Legal Commentary

Couple of announcements (this blog, my speaking etc).

By Ernie Svenson

I've been very busy lately ?which is a good thing ?and so I haven't kept up with my blogging as much as I'd like. I did, however, find time to update the site a little bit. I changed the banner to give a cleaner look, and tweaked one or two other elements. I hope you like it, although many people get my blog posts by RSS or email and therefore don't visit the main site.

Even when I'm not posting to this site I am very frequently posting things to Twitter. This site now has a panel (top left) that includes the last three tweets. But if you are interested in keeping up with my Twitter stream more regularly just go here. It's easier for me to blast out tweets than to blog, so if I have a short link or some interesting tidbit to share I usually do it on Twitter.

This year my resolution is to do more to help people become paperless. I have the PDF for Lawyers website which covers PDF issues ?and PDFs are certainly a key component of "going paperless." Another component is figuring out how to process information digitally in an efficient way; for that there is the DigitalWorkflowCle website, which I maintain with my friend Dane Ciolino.

For folks who live in New Orleans, Dane and I will be speaking (though not together) at the LSBA Solo & Small Firm Conference that takes place at the Hilton on Feb 24th and 25th. I'll be speaking on the basics of going paperless, and Dane will be talking about the practical and ethical issues involved with cloud computing. The conference will offer a wealth of practical information for solo and small firm lawyers.

For lawyers who live outside New Orleans, I suggest you attend the ABA TechShow in Chicago. I will be speaking there in mid-April (11th ? 13th) on two topics in the "Paperless" track: (1) Define Paperless (with Andy Adkins), and (2) Getting the Most Out of PDF Software (with Larry Smith). If you've never been to TechShow then you have no idea how amazing this event is! Everyone who has ever attended has raved?yes, raved?about the wealth of information they gathered, and the social connections they made. If you want to learn to use technology better in your law practice this is the place to go.

Last announcement: I would like to find an easy (for me), but extremely helpful (for you) way to show you how to set up things to make your tech life easier. I believe that the best way is for me to do a "Go To Meeting" and invite 5 or 10 people to watch me as I demonstrate things live on my computer. I'm thinking that, to defray the costs of the Go To Meeting, I should charge something like $10 for a 30 minute session. Actually, it's also about raising money to do some professional videos, so the revenue goes back into education. Getting CLE certification would be nice, but beyond my scope right now.

The goal is to see if I can quickly convey some practical things, and learn from the process. My first idea is to do a 30 minute session on how I use Acrobat to do things like set up pleadings to e-file, organize PDFs that I get from federal court or opposing counsel, and also maybe how to set up a digital signature. If you're interested in signing up for something like this shoot me an email at: esvenson [that at symbol] gmail.com

Full post as published by Ernie the Attorney on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).