links for 2006-02-28
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Another interesting presentation style
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Takes text and searches for wikipedia entries.
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"When you have an angry couple it is often hard to get them change to a positive, workable emotional state. So ask them how they met. They inevitably smile and become physically more relaxed. Once they've told their story you've got five to ten minutes of
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Funny!
Twenty Questions to Build Your Business
Sam Decker shares Twenty Questions to Develop Your Business that every small business should be able to answer. Really worth a read.
Technorati Tags: small+business,
KM for Law Firms
Jack Vinson summarizes the two days of a legal KM (knowledge management) conference he attended. Check out his posts about Day One and Day Two.
Technorati Tags: km, knowledge+management, law
links for 2006-02-25
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A too-cool chair/easel/toy for young kids. My daughter would die for this!
Join Me at BarCamp
I’m going to be hanging around a lot of people waaaaaaaay smarter than I am at BarCamp Los Angeles next weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 4–5, 2006). I’ve tentatively titled my session “UnConferencing for Normal People — Taking the UnConference Mainstream.”
While everyone else is building cool web2.0 applications full of ajaxy goodness (I don’t really know what that means, either), I’ll be working to build the perfect conference. I’ll post my presentation up here later this weekend.
Come join me! Have a Beer. Don’t cost nothin’.
Technorati Tags: unconference, barcamp, barcampla
Seed your clients for better marketing.
Could a law firm bring in its target clients and ask them for marketing advice? Here’s an introduction to how it just might work:
Rather than simply offer free samples, previews, test-drives etc to opinion leaders, the idea of seeding trials is to create goodwill, loyalty and advocacy among the opinion-leading 10% of your target market by putting the product or service in their hands and giving them a say in how it is marketed. By involving opinion leaders in this way, by effectively inviting them to become part of your marketing department, you create a powerful sense of ownership among the clients, customers or consumers that count.
The reason this works is called The Hawthorne Effect. Here’s a fascinating example from the article:
Back in the 1930s, a team of researchers from the Harvard Business School were commissioned to run some employee research for the telecom giant Western Electric (now Lucent Technologies). Conducted as the company’s production plant in Hawthorne, near Chicago, the research program involved inviting small groups of employees to trial various new working conditions before rolling them out to the general workforce. To the researchers’ amazement, whatever was trialed the participants seemed to like, to such an extent that their productivity increased! For example, when researchers invited participants to trial working in brighter lighting conditions, productivity increased. But then when they trialed dimmer lighting conditions, productivity also increased. In fact, productivity kept increasing in successive trials of working under progressively dimmer lights, until the lighting was no stronger than moonlight! In another trial, the research participants were invited to test working shorter hours, and sure enough their productivity increased again. Indeed, subsequent trials showed that the more breaks the research participants were given and the less time they worked, the greater their productivity. But then, when the researchers asked them to trial longer hours, productivity went up again – to an all time high.
Technorati Tags: marketing, seeding, professional+services, law, hawthorne+effect
Domain Name for Sale
Don’t know how I missed this one, but Kevin Heller is selling the domain name sucksmyan.us. Too funny!
links for 2006-02-23
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Step by step guide to setting up Bloglines account, adding feeds, and adding bookmarklet to toolbar. Send this one to mom.
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On Young Associates in Law Firms: "People came out worse off than they went in. Granted, it was done by people who had gone through the same system themselves, but I don't think it's all that different from abused children growing up to be adults who abus
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Looks great, but where's the free trial?????
MegaTrends in Professional Services
Ross Dawson e-mailed me a link to a new White Paper he’s written, titled The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services. You can read the paper online (one trend at a time) or download it from Ross’ blog. I’m through Trend Two, and find it pretty interesting reading so far.
In case you are wondering, Ross’ Seven MegaTrends are:
- Client Sophistication
- Governance
- Connectivity
- Transparency
- Modularization
- Globalization
- Commoditization
Ross is sending me a copy of his new book, the Second Edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships and I’ll let you know what I think. I own the first edition, and am looking forward to reading the second.
