June has been another busy month for Stem clients, with some noteworthy accomplishments. Here are some highlights:

Stem clients have been very busy again this month, with some significant achievements and honours. Here are some highlights:

• Canadian law firm Gowlings received a number of accolades this month, including being selected Law Firm Website of the Month by Precedent Magazine and receiving the Copyright Case of the Year award for its involvement in the recent satellite radio royalties case at the Canadian Copyright Board.
• Gowlings lawyers were also recognized in the press recently. Robin D. Walker, Q.C. received the Murray Klein Award from the Ontario Bar Association for excellence in insolvency law; securities litigation head Kelley McKinnon appeared on two television networks to discuss the federal government’s proposed national securities regulatory authority, and Henry Brown and Jacques Shore of the government relations practice were quoted in National Magazine on new lobbyist conduct enforcement guidelines.
• Strellis & Field elder law attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld launched a substantial new Resource Center to accompany his Bed Sore FAQ site. The new Resource Center includes a new section on bed sore injury articles,a detailed glossary of bed sore terms, and a new National US Directory of medical providers arranged in State-by-State collections.
• Simultaneously, Mr. Rosenfeld and his firm Strellis & Field launched a new practice group dedicated to Bed Sore Injuries.
• Arizona family firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC launched its newly-redesigned website, with informative descriptions of its practices and easy navigation around the site.
• Alexander Nirenstein of Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC summarized recent Arizona legislation affecting divorce and child custody law and discussed how bankruptcy won’t relieve a spouse or parent from paying alimony or child support on the Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog.
• Law practice software Clio launched its completely revised Clio help and support site, rich with informative, interactive and multimedia features.
• At the West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer Blog, Ron Chapman listed and provided links to 20 websites that contain useful and interesting federal, Florida, and general legal reference information.
• Michael Myers of  McClanahan Myers Espey represented families of deceased employees in the Florida Supreme Court this month. Arguments were heard about whether the families have the right to sue to recover benefits paid to the employers under Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI) policies.
• Hissey Kientz LLP continue to develop its legal document databases, with issues including: Asbestos lawsuits, the Fentanyl-Duragesic Pain Patch, and Hormone Replacement Therapy.
• Koplow Law Firm launched a brand new re-design for its Arizona DUI Center website.
• Canadian tax litigators DioGuardi Tax launched a new video to their Youtube channel on filing Back Taxes in Canada. The video discusses CRA’s voluntary disclosure program (VDP) and the lack of lawyer-client protection.
• BC legal support services solution Dye & Durham continues to cover local legal news on their BC Law Watch blog, including an upcoming webinar on the BC Family Law rule changes.
• New Jersey criminal lawyer John Marshall published part two of “What Every Driver Should Know If Stopped for Drunk Driving“.
• Mr. Marshall also discussed his firm’s successful strategy in Central Judicial Processing in Superior Court in Newark to obtain a dismissal of one of the charges against their client and a consequent release on his own recognizance rather than bail.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association released the summer edition of CCCA Magazine.
• Staff of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center will be speaking at or hosting several upcoming events and retreats, including a sold-out lecture this week.

As always, we’ll be back in a month to share more client accomplishments, news, and events.

It’s been another busy month for Stem’s clients. Here are some of the notable highlights:

• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (CCCA), the voice of Canada’s in-house counsel, signed on as Stem Legal’s newest client
• Randy McClanahan of commercial litigation law firm McClanahan Myers Espey explains why bankruptcy attorneys should work on a contingency fee basis
• West Palm Beach criminal lawyer Ron Chapman wrote about when car searches by police are illegal, and sex offender restrictions in Miami-Dade
  
• Law practice management software solution Clio was thrilled to be named an ABA Techshow “Best in Show” exhibitor by TechnoLawyer for the second year in a row
• At the Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog, Alexander Nirenstein of Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC wrote about a petition that proposes to amend that state’s rules of family law procedure
• Due to popular demand, Dye & Durham will be offering additional webinars on the new BC civil rule changes
• Canadian law firm Gowlings LLP launched their new brand and redesigned website, and was also named Canadian Patent Firm of the Year for 2010 by Managing Intellectual Property magazine
• At his Nursing Homes Abuse Blog, elder abuse lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld has been conducting a series of interviews with members of the nursing home community including a registered nurse, a nursing home reform activist, a healthcare marketing expert, a disability rights activist, a nursing home resident and several others
• Death penalty defense lawyer Terry Lenamon wrote about how he worked with a court-appointed public defender to spare their client the death penalty
• New Jersey criminal lawyer John Marshall published part one of “What every driver should know about drunk driving arrests“
• Staff of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center will be speaking at upcoming events including the 21st Annual International Trauma Conference and several lectures and retreats
• Canadian tax law firm DioGuardi Tax Amnesty posted a video on whether the CRA’s voluntary disclosure program is a back taxes trap
• Defective drug injury law firm Hissey Kientz launched a new website, the HRT Message Board

We’ll be back next month to share more client happenings, honours and events.

