more blunt, Lawyers should fire their SEO company on the spot if the words “leave comments on other people’s blogs to boost your google rankings” comes out of their mouths! Leave comments & build relationships? great idea! Do so for google rankings & drop useless comments? Show them the exit door.

If we’re compiling a list of unacceptable online behaviours for lawyers, this would be in my top-10. Maybe top-3.  We expect comment spam from viagra and casino vendors, not lawyers.

Now, here’s the rub, and something I’ve blogged about before: almost every blog software out there has a ‘no-follow’ attribute on comment links – as recommended by Google. That means, don’t index the outbound link AND don’t give the link any weight in the search rankings.  And when was this ‘cutting edge SEO’ technique outlawed?  If your SEO doesn’t know, you might want to inform them it was over 4 years ago!

SEOs or marketers that recommend comment spam are incompetent & unethical. Lawyers who use this tactic are acting in an unprofessional manner. If they knowingly endorse it, they should also be considered unethical.

There are lines no professional should cross. This is one of them.

I’m very proud to announce that for the first time I’ll be speaking at the LPM sponsored ABA Techshow, this April 2nd to 4th in Chicago!

Not only is it a big honour to participate, but I’m also very excited about being paired up with two of Techshow’s veteran presenters – Dave Bilinsky & Reid Trautz.  I offer no guarantees on keeping up with the speaking calibre of these two, but I will do my best not to hold anything back. :)

The following is a brief rundown on what I think will be delivered by attending these two sessions:

The first session is titled Web JD: If You’re Not Serving Your Clients Online Someone Else Will Be, and will be co-presented with my friend Dave B. The goal is to produce a good survey on how web tools can strengthen client service, and how lawyers can use the web to compete against commoditized services. It should cover everything from extranets and virtual deal rooms to web-based client collaboration. There’s also an interesting underlying theme – that the web, as big an opportunity as it is, requires that lawyers think small and differentiate their services. We’ll talk a lot about what elawyering is up against, and then how lawyers can craft a web strategy to compete.

The second session is with Reid Trautz and is titled Supercharge Your Referrals with Technology. We’ll start by covering the basics of referral marketing, but then quickly move into how lawyers can use the web to keep their name and brand in front of clients. We’ll talk about: documenting existing relationships online; leveraging the who-knows-who aspect of many social networking tools; using off-line networking relationships to jump start web-based networks; and supporting existing client relationships with lawyer self-publishing; to name a few. If there’s a genre of web tool that lawyers are currently using, we’ll probably cover it in this session; but from the perspective of client communications, and how it can help generate more client endorsed referrals.

You can find out more by checking out this year’s presentations grid.

I expect both of these to be great sessions.  The Web JD topic lets me cover a lot of material I used to get to think about at Clark Wilson; and web-driven referral networks is something that’s embedded in my work every day here at Stem.

Hope to see you in Chicago! :)

I received the following email last week from an employee at LegalZoom:

Hey Steve,

I’ve been doing some research into legal issues and how they are represented online, specifically focusing on blogs. Your site has really grabbed my attention for the wealth of topical writing you have done and your involvement in the online legal community.  I currently work for a company that maintains a website that offers online legal document services. We are nationally recognized, and very unique in the comprehensive services we provide on the internet.

I’d like to see if you would be interested in working together.  My primary value to you would be in article writing. I have a small staff of writers who are eager to explore recent legal trends and are looking for a palette for their creativity. We are also very interested to see what other opportunities are available within the law blogosphere and would love to hear any other partnership ideas you can think of.

Thanks and keep up the great work,

Employee name
fname@legalzoom.com

The problem I have with this email is that I wasn’t the only one to receive it. This identical form letter-style email was blasted to a huge number of law bloggers. How do I know? Well, first of all I write a number of blogs. But an even more incredible concept… Guess what LegalZoom? Some of us actually know each other! I know, I know. It’s an incredible concept. Shhh. Don’t let our little secret get out.

Next time you want to spam someone, please leave me off your “blogger outreach” program.