February 2005 Archives

Tim Bray reports that he visited Technorati on Friday and advised them to shut down their free service. Tim says, "I'm surprised this is controversial," explaining that "the notion that small companies with poor cash-flow should give things away is so 1999."

I'd be sad to see Technorati's free service go away, because I'm just beginning to understand how it works and how it can be used to Do Cool Stuff. But maybe that's the signal that they should start charging — people are figuring out how to make it Do Cool Stuff, which means there's probably some kind of a market there. Tim also points out that a direct-payment system may be more emotionally acceptable than an advertising based system; he'd prefer it that way, and lots of other people feel squeamish about the notion of advertising in RSS-derived services.

It would be nice to have something like Technorati available perpetually for free, and I'd be sad to see it go the way of a pay service. But I'd be sadder to see it coated with advertisements or, worse yet, gone. I know better than to think that we're going to get something for nothing, and the Technorati service has to pay for itself somehow.

A few entries ago I made fun of those who insist on being called "attorneys" rather than "lawyers" because it sounds more prestigious.

A college friend of mine wrote (separate from the blog, because my comments were broken at the time) and said that she prefers the term "attorney" because she sometimes gets the impression that the public associates "lawyers" with 'ambulance chasing,' frivolous claims, poor client care, and other such law-practice malaises, but associates "attorneys" with more respectable accomplishments.

I don't know if that perception is accurate; if it is, maybe it's only because people who criticize lawyers may prefer to use the less formal and more easily pronounced term. (Try it! "Lawyer" is easier to say than "attorney.") "Attorney" is a more formal term, and appears on my letterhead and business cards.

Either way, I'd guess that "correcting" someone for using the "wrong term" doesn't present a good image.

My favorite word associated with the work that we do is the word "counselor." My certificate from the Colorado Supreme Court declares that I am an "Attorney and Counselor at Law," and I'm glad it uses that full phrase. It reflects an important part of the attorney-client relationship that is hard to perform well, crucial to the client's experience and value received, and too easily ignored by lawyers who too quickly assume that they understand what the client wants or needs.

I want to develop the client counseling aspects of my work just as much as all of the other aspects. To help clients achieve goals, avoid risks, resolve their differences with others, and understand litigation when parties can't resolve their differences, one must make sure the client understands the legal aspects of the transaction or dispute. It is not enough simply to be a good technician, draftsman, or advocate. Some clients are sophisticated enough that they do not stand to benefit from additional counseling — whatever issue is at hand, they've done it before. Few law practices serve only those highly-sophisticated clients.

The very first attorney I chatted with about the possibility of law school emphasized client counseling in his discussion of law practice. That conversation still resonates with me.

My hosting provider had blocked all Movable Type comments scripts because it was slammed by spammers.

Using instructions from the provider I have implemented a work-around, and comments now work again.

After my long post earlier this evening about weblogs and law firms, I would be remiss if I didn't note Dennis Kennedy's post By Request Tuesday – Is There Still Room for Small Firm or Solo Lawyer Blogs?

His answer to that question — followed by a set of great observations — is, "Are you serious? There's more room than ever and better prospects than ever." And he's right on. I think these two points he made, about the individual blog that bears its author's personal voice, are especially important:

4. Let's face it, big law firms are looking at blogging for marketing purposes. The long-time individual practicing lawyer bloggers (and other individual legal bloggers) are blogging because they have passion for their topics and blogging itself. Blogging has become part of who they are and they understand their audiences' interests and needs. Marketing might be part of why they are blogging, but it's not the only reason – not by a long shot.

5. Personality is a big part of any successful blog. Personality is hard to develop in any group blog. In an official big law firm blog – fuggettaboutit.

Dennis and I had a good conversation about this point that parallelled my post on anonymous weblogging. Since then, I've been trying to let my personal voice find a little more expression here.

That msnbot sure is a drain on bandwidth.

Mark, one of the managers of my old office building, told me a story about a conversation among a gaggle of young lawyers and professionals walking through the lobby. One of the lawyers, an associate at a "prestigious" national, nay, international firm, was busy making it very clear that he was not just a lawyer. No, he was something more: an attorney. If I recall Mark's story correctly, this lawyer went on to describe how he had explained that same distinction to his family at Thanksgiving.

People. Get over yourselves.

Think of it this way: imagine that you are trying to convince a roomful of [mere?] laypersons that there is a distinction between "lawyer" and "attorney," and that you are the latter, a member of some more prestigious, accomplished, and respectable subset of those-with-law-licenses. Now, if you can, try to imagine the thoughts passing through the minds of those whom you have just addressed. Do you imagine that they respect you more thanks to the speech you've just given, or less?

If you tried that little scenario in real life, I know which outcome I'd bet on.