Technorati Tags: RossDawson, Professional+Services, Trends
Take a Minute and Save a Child
At BlawgThink, my friend Doug Sorocco told me something that, the more I think about it, is the single best thing that has happened because of my blog. Last year, I posted this appeal from Doug, asking for help with a raffle for the Spina Bifida Association of America (SBAA), which Doug chairs. Doug told me that someone clicked on the link though my site and donated $10,000 anonymously to the SBAA.
First, if that generous person is still reading this blog, THANK YOU!
Second, in hopes that lightning may strike twice, I’m going to post this request from Doug he sent me today:
Hello friends!
As many of you know, I am the Chairman of the Spina Bifida Association of America – a national non-profit organization whose mission it is to prevent the occurrence of spina bifida (i.e through education of the benefits of consuming folic acid prior to conception) and promotion of all those affected by spina bifida.
Although spina bifida is the number one permanently disabling birth defect in the United States, research funding through the NIH is at a woefully inadequate level. As a result, we as an organization have championed the Center for Disease Prevention’s (CDC) efforts to create a National Spina Bifida Program – a program that has been outstanding in its very limited time of existence and is used as a model by the CDC for public/non-profit cooperation. The program’s funding is being threatened by cuts in the FY2007 budget.
I strongly support the program at the CDC and can personally vouch for the programs fiscal responsibility, effectiveness and meaning to the individuals living with spina bifida and the 60 million women of childbearing age in the United States.
Please take a few moments and click through the link below to send a message to your Congressional representatives that the National Spina Bifida Program at the CDC is also important to you. It doesn’t take many responses to truly make a difference.
It would also be helpful if you could forward this email to a couple of your friends and colleagues.
Thank you so much for your assistance – it truly means a lot to me.
Douglas
Here’s a link to the Action Alert from the Spina Bifida Association website, and here’s the link to send an e-mail to your Member of Congress.
LexThink Changes
If you check out the LexThink! site, we’ve changed the logo and tagline, and are slowly (but surely) refreshing the content and updating the navigation in anticipation of the LexThink Lounge and another event we’ve got in the works.
I’m working on a much-overdue and comprehensive redesign of the [non]billable hour, along with MatthewHomann.com and a new blog, so the changes to LexThink will be a bit more significant in time, but for now we needed to freshen it up a bit.
The new tagline “The Legal UnConference Company” fits better with what we do. Though I really liked “Think Big Thoughts, Do Cool Things, Change The World,” it wasn’t very descriptive. Let me know what you think.
Technorati Tags: lexthink, unconference
Pickle Your Great Ideas
Here’s another idea from David Seah that I absolutely love: The Pickle Jar. Here’s his explanation:
I’m sometimes distracted by too many project ideas. When the ideas pile up, my productivity sinks because I keep thinking about them, and multitasking slows me down. To keep focused, I evolved a mind trick called The Pickle Jar that, despite its hokey name, actually works for me. It got me through my thesis, when writing was the last thing I felt like doing.
The Pickle Jar is an actual glass jar that once held pickles. Next to it is a square pad of paper, about 4 inches on the side. To get unrelated thoughts out of my mind, I write down a brief synopsis down, fold it twice, and put it into the Jar.
The physical act of writing down, folding, and then “pickling” the idea for later consumption is weirdly cathartic. Since I’m no longer in danger of forgetting the thought, I can relax. The act of formulating on paper has also satisfied the urge to follow up on it. The size of the paper also prevents you from writing too much…there’s just enough room to get the essence of the idea down.
Technorati Tags: picklejar, DavidSeah, innovation,
Build a Strategy Network in Your Firm
Andrew Razeghi has a great article titled Create Success: Stop Thinking Like a Lawyer he wrote a few years ago, but that I just found. Among other things, he takes on the topic of law firm retreats:
No firm can create strategy in a half day, or even a full day. Not only is the time insufficient, the contributors are isolated. There are typically no clients at such retreats, or any investment bankers, accountants, and other professional advisers that law firms work with. Therefore, the retreat often devolves into a feel-good exercise.
