Small Firm Life

RIP Audioblogger

2006-10-08T20:52:00.000-04:00

Well, while killing off Small Firm Life, I found this notice which related to one of my first posts about putting audio on a blog. Goodbye again!

Hello,
As of November 1, 2006, Audioblogger will no longer accept phone calls. MP3s made with the service will continue to be hosted and served but you will no longer be able to use Audioblogger to post new audio.
Audioblogger is an independent product, run by Odeo, Inc., a small startup company in San Francisco, CA. We are not affiliated with Google or Blogger except that we operate and provide the Audioblogger service.
Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions about what projects to focus on. And we've come to the difficult decision that Audioblogger demands too many resources, time, and money for us to continue its operation.
However, there are several other services that offer similar functionality. Odeo is not affiliated with any of these services, we only suggest them only in hopes that one or the other will be a good alternative for you.
Gabcast.com is a free service for recording by phone Hipcast.com has a seven day free trial and lots of features Gcast.com is another free service for phone recording
All of the phone posting services listed above are compatible with Odeo in that they produce podcast feeds, which can be imported to Odeo. Any audio file at Odeo can be posted on a blog by copying and pasting some embed code.
Odeo would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has tried Audioblogger. If you are interested in keeping up with our other blog-friendly projects, please have a look at Twitter.com and our customizable audio players.
Thanks,
The Odeo Team
Links:
Gabcast - http://gabcast.com
Hipcast - http://hipcast.com
Gcast - http://gcast.com
Odeo Importing - http://www.odeo.com/create/addfeed
Twitter - http://twitter.com
Players - http://odeo.com/channel/102054/embedded_player

Goodbye Small Firm Life

2006-10-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

If anyone's read this blog from the beginning, they'll remember that it was started to explore the possibilities of blogging and to support my column "Small Firm Life" for the New York Law Journal. Well, I've had a couple of life changes that have led me to conclude that I won't be continuing to blog under this title.

Most significantly, I joined a firm. I am partner number 14 in Dunnington Bartholow & Miller LLP. My offices are now on the rather swanky Madison Avenue and feature plush conference rooms, the largest of which has a great view of St. Patrick's Cathedral. And while arguably we are a small firm in the cosmic mix of things, my point of view no longer quite fits the title.

In recognition of the change, the title of my New York Law Journal column will be changing to "Trial and Error". I think I'll probably just write the column, rather than blog about writing it. That may change, but for now it's how I feel.

Another change is that my book, Copyright Litigation Handbook has been published by West. They've put a rather nice author profile of me on their website. The first edition of these books is like a Beta version of software. I need to write next year's update by March 15, 2007. So the race is on to try to get comments, criticism and to follow new developments in the law. I have some ideas on how I'd like to expand the work, but rather than wait until the last minute, I'd like to set myself the regular task of taking it in bite sizes. A blog seems the perfect way of doing that while it's all fresh.

So you'll find me at Copyright Litigation. I won't try to cover every late-breaking development in copyright law or new controversy that arises. But I will be looking for lessons in little-noticed decisions or little-noticed procedural goodies in famous cases that people are discussing for other reasons.

If you're a lawyer new to blogging, I recommend reading this blog (Small Firm Life) from the beginning - following my mistakes and frustrations should help you avoid a few of your own!

Copyright Litigation Handbook

2006-10-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

Well, my first book is on its way to the printer. The process, from proposal to finish took 3.5 years. It was a full year of waiting for the proposal to be approved, then two years to write it, then six months of the editing and additional writing process.

If you would like to order it, please use the OFFER NUMBER 523571. You can find it on West's website here If you use the offer Number, it helps West to track the sales and tell what strategies are working. Obviously people who live in the blogosphere will want to indicate to the company and the publishing world that a mention on a blog is just as important, if not more important, than a mention in the conventional media.

West's web site has a description of the book's contents. I think the book will be very helpful to anyone who needs to litigate (or oversee the litigation of) a copyright case. On the one hand, the book's approach is very nuts and bolts in terms of how to put together pleadings (checklists). On the other hand, I think I really take on some big substantive difficult procedural issues and make them accessible to both the beginning and advanced practitioners.

Copyright litigation is extraordinarily complex. My goal was to simplify it. I didn't succeed there, but I hope I succeeded in showing a few strategies for cutting through it all and saving time, energy and money.

Hitting Faux Cons Icons With a Calculator

2006-09-24T13:30:00.000-04:00

A lot of people I respect describe themselves as "fiscal conservatives". By that they mean that they work hard for their money. They don't like to pay more than their fair share in taxes. And they think that government is wasteful. Before Ralph Nader got involved in politics, fiscal conservatives thought he was one of them. They were right. The big news is that most liberals share the same values as these self-described "fiscal conservatives". In the Reagan era, the American populist wrath was turned upon entitlement programs and welfare mothers.

For decades now, the war on welfare mothers has provided cover for corporate CEOs and those in the top 1% to dodge taxes, amass unthinkable fortunes, rip off their shareholders, and laugh at the rest of us. HMO's and health care are a national, systemic shame and single-payer health care is not even on the political agenda. Corporations went from paying 50% of the cost of government post WWII to 7% today. Who is getting the free ride?