In case you were wondering, I use both the terms "lawyer" and "attorney" interchangeably, as I believe they should be used. I view "attorney" as the more formal term and use it on my business card and letterhead. A certificate from the Supreme Court, State of Colorado, declares that I am an "Attorney and Counselor at Law," a phrase too clumsy for everyday speech. But I use both "attorney" and "lawyer" to communicate the same content about their referent, and view neither as derogatory nor superlative relative to the other.

When lawyers — by which I mean attorneys — try to bend those words to elevate one above the other, it maligns only the speaker, and just reinforces stereotypes of "attorney" elitism. Edited to add: I'm not saying that law practice isn't a profession that brings with it responsibility and, among some practitioners, honor. I'm only saying that I find no useful distinction of meaning between the words "attorney" and "lawyer." I would hold them both up to that level of responsibility and respect. (I do think "attorney" is the more formal term.) The fellow who insists on being called one word instead of the other just makes us all look silly.

What will weblogs mean for law firms? It's too early to tell anything for sure, but law firms face a slightly different business reality than most other businesses, and that will affect how law-firm and other legal weblogs develop. There'll be no legal analogue to the Scobleizer. But both firm-sponsored corporate blogs and privately-maintained individual lawyer weblogs could have great positive effects for law firms. Firm-sponsored weblogs showcase firm expertise and keep clients up-to-date on new developments in the law. Meanwhile, independent weblogs humanize the practice of law while demonstrating individuals' talents and participating in worthwhile conversations.

Microsoft may be one of the greatest implementers and beneficiaries of weblogs in business these days, between its MSDN blogs and Robert Scoble. As weblogs begin flourishing in a business context, I wonder more and more what impact they will have on the business of law practice.

Law firms have a different kind of customer relationship and a different kind of culture from what you would find at Microsoft. That reminds me of stories from lawyers who have worked for Microsoft as outside counsel about how they love visiting the Microsoft campus because of its different company culture, but those aren't my stories to tell. Can you imagine a law firm where an associate publicly criticized a controversial product or service the firm had once provided? (Scoble: "SmartTags in IE were evil".) How about where an associate criticizes an unnamed department for making a bad internet marketing decision? (Scoble: "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.")

I'm sure Scoble is making more than a few people at Microsoft anxious, but the awareness that these kinds of conversations might be happening at Microsoft plants in me a seed of hope for a company I haven't trusted for ages. (Just a seed, folks. I'm still planning to switch, although Apple's recently aggressive legal strategies have been bothering me.) I hope they'll realize there's an opportunity there.

One reason you won't see this sort of blogging at a law firm is that most of what lawyers do involves the confidences of their clients. I certainly can't say anything that would reveal my client's confidences. If I'm working on litigation, I may not want to disclose aspects of my litigation strategy until a certain time in the case. Most anything a lawyer could say about a case would come across as an attempt to try the case to the general public rather than a jury or the judge — just an attempt "to try the case in the [new] media." In the legal industry, the customer depends on confidential advice tailored to the client's specific situation. This conversation between the service provider and the customer cannot take place in an open forum.

A lawyer-weblogger would also have to take extreme care in criticizing any of the firm's prior work. When it comes down to the strategic decisions a law firm makes, no one can say, "I think we should have argued that losing case differently to the judge," because that's tantamount to saying, "Our client should consider suing us." Even if the perhaps-faulty strategic decision doesn't rise to the level of malpractice (and many bad decisions don't), that's a door you just don't want to open.

I suppose one could criticize the firm's marketing approach, or any of the very few other aspects of the firm that don't directly involve client service, but you had better not criticize your firm's methods of delivering its services. After all, as Andy Havens pointed out last week, your clients don't need you, and they can probably get comparable services from another firm. On the other hand, open criticism of old billing methods might fit well into an effort to show how clients get more better service under a new approach.

I also just haven't met that many law firms where people feel like saying, "This is a great place to work and we do wonderful things for our clients!" Microsoft gets that benefit from its employees' blogs, but most law firms won't. Perhaps that betrays something else wrong with law practice, but I'm not going to go there right now. This topic is more than enough to work on already. I'll just say that if I did find lawyers who were that enthusiastic about their firm, they'd get my attention very quickly.

So large law firms probably won't have the kinds of weblogs where the rank-and-file employees gloat about their amazing employer or where they openly criticize current or past company practices. The weblogs that law firms sponsor will probably be those that are designed to showcase a firm's talent in a particular area, demonstrate that the firm is on top of the latest developments in that field, and signal clients about developments in the law on which clients might want consultation. Off the top of my head, I can think of several large-firm weblogs in this vein that are already off and running: the Holland & Hart Health Care Law Blog, the Davis Wright Tremaine Telecom Law Blog, and Preston Gates Ellis's Electronic Discovery Law. There are more, and I expect they will serve as helpful marketing tools.

