Since our last batch of updates, there have been 11 additions to LawBlogs.ca:

• Law of the Lands – Farm, Energy & Enviro Law (John Goudy)
• Blawg Briefs (Aird & Berlis LLP)
• Employment & Human Rights Law in Canada (Lisa Stam)
• The Ten Second Lawyer (Innovate LLP)
• Legal Frontiers (McGill)
• F/Law: Canadian Women and the Law
• LCO Blog (Law Commission of Ontario)
• Bora Laskin Law Library Reference Services Weblog (U of T)
• Canadim Immigration Blog
• Projects, Infrastructure, and P3 Blog (Davis LLP)
• Immigration Law Blog (Davis LLP)

These latest additions mean that lawblogs.ca now lists more than 200 Canadian blogs from lawyers, profs, students, law librarians, and legal marketers.  Cresting over the 200 mark is a noteworthy achievement in the Canadian market.  In fact, compared to just 11 months ago, we’ve observed 71 new law blogs – almost one-third of the directory!

Also noteworthy, we’re currently in the middle of a “weeding project”: dropping all the dead and abandoned blogs. Once we pull those (the list hits 235 prior to culling), we’re still solidly over the 200 mark for active law bloggers in Canada!

If you know of one we’re missing, please – drop us a line!

Spurred by Martha Sperry’s recent post about the numerous benefits to bloggers that Facebook offers, I decided it was past time for me to revisit and complete an old project: creating a Facebook Fan Page for my blog Law21. It’s still early in the process, and I’m learning as I go, but I can see a lot of valuable applications of a Facebook Fan Page to a legal practice, and I thought I’d share some of my initial thoughts here.

By way of brief explanation: a Facebook Fan Page is a dedicated page on Facebook for your business, organization or other commercial entity. You use it to publicize and promote your business by publishing news, updates, information, offers and so forth, and by inviting your professional contacts and interested friends to become “fans.” These people show up as members of the Fan Page, they can post messages and engage in conversations on the page, and they receive new entries from the Fan Page in their Facebook update feeds. Considering there are now 400 million people on Facebook, there’s good reason to take it seriously as a marketing platform. Nicole Black has an excellent summary of how to set up and use a Facebook fan page for a credit union — you should go read that first, substituting “law firm” in the appropriate places, and then come back here.

Setting up a Facebook Fan Page for your law practice is one thing — turning it into an exceptional value-add for both its members and your business can be another. A lot of Fan Pages seem to just sit there, rarely issuing updates, not really telling visitors anything interesting about the company or taking advantage of the features Facebook has to offer. This silence suggests that their owners created the Page because someone told them to and haven’t given it much thought since. These desolate Fan Pages don’t give people any payoff for becoming fans, and their low member totals are duly reflective. Their lesson is: don’t start a Facebook Fan Page unless you intend to give it regular attention; like an abandoned blog, it can actually drive down your prestige by conspicuously collecting dust by the side of the road.

Many other Facebook Fan Pages are active, but they’re not always the right kind of active. Just like a lot of personal Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds, these Fan Pages suffer from IAAM Syndrome: It’s All About Me. Every update and every data point on the Page is all about the business: its latest accomplishment, its newest office, its most recent press release, and so on. Absolutely, there should be some of this content — part of the goal of a Fan Page is to keep your Fans engaged in what you’re doing and what you’re up to, and to use them to spread that word far and wide. But it needs to be balanced, if not outweighed, by content about and focused on the Fans and what interests them.

For every entry on your Fan Page about your firm’s activities or offerings, there should be at least one or two entries that focus on your Fans: a link to a mainstream news article about one of your key practice areas that your clients (and potential clients) care about; a question or opinion poll about a current-affairs issue that affects your client community; a conversation-starter that lets your fans kick around an engaging topic, serious or otherwise. As Niki says in her article, a good Facebook Fan Page is a community, and you should do what you can to encourage interaction, facilitate dialogue and build relationships within that community.

