Showing posts with label lawfirm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lawfirm. Show all posts
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Legal Jobs at ILR Linkedin Group

Monday, March 7, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linkedin opened up its job feature:

LinkedIn has made some upgrades to the Jobs section of LinkedIn groups that will make it much easier for group members and group managers to share LinkedIn jobs specifically tailored to your group. Group owners and managers can set up a keyword based feed of LinkedIn jobs into the group. Group members can also share relevant jobs into the group.

Organic postings from the old Groups "Jobs" tab are now in the Career discussions section.


We are excited about these changes. Be sure to visit the jobs section of your group and set up a targeted jobs feed for your group today.

Best Regards,

The LinkedIn Team


And so, the ILR Linkedin Group used this opportunity for its members to broadcast their talent-hunt. Join the ILR Linked Group here, and start posting your firm’s job offers.



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More on evernote for legal practice

Thursday, August 26, 2010

 

 

Here a list on what evernote can do to enhace your legal practice:

  1. As a blogging tool for legal bloggers (of course!)
  2. Research tool (collection of snippet and bookmarks) and digital filing cabinet.
  3. Customer relation management (CRM) tool
  4. Client tagging, note taking, auto forwarding from website contact form

I think evernote is good to be used for start-up lawfirms or those with SOHO (Small Office Home Office) practices. Recently I connected my inexpensive Lexmark s.305 Wi-FI printer to send scanned files (PDF or Pictures) directly to evernote so that it can sync with the system there. But if you have a scanner with autofeeder, I think it would be much faster and better to scan documents, deeds, contracts and all those boring stuffs :) No need to use expensive Knowledge Management softwares, its a waste of money!

Read our previous post: Evernote for Lawyers.



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Evernote for Lawyers

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

 

 

Many lawfirms are investing thousands of dollars for Knowledge Management software only to discover that their lawyers and workers find a hard time implementing it because they are not user-friendly. The reason why most KM software doesn’t work is because they are not embedded in your daily life; the inputs are tedious and time-consuming.

 

It’s time to liberate yourself. Someday you will quit working for that lawfirm and set-up your own (or do better things like enjoy your life) so you better have your own Knowledge Management system to satisfy your future need of information.

 

With evernote, you can write notes, clip web pages, take picture notes and voice notes directly from your desktop and mobile. Evernote has apps for ipads, blackberry, android and other OS. All of them are synced together in the cloud. The software is also equipped with integrated OCR (optical character recognition), so every text in the picture you take or document you scanned will be recognized. Some printers can also directly send scanned files to evernote.

 

Here’s a list of things that a lawyer can do with evernote:

  1. Take pictures of/scan business cards
  2. Use the voice note for interviews (using blackberry – silently :)
  3. Take a snapshot of important clauses
  4. Scan your meeting notes
  5. Scan legal documents
  6. Take pictures during site visit (and tag it in your project folder)

Evernote is linked with many other apps: your email (you can forward your mail to evernote), twitter and google reader, just to name a few. The most important of all: it’s free!
Click here to sign up.



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Add your lawfirm to our Lawfirm Directory (and get featured!)

Monday, May 17, 2010

 

In case you haven’t realize, the Nanotechnology Law blog adds a few links in the tabs: Lawfirm Directory and Add Lawfirm.

Lawfirm directory is a new feature aimed at collecting information about lawfirms practising Nanotechnology related issue. If you fill out the form and request a review, we will consider the application subject to further documentation provided by you.

Please note that the review is not an advertorial. If you request an advertorial, we will have to disclose it in the blog post.

Click here to download the list of firms and here (or scroll below) to fill out the form.

 

Related:

Solo Practicioner Lawyer, a Trend?
The future of work: no cubicle culture, smaller companies, working from home



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ABAnet Twitter Debate on Virtual Law Office

Friday, May 7, 2010

Quick blogging. Follow this hashtag #22TwDb

 



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Twittering the Indonesian Legal Community

Monday, May 3, 2010

Some of the most prominent figures of the Indonesian legal community is sharing their thoughts in twitter. Sometimes, when they are happy, they provide advices too, with 140 characters, that is.

(Hey, in this world, nothing is free, except for advices. And for lawyers, oftentimes, that is also not free. So, 140 characters is a good thing to start.)

So, who’s on Twitter? Here’s a list of those benevolent lawyers.