I've been focusing on firm-sponsored weblogs, especially in the large-firm world. But the weblogs that attorneys independently keep can also bring incidental benefits to their firms. In their independently-maintained weblogs, writers often participate in cross-blog conversations that thus far tend to exclude the staid corporate weblogs. I think that, as long as attorneys show a modicum of discretion in talking about their work, their personal weblogs can reflect positively on firms large and small. Consider: If you or a client had a civil legal problem arise in Louisiana, whom would you call first? I'd call Ernest Svenson without thinking twice. A case in California? Denise Howell would come to mind right away. And there are many more people whom I'd think of contacting first because of their weblogs, people who I'd trust to handle the matter well or to refer it either within their firms or to someone else qualified. Many webloggers cast a positive light on their partners and employers by their positive presence in the blogosphere.

What's more, I like to know that the lawyers I work with are real human beings with real lives and interests outside the law. The legal weblogs I read most avidly talk about more than law practice. (I could stand to improve my own writing in that respect.) They include glimpses of the author above and beyond that person's role as a practitioner. I deeply appreciate those glimpses, and they tend to promote my trust in the lawyer's integrity and wisdom. I trust the judgment of the well-rounded person more than I trust the person who never leaves the office, and that's also the kind of person I'd rather spend time with.

Now of course, a firm that has outspoken, lousy people for lawyers probably won't stand to gain from its lawyers' blogs, but I'll shed no tears for them. If a firm has to worry about that, it has more serious problems to think about than anything related to blogging.

I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of an imprint blogging makes on this profession. It's an exciting time, and I'm glad to be a small part of it.

I've been taking advantage of my free time to get organized. I'm trying to manage things using the system in David Allen's book Getting Things Done. I discovered David Allen through weblogs and his approach seems to be very popular in the tech community (this Scoble post links to several "GTD" related posts).

It's only been a few days, but I'm pleased with the results so far. One thing I'm trying to learn to do is to limit the frequency with which I check my e-mail. (See this post on Merlin Mann's excellent weblog 43 Folders.) Since, oh, 1995, I've been in the habit of being constantly connected to e-mail while at a computer. I had my mail clients set to check mail every three to five minutes. This meant that e-mail regularly interrupted my workflow. I've pushed the frequency back to about once every 20 minutes. In fact, because I'm now more focused on what I'm doing, I often don't notice when an e-mail arrives until I decide that it's time for a break.

I haven't tried to manage what I do this way in the context of a busy office yet, and it's probably a great luxury that I can start out without having to do that just yet. I feel good about this, that it could have a very good long-term impact. I feel that I've definitely used the last week well.

But I'm not yet to the point where I trust the way I've organized things enough for me to relax about what I have to do next on each of my projects. That's supposed to be one of the big payoffs of the Getting Things Done system. I seem to have freed up my mind to fret about and plan things that don't really need to be addressed, at least not yet. I need to learn at a more habitual level that when I've put those things down on my "someday/maybe" list or my "waiting" list, I can just let them go for a while.

If you're concerned about the privacy implications of information technology and you don't already follow Sabrina Pacifici's weblog beSpacific, this is a great time to start.

Today, beSpacific includes a post with links to resources on how to find out what ChoicePoint knows about you. ChoicePoint is a conglomerate of database services that collects all the data about individuals that it can get its hands on. Then they sell it.

Not exactly comforting. I think I'll have to submit a request to see what they've got on me.

Dennis Kennedy has another good post on weblogging. In this one he offers observations about weblogging from the perspective of one who reads a large volume of weblog content using newsreader software.

Dennis continues to stress the importance of offering full-text RSS feeds so that readers don't have to click through to see the whole post. One of his earlier posts made me decide to do just that. From the reader's point of view, I'm finding full-text feeds awfully important myself, because I also read a lot of feeds (though nowhere near the 600+ that Dennis describes). I had to edit my three MovableType feed templates to make the change properly on my own weblog, but it was relatively easy with a little help from the Template Tags section of the manual.

There are a lot of weblogs, legal and otherwise, whose authors still haven't gone to full-text feeds. Why not? Most of them don't have advertising for which they need viewers. Is it just because many weblogs have excerpt feeds on by default? That can be changed easily enough. If you want tips on editing preferences and templates in Movable Type, let me know and I'll be glad to share my templates and MT settings.

If you're worried that some people might want only an excerpt feed of your weblog, you might take the approach Denise Howell used. Her weblog offers both full-text and excerpt feeds. I haven't tried to set that up in MovableType, but one could do it by making duplicate feed templates and tweaking the tags.

One of Siva Vaidhyanathan's readers points to this freaky Westlaw advertisement. Those are Siva's words, and I can't come up with any better.

