Legal Commentary

About 300 people attended this week's Louisiana Bar Association's first Solo & Small Firm Technology Conference -- about three times the number originally expected by the organizers of this nuts-and-bolts conference.

LSBA's Eric Barefield, left, -- who has the long title of Professional Counsel for Law Office Management and Professional Assistance -- was the chief organizer of the program, which not only was a crash course in legal technology but a nifty way to rack up a whole lot of CLE credits in two days.

I was honored to be invited to serve as the lunch speaker, on the topic of blogging, and among the others of our legal tech community who participated were consultant Tom O'Connor, a recent emigre to NoLa, Andy Adkins of the University of Florida (Gainesville) Legal Technology Institute, and the ubiquitous Ross Kodner, president of Milwaukee-based MicroLaw Inc.

O'Connor and Adkins, right, are current LTN editorial advisory board members, Kodner is a former board member, and watching them in action this week reminded me of what talent and energy and heart they bring to our community.

They are three very different personalities, but one common thread permeates all three: a true passion for their work. It's a running joke among all of us that if you are on a panel with Ross Kodner, you better speak first or you will be lucky to speak for 5 minutes. He's a very effective, enthusiastic  speaker, who seems to almost to burst with eagerness to share his expertise with the audience. If we could tap his energy we would be paying 24 cents a gallon for gas again.

I sat in on his "How Not to Commit Malpractice with Your Computer," and was reminded of how effective Kodner, left, can be at the podium. Aside from his dreadful PowerPoints (Ross! Don't cram so much text on each slide!) he's a whirling dervish of practical information, presented with humor and enough person asides to make the potentially dry material very palatable. In fact, often compelling.

Perhaps the best part of his presentation was when he showed an actual BigFirm document (redacted to remove any identifying material) to demonstrate how a huge firm got fired when its client was able to read all the metadata on the file about its history -- which included such tasty details as the fact that the document was actually originally created by another firm, modified by a low-level associate in less than an hour, but billed out at a huge partners' rate for far more time than one hour. Let's put it this way, Ross had the audience's attention.

Too many CLE speakers at programs are just flat-out lousy who appear to view the opportunity as a chore, and stand up and give flat monotoned monologues while attendees work on their   BlackBerrys or play Scrabble on the iPods while collecting CLE credits.

Ross, Andy & Tom are examples of speakers who know how to push essential information while capitalizing on the "theater" of the podium, so that at the end of the session, the attendees want more ..... rather than looking for the fastest way to exit the room.

Congrats to Barefield and the LSBA team for presenting a high-energy, two-day program that was crammed with the pragmatic and the essential, from ethics and malpractice prevention, to overviews of basic technology tools (everything from Adobe Acrobat to Outlook to case management to scanners).