LockSquawkBox: Encrypt Your Smartphone Calls

Two weeks ago, the Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers E-Journal Law Practice Management Section Featured Practice Tip came from LOMAP. That week's Tip covered options for encrypting smartphone calls, across the major platforms.

Read the Tip here.

Group Sites Options Reviewed, in Groups, Of Course

Upon Google’s removal of most of its Groups’ functionality, we were forced to find an alternative home for our Marketing Group’s webplace. I didn’t fall in love with any of the options, though there are many (many). I easily narrowed it down to three winners, though, so we figured we’d share that information with you. And, for what it’s worth, I’ll talk about the others, too.

The Winners.

We ended up going with Grouply. Grouply offers the basic features that are necessary for professional use: a customizable appearance, a file vault, and the ability to directly add members. Moreover, the main page format is quite flexible with its display of a whiteboard, discussion, news, and events. The administrator of a group can create subgroups, and add page tabs, as well. What sold Grouply to us, however, was the versatility of the member profiles, which supported our objective of allowing our members to market themselves. And, Grouply has a few package levels. Grouply offers a free version, and premium versions provide useful features like ad removal and url mapping. Although we’re generally happy with Grouply, I have two complaints. First, we’re currently relying on Mediafire as a repository for our audio files because large files (very large, admittedly) run into an error timing out during upload. Even after compressing our large audio files, they won’t upload. And, I’m pretty sure I compressed them correctly. Additionally, I’ve had some administrative trouble with associating an authorized email address, which then spiraled into log-in trouble, as well.

Groupsite, does not have a free option. Its prices seem reasonable, though: 50 users with5 GB storage costs $29/month; 150 users with 5 GB storage costs $49/month; and 300 users with 10 GB costs $99/month. Groupsite offers the full range of features one would look for, including unlimited subgroups, a customizable appearance, the ability to add pages, and url mapping. We chose Grouply over Groupsite based on the interface and member profile features, and that’s about it.

OfficeZilla offers less in the area of member profile customization (i.e., self promotion), which is only a drawback if you are specifically looking for a platform that provides such, for a specific reason, as we were. One of our goals for our marketing group was to allow our members to market themselves, to lay the groundwork for referrals. Had this not been the case, I totally would have recommended OfficeZilla, which supports subgroups, the direct adding of members, and does not display advertising. And the most basic concerns speak in its favor, too: there are no storage limits, no member number limits, and it is free, private, and secure.

The Others.

SocialGo is the best among the professional networking sites, which of course, focus more on networking than any other professional purpose (e.g. aggregating resources). SocialGo seems to offer all the features a professional group would need. However, from what I can tell, this platform is designed to support a group of professionals, rather than a professional group. Events and files appear to be linked to an individual profile, rather than a group. Having noted that, group members can share photos and discussions, and they can send mass messages. So, it would seem that you probably could use group feature in conjunction with an administrator profile to serve most of your purposes. One final note, though: there isn’t too much flexibility with plan options.

There are other options, none of which I like, but some of which I will mention anyhow, just so you know I looked into them.

Grou.ps is similar to SocialGo, as a social network site, with features sufficient for professional use. But, I find it to be inconveniently fancy, without offering any improvement on useful features found on other sites.

BigTent offers only very basic features. And, there is no upgrading its free version.

Spruze has limited email broadcasting, which I consider a dealbreaker, particularly without offering anything unique to the group site candidate pool.

Wall.fm is very limited, though it is also new, and still in development. More importantly, it is very targeted to social purposes, almost exclusively so.

Other group sites, not mentioned herein, are not tailored for professional use… at all. Some of these social group sites, particularly the most well-known, Yahoo! Groups, do offer a variety of features that could be professionally useful, like event calendars and polls, but have so many distracting features that I could never imagine why anyone would choose to use one for professional purposes.

