I read a lot of blogs. I am often impressed by the quality of the posts. Many lawyers consistently write thoughtful, insightful posts about their practices and interests. Even so, I often notice simple mistakes in lawyers’ blogs that can detract from their ability to build readership. Here are five common mistakes that you can…

Nothing causes lawyers more sleepless nights than fear of missed deadlines. Just one ill-timed lapse can let a statute of limitations run out or a filing deadline pass. For that reason, tools that help you calculate and calendar deadlines are invaluable.

One such tool is LawToolBox.com. It claims to have been the…

Call me late to the party on this book. Electronic Discovery for Small Cases: Managing Digital Evidence and ESI, by Bruce A. Olson and Tom O’Connor, was published a year ago. I happened to pick up a copy a couple months ago and only…

[Updated with new additions 5/13/13.]

Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Kopf made national news this week when he wrote on his blog, Hercules and the Umpire, about the frequent irrelevancy of the Supreme Court. “A lot of what the Supreme Court does…

Legal research service Fastcase has long had a citator function, called Authority Check, that lets you see how a case has been cited. Unlike Shepard’s from LexisNexis or KeyCite from Thomson Reuters, however, it has not alerted you when a case…

Monica Bay, editor in chief of Law Technology News, invited me to be a guest on her Law Technology Now podcast this week. Our topic was a recap of legal technology trends we’ve seen on the trade-show circuit this year, primarily at the recent ABA Techshow and the earlier LegalTech New York.

Listen…

The managing partner of a law firm called me and asked my opinion of how his firm’s blog was doing. This struck me as an odd question. After all, wouldn’t he know this better than I? So I put the question back to him.

“How do you think your blog is doing?” I asked.

“I

Business cards can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they provide an easy way to exchange contact information. The curse comes when you get back to your office and have to figure out what to do with them. Basically, you have two choices. One is to condemn the cards to business-card…

Richard Susskind

In case you haven’t noticed, technology is irrevocably changing the practice of law. Unfortunately, law schools have not done a good job of keeping up with that trend. Last August, the ABA made it official that lawyers have a

This is an interesting infographic on the best times to post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. It comes from Social Caffeine. Note that the best times to post to LinkedIn are 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., suggesting that the professionals who use…

The University of Chicago Press and the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association have launched the Journal of Law and Courts, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the examination of legal institutions, actors, processes and policy.

The journal will publish biannually online and in print. The March issue available free. Future…

Law Technology News editor Monica Bay interviewed me yesterday for a forthcoming episode of her podcast. The topic was a recap of ABA Techshow. In looking back on Techshow, I saw that four themes predominated there, and it struck me that they pretty well summed up the state of…