March has seen Stem’s clients winning awards, featured in interviews, and blogging thoughtfully on a wide range of topics. Here’s a quick look at what everyone’s been up to:

• Gowlings was recognized in the Canadian Dealmakers Awards Gala for three transactions they advised on. The Awards celebrate excellence in mergers & acquisitions
• BC-based legal support services provider Dye & Durham was proud to launch BC Law Watch, a portal for news, events and opinions related to the practice of law in BC
• Randy McClanahan of contingent fee litigation firm McClanahan Myers Espey LLP answers the question “Why don’t more hourly billing lawyers take on contingency fee cases?”
• West Palm Beach criminal attorney Ron Chapman explains whether it’s possible to have a name removed from the Florida sex offender list
• Cloud computing and SaaS continue to grow in popularity, reports Clio, which had another successful year at the the ABA Techshow. While at Techshow, Clio co-founder Jack Newton was a presenter in LexThink’s IgniteLaw series, and spoke on what law firms can learn from Zappos.com
• Nursing home attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld was appalled to learn that nursing home patient dumping is on the rise. He also wrote about an innovative program that fights sepsis cases in hospitals, and hopes this program will be adopted by nursing homes, where sepsis is a frequent cause of death
• New Jersey criminal attorney John Marshall wrote about two recent cases that show how different “the potential outcomes can be when someone is arrested for selling marijuana“
• Arizona divorce and family law firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist was voted Best Family Law Firm by Arizona Foothills Magazine, which said the firm “has a long-standing reputation of making the best out of life’s curveballs”
• Arizona criminal lawyer Lawrence Koplow has added a new practice page related to the defense of fraud schemes, including internet and white collar crimes
• Dealth penalty expert Terry Lenamon says nixing capital punishment may be a growing trend, and speculates that California might be the next to get rid of the death penalty
• Toronto tax lawyer Philippe Dioguardi of Dioguardi Tax Law was interviewed on CP24′s Stephen LeDrew show
• Mesothelioma attorneys at Hissey Kientz LLP launched a legal documents database that includes dozens of asbestos and mesothelioma lawsuits
• Maureen Canning of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center wrote about what healthy sexuality looks like on her Sexual Addiction Blog

We’ll be back next month with more news and accomplishments to share.

The year’s shortest month is almost over, so it’s no surprise that in February our clients were busier than ever. Here’s a quick look at what everyone’s been up to over the last few weeks:

• Hissey Kientz LLP has begun helping clients with injuries related to Toyota recalls; and launched their latest microsite at: Yaz & Yasmin Side Effects Lawyers
• Legal practice management software Clio’s co-founder Jack Newton gave a webinar on SaaS basics for Solo Practice University (recording available free to SPU’s Facebook fans)
• Chicago nursing home abuse attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld launched Nursing Home Injury Laws, a portal for state-based information on nursing home liability
• Dye & Durham has been hosting a series of webinars on the new BC civil litigation rules, including an upcoming session in March
• Gowlings made Managing Intellectual Property‘s list of top IP firms for the 14th year in a row, earning Tier 1 status in a variety of copyright, patent, and trade-mark practice areas
• At the New Jersey Criminal Defense Law Blog, John Marshall wrote about how opiate prescription drug abuse seems to often progress to heroin addiction
• West Palm Beach bankruptcy attorney Ron Chapman wrote about automatic stays and foreclosures in bankruptcy proceedings
• Nirenstein Garnice & Soderquist’s Arizona family lawyers blogged steadily on divorce issues (recent posts discuss staying away from Facebook during divorce, and unequal division of marriage assets)
• With the dismissal of two judges in one month, Arizona criminal defense attorney Lawrence Koplow wondered what’s going on in the Scottsdale Courts
• Canada’s Tax amnesty firm DioGuardi Tax Lawyers relaunched their new video-rich website at dioguardi.ca
• The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center‘s Maureen Canning talked about tough love and addiction
• At his Death Penalty Blog, criminal defense attorney Terry Lenamon wrote about the “no death penalty” verdict for his client, Kemar Johnston

As always, we’ll be back next month with more news and accomplishments to share.

“You are my creator, but I am your master — obey!”

- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

It might seem surprising that we’re less than ten years away from the bicentennial of Frankenstein, a landmark of English literature that pre-dated the Industrial Revolution but anticipated its enormous impact on society. For a story that’s nearly 200 years old, Frankenstein feels powerfully modern, in part because it expresses the trepidation and occasionally the fear humanity still feels about the things it creates. From the cotton gin to Google Buzz, we marvel at the machines we invent and congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity. But lurking at the back of our minds is a deep uneasiness over whether we’re getting too good at building things simply because we can, and whether the next invention will be the one that gets away from us — whether next time, we’ll go too far.