A Once-In-A-Hundred-Years Event (Literally): The MBA's Centennial Conference

This looks like a pretty big deal to me: The MBA’s Centennial Conference. It can only happen once every century; the name says so. So, clear your calendar, as best you can, for Wednesday, May 18th and Thursday, May 19th, on which dates you will want to get in on the action that decades and decades of serving the public, the profession, and the rule of law has led up to, and that will go down at the Boston Sheraton Hotel.

As you may have predicted, the conference will feature CLE tracks, three in number, from which to choose: Litigation, Substantive Law, and Young Lawyers.

The Litigation track will focus on the following topics:

• Hot Issues in Discovery;
• Crafting a Winning Theme -- From Soup to Nuts;
• Effective Use of Evidence During Your Case;
• Direct-and Cross-Examination of Expert Witnesses;
• Convincing the Judges: Practical Advice for Litigators; and
• Voir Dire.

The Substantive Law track will offer:

• Family Law Update;
• Trends in Employment Law;
• Uniform Probate Code Update;
• Criminal Law -- A View from the Courts;
• Secret Weapons for the Personal Injury Attorney; and
• Tax Implications in Real Estate Transactions.

And, finally, the Young Lawyers track will cover the following areas:

• Running Your Law Practice on a Shoestring Budget;
• Limited Assistance Representation Open Forum;
• Social Media for Lawyers;
• Technology From Your Office to the Courtroom;
• Networking Strategies for the Successful Attorney; and
• 60 Sites to Bring Your Firm Into the Future.

For more specific detail, look over the full conference schedule.

As you can see on the schedule, CLE isn’t all that this conference offers.

The annual Access to Justice Awards Luncheon will happen on May 18th, from 12:30pm to 2:00pm. Five attorneys and one law firm will be honored, and Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray, the keynote speaker, will also be honored.

The “Hail to the Chiefs” Bench-Bar Panel will also take place on May 18th, from 4:30pm to 6:00pm, with a reception to follow. This informal panel, moderated by Associate Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court, will afford attendees the opportunity to interact with many of the state’s top judges.

What more could you ask for? … A ball? Well they have that, too. Yes; on May 19th, the MBA’s Centennial Ball will begin at 5:30pm. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer will deliver the keynote address.

You want to register, don’t you? Like, right now? Thought you might. Go here. And, if you’re wondering who’s exhibiting at the Centennial Conference, here is your answer.

You can also listen to more information on the Conference on Jared’s podcast.

Come on now, you don’t want Rodney to be jealous. Listen to one of his podcasts, too.

Guest Post: Psychodrama and the Discovery of Your Client’s Story

We are excited to publish, below, the second of a two-part series of posts from the 3 Sisters. (No, not those three sisters.) The 3 Sisters (not actual sisters) offer unique trial practice resources and training sessions. For general information respecting the 3 Sisters, check out their website, especially the frequently asked questions section. If you have a handle on what they offer, and you think the intervention of the Sisters may be just what you need to refresh your trial practice, take a look at their specific programming options (via the main tab of their website), to see whether any of their upcoming events may be where you can get started. Be sure to also review information respecting the ladies’ new book “Trial in Action: The Persuasive Power of Psychodrama”. If you want to hear more from the Sisters, listen to them here, at Jared’s “Legal Toolkit” podcast. In this follow-up to their original post, the Sisters write about how client stories are developed and relayed through psychodramatic techniques.

. . .

Story is the portal through which we enter other people’s lives, connect with them and discover our similarities. Stories are the source of human connection; and, storytelling is, perhaps, the most important component of effective communication. And, effective communication is the means to achieving your goal as a trial attorney: justice for your client.

A hunger to hear stories is ingrained in every human being. From the time that our ancestors sat around fires in caves, up through today, human beings seek out and thrive on stories and storytelling, in order to connect with their fellow man, to pass down history and to teach. Story is the currency of human contact. As Annette Simmons (storytelling expert and also author of “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”) writes in her book, “The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling": “Telling stories and being curious about the stories of others is a way of life as much as it is a technique of influence.”

Our insatiable appetite for stories is fed daily through movies, cable television and the internet. Stories permeate our everyday lives, from the moment we wake up, to the moment we fall asleep. Stories even inhabit and invade our dreams. Stories are everywhere, because more than anything else in our culture, stories move us.