Author Nomi Prins has just come out with a new book "Jacked: How 'Conservatives' Are Picking Your Pocket" (whether you voted for them or not). She travelled America and examined the wallets of average citizens. A former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, she took out her calculator and showed how soi disant "conservatives" have used our money to enrich themselves, pocket our nation's resources and rip off the average person. Does Ann Coulter know how to use a calculator? In a political version of Celebrity Death Match, my money is on Prins over Coulter 10 to 1 odds. Is Jacked potent enough to scare Rush Limbaugh straight? Send Jacked to your friend who thinks he is "conservative". The numbers don't lie, and chances are your friend with the true conservative principles that we should all respect and honor - like conservation and hating waste -- is not really part of that club, which consists of people who can't face fiscal -- and other reality. Liberal is the new conservative. Go figure. God will not be angered if you learn how to use a calculator, Ms. Coulter.

Benedictine Marketing

2006-09-23T22:05:00.000-04:00

While surfing around on a topic, I came across Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog. I'm not sure that the content fits the blog title, but I'm not sure that Small Firm Life's content does, either. Anyway, Eric's got a lot of interesting and intelligent posts, particularly in the copyright area. Highly recommended and very current, an excellent post on the Google Print controversy. He had a great link to the Copyright Website, a spot where Benedict O'Mahoney has collected examples of the works that were allegedly infringing and the originals from copyright cases. Smart and well-presented.

I thought it was very odd that the Google ad on Eric's blog had a link to www.worldslastchance.com, a site that predicts the current Pope is the last one the world is going to see. The crazy thing is that these Google ads are supposed to relate to the topic of your blog so that the advertiser gets views by persons interested. I've noticed ads on my blog for everything from personal injury lawyers to public service announcements.

Google should have a "no armaggedonist ad" filter. None of us really wants to disseminate hate speech, pornography or lunatic rantings, and I clicked on the link to figure out what it was through Eric's blog. Yuck!

Privatizing Air Traffic Controllers

2006-09-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Last week I was participating in a CLE presentation in a federal courthouse in Central Islip New York. The topic was cease and desist letters in intellectual property cases and related issues of declaratory judgment actions, personal, general and specific jurisdiction and related professional responsibility issues. The CLE was sponsored and organized by the new Eastern District of New York Chapter of the Federal Bar Association.

I met a woman there who said that her husband is an air traffic controller. She said that the Bush Administration is privatizing air traffic controllers who will now be paid $8.50 per hour. Workers will be stripped of retirement benefits.

My law office, which was located at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street was displaced by the attacks of 9/11. One of my close friends was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. One day on the beaches of Long Island, I saw a commercial airliner explode.

I find it hard to understand how replacing qualified, quality labor with workers willing to accept $8.50 per hour will make us safer. Will these workers be based in Pakistan? The Connecticut Congressional delegation's take is here. The "Reason Foundation" kooks who cooked up this nonsense are found here. Richard Posner and his Chicago School fanatics would argue that a few crashes would increase the market's appetite for good air traffic controllers and increase consumer demand for an investment in quality. Richard Posner and his Chicago School fanatics are sociopaths. If and when even one person is injured due to an unqualified air traffic controller, the Bush Administration officials responsible should be tried for reckless endangerment homicide. Endangering our national security by selling off key defense strategic assets to the highest bidder is a collossally stupid idea.

They'll be auctioning off the Constitution next and charging user fees to benefit from its protections.

Occam's Razor in the Law

2006-09-10T15:44:00.000-04:00

Occam's Razor is a tool of scientific and philosophic inquiry. Simply stated, it posits that the simplest theory is the best, or that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true. Leonardo Da Vinci's riff on this theory was the aphorism: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

Clicking on the above link will take you to a terrific Wikipedia page on Razor theory. I ran across an interesting reference to it reading David Liss's "A Spectacle of Corruption" - a paperback historical fiction set in seventeenth century London that I found in an airport bookstore. The book is a great page-turner and I couldn't put it down.

For years, I've been subjected to the Razor by editors, judges and juries. My tendency to present complicated facts, suggest multiple alternative theories and to consider mixed motives has at times frustrated them all. When chopping away at an unwieldy brief, my Razor has left a few bleeding victims, too.

If I'm allowed to add another riff to Razor theory: "Where the truth is complicated, you must simplify it to be credible." The Wikipedia has references to the use of the Razor in science, statistics, religion, medicine and biology (among others), but none in law. Politics is missing, too. The Razor does help to explain why the natural human tendency is to distrust and dislike the complexity of democracy and constitutions and to be drawn to the simplicity of authoritarian systems. When sloganeers wielding the Razor make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution and democracy suffer. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is the rallying cry for authoritarians wishing to eliminate the complexities and inefficiences of such democratic concepts as "due process of law".

The frightening thing is that these ideologues believe that stripping Americans of basic democratic freedoms will make the world safe for democracy.

Next time you're facing the Razor and getting cut to ribbons, pick up a simple piece of the puzzle. Fit it in, move to the next piece. After three convincing pieces, your audience will trust that the fourth piece will fit.

Federal Bar Association Annual Meeting in Vegas

2006-08-27T17:29:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas typing away on my laptop. I am returning from the Federal Bar Association's annual meeting, which was held in a resort just outside of Las Vegas. The meeting was interesting and informative, with great CLE programs. Our chapter won an award for setting up the Second Circuit swearing-in ceremony.

The program on electronic discovery was terrrific - it was just enough information to scare the pants out of all of us. The duty to turn over native files (a file in Excel in Excel), digging through your client's computer systems before the first Rule 26(f) conference, and issued related to metadata will revolutionize the practice of law and put anyone who is not keeping up on technological issues at a further disadvantage. The presenter, George Paul, who authored The Discovery Revolution, was terrific. His thesis was that lawyers are the priests of information and that we'd all have to become technologists versed in computer systems and hire forensic experts even for run-of-the-mill cases. He also believes that much more diplomacy and statesmanship will be involved with the discovery process, since a lack of good faith can create such tremendous liabilities for both attorneys and clients.