Frankenstein explores our love-hate relationship with the things we create and with our ability to do so, a theme that has surfaced repeatedly in popular fiction ever since. As technological advances accelerated over the last 60 years, so have the fictional expressions of that theme. A similar arc can be detected in the legal profession — the more sophisticated and powerful technology becomes in the law, the more upset many lawyers become about the rise of the machines and the threats they pose, taking away lawyers’ work, robbing the law of its humanity, and even replacing lawyers altogether.

(Image courtesy the Canadian Bar Association. Illustration: robertjohannsen.com)

Here at the Law Firm Web Strategy blog, where we talk about how lawyers can leverage the Web to build their practices in the 21st century, this week’s Blawg Review will combine these themes. We’ll look at the best of the blawgosphere’s last seven days through the prism of seven classic novels and films that emphasize the extraordinary and unsettling role technology plays in our lives, and highlight posts that express that same theme in the law. And we’ll begin with the story that started it all.

1. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818

A common misconception about this novel is that the title refers to the monster. Frankenstein, of course, is the name of the man who creates the monster, and the book is really about him: a gifted but sheltered scientist who lacked the ability to sense the repugnance of creating life just to see if it could be done. He crafts a new type of being — not from corpses, as modern retellings have it, but from unspecified material — but when he sees it come to life, is filled with horror and abandons it. The monster’s brutal treatment at the hands of its maker and of the humans it encounters leads it to violence and murder, but it lays the blame for its evil conduct entirely on the man who made it. The book’s subtitle (The Modern Prometheus) expresses its core message: reaching beyond nature’s limits is dangerous and self-destructive.

Has Thomson/Reuters created a monster with WestLawNext? A rough couple of weeks in the blawgosphere continued for the new research engine, with posts from Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Richard Leiter at The Life of Books, and ongoing updates from an earlier post by Lisa Solomon at Legal Research & Writing Pro. The housing boom of the last decade has now created a foreclosure monster in 2010, as detailed in a harrowing post by Equal Justice Works. Monstrosity, of course, comes in all shapes and sizes. Suing the people you’re planning to execute, as Solitary Watch reveals the state of Louisiana is doing, or deciding that lawyers who authorized torture didn’t engage in misconduct, as Balkinization reports, are two compelling examples.

2. With Folded Hands…, Jack Williamson, 1947

Not well known by casual readers but highly influential in the sci-fi genre, With Folded Hands… is a novella written at and inspired by the dawn of the Atomic Age. It explores the perils of creating machines too powerful for anyone’s good, even when, unlike in Frankenstein, the motivation behind the creation was manifestly good. A scientist on a distant world discovers a new technology that leads to a war of complete destruction; stricken by guilt and seeking to right this wrong, he develops a race of robots with a core mission: “to serve and obey and guard men from harm.” But the robots are too good at their jobs: they interpret their directive by travelling from world to world (and eventually Earth) to enforce happiness: replacing humans in every endeavour, lobotomizing those who object and “seem unhappy,” and eventually subjugating all of humanity — not through malice, but through the efficient mechanical enforcement of “guarding from harm.” The title refers to the protagonist’s fate at the end of the story — to sit quietly, with folded hands, because there’s nothing else left to do.

There’ll be more law firm lawyers with idle hands after Microsoft announced it was outsourcing multi-jurisdictional legal research to India through CPA Global. CPA had scored another coup a few days earlier with news it had hired Rio Tinto managing attorney Leah Cooper, who previously had outsourced millions of dollars of legal work from the mining giant. The steady growth of LPO has Gabe Acevedo fed up, and his guest post at Above The Law sounds a grim warning: “the practice of discovery in American law is not just on a slippery slope, it’s careening down a steep mountain covered in ten feet of solid ice. I am afraid that if the leaders in our profession do not step up and stem the tide of this soon, the line between who and who cannot practice law in this country will eventually become almost unrecognizable.” But Mark Ross of Integreon disagrees, in a white paper on the ethics of legal outsourcing: “The practical reality for US and UK attorneys engaging in or contemplating Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is that the outsourcing of both core legal and support services across the legal profession is nothing new.” On a lighter note, lawyers who would like to Twitter with folded hands can now hire ghost-twitterers, as Charon QC reports.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 1968