I've never understood the students whose goal is to make six-figure salaries straight out of law school, and who elevate that goal above other job-related factors. Don't get me wrong, I like financial stability and being able to have things that are nice (but not too lavish). But there must be a lot of those for whom money makes all the difference, or at least the firm Buchanan Ingersoll seems to think so.

In his post "When your only tool's a $115k hammer...", Andy Havens takes umbrage at Buchanan Ingersoll's justification for increasing its starting salary for associates from $105,000 to $115,000. Andy quotes Howard Scher, the manager of that firm's Philadelphia office:

We have clients who want first-class legal representation, so we have to compete for the best people. While I don't think that $5,000 or $10,000 should be the basis for making a career decision, it is for people at that stage of their careers. So we hope this shows law students that Buchanan Ingersoll is a first-class firm.

Andy criticizes the quote for a few reasons, among them the fact that no client is thinking,

"I should check and make sure that my surgeon (dentist, mechanic, kids' teacher, banker, insurance agent) is the HIGHEST PAID PROFESSIONAL IN HIS INDUSTRY!!..."

I'll point you to his article here for the rest.

Novell announced yesterday that it's releasing "core components" of its NetMail "collaboration server product" under a combination of two open-source licenses, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The spun-off open-source project is named the "Hula Project." Opinions are beginning to circulate about whether "groupware" makes for a good open-source project. Some of the comments out there made me wonder why we don't have better business software.

Jamie Zawinski, former Netscape programmer turned nightclub owner, suspects that the project will founder, and expounded on his belief in characteristic fashion on his LiveJournal. Clay Shirky quoted some key passages over at Many-to-Many, and I'll quote some of them below, too.

Zawinski says Hula won't work out as an open-source project because it won't make its users happy, and independent coders won't be motivated to jump in and be part of the project. Possibly true.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

Zawinsky's concern is that the Hula project will not attract open-source coders because it lacks an intrinsic sexiness or coolness factor. "With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf."

Beyond that, though, I want to ask why we settle for "enterprise" software that's hard to use and bogs its users down. Jamie Zawinsky's rant promotes software that "makes people happy" by helping them do things that they already want to do. I would extend that principle to say that using business software should be easy. Business software should also be engineered to make the user as "happy" as possible from a usability perspective. I have had few moments more frustrating than when I've been working on a project and poorly-designed computer software only got in my way.

If I had employees, I'd want to have tools that they would like using. I'd propose that enterprise business software should, at a minimum:

• Help the user get something done — communicate, schedule an appointment, solve a problem, think clearly.
• In the process, also make the user feel like she or he is getting something done. (Hint: this may be best accomplished by reducing, rather than increasing, the number of interface cues. Successfully completing extra steps arbitrarily imposed by software or interface design does not make me feel like I've accomplished anything other than fighting software.)
• Stay out of the user's way — the program's design and human interface should be carefully engineered to facilitate the purpose of the program, but never to interfere with it.
• Prevent information overload. Information overload comes in many forms, of which an overcrowded interface is only one.

The more I think about it, the more those propositions all seem like corollaries of each other. This is my first foray into thinking about business software that way, so I'm sure I've left something out in this over-general, amateur software design rant. Perhaps my friend studying for his Ph.D. with a concentration in human-computer interaction will have something to add. But I'll leave it at that for now.

I've read a lot of pitches for enterprise software that's supposed to improve employee efficiency, trim the "bottom line," and improve communication and planning within an organization.

That's a fine place to start, but I really want software that can deliver on a pitch that goes something like, "Not only will this software make your employees more effective, but they'll like using it. You won't have to cajole them or force them to take training courses because they'll want to use the software anyway, and it's so well-designed that they won't really need (much? any?) training. They won't have to waste time figuring it out. Give this to your employees, and they'll leave at the end of the day feeling like they got more done. That's because they did. And they'll come to work a little happier the next day."

Who could turn that down? Is there anything out there that can make that kind of sales pitch, let alone deliver on it? Shouldn't that be the business software designer's goal just as much as for any other software writer?

Zawinski says, "If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy." I say, managers ought to want to buy software that people want to use at work; I'm just not sure who makes it.

See also: Tim Bray on collaboration tools.

Today I attended a lunch meeting of the Real Estate Law Section of the Boulder County Bar Association. I'd been expecting a dreary discussion, but it actually turned out to be an interesting topic that prompted some animated conversation.

Jim Calloway advises people who use public computers to flush the browser history after using the computer, so that people can't see the sites you've visited.

That's a good idea. You should also consider emptying the browser's cache, which will probably be controlled from the same dialog box. When a web browser displays a page, it saves a temporary copy of the page on the computer you're using. It won't delete that temporary copy until it needs the space, which means that copy could sit around for a very long time. I've sometimes found documents in my browser cache from months before. That information is probably more precious than notes about what sites you visited.