Lots of carping about the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. A great appellate practice panel with four Ninth Circuit judges - highly entertaining and informative. I have a better insight into why Ninth Circuit decisions seem to be all over the place. Great panel on the FBI's programs involving private business.

I spent about 20 minutes talking to Bishop Pepe, whose diocese is the southern half of Nevada. He is a Canon lawyer, originally from Philadelphia. His church on the Las Vegas strip services 3.5 million visitors annually. The land is worth $11 million per acre.

La Dolce Vita

2006-08-08T22:30:00.000-04:00

Certain movies should be seen again and again. Fellini's La Dolce Vita is one of them. Fellini documents the career arc of a young gossip columnist who dreams about giving up his celebrity-chasing job and party lifestyle to write some real literature. The film is rich and full of complex human drama, of cruelty, heartbreak, vanity, perversion and self-inflicted suffering by people who publicly crush and mock their own dreams.

My cousin Bill Lacey restored the audio soundtrack. Bill is a Grammy-winning audio engineer and musician. Great music, great film.

Cases Citing Legal Blogs

2006-08-07T10:49:00.000-04:00

Ian Best of 3L Epiphany just published an updated list of citations to legal blogs:

There are now 32 court citations of legal blogs from 27 different cases.
URL: http://3lepiphany.typepad.com/3l_epiphany/2006/08/cases_citing_le.html

The citations are broken down by subject matter and by blog. Very helpful!

Copyright Code in Verse

2006-07-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

A non-lawyer from Israel named Yehuda Berlinger who keeps a blog on board games sat down and put the U.S. Copyright Act to verse. The verses are numbered by the section of the statute they describe. The poem is by turns bad, funny, insightful and brilliant. It's also an implicit critique of the ridiculously bad prose our lawmakers use for these statutes.

Yehuda claims it took him only three hours. Hmmmm.

It should become required reading for aspiring IP attorney. It's a great fun way to learn what the law is and where to find it. The Copyright Act is mind-numbingly difficult to follow and tough to navigate and cross-reference. Almost no one sits down and reads it front to back just for kicks. Of those that do, certainly few understand it.

We should all salute Yehuda's sense of fun and fearlessness. Too many lawyers think it's all a big pain to wade through all of the fine print.

The U.S. Copyright code, in verse
These verses describe
All the copyright code
Of the U. S. of A.
Written down as an ode

Copyright 2006, Yehuda Berlinger. Permission is hereby granted to copy in part or in whole along with this notice, attribution, and a link back to this web site.

Traffic Index #4 (Part 2)

2006-07-16T13:03:00.000-04:00

I just lost half of a post that I spend a good deal of time on. So I'm just providing below the raw data and haven't cleaned up the links that I'd made all tidy and lost. Blogger's "Recover Post" function simply doesn't work. And I'm not even going to finish the thoughts I started. Blogging should be short and sweet, and I went on for too long!

French Wikipedia page on the Constitutional Council http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_constitutionnel_(France) 17

The Palais Royal in Paris http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Royal 17

Maps of Paris (Plans de Paris) http://www.paris.org/Maps/ 44,160

French National Assembly http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/english/index.asp 52,900

Les Journaux officials (French equivalent of Federal Register) http://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/jahia/Jahia/pid/1 70,793

French Ministry of Justice’s Page on Paris La-Santé (maison d’arrêt)
http://www.justice.gouv.fr/minister/DAP/Etablissements/LaSante.htm 70,959

Opera National De Paris http://www.operadeparis.fr/ 121,468

Cour d’appel de Paris (Paris Court of Appeals) http://www.ca-paris.justice.fr/ 310,122

Cour de Cassation (French equivalent of US Supreme Court) http://www.courdecassation.fr/ 425,043

Dowd & Marotta http://www.dowdmarottalaw.com/ 685,261

Small Firm Life http://smallfirmlife.blogspot.com/ 888,685

Organization for Information on European Prisons http://www.prison.eu.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=1315 905,653

Traffic Index #4: Bastille Day Weekend

2006-07-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

In 1989 I worked in Paris at a law firm called Vovan & Associes. It was the summer following my first year of law school. It was also the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. July 14 is the date that the celebration took place. I had a wonderful apartment and filled it with friends for the celebration.

The entire summer was magic. My experience working in France formed my entire career. In the United States, lawyers work in firms that are grinding pyramid schemes. In France and throughout Europe young lawyers in civil practice are grossly underpaid, but seem to get their hands on real work immediately and develop as professionals through a mentoring system.

In the United States we are going through very dark times politically. Although we are experiencing a technological and cultural renaissance, we are experiencing an almost total loss of respect for democracy, freedom and human rights. Cowards, weaklings and bullies have taken over our government and have damaged American democratic institutions. Respect for the rule of law in our country is at an all-time low. Respect for diplomacy is even lower. During the Italian Renaissance, Italy was run by weaklings, fools, madmen and religious fanatics who wreaked tremendous destruction. It is hard not to see the parallels.

In the United States, lawyers are subject to criminal penalties (sanctions) for making "unreasonable" arguments. The government is in charge of what is "reasonable". The newspapers for lawyers are full of tales of lawyers being subjected to these criminal penalties without due process of law, just for speaking on behalf of their clients. These penalties are enshrined in Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and many state copycat laws.