Credit for both the novel and the film is shared between the author and the director, who collaborated on both, although the movie differs in significant ways from the book. 2001 is a multi-layered film that explored deep philosophical issues and left key elements of its plot deliberately ambiguous, while also revolutionizing movie-making in significant ways. But for most people, the movie is best known for the HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent computer on board a spaceship that malfunctions (or does it?) and begins killing the astronauts aboard. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature was a figure of revulsion, an eight-foot grisly caricature of a man, HAL is the extreme opposite — a machine with no outwardly human appearance, quiet, genteel, and soft-spoken — making his transformation into a monster all the more chilling. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In the film, HAL learns the astronauts are plotting against him by watching them talk in a soundproof pod and reading their lips. There could be a mini-HAL on your very own computer, as illustrated by Scott Greenfield’s account of a principal who remotely activated a student’s laptop webcam. Privacy lawyer Brian Bowman shines a light on cameras too, writing about the implications of all-pervasive security cameras at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. That wasn’t the only legal problem the IOC created for itself at the Winter Games: it also tried to stop circulation of the video of a Georgian luger’s fatal training accident before the Games began, says the IP Strategist. The spectre of devices that malfunction with lethal consequences is also reflected in Toyota’s many legal problems, reports the WSJ Law Blog, while Howard Knopf’s Excess Copyright looks at the emerging issue of event data recorders in Toyotas’ black boxes.

4. Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982

Of the fictional works in this list, the Frankenstein story is retold best by Blade Runner, a movie that, like Shelley’s novel, never feels dated no matter when it’s viewed. The monsters in Blade Runner are replicants, genetically engineered beings bred to serve humans but who rebelled against their creators. Banished from Earth and hunted down if they return, replicants have a four-year lifespan to ensure they never develop emotions or otherwise pose a long-term threat. The lead replicant in Blade Runner, Roy, returns to visit his creator Tyrell, just as Frankenstein’s creature did, to make a simple request. Shelley’s monster asked for a mate, while Roy asks for a longer life; both are denied by their creators. The consequences for Tyrell, much as they were for Frankenstein, are severe (I’ll spare you the actual scene from the movie and give you just a still instead):

Are juries, like replicants, in danger of elimination? Public Defender Gideon reports that fiscally and emotionally unhinged jurors are causing problems for the system, while the WSJ Law Blog reports on an L.A. case where half of all potential jurors were excused for financial hardship. A report from the UK says juries are reasonably fair, report’s Slaw’s Simon Fodden, but adds that they usually don’t understand the judge’s instructions. The billable hour will likely never die, but it’s being hunted down by bloggers like Jay Shepherd at The Client Revolution, who explored the concept of “open-price” lawyering. If sole practitioners become an endangered species within the ABA, Susan Cartier Liebel of Solo Practice University thinks there’s good reason for it.  And perhaps thinking of Roy’s final words — “Time to die” — idealawg refers us to eight steps to prepare for your final act.

5. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed by James Cameron, 1991

Not just a classic Hollywood blockbuster and a landmark sci-fi movie, T2 presents a twist on the trope of machines that kill: the idea of a guardian machine programmed to protect humans rather than destroy them. The irony in Judgment Day, of course, is that the protective Terminator, the old version from the original movie, is no match in strength and skill for the new, shape-shifting, much deadlier version, expressing the post-modern idea that older technology can be trusted, while it’s the newfangled kind that’s dangerous (remind you of any lawyers and their attitude towards email?). The critical plot point for our purposes is that a highly advanced computerized defence system called SkyNet unexpectedly achieves self-awareness, and when its panicked creators try to deactivate it, it unleashes a nuclear holocaust to defend itself and starts a war to wipe out humanity’s remnants. So one lesson to take from these movies is: if you create a powerful self-aware technological entity, don’t try to unplug it.

The rise of the machines is a common theme throughout the Terminator franchise (it’s the subtitle of the third installation). Few machines today have risen as fast as Facebook, which now boasts 350 million users and which Larry Bodine reports this week has passed Google as the world’s leading source of website visits. And few technologies are as ubiquitious as email: abuse it and suffer the consequences, warns Patrick J. Lamb. Is the National Association for Law Placement also a powerful machine that’s out of control? Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith Esq. thinks so, but Carolyn Elefant at MyShingle thinks the fallout from NALP’s war with big firms will most hurt students and new lawyers. Has electronic data gotten out of hand, too? You might think so after seeing this video from Jason Baron and Ralph Losey, reproduced at Securing Innovation. But Sarah Rhodes at LLRX directs our attention to a less publicized but still important e-discovery issue: how to preserve “born-digital” legal information. And since discovery itself is strongly affected by privilege, the BC Injury Law Blog has a detailed post on common-interest privilege to consider.