But don't be lulled into thinking that these two techniques make your use of a foreign computer secure. They will help keep information about where you've been private, but you have no way of knowing whether the computer is polluted with viruses or spyware. You don't know if the kid in the hotel room across the hall from you is a "script kiddie" who has gotten bored and found a way to install a keystroke logger on a public computer. You may not be able to find out what kind of networking equipment the computer uses, so you don't know who may be listening.

Most e-mail providers transmit and receive passwords and e-mail data over a secure connection. In that case, one can probably feel safe against most threats other than keystroke logging, but I'd still be a little nervous.

I'm not really that paranoid most of the time — honest! — but I'd hesitate to handle client or other critical communications over an unfamiliar computer without some assurance that the computer owner maintained the computer well and had some kind of anti-tamper mechanism in place.

Evan Schaeffer (Notes from the [Legal] Underground) has posted the question, "What Do You Like Best About Being a Lawyer?" The question has started off a stream of comments from lawyers and law students. Evan's post begins,

Last week, I was at the kitchen table making some notes when I came up with the title for this post. But I only had the title. I didn't know what else to write.

Andrea was in the kitchen too. "Hey," I said. "What do you like best about being a lawyer?"

She stood there looking at me. Clearly, she'd heard the question. But she wasn't speaking.

"You're drawing a blank, aren't you?" I said. "So did I."

The commenting seems to have been dominated by litigators so far, and I wonder if any lawyers who focus on transactions have anything to add. I favor transactional work over litigation (though I've done both).

I enjoy working with business clients who are developing intriguing products or services. I also enjoy working with business clients whose products and services seem more mundane, but they like what they do, and they're looking for someone who will really listen to what they have to say and make the effort to learn about their businesses. I enjoy learning about clients' businesses, and I feel like I'm in a much better position to help them once I've spent time talking to them and learning the details about how their businesses work and what their goals are — even if some of that time has to be "off the clock." I also enjoy working with public entities and aiding their efforts to provide important services or facilities.

Maybe I should be aiming for a career in business management instead of practicing law, since the business aspects of my clients' work often interests me more than the legal aspects. I could end up there someday. In the meanwhile, I just hope I my work keeps giving me opportunities to meet interesting people who are doing "cool" things.

Scheherazade Fowler offers this entry to her readers as a love letter.

Scheherazade professes to be a "recovering lawyer" in Portland, Maine. She's a wonderful writer and I thoroughly enjoy her weblog, especially her descriptions of Maine that remind me of the several years I lived there as a child.

Lots of people are welcoming the new weblog of Reid Trautz, a practice management advisor for the D.C. Bar. He writes that he hopes "to help my fellow lawyers find and implement solutions to improve the business side of the legal profession. Because, quite frankly, that's what I enjoy."

I'll be looking forward to reading it — and it's very clear that I'm not alone! Welcome, Reid!

(First spotted through Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips Blog.)

Tom Mighell (Inter Alia) points out the current edition of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's webzine, Law Practice Today. Tom specifically mentioned the technology-centric articles. I want to note some of the articles that focus more on management of the human aspects of the firm.

David Freeman bases his article, Developing the “Great” Law Firm, on principles discussed in Jim Collins's book Good to Great (which I haven't read). Applying those principles to law firms, Mr. Freeman observes that often, law firms have the wrong people in leadership positions, or their efforts to lead are consumed in dysfunctional dynamics.

Alas, a short article can't really provide enough information or inspire enough reflection to make a change, and to me Mr. Freeman's article reads a bit more like a promotion for his consulting services than anything else. Still, he raises questions worth asking, especially in any mid-sized or larger organization: Are our leaders in leadership positions because of sheer seniority or because of real leadership skills? Are we hiring and grooming people with leadership skills, people who have a "mix of personal humility and a strong desire to help the organization succeed. … who have strong ambition, not for themselves, but for the organization"?

Stewart Levine's article, Courageous Conversations, encourages introspection and reflection both on the individual level and the business level. He remarks, "Though it might seem surprising, what we do to earn our keep as part of an organization is engage in conversations with others." He proceeds to ask,

• What is the conversation you are not having with your unknown future?
• What is the conversation you are not having with your customers?
• What is the conversation you are not having with other divisions of your organization?
• What is the conversation you are not having with your work group and the people you phone, e-mail, and speak with everyday?
• And most important: What is the conversation that you are not having in your own heart and mind, with your partner and loved ones?

Mr. Levine acknowledges that some of those conversations pose daunting prospects, that sometimes we'd emotionally prefer to have our heads in the sand. But he proposes that by having certain conversations, we can be both better lawyers and more successful humans.

Neither of these articles really carries their ideas especially far, but one can't expect much more from webzine articles.

I know some lawyers who bear disdain for such "touchy-feely" contemplations about law practice and management. Although my initial suspicion is that such disdain predominates, I am not at all sure that suspicion is justified. I hope it's not, because the kinds of questions the articles discuss seem to be worth asking.