But, some stories draw us in and move us more than do others. In the courtroom, we need to grab the jury’s attention, to hold it and, ultimately, to move the jury to action on behalf of our clients. This is not easy maneuvering.

One of the most difficult tasks that you face as a lawyer is finding out about, or, rather, discovering, your client’s story, the one that you must tell at trial. What parts of the story are important? Where do you begin? Who are the characters, or important players? What facts do you need to prove the client’s claims? And, most importantly, What story will move a jury to deliver justice?

You cannot give jurors the actual experience of your client; but, you can provide them with the next best thing. Annette Simmons has written that, “Stories interpret raw facts and proofs to create reality.” You can bring your client’s experience to jurors through story, and by weaving a story that is so vivid and detailed that jurors feel as if they are actually there to experience the events of the story as they are happening. Simmons goes on to say that, “Story is a re-imagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listener’s imaginations to experience it as real.” Even though the jurors cannot be witnesses to the actual event, they can, through the impression of psychodramatic tools, bear witness to the re-imagining of the experience.

One of the first things that you must do to fully explore your client’s story is to abandon your agenda: to focus not only on the elements of the cause of action asserted in the case, but to, instead, also: look at all of the facts, all the points of view expressed and the perspectives of each witness (including the opposition’s); in this way, only, will you get the whole story. You need to take a first look at the story as a human being, not just as a lawyer, so that you can relate to another group of human beings: jurors.

The case may be about an automobile accident; but, the story is about much more than the accident itself. If all you do is focus on the actual event giving rise to the cause of action (the accident), you will miss critical parts of the story. Those other parts of the story will help a jury to understand, not only the accident itself, but also how the accident had an impact on your client’s life, and, ultimately, how not holding the defendant responsible could have an impact on each of the jurors’ lives. (This is not, incidentally, about violating the Golden Rule; rather, this is a recognition of the universal truths that are part of our lives. Many of us share similar life experiences, albeit with slight variations; this means that our stories are largely the same.)

Traditionally, you begin to explore a new client’s case through an initial interview. Unfortunately, most lawyers limit themselves to looking for facts that fit into various boxes tending to proving the elements of a particular cause of action. This is, after all, what you were taught in law school. This stock-type of analysis, though, will not serve you well when it comes to finding the story that will result in the successful outcome of your client’s case, because this sort of baseline work-up does not take into account emotions, or the universal story, or other stories, that have arisen out of the events. A story, to be effective, must evoke feelings in the listener or observer.

In a trial, human beings, not automatons, are the decisionmakers; these human beings are the people whom you want to convince that your client has been wronged, and is so now deserving of redress. Despite what many law professors teach, people make decisions based on their gut, on their instincts, and their feelings, rather than on rationality and the application of intellect. As human beings, our feelings play a large role in our decisionmaking. After all, a verdict really reflects the decision of human beings who use their intellect and rational analysis to support the decision that they “feel” is right.

Limiting yourself to a cold analysis of facts, and pigeon-holing those facts into neat cause of action checklists, is far too limiting. It may result in your missing powerful and persuasive aspects of your client’s story, specifically: feelings and emotions that will lead a jury to mete out justice on behalf of your client. Annette Simmons says that, “[F]acts aren’t as powerful as human emotions. Feelings alter facts, at least the impact of facts.” The most effective way to elicit an emotional response from people is through psychodramatic methods, that is, the “show me, don’t tell me” method.

Forget-Me-Not(e)s: Imagining a World Without Post-It Notes

With the forces of green combining with the electronic arts to ru(i)n the world, it’s only a matter of time before Post-It Notes enter upon an afterlife as nostalgic claptrap images making bygones appearances upon the future/futuristic lunchboxes.