1. Taufik Basari often tweets about human rights law.

2. Pramudya tweets about Law and Economics.

3. Ari Juliano, who is the Indonesian Coordinator for the Creative Commons Project, often tweets about IPR

4. Faiz, our future Constitutional Court Chief Justice, tweets about, well, Constitution.

5. Arsil has his own Jurisprudence class in Twitter.

6. Anggara, our savvy Press Lawyer (he did several Judicial Reviews related to press law by the way) tweets here.

7. If you are a law student, keep an eye on Legal101 (from students, for students :)

8. Oh, I tweet too. You can find me here. I tried to organize my useful tweets, with this hashtag #lawtalk . Pram is also joining me in this hashtag. 

These people are quite friendly. So I think they will be happy to answer your twitter queries.

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6 Free Collaboration Tools for Lawyers

Sunday, May 2, 2010

You just start up a small law firm and can’t afford to pay expensive IT costs? No problem. There are tons of freebies out there which you can use to enhance your law firm’s productivity.

1. Delicious

Bookmarks cluttered your browser page? Use bookmarking sites. There are many free bookmarking services including google notebook and Digg, but I prefer delicious for my bookmarks. I have been sharing these bookmarks with colleagues in other countries working on the same issue. I don't lose anything by sharing what I found in the net and they don't risk the possibility of reinventing the wheel.
 

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In delicious, have a look at my Water Law bookmarks. If you do European Law, have a look at my EU Law bookmarks. For nanotechnology law, have a look here.
 
Important tip for delicious. In tagging, always use root words. Don’t use “nanotechnology+law” or “nanotechnologies”, unless you really have to.

2. Manymoon
Manymoon is a cool software for project management. It has project management features such as milestones, tasks, calendar, link sharing and progress report.
 
 
  













For example, if you are doing a merger, you can set the milestones into (i) Merger Plan, (ii) BoC Approval of the Merger Plan, (iii) Shareholder’s Approval for Merger and (iv) Notifications to Employees. You can add tasks to each milestones. For milestone (i) you can assign the drafting of a Merger Plan to a junior lawyer and a reviewing task to the more senior lawyer. You can set dates for these task, set a deadline and a reminder.
What I really like with Manymoon is its integration with Google Apps. Manymoon is integrated to Google Docs, Email and Calendar. It has a reporting tool too, but unfortunately, the free version only has one reporting for each projects.

Sign up to manymoon for free, here.

Oh, in case you are a time-sheet freak, yes, manymoon does track your lawyer’s time sheet.



3. Tungle
You are a very busy person with lots of schedules, but yet, your firm can’t afford to pay a secretary? It’s OK, not a problem. Tungle will help to sort out your scheduling problem.

 

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Tungle use google calendar to check the dates when you would be available. Clients can then propose several dates for a meeting or web conference or telephone call. Not clear enough, you can try scheduling a conference call with me, using my tungle here.


4. Dimdim
You are in Bali and too tired to go to Jakarta for a meeting, or you simply have a ‘virtual’ lawfirm and only work at the office if you have too. Besides, who needs an office these days, right?

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With Dimdim, you can always hold meetings online. Share presentations, share your computer screen, hold a web conference! Dimdim can record your meetings too. Again, no need for a secretary.


5. Offisync
The old school of doing review is by turning the track changes on and then sending it once you made the review. Well, there’s a more effective way of doing it.

Offisync, well, sync, your office files with Google Docs and allow instant, online collaboration with coworkers. However, there is a caveat. You may not be able to save the doc files in its original MS Word Format, unless you have a premium account with google apps. So, everytime you save docs in offisync, it save it in google doc format. If you have plenty of tables and footnotes, you might want to be a bit careful using the service. I hope they will sort out this problem soon. I will update you when they do.



6. Finally, Google Apps




Get 50 free (7GB each) email@yourlawfirm.com with google apps, integrated with calendar, docs and other google services such as video and sites. Yes, you get the email with your company’s name but using gmail services. Ain’t that cool? Sign up here.
All of the software I listed above (except for Delicious) are integrated into Google Apps. So when you sign up to google apps (the basic version) and go to the Marketplace from your domain management console, you can install those apps in your domain. Have fun! 

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The future of work: no cubicle culture, smaller companies, working from home

Saturday, August 11, 2007

I am still on the Lawfirm 2.0 topic. This week's edition of business week issued an interesting report about the future of work. The articles are a good news for all (structured) procastinators, freelancers, solo lawyers, outsourcee and those who hates cubicle culture.