I'm working on some questions of my own about how law firms envision, identify, and draw upon the strengths of their personnel. Those questions aren't yet well enough conceived to pose here.

(I'll also note Roger Hayes's article, The Aligned Law Firm and Partner Compensation, but say no more because I must confess that partner compensation isn't a topic to which I've yet given serious contemplation.)

I'm in a job transition and would appreciate any advice, contact referrals, or other information that any readers here might be able to offer. Even if you don't anything about law firms in Colorado, if you know any people out here you think I should meet, please e-mail me or comment below.

I'm looking for work involving commercial, real estate, or IP transactions, or some combination of them, in a healthy, promising law firm or legal department. Ideally, the firm will be located in Boulder or Denver, Colorado, or in the general vicinity between those two cities. I'm looking for a firm that makes smart use of technology and that will be attentive and responsive to the potential changes in the market for legal services in the next several years. The firm should also have friendly lawyers who are involved in their local bar and community, and should encourage its lawyers to thrive both in and outside of the office.

I think of "success" as helping clients achieve worthwhile and interesting goals, and also leading a well-rounded life overall.

I have more background information here and here.

Update: Thanks to Dennis Kennedy for his generous compliments and link. (I've actually been blogging since September 2002!)

Later update:
— and thanks also to everyone else who has linked here!

Dennis Kennedy is skeptical about anonymous weblogging. In his guidelines to would be bloggers, he includes the following bit of advice:

6. Think Carefully About This Anonymous Thing. I really struggle with the idea of anonymous legal blogs, but I'm an old-school kind of guy. On the one hand, I am very disturbed by the current legal culture in which associates in law firms live in such a state of terror that they will not blog unless they are anonymous. On the other hand, I don't understand how blogging anonymously helps you. Of course, look what I named my blog.

On one hand, I can see his point, especially since he is coming from the perspective of a seasoned lawyer who uses his weblog primarily to comment on what he sees as the future of law practice. But not every weblog author shares that perspective, and I can understand their point of view as well.

I've gone from writing anonymously, to publicly, back to anonymously, and back to public again. I recently gave up on anonymity simply because publicity in early 2003 means that Googling my name leads people here anyway. The tph-lex.com domain is on my business cards, and I use it for my business-related e-mail. It's not hard to figure out who this is.

Many lawyers avoid thinking of their weblogs as marketing devices. They're looking for an outlet that they can use to communicate with other lawyers and non-lawyers about whatever is on their minds. (Some may want to take the potentially dangerous step of writing about work.)

If these authors write under their own names, they will feel the pressure of marketing standards. Firms generally want to present a unified image, a "brand," if you will. They want clients to see a particular professional image that may clash with the writer's desire to write about his or her personal life. (This facially good marketing idea can have poor side effects, but that will have to wait for another post.) They worry about losing their jobs or not getting jobs that they want.

The public weblogger who is looking for work experiences the same constraints. The job-seeker or client-seeker must hone, or at least be attentive to, a public image that may exclude some of the very topics the writer feels a need to express. This is probably especially true among many of the law school webloggers. They're acculturated and trained to be very concerned about the image that they present to potential employers, but they're also going through a trying experience that prompts many people to seek expressive outlets.

I often feel like my entries are too "stuffy," so I always laugh at myself a bit when Evan Schaeffer asks the question, "Why are lawyers so stuffy?" In my case, it's for the very kind of reason I discussed above — I feel a need to be very cautious because I don't want to say anything to dissuade employers or clients. I'm probably overcautious, and there are probably ways to be careful without being "stuffy."

What do you think?

See also: Robert Scoble, A little more on Mark Jen's story.

AKMA writes, "I really, really dislike the use of ‘reference’ as a verb."

So do I. I'd probably use even stronger terms. But I've seen it all the time — I'll even admit, hanging my head in shame, that I have used the word "reference" as both a verb and a verb-derived adjective. That usage seems to be idiomatic in legal work, at least in Denver. I have regularly seen letters that bore a case name and number as the subject line and then began, "I write in regard to discovery in the referenced litigation." Ugh. Ugh!

Abuses of the English language abound in law. I'm not talking about technical terms or jargon; those are deviations from ordinary speech that have meanings developed through years of court cases and customary usage. I mean, for example, the use of the idiomatic phrase "the instant [noun]" to mean "this [noun]." I've seen this most often in pleadings, where the author would use the phrase "the instant litigation" to mean "this case." The only argument I can envision in favor of this usage is that "the instant litigation," is a shorter, simpler form of "the above-captioned litigation" or "the above-referenced litigation." So apparently it's a bad alternative to a worse option.

What on earth is wrong with just saying, "this case," or "this litigation?"

