Advocate's Studio

Another option for attorneys to display expertise and connect with potential clients? Another site for potential clients to search and vet attorneys based on knowledge and content? RFP Attorney seeks to meet both needs. The site offers a marketplace with optimal search capabilities and flexible content options, ideally offering attorneys and clients a better means of connecting with each other. RFP promises to maintain a state of the art site on which attorneys can collect and showcase vital information through the creation of a Presence, which includes vital contact information, an About Me with background, experience, unique qualifications and personal statement, Case Studies or your example cases including actual briefs or key links, Thought Leadership which collects articles, newsletters, presentations, links, etc., a place to link your blog posts, your Twitter feed, real world Events you are appearing at and where potential clients can meet you in person, and Services – provide information on the legal services you offer, including optional Flat-Fee Solutions. This latter concept is a means offered by RFP for attorneys to offer unbundled legal services through their platform. Presence is not structured around an area law, but rather industries and services the attorney serves and provides, presumably making it easier for potential clients to find what they are looking for. Attorneys can share their Presence on other social platforms as well – improving visibility through more established sites. RFP also promises to boost your visibility on the web through its back-end and search friendly features.

I like the “Verify Me” button – this allows clients a quick link to the applicable bar association for each attorney, allowing potential clients to perform a quick search to determine whether the attorney is in good standing.

For potential clients, RFP offers a variety of tools to search, track and manage relationships. Potential clients can use Quick Search which asks two questions – where do you need the attorney and what your needs are – and returns responses. There are filters on the result page that allows you to further refine the return. Clients can submit requests for proposals for legal services through the site and the tools make it easy for clients to complete the request. Submitting requests after the first will incur a charge, which is one of the means by which RFP monetizes. Attorneys can accept or decline the request. Prices break down as follows:

For Attorneys: Signing up is free and creation of the first Presence is free (you can have more than one). If you wish to showcase additional areas of knowledge, add a second Presence for only $19.99 per month, and each additional Presence after that is $9.99 per month.

Each client lead an attorney accepts costs $1.99. Discounts are available: 5 for $1.59 each and 10 for $0.99 each. Responding to an RFP received costs $9.99. Discounts are also available: 5 for $7.99 each and 10 for $4.99 each.

For Clients: Signing up is free. Searching for attorneys and reviewing their content is free. Sending a contact request is free. If you choose to run an RFP, the first one is free. If you are a legal department, business, or individual with several areas of legal needs, you can run additional RFPs for $29.99 each. Discounts of 5 for $19.99 each are available as well.

I am not sure how the charge arrangements comport with referral / fee sharing rules – we will have to see how hat all falls out.

If the site works as well as it promises and it’s fee structure compliant, this could be a cost effective means of tailoring attorney marketing and fine-tuning attorney search. I am interested in seeing reviews on the RFP Attorney process as people kick the tires.

Want to expand your virtual real estate on your mobile phone? If you haven’t already gotten your free Windows Live account, now is the time to do it. Sneaking under my radar during the holiday crazies was this announcement from the fine folks at Windows Live – you can now access SkyDrive’s 25GB of storage via apps on your iPhone or Windows Phone. Pretty darn cool. Dropbox is nice, but it can’t hold a candle to the size of SkyDrive.

Of course, Microsoft has baked SkyDrive fairly deeply into Windows Phone 7.5. With the Windows Phone app, you can store documents, notes, photos, videos and access them from your phone. Share photos stored on SkyDrive by email, text, or IM, use Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with SkyDrive files, and keep your phone’s camera roll up-to-date on SkyDrive automatically. SkyDrive is integrated directly into the apps as well as core phone functions. Of particular use on mobile, you can browse your entire SkyDrive. share files and manage your storage.

The “extra extra” though is an iPhone app! In addition to their OneNote notebooks, iPhone users can access their files in SkyDrive, create folders, delete files, and share links to folders and files directly using the Mail app. Much of the functionality is the same between the Windows Phone and iPhone apps – tailored to the particular phone’s user experience. This is very very cool indeed – kudos to Microsoft for not leaving us iPhone users hanging!

Read more about these apps and SkyDrive and check out some vids over at the Windows Live site. And get an extra 25GB of useful storage on your mobile device. Thanks Microsoft.

Whether or not to use the Cloud in your legal practice: that is the question. To be, or not to be, in the Cloud depends heavily on the ethical rules that guide our profession. Not surprisingly, those ethics commissions are having just as much difficulty grappling with the question as are the ordinary practitioners faced with the attractive option of SaaS and cloud products. Is there an ethical trap inherent in the use of these tools, just waiting to be sprung?

Fortunately, the ABA Commission on Ethics is striving to be realistic in its approach to the use of cloud computing and possible violation of client confidentiality. The Commission has drafted a proposal to assist lawyers in making decisions regarding cloud services. 