6. The Matrix, Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999

The apex of the fear-the-machine trend in popular fiction (so far), The Matrix describes a world similar to the Terminator franchise — a powerful artificial-intelligence network turns on the human race that created it — but with a gruesome twist: the machines feed off human bodies, using humans’ electrical energy and body heat to sustain themselves after mankind tried to stop them by cutting off access to their solar power (again: hands off the plug, people). The human race is kept docile through immersion in a computer-generated simulation of the world called the Matrix; the movie’s protagonists are humans who have freed themselves from the Matrix and are dedicated to its destruction. Fending them off are “agents,” computer programs designed to seek out and destroy intruders. Their leader, Agent Smith, delivers the movie’s signature line in this speech to resistance leader Morpheus:

“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague, and we are the cure.”

Can technology harm you? Of course, especially if you accidentally send the whole firm an email touting rising partner profits after instituting salary freezes, or outsource too much work to your virtual assistant.  But the fact remains that lawyers who look forward and embrace technology surge ahead of those who don’t. Rees Morrison of Law Department Management approvingly notes that Latham & Watkins’ new Capture program not only helps clients with outsourcing and RFP projects but also includes fixed-fee elements; elsewhere, he refers to Orrick’s software-based global secretarial service developed in collaboration with a client. Other large law firms, meanwhile, seem more content to look backwards, increasing their billing rates again (The Wired GC), raising starting annual salaries back to $160,000 again (Above The Law), and pulling up the drawbridge into partnership (AmLaw Daily).

7. Battlestar Galactica, 2003-2009

The Frankenstein motif comes full circle with last decade’s relaunched Battlestar Galactica series. As in the original 1970s version, humans are at war with a mechanical race called Cylons. But whereas the old Cylons were simply metallic bad guys who just showed up and started shooting, the new BSG added the now-familiar plot point: humans created the Cylons as servants. The servants rebelled and there were two wars, in the second of which the Cylons wiped out nearly the whole human race. What really sets these Cylons apart, though, is that some of them are, for all practical purposes, human — down to the cellular level, in fact. So the series plays with the contemporary fear of killers in our midst — but it also suggests the idea that our machines have become indistinguishable from us. No one could mistake Frankenstein’s creature for human, but it’s a lot harder to identify the monsters when they perfectly resemble the people who created them.

A technology whose creation many people quickly came to regret last week was Google Buzz. Holly Gale of LLOPSCited summarizes Buzz’s features, while Connie Crosby at Slaw breaks down its troublesome privacy issues and Library Boy notes that Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, fresh off a bout with Facebook, is raising concerns here too. And predictably enough, LegalPad reports, here comes the first Google Buzz class action. We may even have created self-burgling technology in the process: the popularity of Buzz, Foursquare and other location-based social network tools led to the establishment of “Please Rob Me,” a site that highlights who’s left their home and when, says Legal Blog Watch’s Bruce Carton. Deep and discouraging stuff, so let’s end this seventh entry on a much happier note: the seventh anniversary of Dennis Kennedy’s immensely influential legal technology blog.

It’s been argued that one of the reasons we create machines is to build more reliable, less fallible versions of ourselves, which is where our eventual unease with these machines’ effectiveness comes from — we’re training our replacements, as it were. But maybe the thing we fear most about the machines and systems we craft is not that they’ll become too much like us, but that we’ll become too much like them. We’ll wrap up Blawg Review this week with two thought-provoking posts that touch on this theme. One, by James Dunning at An Inside Take From the Outside, discusses the ramifications for lawyers of Neil Denny’s new book Conversational Riffs: Creating Meaning Out of Conflict:

Its premise is simple, though, as much for its insight as its truth: “The biggest problem with conflict in our organisations…is not that there is too much of it but rather that there is too little. We spend massive amounts of energy avoiding situations until they can no longer be ignored.  We then have to deal with the conflict once it has become a crisis.” Neil goes on to highlight what we all might squirm on hearing but know to be true really, namely that “unresolved conflict rarely disappears.  At some unmanaged time, those issues will erupt into the open, and will likely cause a crisis when they do.” …

We can’t create technologies and design systems to take the difficulties out of life and law; we need to deal with each other and our many imperfections, and we’ll make progress only if we utilize our humanity, the good and the bad, in its entirety. That brings us to the second post, a tour de force by Victoria Pynchon at Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, who issues an impassioned plea to the profession to restore the human art of counselling to the increasingly impersonal job of a lawyer:

You Are Not a Gadget [a recent book] refers to the international “project” of reducing qualities (primarily personality and desire) to quantities for the ultimate purpose of selling one another goods and services.  The reductive dimensions of this on-going process struck me as the way in which we are now training law students to “handle” the “facts” to which they’ll “apply the law” as if they were going to spend their professional lives taking and re-taking the Bar Exam rather than helping their clients secure a relatively predictable future (the transactional lawyers) or resolve conflict without the bitter aftertaste of injustice in their mouths. …

[W]e do not have to imagine a sci-fi future to test the ability of present-day artificial intelligence (the Holy Algorithm) to “get the facts right.” All we need do is take a look at how the Holy Algorithm has done in achieving economic stability over the past few years. …

No matter how “abstract and impenetrable” we make our “justice products”; no matter the effort we make to separate fictionally “objective” “facts” from hypothetically rational “law,” we will never be able to “separate the people from the problem.” Nor, thankfully, are we capable of escaping that which most strongly unites us – our very fallible, subjective humanity.