Take a look at one of the companies covered by the magazine:
It sounds like the corporate paradise of the future. Workers organize themselves, coalescing around natural leaders and gravitating to the most exciting projects. There are no middle managers, no hierarchies, no fixed assignments.
And its article titled "the wiki workplace":

Nourished on instant messaging, blogs, wikis, chat groups, playlists, peer-to-peer file sharing, and online multiplayer video games, the Net Generation will increasingly bring a heightened comfort with technology, inclination toward social connectivity, more emphasis on creativity and fun, and greater diversity to the companies they work for and to the companies they found themselves.

Eighty million young people are entering the U.S. workforce. Are today's senior managers ready?


The future is a designed chaos, and we love it ;)

Read more.






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Solo Practicioner Lawyer, a Trend?

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Wired.com released an article about career 2.0. One of them is lawyering:

The idea of working hard to pay your dues as a lawyer is outdated. The Wall Street Journal says the latest law firm trend is "de-equitization," which is a fancy word for kicking a partner in the pants and throwing him or her out the door. Since there is no longer a safe ladder to climb in big law firms, people will stop climbing and set up shop on their own.

Warning: Lawyers are the most unhappy of all professionals, according to the Colorado Law Journal. But people who work for themselves are among the most satisfied workers, according to Dartmouth economist Daniel Blanchflower (.pdf). Add the two together for a more balanced work life.

Preparation: Success as a lawyer is increasingly about client relations rather than providing Alan Dershowitz-style genius legal representation. Take some marketing courses in college since that's what you'll be spending time on once you hang out your shingle.

If this prediction is correct, we shall see that either the period of partnership tenure or the total amount of partners appointment declining from time to time, and at the same time solo or boutique lawfirm mushroomed. Another possible thing: once these lawyers 'disaggregates' and work as a solo practicioners, they might need to collaborate. Do we have the collaboration engine in place?

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Law 2.0 business model: filtering and aggregation

Sunday, July 8, 2007

I have discussed the application of the long tail quite lengthy in several post. Recently David Hornik said in his blog that those who will gain money from the long tail phenomenon are aggregators and filterers:

The aggregators are those web businesses that seek to collect up as much of the Long Tail content as is possible, so as to make their "stores" a one stop shop for content no matter how popular or obscure. The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content.

The filterers are those businesses that make it easier to find the content in which we are interested, despite the increasing proliferation of content creators, hosts, aggregators, etc. Again, while these different filtering technologies may make it slightly more likely that an end user finds his or her way to a piece of obscure content, it will not likely be sufficient to catapult an artist into the mainstream. The beneficiary of the filtering is the end user and the filterer, not the content owner per se.
I have discussed the value of filtering in my previous post:

More choice = more freedom
More freedom = more welfare

# More choice = more welfare (False?)

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore suggest that the syllogism above could be false. In his book, "The Paradox of Choice", he argued that more choices are essentially good as it reflects improvements, but, there are dark sides of having more choices:

1. Paralysis. We don't choose at all. Many people stays single, right? :)
2. Poor decisions and performance quality. We made bad choices.
3. Dissatisfaction, dissappointment. We are not happy despite our choices.
4. Opportunity costs. The cost in choosing stuff could even be greater than the stuff itself!
5. Time Pressure. Too many choice makes us feel like we are being rushed.
6. Escalation of expectation. When we spent lots of time in choosing, we expect that the stuff we finally choose is a good stuff. When we turned out wrong, we become dissapointed.
7. Self Blame. Good feelings gradually reduces. Bad feelings escalates and change forms.

More choices is better, only if it occurs in any of these two situations. First, Preference Articulation. If you really know hat you want, more choice is better. Most people never have this. Or, second, Alignable Option. If the options can be scaled down to the similar size. Most people never have this too.

How would this be applicable to the legal business? Well, I see several opportunities. First, there are many blogs out there preaching about the law. There are quite so many boilerplates provisions available for free and listing documents (containing contracts) available also for free. The point is how to aggregate them. Some have been doing this through blog aggregators.

Filtering is done by making the best recommendations for clients, which blawgs or which legal service, or which legal form is preferable.

Both arguments above however, comes up with several assumptions:
  1. The legal society willingly shares its content (some fact: nobody shares boilerplates provisions freely, its not like uploading photos in flickr)
  2. Big lawfirms disagregates and legal business is conducted as a small-business (some fact: web 2.0 does not seem to have the power to "disagregate" giant lawfirms, yet)
  3. There is a web 2.0 social networking tool that would enable "small-business" lawyers to collaborate with people from other lawfirms. (some fact: it may not be in the nature of lawyers to collaborate with each other, except when they are defending the same client, of course)


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Will blogs transform the nature of legal services?