On top of that, you can make this community even more special by giving your Fans bonuses or insider access they can’t get from your website or your firm’s newsletters. Write an article that’s only accessible by clicking on a link from your Fan Page. Provide an exclusive offer — a half-hour’s free consultation, say, or free parking in your building, or a list of kid-friendly diners near your office — that only your Fans will hear about. Set aside one hour to do a question-and-answer session for your Fans on any legal subject of interest. Give people an incentive to become Fans and to pay close attention to every new announcement or addition to the Page — increase their sense of belonging and exclusivity.

What’s more, remember that Facebook offers you a lot of unique options for packaging your content. You can create Photo Albums of your office or staff members, maybe for a special event like a birthday or baby shower, helping to humanize the members of your firm who are otherwise only known through those stiff, posed, smiling photographs on your website. Schedule Events at your firm like in-house seminars or outside speaking engagements by lawyers. Post Videos now and again, either little three-minute advisories from the managing partner or links to a relevant and interesting item at YouTube. Use the RSS Grafitti application to send your Twitter feed directly to your Fan Page. Profile one of your Fans once a week or once a month, introducing him or her in more detail to the other members of the club.

In short: keep it active, keep it interesting, and keep it about your Fans. Those are the three keys to a successful Facebook Fan Page — and, not incidentally, to everything you do, say or publish under your firm’s banner.

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.

Just a quick post to say my latest Web Law Connected column is up this week on Slaw.ca.  This month’s article discusses some of the different issues many firms consider with respect to domain names.

For Canadian firms, I share my thoughts on the .ca vs .com debate. Other issues include: when and how many domains to keep in a firm’s portfolio, the use of branded-domains -vs- keyword-driven domains, and how I decipher when a domain has enough value to purchase from a third party.

Please drop by and take a look.

“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.

Just wanted to post a quick note about my trip to Calgary yesterday to speak with the Calgary Legal Marketers.  Our presentation topic was building an effective web presence in the legal industry, and the issues covered included:

• some recent trends & adoption rates;
• the basics of lawyer SEO and link building tactics; and
• how lawyers & firms can participate strategically.

I had a wonderful time, and even caught an early flight back to the west coast! (gotta like it when that happens…) Many thanks to everyone who attended;  and especially to Karen Parucha and Caroline Baynes at Gowlings Calgary offices for inviting me & graciously hosting the session.

My PPT deck is embedded below:

Today marks the final entry in a series of excerpts from a Q-and-A session on how law firm marketers and PR professionals can get the most from members of the legal media. My thanks again to Paramjit Mahli for conducting this interview. We wrap up with advice for the new PR professional.

Q. Say a new PR person was starting from scratch and a partner wanted immediate coverage. Are there any words of wisdom could impart to them?

That’s a tough assignment — impatient partners are brutal to work for at the best of times, and “starting from scratch” probably means very few contacts in the media. This will come as no surprise, but relationships matter a lot in the legal media business. Journalists and editors tend to rely heavily on the freelance writers and marketing professionals who help bring them good stories, and breaking into those circles is a real challenge.

I’d say the best thing to do is start cultivating relationships with the media before the partner ever gets on the phone. Meet a reporter for lunch or take an editor for coffee, and focus the conversation on what they do and what they need. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how pleasantly surprised media folks are when a PR professional takes an interest in what they do, rather than immediately talking about themselves and everything they can offer. Journalists are used to being treated as means to an end, so treating them as ends in themselves will, after the initial shock and wariness fades, prove to be a very constructive approach.

If you don’t have time to plant those seeds and watch them grow — if you need results straight away — then you should start by narrowing your focus. What exactly does the partner want? Is she looking to appear in a mainstream media periodical, a legal trade magazine, or a client publication? What sort of coverage does she want: attention for her pro bono work, a spotlight on a recent court victory, general praise for being such an all-around amazing lawyer? Then figure out which periodicals offer the best chance of success with these criteria — don’t bother trying to sell a monthly magazine on a story about a decisive trial result, for instance (you’d be surprised how often PR people don’t pay attention to publishing frequency and production deadlines).