Amen to that.

The fear of making something too powerful for us to control, first expressed in Frankenstein and continually reappearing in the years since, is one we all have, and the legal profession’s technophobia is, by comparison, just a mild case of the heebie-jeebies. But we still have to work hard to overcome that phobia, because it’s holding us back and it’s holding back our ability to serve our clients. The problem, as I’ve said before, isn’t that machines can do what we do; it’s that we keep insisting on doing work that machines can do better. Knowing what makes a machine mechanical, and knowing what makes us human — and wisely dividing up our tasks accordingly — is one of the keys to the future success of our profession.

And that brings us to the end of this week’s Blawg Review. In addition to thanking Ed and the Blawg Review team, my thanks go out as well to my Stem colleagues, Emma Durand-Wood and Laurel Fulford, without whose help this edition would not have been possible, as well as to Stem founder Steve Matthews, at whose invitation I had the opportunity to join you this week.

Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

2010 is off to a great start for Stem’s clients, with a bunch of new websites and media mentions. Here’s our monthly look at what they were up to throughout January:

• As noted earlier this week, Stem’s new client Gowlings released Trendwatch 2010, its annual roundup of legal trends that are likely to affect domestic and international businesses this year.
• Arizona law firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist rolled out a new blog, Arizona Elder Law & Probate Litigation Blog (the firm also maintains the Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog).
• Phoenix DUI attorney Lawrence Koplow has added new service pages to his Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog, including Arizona drug crimes, asset forfeiture & seizure, fraud schemes, and DUI.
  
• At their Drug Recall Watch newsblog, products injury law firm Hissey Kientz LLP noted that pretrial proceedings for Yaz and Yasmin lawsuits are going forward in Illinois.
• Legal practice management software Clio announced its new Clio Facebook page as well as its new partnership with LawCharge.
• Mike Myers, a corporate-owned life insurance attorney at McClanahan Myers Espey was quoted in a pair of Houston Chronicle articles that detail a settled COLI case.
• Maureen Canning of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center was quoted in a pair of articles on sexual addiction rehabilitation.
• West Palm Beach attorney Ron Chapman introduced new websites for his Florida bankruptcy practice & West Palm Beach Bankruptcy Blog.
• Nursing home abuse lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld added several new categories (including malnutrition, dehydration, physically disabled patients, infections and gangrene) to his Bed Sore FAQ website.
• Miami criminal attorney Terry Lenamon at Lenamon Law has launched a new blog on the death penalty and capital crimes issues, www.deathpenaltyblog.com.
• At his New Jersey Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog, attorney John Marshall described a new law related to expungement of drug distribution charges.

We’ll be back in a month to share more notable projects and news.

The 2009 CLawBies are now online.

Here are this year’s winners & finalists …

• Slaw
  
• Canadian Privacy Law Blog
• Wise Law Blog
• Erik MacGraken’s BC Injury Law and ICBC Claims Blog
• All About Information
• Brian Bowman’s On the Cutting Edge
• The Cross-Border Biotech Blog
• Thoughts from a Management Lawyer
• Law is Cool
• Precedent
• Dynamic Lawyers
• Rob Hyndman
• Connie Crosby
• Dennis Kennedy
• Doug Cornelius
• Charon QC
• Avoid A Claim Blog
• David Bilinsky
• Shaunna Mireau on Canadian Legal Research
• Library Technician Dialogue
• The Stream
• Michael Geist
• The Trial Warrior
• Blogasaurus Lex
• Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog
• University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog
• The Court

For the full details, please drop by for the official word.  Happy New Year! And cheers from all of us here at Stem for a prosperous (fingers crossed) 2010!

Along with the rest of 2009, December has come and gone in a whirl. Here’s a quick look at what our clients were up to as the year drew to a close:

• Arizona criminal lawyer Lawrence Koplow instituted “best of” blog posts on his DUI Defense and Criminal Defense blogs, where he points to the month’s best DUI and criminal defense posts from other legal blogs
• The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center published new issues of their professional publication, The Cutting Edge, as well as their alumni magazine, MeadowLark
• Florida attorney Ron Chapman launched a new website for his West Palm Beach bankruptcy law practice, www.chapmanbankruptcy.com – and of course, there’s also the companion West Palm Beach Bankruptcy Blog
• Small firm legal SaaS provider Clio was honoured with an award for excellence in practice management software from Law Technology New magazine
• Illinois injury lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld outlined the most popular FAQs at his Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog
• Arizona divorce and family law firm Nirenstein Garnice & Soderquist, who also blog at azfamilylawblog.com, was Stem’s newest client
• New Jersey criminal attorney John Marshall explained why it’s worth it to hire a lawyer to defend a simple assault charge
• Product injury law firm Hissey Kientz pointed to several articles on their Mesothelioma Asbestos News blog, including one on a settled asbestosis lawsuit for a former Smithsonian employee

We can’t wait to see what 2010 will hold for our clients and colleagues alike, and wish them all a prosperous and successful new year!