It is my hope that we will remember these days as we remember the darkest days of the McCarthy era. Where lawyers were subjected to witch hunts for speaking truth to power, for advancing novel theories, and for advocating zealously as a true adversary system requires.

The French have erected an opera house where the Bastille prison once stood. It's time that lawyers started thinking about shrugging off some of these crazy laws that are used to undermine our basic freedoms and the common law rights

Everything Bad is Good For You

2006-07-05T21:42:00.000-04:00

Over the Fourth of July weekend I read a book called Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson. Steven lives in Park Slope Brooklyn where I have roots and family. The book is terrific -- a blend of pop culture and neuroscience. Its thesis is that pop culture is getting smarter and more complex which is in turn making much of the population smarter. Steven maintains a blog.

The book reminded me of a lot of the topics that I've blogged about. He talks about the difficulty of video games and how the more advanced games force players to spend hours struggling with new interfaces, experimenting, and to both consult and compile manuals to figure out how to make it through extraordinarily difficult game based or online challenges.

This is a lot like lawyering in a small firm: figuring our way through mazes of rules, dodging monsters, causing and avoiding explosions, and constantly having to pick up golden coins along the way to recharge our superpowers. The new interfaces presented by blogging and technology present challenges that most of the population has to pay $9.95 per month to play. We pay with our daylight hours and our enjoyment level is generally much lower.

If anyone wants to start a video game called The Attorney, I can share some mazes, traps and amazing sequences. I know a few evil adversaries! My virtual hourly rate will be higher, but my avatar accepts Paypal.

In the end, I think Johnson is right. I think that we are going through an incredible cultural renaissance that is simply too close for most of us to perceive.

Book Publishing & Court of International Trade Ceremony

2006-06-26T18:52:00.000-04:00

I keep thinking that I'm going to be done with this book that I've written on copyright litigation, but more and more things keep popping up. It's an amazing experience to go through the editorial process, focus the book toward the audience's needs, and think about marketing. It's all very exhausting, but last week I was informed that the book is considered "publishable" and my editor had some very kind things to say about how it is written.

The ceremony at the Court of International Trade is shaping up nicely. You are all invited to attend on July 25 at 3 p.m. Here is an invite! If you are not sworn in to the court, the Federal Bar Association will sponsor you. We are honoring Chief Judge Restani, the first woman Chief Judge of the court. We have learned that the chief judge has fans around the country, so attendance should be fairly robust.

If you care about things like countervailing duties, gray market goods, getting your seized goods back from customs, or just enjoying some great modern architecture and learning about this important institution, please come on over!

Software: Open Content Licenses

2006-06-19T22:10:00.000-04:00

Every day busy lawyers are clicking the buttons to download software. The buttons often say "I agree with the terms of this license agreement" or simply "I agree". Is anyone reading this stuff? I certainly am not, and I'm pretty much in the field -- litigating things like forum selection, class actions, and certainly wanting to buy things that carry a warranty of merchantability. These license agreements are both onerous and odorous: as lawyers we will be arguing that they are "contracts of adhesion" and should be disregarded. Chicago school lawyers would enforce shrink wrap licenses placed on rotten sides of beef. As you can tell, Small Firm Life is generally on the Ralph Nader side of things when it comes to consumer protection.

But there's a whole group of people that have been worried about the bigger picture. "Locking down" culture is their stated concern. Academics, politicians, industry lobbyists, and copyright philosophers all have different points of view as to how much control over modifying written works a copyright owner should have. And since software counts as a written work under US copyright law, modifications to software are a major point of contention.

Licenses are contracts governing the use of software and other copyrighted works. Generally, a content owner like Microsoft asserts full copyright in its work and leverages every aspect of that copyright, including the right to stop others from modifying its software ("creating a derivative work").

Open Content Licenses are licenses to use software that allow you to modify the software, make a product, and sell the product (the new software) subject to certain conditions. In other words, the copyright owner is asserting less than all of its rights. But as a cond a ition of using the software in modifying it, you have to agree to permit others to modify the software and to sell it. The idea is that if you are a young and hungry software developer, you will take "open source" software for free, develop a great product based on it, and both the underlying software and the new product will both find a bigger commercial market. For a good explanation of what's going on, check out Lawrence Liang's Guide to Open Content Licenses. It's free, of course. Also known as the "open source movement" this is becoming big business.

Copyright Society & Network of Bar Leaders

2006-06-14T23:13:00.000-04:00

I spent a terrific weekend at the annual meeting of the Copyright Society of the USA. On the bus ride up I got to sit next to Joyce Creidy, a classmate of mine from Fordham Law school who is the mother of twins and recently landed a job with Thomson Compumark. Joyce really knows everybody and convinced me to join the intellectual property section of the New York State Bar Association. Not like I don't have enough bar association memberships!

The most interesting presentation of the weekend was on documentary films. Check out the Center for social media's Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. It's really tough for documentary filmmakers to get clearances when bits and pieces of copyrighted works appear naturally in their works. Fair use is a delicate and highly controversial issue. It is highly politicized and people take very extreme positions. On the political "right" of copyright, there is no "right" of fair use, it is only a defense. On the political "left" of copyright, almost every creative work should be free and communal. An attorney from Paramount Pictures characterized the above cited Statement of Best Practices as being like Winona Ryder writing a book on best practices in shoplifting. So it was a fun panel!

