The new issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s webzine, Law Practice Today was published today. I’m an editor and on the board, so, in my potentially somewhat biased view, I think it’s great and encourage you to check it out.
The feature article is a roundtable article called “Looking Back and Looking Forward,” which got together most of the LPT editors and a few guests to talk about what technologies we actually used and liked in the last year. It’s a fun and informative article. We all like the roundtable article format.
The article was written in part as an experiment in using the Web 2.0 collaboration tool, Writely (www.writely.com). To say that we liked our experiment with Writely is quite an understatement. It seems perfectly suited for use in creating this type of article. We’re already planning to use it for regular roundtable articles in the future, including an article on Web 2.0 apps for the next issue.
The issue has the usual assortment of good articles. Let me highlight first Fred Faulkner’s article where he revisits three predictions about legal technology he made at the beginning of the year. I have to remind Fred that it’s best to write those predictions articles and either not revisit them or only revisit the ones that were on target. I learned that from the newspaper psychics. I think Fred did better than he gives himself credit for and I’m in 100% agreement with his quick predictions for 2006.
The second article I’ll highlight is Patrick McKenna’s excellent “Bringing Outside Voices In: The Logic For Having An Advisory Board,” which I highly recommend. I must admit, however, that it did leave me thinking about whether I could come up with a way to get Patrick on my advisory board. As an aside, one of the interesting things I’ve noticed happening in blogging this past year is that a good number of bloggers have become informal advisory and sounding boards for each other in an organic and collaborative way.
Finally, Tom Mighell and I wrote the Strongest Links column on the topic of legal ethics resources. We didn’t use Writely, though. We used an old-style technique – we used a “best of” the column approach (which was a working theme for this issue) and Tom took his excellent article on legal ethics resources from April and we updated it with some new resources and updates.
I mention the way Tom and I wrote this column because I noticed recently that some people apparently do not realize that I have been writing this column with Tom for the past year in preparation for me transitioning it over to him. Truth be told, he does most of the work on the columns (and all of the best work – I primarily handle the mistakes and typos), although they are true collaborations. Tom is enormously talented and I hate to see his efforts slighted because people make the assumption that I am the lead writer of the column. For example, the instant messaging column we did, which I think is our best, was Tom’s idea. He deserves far more credit on these columns than I’ve seen him given lately – as they say, be careful when you assume.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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