Wouldn't it be better to have 20 attorneys thinking about strategy for four hours a month for 10 months? Who are those who make things happen? Who are the thought leaders in your firm? What if you gave them the chance to think strategically as a part of their job? Create a "strategy network" within your firm - a web of business thinkers with a structured forum in which to think about the business of law, not the practice of law. This network should not just include senior partners and rainmakers, but new partners and senior associates too.
I really like this idea and think it could be a good fit for a practice group or small law firm. Anyone want to try this in their firm? I’d be happy to help you get it off the ground.
Billable Hour Resources
Here’s a great list of billable hour resources from my friend Lisa Solomon at The Billable Hour.
If you must bill by the hour ...
Here’s a cool utility that could help you recapture some of that lost time. From the TimeSnapper website:
With TimeSnapper you can play back your week just like a movie. You can play it at any speed you like, and jump in at any time you like.
When it's time to fill out that dreaded timesheet, TimeSnapper is a savior. No need to tear your hair out trying to remember where all the time went.
Via Lifehacker.
Do your calendar and priorities match?
Mark at Manager Tools writes about an exercise he has all of his executive coaching clients do before he begins working with them: He asks them to list their priorities and then looks at their calendars. The result?
90% of the time they don’t match.
When I review with my clients what they said their priorities were, versus what their calendars proved they actually were, the primary emotion, once we fight through disbelief and dissembling, is embarrassment. The smart ones get something powerful from this: the disparity between what they know their jobs to be and what they spend their time doing is the primary source of their dissatisfaction in their role.
Such a simple, yet profound exercise. Try it yourself and see if your calendar and priorites match?
Thanks to Lisa for the tip.
E-Mail Retention for Lawyers
ZDNet has a great list of “classic clueless-user” stories submitted by IT folks. Here’s one that made me laugh:
4. We currently have a great policy for keeping e-mail to a minimum. It's only kept 90 days, then it's deleted, so if you want to save it past the retention period, you have to put it into a file somehow.
This has been in effect for several years, but amazingly, we had a couple of executives in the legal dept who built up 40,000 messages in their inboxes each, without having any deleted. I finally got the connection when the new "retention policy" was published. The company lawyers who wrote it had a line in the document that excluded themselves from the policy and made sure they could keep everything forever!
More on the LexThink! Lounge
We are almost ready to announce the complete details of LexThink!(R) Lounge. Here are some more details:
On April 19, 2006, one hundred invited guests will congregate in Chicago for the inaugural LexThink! Lounge, presented by Dennis Kennedy, Matthew Homann and JoAnna Forshee.
Taking place on the eve of the American Bar Association’s TECHSHOW*, the LexThink! Lounge is a salon-like gathering of some of the brightest minds in legal technology today.
Beginning at 4:00 pm, and continuing into the evening, the LexThink! Lounge will combine LexThink! collaborative brainstorming techniques, OpenSpace facilitation, and small discussion groups with fine food and drink to create an amazing atmosphere for in-depth discussions about the future of legal technology.
Attendees at the invitation-only event are expected to include many of the TECHSHOW speakers, prominent legal and technology bloggers, alumni of prior LexThink! events, and other Chicago-area innovators and influencers. The centerpiece of the evening will be a Legal Tech Five by Five, where five legal technology pioneers will offer their five tech predictions and a glimpse into the future of legal technology.
*The LexThink! Lounge is not affiliated in any way with the American Bar Association or TECHSHOW.
We have 9 of our 11 sponsorships spoken for. If anyone wants to know more, e-mail me at Matt@LexThink.com or download the sponsor sheet (in pdf) here.
Best Management Ideas
Lisa Haneberg posts the winning entries in her Best Management Ideas contest. All are worth a read.