My partner Dan Marotta was sworn in as President of the Network of Bar Leaders last night at a ceremony at Tavern on the Green. New York State's Chief Judge Judith Kaye. United States District Judge Eric Vitaliano (EDNY) swore him in. It was amazing - about 90 people attended. Many distinguished judges and bar association presidents were there. The best part for me was being seated next to actress Linda Fiorentino who is just the most terrific person! Dan will make a great President.

On my way to the swearing in, I ran into Jonathan Tasini. He is running for US Senator for the seat occupied by Senator Hillary Clinton. We walked together for a few blocks, had a good talk, and I complimented him on his campaign's achievements and visibility. I support his position on the war.

Court of International Trade Event & Frontpage Link

2006-06-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

I'm helping to organize an event at the Court of International Trade. It's a court of national jurisdiction located two blocks from my office (right across from the state and federal courts on Foley Square). It's a very modern floating glass block building. Chic period architecture within.

The CIT consists of nine active Article III judges and four senior judges. Although seated in New York, it is authorized to hold proceedings anywhere in the nation and abroad. On July 25, the Federal Bar Association will be honoring Chief Judge Jane Restani, the first woman to serve as Chief Judge of that court. We will also be holding in a swearing in ceremony for attorneys wishing to be admitted to the court. All judges are expected to attend, and the wine & cheese reception afterwards should be great. All of my attorney friends from Blogville are welcome to attend.

So I sat down with my partner for another Frontpage lesson. I figured out how to put a new picture of myself on the website, how to create a page, and how to add a link. I succeeded in putting an Invitation to Court of International Trade event on my website. I think it looks pretty good. When I saved a draft of this post and tried to test the two preceding links, the invitation came up, but Blogger threw me out. We'll see how the published post looks.

I'm pretty impressed with Frontpage and look forward to learning a lot more about it.

Linking A Website To A Blog - Frontpage & Class Actions

2006-06-07T19:43:00.000-04:00

My partner Dan Marotta did all of the hands-on in building our firm's website. We worked with a designer and used Microsoft Frontpage. I was involved with the design and the links that we selected to put on the site, but he learned the Frontpage program and sweated over making it look uniform and having the boxes line up. We didn't want a site that we couldn't change or understand. We were watching at the time (late '90's) how web designers were holding people hostage over making changes and locking them into crazy contracts. Over time, there have been relatively few changes to the site.

We've seen our website as place that people visit after learning about us, basically to read our resumes. For class action issues, it's a good thing to master. If a class action I've proposed gets certified, I really don't want to outsource the fairly simply process of getting the right documents onto the web to give the world notice. Probably the best website for class actions around is the Milberg Weiss website. Forms, notices, copies of pleadings, etc. Also forms on the Federal Judicial Center's site mentioned in my previous post. It's sad what's happening to them, because I think they've done so much good. Their website description:

Experts in protecting victims of corporate fraud and other public misconduct
Responsible for over $45 billion in recoveries
The most prestigious and recognized plaintiff law firm in the United States

I've resolved to dig in, master Frontpage and start using our website more dynamically. I took the very small step of installing Frontpage and sitting down with my partner and getting a lesson. In a few minutes, I added a link to Small Firm Life and learned the design and preview functions. It was very simple.

I hope to spend more time on it during my Spring cleaning. I have a feeling that my Spring cleaning of the website and blog will take place during the dog days of August at the rate I'm going. Since I'm not going to quit the day job, that's just the way it's going to have to be.

Federal Judicial Center

2006-06-06T14:38:00.000-04:00

The Federal Judicial Center maintains a website with lots of great information and free publications. It has a biographical database on all federal judges (past and present). For example, I was able to figure out that there have been 38 female chief judges who are still sitting on the bench. Search limitations (gender)(chief judges)(sitting judges only).

One indispensable free publication is the Manual of Complex Litigation (4th). Download it and velobind it if you are engaged in class action or multidistrict litigation.

The FJC's job is to train federal judges and federal court employees, but they've got a very rich website worth exploring.

New York Commission To Examine Solo & Small Firm Practice

2006-06-01T21:20:00.000-04:00

In February 2006, a Commission To Examine Solo and Small Firm Practice issued a report on how New York's court system could be improved to level the playing field for solo and small firm practitioners. The report may be found http://www.nycourts.gov/reports/ssfreport.pdf The report opens:

The vast majority of attorneys practicing law in the State of New York work in solo and small firms. More than 83.5% of attorneys in New York are solo practitioners, 14.7% work in offices of between two and nine attorneys, and only 1.8% of attorneys work in "large" firms, defined as firms having 10 or more attorneys.

This information will probably shock not only attorneys around the world who know only New York's megafirms, but also New York practitioners. We lack a certain self-awareness and are certainly not well-organized.

The report is chockablock with interesting information about the needs and interests of small firm practitioners and how the costs of litigation could be driven down by a more efficient court system. Technology plays a big role. The report comes out against mandatory electronic filing being instituted. Glenn Reynold's message that "Small is the new Big" hasn't hit us here.

Some great suggestions: abolish individual court rules, have courts serve orders by fax instead of requiring personal appearances by attorneys, promulgate forms on court websites to avoid the need to purchase expensive formbooks, permit preliminary conferences to be eliminated where parties agree on discovery issues, stagger court appearances to avoid "cattle call" motion calendars.

While this report is highly specific to New York State, it would probably be a good tool for small firm practitioners nationwide concerned about improving quality of life to take a look at. Your state may be way ahead or way behind, it's always interesting to know. The report really takes into account the life differences between urban and rural practitioners.