Some archaic idioms, born out of the Norman conquest, are causing confusion and litigation in American law even today. An Ohio Court of Appeals had to sort out whether "clear title" is any different from "free and clear title." (Here's the opinion [Warning: It's a MS Word file]. Here's an excerpt:

III. The Normans Strike Again

Monfort contends, "Although a ‘clear title’ is one that is not subject to any restrictions, the case at bar involved a ‘free and clear’ title, which is the same as a marketable title." So, according to Monfort, a free and clear title is worse than a clear title. Say what?

Would that Harold had not lost the Battle of Hastings.

Free and clear mean the same thing. Using both is an unnecessary lawyerism. Free is English; clear is from the French clere. After the Norman Conquest, English courts were held in French. The Normans were originally Vikings, but after they conquered the region of Normandy, they became French; then they took over England. But most people in England, surprisingly enough, still spoke English. So lawyers started using two words for one and forgot to stop for the last nine hundred years.

So free and clear do not mean separate things; they mean, and were always meant to mean, exactly the same thing. Just as null and void and due and payable mean the same thing. All of these couplets are redundant and irritating lawyerisms. And they invite just what has happened here—an assertion that they somehow have different meanings.

The Norman Conquest was in 1066. We can safely eliminate the couplets now. . . .

(Thanks to Eugene Volokh and one of his readers for noticing the case.)

The Background

I last acquired a new notebook computer in 2000. That one was a replacement for a glitchy one I'd bought in 1999. They were both Intel-based machines that arrived from the store running Windows 98SE. I chose those computers because I had built my own Windows and Linux desktop computer, I wanted to be able to dual-boot Windows and Linux on the notebook, and I knew that the software I would want for law school either ran only on Windows or had Mac versions that lagged the capabilities of the Windows releases.

I stopped using my notebook computer during my third year of law school because it was too heavy to lug around. I had several pairs of jeans with a small hole where my computer bag brushed against my leg and wore through the denim. I also wanted to write my notes more selectively instead of transcribing classroom events.

In the meantime, I've continued to upgrade my workstation at home, but the notebook is sitting unloved because its piddly 64MB of RAM can't handle anything that's currently out there. Once I load Windows (or Linux and a desktop environment), running just one worthwhile application starts the hard drive a-grinding as the computer constantly relies on its swap space. And the battery is dead.

So as soon as I've re-established positive cash flow, I need a new notebook computer. But this time I plan to make a different choice. I plan to buy an Apple PowerBook.

Why?

Several reasons. I could probably analyze it out into seven to ten reasons. But instead, let me tell a story.

I like playing with different operating systems and interfaces. I've been a computer hobbyist since I was about seven years old. My experimentation has taken me from Apple ProDOS (on the //c) to MS-DOS to OS/2 to "old" MacOS to OpenVMS to Windows XP and Linux — and those are only some of the steps along the way. Since 1999, though, I've used Windows for all my "real work," because that's what law school and my firm required.

For years, my hobbyist background meant that user-interface quirks and technical glitches didn't bother me as much as they bother most people. I usually had enough time that I could treat a computer problem as an interesting puzzle to be solved rather than a brick wall across my path.

Law school, and law practice especially, have robbed me of that point of view. When I have free time, I don't want to spend it solving computer problems — unless, of course, I've chosen to spend hobbyist time on them. Several times over the course of the last two years, I've found myself hacking away at a computer problem instead of finishing my "real work" while under deadlines.

I have several friends who have used Windows, Linux, and OS X. They agree that OS X has given them the greatest amount of flexibility with the least amount of frustration. One of them said, "I didn't use Linux because I wanted a challenge or because I necessarily needed it for something; I used it because I wanted a computer that would do what I wanted it to, and I was willing to invest some effort in that. The Mac does what I want it to, and I don't have to put any effort into it. It just works."

Of course, I'll grant that a computer won't just work all the time, even in the Mac world. But it just works more of the time, and it works more intuitively. That translates to increased efficiency.

Interface design in the Apple world also plays a big role in my decision. Apple, and people who design software to run on Apple equipment, do really impressive things with interface design. I want to take advantage of that. I've spent too much time in the last year cursing programs for getting in my way.

Even better yet, the Mac will still let me experiment if I want to. Part of the guts of OS X is based on a BSD-flavored UNIX called Darwin. I'm already familiar with a few flavors of Unix, so once I figure out some of Darwin's unique quirks, I'll be in a good position to play around with it a bit.

There's still one area where software tends to be a little sparse on the Mac in a way that affects me. It remains true that a lot of specialized legal software runs on the PC only. My next firm will probably require me to use Windows XP. They'll probably keep time with Timeslips or TABS3, or maybe even Amicus Attorney. CaseSoft doesn't run on the Mac, and I haven't yet found any reports of whether it works under Virtual PC. So I'll have two computers at work. But that's worked well for an increasing number of people (Ernest Svenson is my model in this regard). I'll need to cough up four to five hundred dollars for Microsoft Office. But then I'll be set.