At that point, you can start pitching — but again, put the focus on what the publication’s needs are and how well your proffered content can serve that need. Treat the editor or journalist as a partner, take their perspective into consideration, and you’ll be remarkably successful.

Continuing excerpts from a Q-and-A session on the intersection between legal marketing & PR and the legal media. Today’s conversation centers on law firm size and cross-border issues.

Q. Did you only work with and quote BigLaw lawyers, or did you also talk with lawyers from smaller and mid-size firms? Did you speak just with Canadian firms, or were you open to quoting legal sources from the U.S.?

I wrote a blog post last October at Law21 about the difficulties small and mid-size firms experience in trying to get noticed by the media. The gist is that large firms can outgun their smaller rivals just by throwing a lot of money into the publicity machine and cranking it up, although there are cultural issues at work too. It’s kind of an institutional problem, and I wouldn’t expect the media to correct it independently: if a mid-size or smaller firm wants to get its rightful share of publicity, it needs to make media relations a disproportionate priority.

Luckily, there are cost-effective ways of doing this. Twitter is great, although nothing beats blogs. And in any event, a mid-size firm doesn’t need to out-publicize the Clifford Chances of the world — it just needs to shine in its specific market or in the industry areas it deems most significant to its business plan. Smart media relations are an underrated tool for mid-size firms looking for a competitive edge.

In terms of the nationality of firms the magazine interviewed, a lot depended on the story itself. Obviously, I had no interest in speaking with American firms about American law for a Canadian publication, but I was always interested in U.S. firms that were doing something interesting on the practice management or business-model side, because these are universal issues for lawyers. The same applied to U.K., Australian and other firms worldwide.

But even for all that, there were still important distinctions when you crossed the border. I remember receiving a fine article last fall written by lawyers at four different firms worldwide about surviving the recession. But since Canada escaped the worst of the recession, it didn’t make sense for National to run it. And you always needed to be alive to the potential for pushing nationalist buttons: lawyers in one country want to read about themselves, not lawyers in a foreign jurisdiction. It’s challenging to recognize and promote globalized ideas to readerships that are often more interested in home-grown fare.

More from a recent Q-and-A session about how to deal editors and reporters in the legal media. The Wednesday entry is on what law firm websites do and don’t get right from a media perspective.

Q. Are there any specific items on the media pages of law firm websites that you and your editorial team preferred?

There are very few good media pages on law firm websites, to be honest. Some sites squirrel away their media contacts on an obscure “Contact Us” page. Others create media pages, but fill them with old press releases — or worse again, lists of the latest publications to feature one of their lawyers. Put it this way: if I see that one of your lawyers has been interviewed by a competitor publication, why would I now want to interview that lawyer for my publication? That would make me look like I was scouring the competition seeking sources. Firms invariably place this information, which is nothing more than marketing bumpf, on their media pages  — which is kind of pointless, because the people least likely to be impressed that a lawyer was interviewed by a reporter are other reporters.

The firms that get it right are the ones with media pages that serve the media’s purposes, not the firm’s. These websites make it incredibly easy for a reporter or editor to find a complete list of media contacts, two clicks at most from the home page. These pages specify which personnel handle which sorts of matters, so that the reporter needing a quote for a deadline 30 minutes away doesn’t wind up in the voicemail of the person who handles reprint permissions. These sites also comprehensively index their lawyers’ written work according to subject area, so that reporters looking for experts don’t need to skim through individual lawyer pages hoping to find an article on a topic of interest. When designing your media page, remember that its purpose is to make it easy for reporters to get your lawyers into their publication on the right topics. It’s not there for the firm to brag about itself.

Also, and I wrote about this on Law21 a while back, one of my major annoyances was that many law firms fail to list their professional staff on their websites. If I wanted to talk to a firm’s marketing director or recruitment chair or IT supervisor for an article, many firm websites were useless — as far as the sites were concerned, these positions didn’t even exist. The only employees many firms list on their sites are lawyers, and the firm often adds insult to injury by giving this list the title “Professionals.” Or worse: “People,” which presumably means that the director of professional development is either vegetable or mineral.