I did a google search and the report does not seem to have sparked much discussion on the 'net. I hope that some of the other bloggers looking at solo practice, such as Ben Cowgill's Soloblawg or Carolyn Elefant's MyShingle will dig into this rich feast. Will Arnie Herz find Legal Sanity in the report?

Or will the report, as so many other sensible and learned initiatives, die a quiet and unremarkable death? The report was commissioned by Judith Kaye, our highly-respected Chief Judge and was written by thirty solo and small firm practitioners. Bravo! In our maverick tradition, the report didn't pull any punches and may have been a more daring vision than the court anticipated.

If you care about the practice of law and the admistration of justice to real people, this report is critical. It's 95 pages, it's free - read it, talk about it and let's hope it sparks some positive change.

Copyright & Fair Use Comic - Lawyers Shouldn't Steal

2006-05-22T23:25:00.000-04:00

I get a lot of calls about fair use. "Can I use this image?" "Can we copy this article?" Fair use ("the fair use doctrine") is governed by and defined under the Copyright Act 17 U.S.C. 107. Research, scholarly criticism, news reporting . . . these are some of the terms found in the statute. Each term has volumes of cases and complicated tests interpreting it. Recently, the Second Circuit decided that a book about the Grateful Dead could use small images of Grateful Dead posters to illustrate a timeline in a biographic work about the band without licensing the rights.

Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has put together a terrific comic book explaining copyright law and what constitutes fair use. The book is directed at documentary filmmakers, but is an excellent illustration of the concerns that people (such as lawyers blogging) wishing to use copyrighted works for non-commercial, semi-commercial, or transformative uses face. It also is a great introduction, in graphic novel format, to the great cultural debates going on as described in such books as Professor Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

I hope that the authors and Duke University will keep up the comic book format - it's fun and contains powerful images that really drill home the practical problems facing authors, artists and educators.

Bloggers should start educating themselves on how to avoid claims that they are stealing the works of others. Tricks like using small snippets and linking back to the author, making sure the author is credited and trying to use as little of the work is necessary, and making sure that the work is commented upon are all not only good etiquette, but may bring your borrowings under the fair use doctrine. Maybe. I'm a lawyer, but I'm not giving legal advice here. As lawyers, however, no one will feel sorry for us if we are caught stealing. Be careful my friends. When sampling busted out in the 80's, it was cool and free. When it started making money, it got shut down. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

On the other hand, if you know your rights and want to take a principled stand, go for it. Just make sure it's creative expression, not laziness and plagiarism that you're going to bat for.

Traffic Index #3: Da Vinci Code Weekend

2006-05-21T22:05:00.000-04:00

Numbers based on rankings of website by traffic by Alexa:

St. Mary Magdalen Dominican Parish No Data
Knights Templar, Salem, MA No Data
Priory of St. Bernard De Clairvaux (Louisiana) No Data
Grand Priory of Knights Templar of England and Wales No Data
Sony Pictures 966
Random House 4,803
The Vatican 7,175
Official Website of Dan Brown 14,117
The Louvre Museum 21,901
Opus Dei 50,343
Opus Dei Awareness Network 118,928
Rosslyn Chapel Templars 365,105
Magdalene.org 437,393
Small Firm Life 848,621
Grand Encampment of Knights Templar (USA) 856,215
San Graal School of Sacred Geometry, Sevierville, TN 1,192,081
Dowd & Marotta 1,206,861
Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem 2,337,534
The Sovereign Great Priory of Canada 3,209,218

Traffic Index History:

Traffic Index #1: Where Small Firms Stand March 10, 2006
Dowd & Marotta Website was at 4,814,282
Traffic Index #2: Tax Day in the Blogosphere April 16, 2006
Small Firm Life was at 1,188,011
Dowd & Marotta Website was at 1,478,589
Today:
Small Firm Life 848,621
Dowd & Marotta 1,478,589
Small Firm Life was launched on February 11, 2006. Other than the posts to Small Firm Life, my firm has engaged in no other promotion of the Dowd & Marotta website.

Stealing Content From Flock

2006-05-20T17:59:00.000-04:00

I am testing out Flock, a new open-source toolbar that is supposed to make it easy to grab web content and blog it easily.

Grabbing content to use later

From Flock Community

[edit]

Introducing the Shelf

The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later. You may find that dragging text, links, and pictures on and off the Shelf is faster and more convenient than traditional cut and paste.

The Shelf is especially handy for re-blogging bits of text from web pages. When you drag a text snippet from the Shelf into a blog post, it is automatically formatted as a blockquote with proper citation.

[edit]

Using the Shelf

Open the Topbar menu and choose Shelf.
Highlight and drag interesting URLs, pictures or text snippets from any web page onto the Shelf. You can also click Add Note and type your thoughts, observations, and wild ravings to add to the Shelf.
To move highlighted text to the Shelf when the Shelf topbar is not open, right click on the highlighted item (click and hold for Mac users) and choose Send to Shelf from the context menu.
Click the Blog Editor icon (which looks like a feather pen).
Drag items from the Shelf into your blog post.

When you're done, you can make your favorites re-appear in the topbar by clicking the tiny arrow icon on the right end of the topbar.

Grabbing content to use later - Flock Community

Successful Format for Blogging Workshop

2006-05-19T23:25:00.000-04:00

Our workshop on blogging at the New York County Lawyers' Association was very successful. It was sold out. AttorneyKaiser Wahab and I made a pretty good team and I think provided pretty good perspectives on how to create and use a blog. Nuchine Nobari, NYCLA's head librarian, was very thoughtful in giving ideas on what people needed to know, in configuring the space, and in helping us generally. I'm throwing out some thoughts for anyone considering organizing a similar workshop.