I'm heartened to see that Apple is again targeting the legal market, particularly small and mid-sized firms where the costs of transition are lowest and the necessary software is most robust. If I were to start out on my own, I'd probably do it like these guys. It's good to know that law practice management software is out there for the Mac.

I replaced my old Macintosh Performa with a PC in 1997 because I wanted to experiment, because I wanted to run Linux. At the time Apple looked like it was in a slump. Now I want to spend my time getting things done, making things happen. So I'm going to buy a Mac.

(Now that I've gone and said all these things, I guess I'm really going to have to go through with it.)

Shelley Powers came up with an interesting idea to employ Technorati tags as a sort of replacement for Trackback.

I have to confess I'm a little behind on the tagging phenomenon; I can sense that it seems to have a lot of potential for many uses, but I haven't thoroughly thought it through. (And how's that for a lot of th-s and gh-s?)

I'll participate and give this little proof-of-concept experiment a try here. Shelley assigns this topic a tagback-tag of "bbintroducingtagback". I guess I have two initial observations. The first is that if people spread the same discussion topic out over a bunch of different tags, it would be difficult to keep track of the conversation. But that was somewhat beyond the scope of Trackback anyway, and this might work better. The second is that this system could impose costs on Technorati, but it could also just make Technorati even more useful. Shelley points out that Technorati can tune the system to avoid spam:

Since Technorati scarfs up delicious tags and flickr tags, all of these items will eventually appear in my Tagback page, along with weblog posts where people have linked to the tag directly in the post. And if Technorati excludes googlebots and other bots in the tags pages, there is not impetus for spammers to spam this page. As long as Technorati excludes pagerank from these pages. Hint. Hint.

I'm glad to see more discussion about work-life balance out there, even if right now my balance is skewed because I need more work (at least, work of the kind that pays). In any event, Arnie Herz (Legal Sanity) noticed that the Center for Creative Leadership has three short articles on work-life balance.

You Know You're Out of Balance When...
Balance: Choose It or Lose It.
Seeing Balance Through Their Eyes.

For another worthwhile post on this kind of topic, check out "Defining More" at Sam Decker's Decker Marketing site.

Carolyn Elefant (MyShingle) has an worthwhile article at Law.com titled "When Lawyers Make Mistakes."

Most lawyers have heard similar admonitions and stories before, but for some reason, many fail to address mistakes properly and wisely. This kind of reminder never hurts.

Carolyn's article links to the weblog of The Uncivil Litigator, whose recent experiences, and his admirable handling of a mistake, demonstrate the value of acknowledging one's mistakes and addressing them directly.

Adina Levin has this interesting post raising questions about electronic social networks and notions of public identity.

Many2Many

Christopher Allen's post that started it.

Ann Althouse has this interesting this post about the article "Our Godless Constitution," in The Nation. She shows how the article incorporates shoddy scholarship and, more importantly, explains how the article's inflammatory approach will utterly fail to explain the importance of separation of church and state to religious people. There are many arguments, including those adopted by the founders of the United States, that would demonstrate the social and religious importance of the separation of church and state.

Andrew Raff's IPTAblog has an article following up on the controversy that blew up last month when Martin Schwimmer asked Bloglines to remove his Trademark Blog from the Bloglines service. He frames and summarizes the issues well, I think.

My jaw dropped a bit, though, at the Sieblogs site that Andrew linked to. Sieblogs aggregates content from what must be a collection of hundreds of weblogs and mass media sources. It then displays that content by category. There's nothing on the main page or entry page that indicates the original content author. That's a violation all of the Creative Commons attribution licenses, and the sheer copying and re-display of the content is a violation of general copyright law, although it is something many weblog authors would permit if asked. Even though there are no advertisements yet, the utter failure to credit the author and source weblog really surprised me. They at least link to the original article.

languagehat.com today noted the website Thinking With Type, designed to support Ellen Lupton's book of that name. The book is published by Princeton Architectural Press. The website is a good introduction to terms and some conventions of typography. I'll have to find a copy of Ms. Lupton's book to see what she has to say there.

My favorite book on typography is The Elements of Typographic Style (3d ed.) by Robert Bringhurst. Hermann Zapf has called it "the Typographers' Bible," and most reviewers refer to it as a great classic in its field (in all of its three editions and thirteen years). Bringhurst skillfully presents a great amount of detail in a manner that even a newcomer to the topic can easily comprehend, and he also does not confine himself to typography of the roman alphabet. I won't promise that the book will hold everyone's attention — who could make such a promise — but if you're interested in the topic, it will prove nourishing.

Today I also discovered the Web Style Guide's section on typography. I haven't taken a close look at it yet.