Friday, January 26, 2007

It has been an honour that political analyst Fatih Syuhud reviewed this blog in his "blog of the week" feature. Here's a quote:
Some non-law students are just reluctant to read anything to do with law because the writer uses too rigid a language which is hardly understood by non-law student...

The stark substantial differences between modern people and "primitive" ones is not about the physical appearances, it's about how thirsty we are to acquire new knowledge and information, which are ups for grabs in front us. Al Afghani's blog content is one of those information that we should read regularly and joyfully to quench our thirst of knowledge just in case you are one of those modern and civilized persons.

Not only that the law is difficult to understand for lay people, it is also expensive and not reliable. Am I right or am I wrong? In theory, the law is created for the people, and not the other way around. Is there any way to bring the law closer to the people?

It is possible. Ever heard of "Law 2.0"? Click it if you are curious. Blog is a part of Law 2.0. Blogs can make legal services faster, better and cheaper. How?
  1. Collaboration. My researches and blog posts may be useful for the legal people. They can cite, improve and edit my article to create a legal memo. No need to do another research. There is no use reeinventing the wheel
  2. Better scrutinies. If you write a legal analysis alone and put in your desktop, only you and probably your partner knows if you made any mistakes. But if you publish it online, maybe other lawyers or me would be able to comment should you make errors, vice versa
  3. Niche-creation. If there are too many law blogs (US has so many legal blogs), bloggers will start creating niche content to attract visitors. This is positive for legal specialization
  4. Blogs will give opportunities for small and boutique lawfirms or even solo career lawyers. In light of regional autonomy, this is very good
There are barriers to these possibilities: (i) slow internet connection, (ii) reluctancy to write, (iii) fear in giving away opinions, (iv) materialism. Point iv is really something outdated, if you read Time's 2006 man of the year.

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Law 2.0: exchanges with mazyar hedayat

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Mazyar Hedayat posted in his blog a draft business model for Law 2.0. I'll give you a quot:

the business model of the website is simple: users post content for others to download, such as:

  • documents: pleadings, letters, briefs, memoranda, research
  • presentations: power-point, flash, PDF
  • media: videos, photographs
  • applications: applets or widgets

authors and items receive user ratings. highly rated authors and items are featured more prominently. revenue would be generated through

  • e-commerce: host site would take a fair % of the value of each transaction
  • advertising: start simply by deploying ads then work up to sponsorship
  • subscriptions: as mentioned above
  • licensing: application could be licensed for use within an enterprise
The content looks perfect to me. The means are already available. With Google Docs, Google Notebook, Flickr, You Tube and del.icio.us they are virtually already here. But, aside from Creative Commons, I have never seen any boilerplates provision available online for free. Why? What would attract the hourly paid lawyers to tag, post and share their docs on the net? Can the networking power of web 2.0. altered the way legal services are delivered?

If you have a say, join us in this conversation. Give a link and we'll link you back.



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How virtual office works

Thursday, January 4, 2007

How stuff works posted an interesting article on how to run a virtual office. For advanced techies most of the tips provided there are basics and refers more to Small-Office-Home-Office (SOHO) concept, nevertheless, there are some which is relatively new such as the use of Virtual Assistance. There is also a link to Virtual Office Group, a london based company offering telephone reception services and renting office spaces on hourly basis.

I can actually lists down free programs that could be used for Virtual Offices as I have been using it myself, but I think I'll just do it on a later post. See also my previous post on virtual lawfirm, long tail and law 2.0.

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Online meetings can be more effective than face to face

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Supporter of virtual lawfirm concept might be interested knowing this:
Face-to-face meetings are expensive to schedule and run. They might involve travel costs or come at inconvenient times, when attendees are busy or tired. Time is wasted when people come late, talk about irrelevant topics, or leave early. Meetings are also subject to many types of biases. How loudly do people talk? How deep are their voices? What do the people look like? How is the furniture arranged? How are people dressed? What is each person’s body posture? Who has the power? How does the group leader guide the meeting? Does the group nurture dissent? Do people have preconceived positions on the topic at hand?
Sometimes communication is more to form rather than content. As a result, people tend to focus on how we say and deliver things and not what we said. With written language, things like these can be masked. See the report here.