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What about the Yellow Pages? We’ve been hearing for years, that they are the big doorstop buggy whips of the 21st century – and, they are!  Who the heck uses em?  I literally have no idea, but, if you find somebody, let’s get that person a smart phone – stat!  Now, we’re seeing a lot of ads for YP.com (the yellow pages new online network), so it looks like even the Yellow Pages pooh bahs know for whom the bell currently tolls — my home town of San Francisco actually is considering a ban them as environmental hazards!

So, thousands of lawyers have already embraced Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as publishing their free legal profiles on sites like Rocket Lawyer, to provide the online experience that millions of clients already obviously want.  I’m not telling anyone what to do, but – what side of the tipping point do you want to be on?

Submitted by: Charley Moore | blog | @RocketLawyer

What began in a dorm room seven years ago has become a global social network and revolution in communication. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard roommates and fellow computer science students have become billionaires and changed the world by creating a central nervous system for online interaction.

But can this site started to compare ‘Hot or Not’ from the online facebooks of nine Harvard houses be tastefully used by attorneys and law firms? And if so, how?

I’ll discuss:

• How Facebook is being used by lawyers today.
• What lawyers are telling me about the opportunities and challenges.
• How Facebook is being used by law firms today.
• What law firms are telling me about the opportunities and challenges.
• Can Facebook be used for publishing?
• Perils, privacy, and ethics concerns.
• Where lawyers and law firms may be headed on Facebook.

Submitted by: Kevin OKeefe | blog | @kevinokeefe

Client confidentiality is the bedrock of the attorney-client relationship.  Or is it?

As bars focus on confidentiality issues related to the cloud (a red-herring, in my view), there’s a greater assault taking place on the attorney client privilege.  With the launch of sites like Law Pivot, where clients can obtain crowd-sourced advice on legal services, Shpookle, where clients post about a case and seek bids, the growth of consumers seeking peer-to-peer advice on healthcare (can legal advice be far behind) and of course, the emergence of non-lawyer providers like Legal Zoom which don’t owe a duty of confidentiality at all.  And what about locational-sites like FourSquare or real-time social media sites like Twitter where lawyers and clients may inadvertently broadcast confidential information to the world.

Bottom line, are client secrets still safe in the Internet Age – and should we care?

Submitted by:  Carolyn Elefant | blog | @carolynelefant

• “the necessary evil,”
• “the largest portion of costs,”
• “an inefficient process,”
• “an industry made up of charlatans and snake oil,”
• “one of the most important and infuriating developments of the legal profession”
• … and it is dying.

Come join in a pre-celebration.  Key trends and facts that detail the pending death of this practice.  And why that is a good thing.

Submitted by: Joshua Kubicki | blog | @jkubicki

The profession is endangered.  Law schools are in trouble.  New lawyers are unprepared for economic and technological reality. There’s vast unmet need for legal services.Talk about opportunity!

This six minute session will preview a proposal being presented by a group of legal educators and technologists at the FutureEd conference on April 15th in New York City.  The basic idea is to greatly expand programs in which students write software as part of their education.

Courses that engage students in creating ‘apps for justice’ – things that do useful legal work – can take on many forms.  They can focus on tools practitioners can use to ‘work smarter’ and assist others; they can focus on empowering self-helpers to address their own problems and opportunities. Students can build document templates, guided interviews, dynamic checklists, calculators, interactive advisers, instructional modules, games, and decision support systems.  Embedded with rich intellectual contexts of doctrine, ethics, history, and theory, such courses can deliver a quadruple bottom line:

•    (for students) learning, professional development, career positioning
•    (for the profession) helping lawyers serve clients better and live more satisfying lives
•     (for society) advancing prosperity and the rule of law
•     (for schools) resuscitating their value proposition by better delivering the above results

Submitted by: Marc Lauritsen | blog | @marclauritsen

Submitted by: Sam Glover | blog | @samglover

Despite our best efforts to maintain our Facebook firewalls, we cannot control all the types of information about us that the internet increasingly puts at our clients’ fingertips. The expectation of the last five years that static law firm websites will satisfy clients’ thirst for information about their lawyers will give way to demands for greater transparency about lawyers’ interests, backgrounds, opinions, and reputations. Frightening as increased transparency may seem now, lawyers who embrace it will find new avenues for better attorney-client relationships, niche marketing, and lawyer professionalism.

Submitted by: Eric Cooperstein | blog | @ethics_maven

Everyone is pretty aware that Facebook has been a resource for family law attorneys, but lawyers are under utilizing Facebook and other social media technology to market their own business.  Social media creates a level playing field, and if you are willing to invest the time and commitment, you can get on board fairly easily.  But it is a journey.

Therefore, my talk is going to be about my journey.  First realizing that I needed to get on board and then just jumping in and embracing it.  I may not be religious about tweeting or blogging all of the time, but I am out there, engaging people, and connecting.  My life is a story of making connections, and social media is a way to unleash your creativity and ability to connect.  I started by creating my own website with Yahoo Webhosting, and then I jumped into Twitter using Tweetdeck and Hoot Suite, and then set up my Facebook.  I have read everything I can get my hands on in order to develop my web persona and to create my personal social media policy.  I think that by sharing my journey I can help lawyers understand that this is very doable and they should not be afraid of the future, rather, they should embrace it. I will include helpful pointers, such as positioning yourself as an expert and responding to negative feedback.

Submitted by: Pam Makowski | blog | @pammakowski