Designing a new logo and looking for new ideas? Try SeekLogo.com, a new search tool that indexes 200,000 downloadable vector graphic logos.

The term ‘law’ produced only 59 logos, so it’s not particularly heavy on legal examples;  but a database of 200K operational logo designs may help your next brainstorming session.

When we posted our last round of new additions to LawBlogs.ca, we wondered whether there was a future Clawbies winner among them. Well, as it turns out, there were three of them! Avoid a Claim, The Trial Warrior, and The Stream were all winners or finalists in the 2009 Clawbies, and each was less than six months old. How’s that for an auspicious start?

Here’s the newest batch of Canadian law blogs at LawBlogs.ca:

• Coloured Complexity (Christian Weisenburger)
• Avocat droit criminel (Xavier Cormier)
• Chaudhary Law Office (Max Chaudhary)
• PitbLAWg (Pitblado LLP)
• The KF Modified Blog (Tim Knight)
• Education Law Blog (Noah Sarna)
• Newfoundland Injury Law Blog (Ches Crosbie)
• Clicklaw Blog (Public Legal Education & Information Portal Project)
• Condo Law Blog (Fine & Deo)
• Labour and Employment Law Blog (Greg Gowe)
• Legalease on CKUT 90.3 FM (McGill)
• DL Blog(Michael Carabash)
• Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Law (Adam Baker)
• Employment-Law.ca (Matt Lalande)
• Lex Sustineo (Michael Torrance)
• E-Forensic Services Blog

We wish all of these new bloggers as much success as their blogging forefathers… may there be Clawbies in their futures!

All this week, I’m reproducing parts of a Q-and-A session with SCG Legal PR Network founder Paramjit Mahli about my former career in legal journalism and what legal marketers could learn from it. Today’s exchange: the phone pitch.

Q. What made you open and receptive to a telephone pitch? How did you prefer to be approached?

Telephone pitches are risky, for the same reason that telemarketer calls are risky – not many people like taking a call from a stranger who’s trying to sell them something. I’d advise a legal PR professional to start with a prior email identifying yourself, stating concisely what you’d like to talk about, and saying that you’ll be calling within the next 24 hours in hopes we can talk about it. Make the email professional yet friendly – you’re introducing yourself and laying the groundwork for a productive phone call.

In order for me to take a pitch over the phone even halfway seriously, I needed some prior knowledge of who the caller was, a sense of exactly what they intended to pitch, and confidence that they were specifically interested in my specific magazine. I hated wasting my time on the phone with someone who was just making the rounds of the legal periodicals with a one-size-fits-all pitch, or who didn’t understand what kinds of pieces appear in the magazine. If someone could prove to me, in a few words, that they knew the publication and could pinpoint exactly the right place where their piece could make it a better issue, I would pay attention. I have to say, though, that was an extremely rare occurrence.

I can’t count how many times I saw or heard the phrase “I thought you might be interested” in pitches. You can’t afford to “think” a journalist “might” be interested. You’ve got to know that what you have to offer is so well aligned with what that journalist needs that you’re certain this is a guaranteed winner for everyone. You have to be in the business of providing solutions to the media outlets with which you work, because while it might be the lawyer who pays your bills, it’s the journalist who has what you need.

Late last year, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paramjit Mahli, founder of the SCG Legal PR Network in New York City, about my experiences in legal journalism over the past dozen years. Our discussions led to an Q-and-A interview about how law firm communications and legal PR professionals should and should not interact with members of the legal media, which Paramjit has circulated to the members of her network. Today and throughout this week, I’m going to reproduce that interview in five short posts here at the Law Firm Strategy Blog, to give you some perspectives from the editor’s chair that could guide you in your future interactions with the media.

Today’s segment: what not to do when dealing with a journalist.