Now, don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Post-It. Don’t get me wrong; I mean, I love Post-It Notes almost as much as Rachel Willcox--in fact, I’m staring at a pile of them right now. And, I will fight the long, losing battle. However, I recognize the flow of culture; and, I do fully expect, one day, to be guarding my library against an angry mob wielding torches in one hand, and Kindles in the other. The fact of the matter, though, is that just about everybody has use for Post-It Notes; it’s just that some have converted the Post-It style of note-taking to electronic media, and others will be compelled to do so.

The other day, one of our clients asked me what she could to do to convert her Post-It Notes to electronic matter, which gave rise to the above theoretical musing, and the below practical suggestions:

The way I see it, there are options to go paperless with Post-It Notes, if that’s what you want to do; heck, you may already be doing it . . .

Post-it itself, perhaps recognizing the writing on the wall as clear, offers it own digital Post-It Notes software, retailing, for starters, at $9.99 for 1-4 licenses, with volume discounts therefrom.

You could stop there, certainly; but, what would be the fun of allowing Post-It a veritable (communicated) monopoly on both paper and electronic posted notes. There are some alternate methods for creating and utilizing non-paper, Post-It-style notes, which may not cost you anything at all, or which may cost you less than the official Post-It version software does, or that may even already be incorporated through features within some of your existing systems. Perhaps the nearest thing to traditional Post-It Notes are tasks; and, almost all modern email systems carry task functionality, including: GMail has task functionality built-in; and, you can find a quick tutorial on using tasks in GMail here. Outlook, while not a free program, is an email application that many attorneys use as part of the Microsoft Office Suite. Outlook, naturally, has tasking functionality, as well. Email systems will generally also allow you to create tasks from emails, and to associate tasks with calendar events and/or to include alarmed reminders for tasks. Traditional Post-It Notes can’t offer that sort of synchronization and richness. And, if you’re utilizing a practice management system of some kind, like Credenza for Outlook, you can filter your tasks by clients, after associating those tasks to individual matters. If you’re not in your email enough to make task management through that application effective, or if you want a separate method for creating and tracking tasks, you can use a system like Remember the Milk, which is a cowley task management tool, with some nifty features, like location-based tasking, mobile access and cross-posting for reminders.

If you’re looking for something more along the lines of scratch pads instead, you may try Microsoft’s OneNote, which more or less started out by allowing you to capture your jotted memoranda upon a legal pad-style, Wiki-ish background that was meant to free one from some of the strict formatting applied against us all via Microsoft Word. Watch the OneNote demo here, for all about the 2010 version, to see that OneNote moves ever closer to Evernote. Evernote being a favored free tool of a number of attorneys for (1) capturing any sort of electronic information (2) across devices, for access wherever you have an internet connection, (3) and so that you can find anything you’ve clipped via a global search tool.

Of course, you may still prefer your own handiwork to view; and, if that is the case, and you have run after the tablet craze directly to the iPad, you will likely find the PenUltimate app (selling for $1.99 as one of a number of iPad apps) to be a nice (the ultimate?) solution for capturing your own handwritten notes, as if they appeared on . . . well . . . as if they appeared on Post-It Notes.

In an interesting twist, and while we did discover that the Post-It Notes people have already begun hedging their bets against the demise of the little yellow sticky, it appears that the landscape of notetaking, or, more appropriately for twenty-eleven, the capture and leveraging of electronic information sets, is, perhaps, a wider panorama than previously thoughtfully imagined; and, neither does this represent an exhaustive list of arrayed options. Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men, and Post-It Notes . . .

. . .