It was important to show how to register a domain name. We registered the domain name www.thenewyorkcountylawyer.com for Nuchine by going through Network Solutions. Participants also were not familiar with the WHOIS search, so we showed that. If you go to networksolutions.com, and click on WHOIS, you can find information on who owns a particular website. We advised to reserve a domain name that will correspond with your blog name. It's not necessary, but it's nice. For example, I own www.smallfirmlife.com. When I get fancy, I will connect this blog to that domain name. Stay tuned.

To launch the blogging portion of the NYCLA workshop, we oversaw Nuchine as she created a blog on Blogger.com. There was almost no introduction to the topic, aside from a welcome from Ron Katter, the Chair of the NYCLA Committee on Solo and Small Practice. We had a digital projector showing how she did it. Then, on the 14 library computer stations, we walked around and helped everyone create a blog on Blogger and make a post. Since the library had a wireless connection, people could have worked from laptops. Once a laptop has logged into Blogger, Blogger will recognize the user. So I couldn't access Blogger through Kaiser's laptop. We had to disconnect and reconnect to my laptop to show my blog from the laptop. An important point for future presenters who may count on sharing a laptop: bring your own just in case.

We found that no partipants brought laptops. Also, none had started blogs. I was a little surprised at both, I thought that we might have attracted at least one current blogger.

After setting up Nuchine's blog and helping all participants set up their own blogs, both Kaiser and I gave guided tours our respective blogs, showing the range of capabilities of blogs and their purpose. I showed a few of my Small Firm Life posts demonstrating various blogging tricks like inserting links and photographs. I demonstrated the utility of Sitemeter and how Feedburner works. Kaiser showed how a Yahoo RSS reader works and how to subscribe and change the hierarchy of subscriptions.

Participating attorneys were smart, quick and practical. They put together an interesting range of creative blogs in a matter of minutes. Lots of great questions.

I think the decision to have people create blogs and then talk about them was a good one. Everyone was very psyched and completely experienced the medium's capabilities before we downloaded all of the fancy things on them. I had fun, learned a few things, met some great people and would definitely do it again. My advice to anyone putting on a similar event is to show, rather than telling. People wanted to know HOW, not WHY.

Special thanks to Olivera Medenica, C0-Chair of NYCLA's EMIPS (Entertainment Media Intellectual Property and Sports Law Section) for co-sponsoring the event, promoting it and helping to organize.

Invasion of the Killer Blogs : CSUSA & NYCLA

2006-05-17T18:11:00.000-04:00

It's 6:10 p.m. and I'm sitting in the library of the New York County Lawyers' Association. Kaiser Wahab and I are prepping a presentation and hands-on workshop on creating blogs for attorneys.

I attended a Copyright Society Luncheon today at the Princeton Club on blogging that was moderated by Prof. William Patry of The Patry Copyright Blog and featuring Marty Schwimmer of The Trademark Blog, along with Tom Kirby and Jeff Neuberger. I was fortunate enough to talk to Prof. Patry for a bit, along with the other speakers.

Blogging seems to be exploding. Tom Kirby's presentation made blogging out to be the unregulated political loophole that should make it a deciding factor in upcoming elections. He opined that corporations will finally have a voice in elections, a statement that I found troubling, since I think corporations have too many voices in our elections.

Looking forward to May 23 - The Copyright Office is coming to Fordham Law School, and June 11-13 - the Copyright Society's annual meeting at The Sagamore on Lake George.

Technical Issues In Posting Photos To A Blog

2006-05-09T17:45:00.000-04:00

People have complained for years about the photograph that I currently have posted on my profile. Others have praised it strongly. It was taken in 1999. It's a black and white photograph taken by a major photographer named Pascal DeMeester. He used a very old 8 x 10 Polaroid camera. That means that the Polaroid negative was the size of a sheet of looseleaf paper. He used a color negative to create an interesting effect. We scanned the photograph, retouched it, and I have used it for the web.

I recently asked my friend and client, photographer Jacob Getz www.getzphoto.com to do a headshot for me. That's the photo you see here. Jacob took a number of great photographs and took some with interesting poses. I'm not particularly photogenic, so the man does miracles.

The files that he provided with me originally were for print publication or high resolution web publication. The files were much larger than the 300 MB per photo that Blogger permits. He was kind enough to reduce the file size and provide me with this version, which I'm able to post. I'm trying to replace the photograph that I have in my current profile, and the problem is that Blogger requires a photograph to already have a URL for it to serve as your "profile" photograph. I will try posting this, then using the posted photograph to change my profile photograph.

As I announced in an earlier post, I am planning a Spring Cleaning for Small Firm Life (what they call an extreme makeover on the West Coast). Figuring out how to update a photograph and how to better handle photographs generally is on the agenda.

Since I'm giving a presentation on May 17 at the New York County Lawyers' Association on creating a blog, I would really like to have a handle on these elementary issues.

How To Advertise a Blog

2006-05-01T23:12:00.000-04:00

This is a snapshot of Small Firm Life's killer advertising campaign. From March 22, 2006 through May 1, 2006, we've achieved two clicks. We've also gotten 1,937 impressions. People are seeing the ad (featured at the top left of the screenshot), but obviously fighting back a desire to click. The total cost for this nationwide ad blitz is thirty-three cents. Initially, the campaign was limited to New York, but I increased the geographic footprint to the United States. I also added the word "blawg" and "solo practice". Cost per click: 16.5 cents. Cost per impression: .0001703 cents. 125 people searching "blawg" now presumably know - at least subliminally - that Small Firm Life exists.