The gist of the proposal, as well as the gist of the ethics opinions rendered by state bar associations, is that a lawyer need take “reasonable” steps to ensure client confidentiality and that this same standard applies to use of the cloud to transmit client data. Some opinions also combine the concept of flexibility with reasonableness, clearly a nod to the “everchanging nature” of technology. Protection level may be adjusted based on the client’s needs and nature of the information involved. And, rightly so, the onus should be on the lawyer to establish that he or she acted reasonably with respect to the use of technology for storage, manipulation and transfer of data. This includes a showing that the lawyer acted diligently by, for example, analyzing terms of service, privacy policies, security features and actively took the steps necessary to ensure the greatest level of protection available. This does not inecessarily require a complete refusal to use anything cloud in support of your practice.

Take a look at some  of the reported ethics opinions. From these, you should be able to get a sense of what is required of you when you opt to look to skyward for technological assistance. And remember, just because it comes from the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean that something wicked this way comes.

• Iowa State Bar Association Committee on Ethics and Practice Guidelines: Ethics Opinion 11-01 Use of Software as a Service – Cloud Computing – September 9, 2011
• Pennsylvania Bar Association Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility: Informal Opinion 2010-60 (January 1, 2011) – no link
• New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics: Opinion 842 – September 9, 2010
• State Bar of Arizona Ethics Opinion 09-04: Confidentiality; Maintaining Client Files; Electronic Storage; Internet - December 2, 2009
• New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics: Opinion 820 – February 8, 2008) 
• Maine State Bar Professional Ethics Commission: “Client Confidences: Confidential firm data held electronically and handled by technicians for third-party vendors;” Opinion 194 – June 30, 2008
• New Jersey Bar Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics: “Electronic Storage and Access of Client Files;” Opinion 701 – April 24, 2006
• State Bar of Arizona Ethics Opinion 05-04: Electronic Storage; Confidentiality July, 2005

Sometimes browsing the Web feels a little like a game of “catch and release.” You happen upon interesting content, you consume it, and then you release it back into the wild. Invariably, at some point in the future, you may find yourself vaguely remembering having seen something once that might pertain to something you need to know right now, but you can’t quite put your finger on it ….

If you aren’t too fond of the circular file-like cycle of information consumption on the Web, then Zukmo might be your new best friend. At it’s heart, its a bookmarking system. But it’s clever-simple interface and deep functionality make it worth a look. The key functions of Zukmo are the ability to store, access, and share content. Content is culled from various sources around the Web to be stored in Zukmo’s one, centralized location. Create your account for free, drag the bookmarklet up into your browser bar, click it when you are on a page you want to keep and you can then retrieve it at your “My Zukmo” page, either via the bookmarklet link or at their website.  A very nice feature is the ability to import bookmarks from your browser and Google and sync with Delicious and other sources so that you can keep everything centralized. A very, very nice feature is the ability to add the bookmarklet to your mobile browser on your iPhone and iPad – where I do most of my reading anyway.

But it isn’t just about your Web bookmarks. You can also bookmark and upload local documents to My Zukmo, which then become part of the search universe within Zukmo. You can pull content from your Twitter stream, from Google Docs, from YouTube and Vimeo and from Slideshare and view them within Zukmo. The search function offers full text and attribute search across all of the stored content and streams and get back highlighted results, like a Google search. You can distribute out of Zukmo to Facebook and Twitter, by email, or all three at the same time.

When you save in Zukmo, the app uses a simplification process to improve readability, showing only the key content, without the usual Web page gobbledy gook. There is also an Easy Reader button on each entry, which essentially shows the substance in a printer-friendly format. Finally, you can use Zukmo as an automatic sharing hub to Facebook and Twitter, and access your content from any device, anywhere. Check out the sample screenshot of your My Zukmo page. Nice and clean:

Zukmo really offers an incredibly amount of storage service for free. Besides considering it for your bookmarking needs, the document add feature brings Zukmo closer to a cloud backup solution for a large segment of your own personal data. Not a bad deal for the price.

I have had people ask me about the best options for backing up data and media. Invariably, the discussion centers around local storage versus cloud storage and some combination thereof. Studio readers know I am a big fan of cloud storage (particularly if it is free), and that I use DropBox quite a bit to manipulate my content in the cloud. But I don’t really use DropBox for online backup – I tend to use it more as a way station and sharing option when I need to use certain files across devices or work with someone else on something. The free limit is rather small to be used to backup tons of data.

Cloud Experience is a great cloud option for online backup. The service starts at 10gb for free for both consumers and developers, as well as quite reasonably priced for added storage if the 10gb is insufficient. You can sync documents, photos, calendars, contacts – pretty much any data worth saving in multiple locales. You can sync these backups across a plethora of devices, so you need not wring your hands when your trusty smartphone bites the dust or you find yourself remote from your main address book needing to call that contact whose number you haven’t memorized. Files can also be shared with lots of networks, including the social ones.

There is no harm in adding a layer of protection to 10gb of your content when the price is free. Check out Cloud Experience – you may find yourself thanking me.