Q. What are the top three faux pas that legal media folks commit when approaching legal reporters?

1. You’re just conducting a mass email. I would get a pitch for, say, an article that discusses the ramifications of a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which was really annoying because I edited a Canadian legal periodical that doesn’t report on U.S. case law. Same thing for proffered articles on the David Souter legacy or the Americans with Disabilities Act or what have you – I was clearly just on a mass-emailing list plucked from a directory somewhere. It was lazy and unprofessional, and all it did was get the sender added to a blacklist. Unsolicited and uncustomized emails from marketers lasted about five seconds in my inbox, if that.

2. You haven’t done any homework on the periodical. National rarely if ever published articles written by law firm lawyers on a new development in an area of law, and any marketing professional who’d even skimmed the last few issues would know that. So I got really tired of having to constantly write back to law firm marketing people to explain that we don’t publish those types of articles. It’s an example of the most common and most damaging aspect of legal PR: making pitches based on what the firm cares about, not what the periodical can use. Send journalists a message that you’ve read at least one issue of their magazine or have paid some attention to their editorial mandate. There’s no excuse for sending a pitch that’s not customized for the specific publication in question.

3. You’re addressing me by my first name and we’ve never met. This may be completely idiosyncratic, but it always bothered me no end to get a chirpy “Hi Jordan!” greeting from a complete stranger. Unearned familiarity is not the way to start a professional relationship. (This is worse for female journalists, by the way – John Smith may often be addressed “Dear Mr. Smith,” but Jane Smith will usually be addressed “Hi Jane”). In this, as in so many things, I take my cue from Ben Stone on Law & Order: “In polite society, sir, you don’t call a man by his first name unless he’s given you permission. I never did that.”

We don’t build or manage all of our client’s websites here at Stem.  Sometimes it’s us at the controls, and sometimes we collaborate with the client’s in-house or local web developer.  It’s an arrangement that works quite well most of the time.

One situation where it can cause problems, however, is responding to a website that has been hacked.  Ignoring the fact that security measures should be in place prior (complex passwords, login lockdown protection, etc.), the speed at which you respond to a website that’s been hacked is absolutely critical. Especially when it comes to protecting that website’s search rankings.

Let me explain a bit more… One of the biggest hacking problems out there currently is a completely stealth operation; that is, once control of the website CMS is taken over by the hacker, hidden pieces of code are injected (or files uploaded that run outside the target site’s navigation structure). The intruder’s spam insertion is also completely invisible to site viewers without inspecting the webpage code.  The hacker’s motive? To strip off some of the target website’s trust & link value, and route it to another money making venture.

Now unfortunately, the way most Firms (& Webmasters) find out about this type of attack is that their pages almost entirely drop out of search engines.  Here’s a frequent scenario:

• someone complains that they can’t be found in Google;
• webmaster inspects & the hacked code snippets are found;
• panic;
• passwords are changed globally; and finally,
• better security measures are put in place.

The bigger problem now? Google & the other search engines believe you run a spam website!  Suffice to say, you don’t want the headache of cleaning your site code, manually removing spam URLs from Google, and ultimately submitting a re-inclusion request explaining to BigG your remedies & new security.  So now – with context – finding out about any hack ASAP & responding before the search engines can index that spam code is … critical.

One helpful solution we came across recently, almost accidentally, is using WatchThatPage.  WTP is a tool we normally use to alert us about client news items & events (sans-RSS…). This time though, WTP identified that the client’s webpage had changed and alerted us within an hour of the attack. Rather than on-page text changes, the hacked-code insertion was detected.  The client was alerted, and their local developer had the site fixes in place a few hours later.

The end result?  Not one page dropped out of the search engines!

So two lessons I’d like to pass along:

1. Website security needs be taken seriously: At the very least, do these two things: 1) add longer complex passwords (10 characters plus, no dictionary words); and 2) lockdown your CMS login – if you use Wordpress, we highly recommend the plugin linked above.
2. Get an alert service to email you when your webpage code has changed:  WatchThatPage proved to be a big help; and it’s likely we’ll expand it’s use to more client websites in the future.