Liner Notes

I’ve written, here and there: everywhere, and in snatches and fits and starts, at the LOMAP Blog, about Son Volt, one of my favorite bands ever. At one point, I’d christened Jay Shepherd, founder of the consultancy Prefix, LLC, a big fan. Son Volt is largely unknown, which is unfortunate, given the depth and quality of music that they’ve produced over 15 years. (Son Volt was born of the split within Uncle Tupelo, a popular alt country band led by Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy. Tweedy formed the more pop-friendly Wilco, which relatively recently produced something of an eponymous comeback album, and which you may know from the song “Box Full of Letters”. Farrar founded Son Volt, which leans more country than alt, and which has produced, to my mind, some of the finest music of the late past and just new century.) Although Son Volt’s first album, in certain parts, was amendable to pop radio, especially their first single, “Drown”, their, generally more traditional, sound has remained pretty much unchanged since that first album, save for the fact that their two most recent albums have slowed things down some, with fewer driving rock songs, and more drawling countrified moaners, more closely matching in the melancholy overwhelming Farrar’s voice. Perhaps, had their popularity crested at a higher apex in the late ‘90s, Son Volt would now be viewed as a modern-day Eagles, the crossover alt country band that’s (still) charting; but, if that would have changed their sound toward the Hotel California, then . . . I’ll take what I can get: what I’ve got, with discrete apologies to the various members of Son Volt’s various wallets.

Although this is a massive oversimplification, I will nevertheless tell you that Son Volt generally puts together two types of songs: (1) these sorts of alternative rock songs with a country twang, that is very slight, at times; and, (2) these sorts of dripping, molasses-moving country road songs, complete with pedal steel guitars and tears held back. Jay Farrar’s lyrics are often bordering on brilliant; and, if you listen close for the words (including in the song titles) throughout the Son Volt discography, you’ll likely need to keep both a dictionary and an encyclopedia (Wikipedia?) at hand, for the opportune moments; and, that’s something you can’t say about most, more modern, musicians, especially those with some modicum of chart success.

I’ve been intending to write in full about Son Volt for quite some time; only, I was feeling like a poser: because I didn’t yet own all the group’s albums. I’ve recently remedied that sadly gap, and have given a listen through to the complete Son Volt compendium. Assisting my ability to drop this here knowledge is the Grooveshark listening service. While most Son Volt songs cannot be found on YouTube (or, if found, can only be so found as homegrown live recordings; although, MrAlstec appears to be attempting to remedy this situation, all on his own), most of the original album recordings, at least, are available on Grooveshark. Now, I don’t know how Grooveshark works; but, it has much better taste than YouTube . . . or, perhaps, that’s just a willingness to transgress copyright laws with virtuoso ferocity.

Now, then, without further ado, here are some of my favorite songs from the albums, something of a Son Volt primer for you:

Trace (1995) (one of the best albums ever made, by the way)

-“Windfall” (the perfect companion song for driving at night)

-“Catching On”

-“Route”

Straightaways (1997)

-“Creosote”

-“No More Parades”

-“Left a Slide”

Wide Swing Tremolo (1998)

-“Medicine Hat” (their best song)

-“Straightface”

-“Hanging Blue Side”

A Retrospective: 1995-2000 (2005)

-“Lookin’ at the World Through a Windshield”

-“Loose String (Demo)”

-“Tulsa County”

-“Medicine Hat (Live Acoustic)” (yes, I love this song--that’s why I’ve listed it twice; also, listen to how closely the studio and live versions sound--that’s one of the marks of a good band: the unnecessity of post-production values)

Okemah and the Melody of Riot (2005)

-“Jet Pilot” (a send-up of George W. Bush)

-“Afterglow 61” (something of a tribute to Bob Dylan and his “Highway 61 Revisited”, done in a very Son Volt-ish manner, as one of the sublest: Highway 61 Revisited Revisited)

-“Gramophone”

The Search (2007)

-“Beacon Soul”

-“Methamphetamine”

-“Houdini Punches” (sounding a little bit like R.E.M.)

American Central Dust (2009)

-“Sultana” (a song memorializing the sinking of a steamboat on the Mississippi, just after the Civil War, that resulted in more lives lost than in the Titanic disaster)

-“When the Wheels Don’t Move"

-“Jukebox of Steel”

. . .

Son Volt’s even covered the Beatles. Hello!

Goodbye.

Put a Ribbon On It: Getting the Word Ruler Back

This week's Massachusetts Bar Association Lawyers E-Journal Law Practice Management Section Featured Practice Tip comes from LOMAP. This week's Tip is a simple solution related to the use of applications in the Microsoft Office Suite.

Read the Tip here.