As we  just announced on Clawbies.ca, the nomination period is now open for the 2009 Canadian Law Blog Awards, with the awards list set to be released on New Year’s Eve.

This is the fourth year we’ve held the awards, and similar to last year, we’re bringing back the social nomination to let everyone share their favourite Canadian law blogs!  You can read more about he nomination process on Clawbies.ca, but here’s a quick rundown on the 2009 rules:

1. You can tweet your nomination on Twitter, but please include the hashtag text: #clawbies2009. We’ll be monitoring!
2. You can also email in your favourite blog, along with a sample post or two, or any other notable highlights to Steve Matthews at steve@stemlegal.com. It’s not a public nomination, but still perfectly acceptable.
3. And perhaps the most influential method, write a blog post about three other Canadian law blogs you currently read and tell us why those blogs are important to you.
4. If you are nominating via your blog, remember to act like a humble Canadian and tell us NOTHING about your own blog.  In return, we promise the nominator’s blog will receive a thorough review, as will your suggested peers, PLUS you get a chance to plug a fellow Canadian blogger!
5. Don’t include or suggest categories. We’ll figure out that part.
6. You don’t have to be a Canadian to make a nomination.
7. Don’t bother nominating Jordan Furlong.  Feel free to say nice things about him, but he’s kinda conflicted now. :)
8. And finally, we’re on the look out for sleeper picks! That fantastic blog flying under the radar!

Vote early and vote often! (pretend that volume counts, even if it doesn’t…)  And have fun promoting the Canadian legal blogosphere.

Cheers!
Steve

November was an exceptionally busy month for Stem clients, and with lots of website launches and redesigns (extra busy here at Stem, too).  Here’s a look at what our clients have been up in the last month:

• Arizona criminal attorney Lawrence Koplow of Koplow & Patane unveiled a modern new design for his Arizona Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog.
• Florida federal criminal lawyer Ron Chapman launched his Federal Criminal Lawyer FAQ site at  www.federalcrimefaq.com, where he answers questions about types of federal crimes, sentencing, and defenses.
• Products injury firm Hissey Kientz introduced a new website section for its new Yaz & Yasmin practice group, which includes FAQ on the possible link between the Yaz birth control pill and dangerous blood clots.
• Web-based legal practice management solution Clio was highlighted at the iPhone J.D. blog, and also announced that its mobile version is now compatible with Android & Palm Pre phones.
• Chicago injury firm Strellis & Field announced its firm website redesign, which boasts a fresh new look and added content (including results, web publications, and news).
• Quickscribe added a Bill Tracker to its BC Legislation Portal, which provides RSS notification for 1st & 3rd reading of bills and consequential amendments.
• New Jersey criminal law firm the Office of Jonathan F. Marshall rolled out a new look for its New Jersey Criminal Defense Law Blog.
• Mike Myers of McClanahan Myers Espey continued to get excellent feedback on his Dead Peasant Insurance FAQ site, which answers common questions about corporate-owned life insurance (COLI)
• Clark Wilson lawyer Warren Brazier was recently appointed to the Province of BC’s Green Energy Task Force. Brazier is also a frequent contributor to the firm’s Megawatt blog.
• Our sole non-legal client, The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center, launched its Sexual Addiction Blog, where their clinical consultant Maureen Canning explores many aspects of sex addiction.

As always, we’ll be back next month with more news to share.

I’m about a week late with this post, but it’s always a good time to plug ABA Techshow! Right?

The paper I wrote with Reid Trautz last year, titled Supercharge Your Referrals With Technology, has been released as part the Best of ABA Techshow series. It’s the full version of the paper that was given out to attendees, in PDF format & around 15 pages.  I just re-read some of it, and was reminded of some of the great ideas we covered.

You can download more presentation papers from ABA Techshow, which runs again March 25-27th, by clicking over to the newly created section on the conference website.

And speaking of Mr. Trautz … Every year Reid publishes his guide on holiday shopping for lawyers. Reiding Reading his blog a few minutes ago, I notice the 2009 Gift Guide went up a couple days ago. It’s great fun, as usual!   Where else would I find an online store for a gas-powered blender! (seriously, near the end…)

Stem’s clients were busy again in October, publishing thoughtful commentary, appearing in the media, and launching new sites and services. Here are this month’s highlights:

• Law practice management software tool Clio announced its new “Clio Sync for Outlook” tool today, to the joy of Sam Glover at Lawyerist.
• Nursing home abuse lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld wants us to know that good nursing homes do exist, and describes how to find a good one in your area.
• Medical malpractice attorney Angelo Patane of Koplow & Patane officially launched his Arizona Birth Injury Lawyer Blog, where he discusses cerebral palsy and other birth injuries and defects.
• Federal crimes attorney Ron Chapman describes changes to Florida drug laws that provide additional ways to avoid prison.
• The Mesothelioma lawyers group at Hissey Kientz LLP warn navy and merchant marine veterans that they may be at risk for developing asbestos-related illnesses as a result of exposure to the chemical during their military service.
• Corporate owned life insurance attorney Mike Myers appeared in the documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” and on ABC’s Good Morning America to discuss dead peasant insurance policies.
• Vancouver law firm Clark Wilson’s insurance lawyers Nigel Kent and Krista Prockiw published an in-depth paper on proposed changes to BC’s Insurance Act.
• New Jersey drug crimes attorney John Marshall writes about how heroin distribution and possession are on the rise in New Jersey.
• The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center is offering an extensive list of upcoming free lectures on topics ranging from addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, and trauma recovery.

We’ll be back next month with more new and noteworthy projects.

A big pat on the back for Stem client Themis Solutions, makers of law practice software Clio, on the occasion of its first birthday!

It’s been a tremendous first year for Clio since it launched one year ago today. Since then, the company has added has hundreds of users globally, who collectively manage (pulled from an upcoming press release): 150,000 contacts, 20,000 matters, and 25,000 documents.  Looking at their buzz page, there’s no shortage of enthusiasm.

The following quote is from Themis Solutions President Jack Newton on the company’s success,

“In our first year we’ve made great strides to enhance and refine Clio’s feature set, while ensuring it remains easy-to-use and accessible to all lawyers. This has been a terrific year and we see an exciting road ahead.  All success aside, we will keep our focus where it has always been: to provide an excellent product and superior customer support experience to our subscribers.”

If I had to pick my own moment from the first year, it would be this article from Kira Fonteneau. You don’t get a better endorsement than a client writing a hands-on article like that. … Launch day last year would be a close second. :)

In honour of birthday #1, the company announced three major new features today:

1. Outlook Synchronization (two-way synchronization of Outlook contacts, calendar items and tasks – items entered or updated in Outlook will appear in Clio and vice versa)
2. New and Improved Reports  (Client Ledger, Productivity by Lawyer, Work in Progress (WIP), Accounts Receivable (A/R), and more)
3. QuickBooks Integration

Also noteworthy, to celebrate the milestone, new users get a $25 discount on their first month’s subscription by entering the discount code “HAPPYBIRTHDAY” during checkout.

Congratulations to founders Jack Newton & Rian Gauvreau, and everyone at Clio. Many happy returns of the day…and year!

Fall is in full swing for Stem’s clients — here’s a quick peek at what everyone’s been up to since our last update:

• Mike Myers, a corporate owned life insurance lawyer at McClanahan Myers Espey, launched a new website, Dead Peasants Insurance Frequently Asked Questions, at DeadPeasantInsurance.com.
• Clark Wilson LLP labour & employment lawyer Valerie Dixon authored an article for Canadian Insurance magazine entitled “Competition is Fierce— Restrictive Covenants in the Shafron Case“.
• NJ criminal defense lawyer John Marshall revealed that extradition is on the rise in New Jersey and theorized that renewed interest in extradition may be related to the economy.
• Products injury firm Hissey Kientz put together a linkblog for mesothelioma and asbestos news.
• Florida federal crimes attorney Ron Chapman wrote about judges’ rulings related to expunction of criminal records on FloridaCriminalRecordsFAQ.com.
• New York brain injury lawyer John Hochfelder wrote about brain injury damages verdicts for lead paint poisoning in children and construction workers.
• Gregg Strellis, an attorney with Chicago injury firm Strellis & Field launched his new blog, Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer Blog.
• Arizona medical malpractice law firm Koplow & Patane rolled out their new firm website, azinjuryfirm.com.
• The Meadows of Wickenburg introduced its Soldiers & Military PTSD Treatment Program, which helps troops affected by service-related stressors.
• Legal case management SaaS provider Clio was featured in a case study in North Carolina Lawyer’s Weekly. The case study profiled Place & Hanley, a law firm that found Clio to be a good fit for their geographically distributed firm.

We’ll be back next month with another look at our clients’ achievements and successes.