Look out, William Randolph Hearst - the micromedia micromarketing age of publishing is here!

Small Firm Life is finding true value in the Google Adsense program, even within our frugal parameters and an international assault is being considered.

Good Links From a Blog: The Patry Copyright Blog

2006-05-01T22:29:00.000-04:00

I am an avid fan of Professor Patry's Copyright Blog. I'd say it's become pretty much required reading for lawyers serious about copyright. Professor Patry's deeply reasoned and well-researched posts appear almost daily, exhibiting a breathtaking erudition and a virtuoso grasp of his subject. He writes with the confidence of someone who can tell us how a judge bungled a copyright issue in the latest decision, and doesn't mind pointing it out. He's also got fiercely held opinions on policy issues, which make tackling some very technical issues fun, no matter what your copyright politics are. I don't usually read the comments, but I have noted that he attracts some of the best in the field.

In his post of April 30, he writes about a Los Angeles photographer suing the country of Burundi for copyright infringement. Burundi's 10,000 franc note has what appears to be an engraved rendering of the Californian's photograph.

I've noticed that Prof. Patry is good about creating links to PDF files to all sorts of things. In this case, a PDF of the complaint, which has a color photograph of both the allegedly infringed work, along with a color image of the 10,000 franc note. His blog notes that he "created" the link, and I can click to the PDF and even save it to my computer if I'd like, but can't tell how or where it is stored. In a couple of weeks I hope to do a "spring cleaning" of my blog, putting a blogroll together, removing the nasty Google Ads featuring my low-cost competitors, and trying to add as many bells & whistles as I can.

According to alexa.com, Prof. Patry's blog rates #444,137 as of today. That's some pretty serious traffic, and it does not look like he has added many bells and whistles to drive traffic to his site. In fact, his template still has the "edit me" links from the Blogger template. Just shows that a serious commitment to quality will attract visitors.

Federal Bar Association

2006-04-30T15:41:00.000-04:00

I was invited to Washington, D.C. to speak at a leadership training event for the Federal Bar Association. The FBA is a 16,000 member nationwide organization. If you are a lawyer working for the federal government or litigating in the federal courts, this is a terrific bar association for you. I have been a member for a number of years and have found it to be very rewarding. The FBA has chapters throughout the nation and a staff and national headquarters in DC. It is strictly non-partisan.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2006-04-30T15:37:00.000-04:00

Lawyer Steve Filler wrote a post on his Greencounsel blog on an upcoming film of interest "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The film was made by friends of mine in Los Angeles and sounds terrific.

Two-Monitor Time Saver

2006-04-22T21:25:00.000-04:00

Attorneys who come to my office are sometimes wowed by the fact that I have two 17" flatscreen monitors. They are Samsung 730B and are just terrific. I don't understand how attorneys who have to juggle a lot can work with just one. It's great for cutting and pasting, working from different sources, entering time or doing another task without leaving a main document that you are "really" working on. Looking at a PDF on one screen, and writing about it in a Wordperfect document on the other. Just buy another monitor, and plug & play. I've checked out the really big monitors and they seem to daze me with their size and price. My control panel shows that I could put in a third, but unless you're an addicted day trader or sports addict, that seems a little over the top. Then again, when Gillette put another blade in my razor . . .

P.S. My last blog post went out unproofread. I use a macro to create the section symbol. 17 USC (Section Symbol) 107. The macro is (Control + S). Well, to Blogger that apparently means "Publish" so it just threw my unpolished post into the blogosphere. I'm starting to be concerned about lawyers using web-based apps. Sorry to subscribers who received two versions.

Ben Cowgill's SoloBlawg

2006-04-21T22:35:00.000-04:00

Some time ago, I noticed that Smallfirmlife was getting visits from an address with the word "Cowgill" in it. I regularly visit Sitemeter (the green button at the bottom of my blog), and by clicking on a button called "referrals" it will tell me. I tried visiting the site, but it was "under construction". If you want to see who visits this blog, you can click and explore now. Scroll down and try it. If you want Sitemeter to keep your stats secret, you can pay them $$$.

Well, I kept getting referrals from the same address, and it turns out that an attorney from Lexington Kentucky named Ben Cowgill who specializes in representing lawyers who run into trouble has launched a blog called SoloBlawg. Next time you've had one too many mint juleps at the Derby, you know who to call. Seriously speaking, Ben's blog links to his professional website that reveals a very impressive career in legal ethics and discipline and innovative uses of technology.

Ok, it may be that Smallfirmlife's admiration for Ben and his blog border on jealousy. Let's explore why. The photo is fresh, dynamic and professional. The content is focused, helpful, well written. Useful for the sole practitioner. And the design of the blog itself has a number of well-done features. For example, the nice copyright notice with Ben's signature. Good, clean design.

Even better, Ben's blog attacks and solves the ethical issues of blogging in a confident, lawyerly style. First, he has a box on the blog in his bio section that says:
For information about Mr. Cowgill's services as an attorney,please visit:Benjamin Cowgill, www.cowgill.com This link is an advertisementfor legal services.

Second, his disclaimer reads as follows:

This weblog is published by Cowgill Consulting. It is not an advertisement for legal services.This weblog is a exercise in journalism, not legal advice. It should not be relied upon as a substitute for legal advice from a qualified attorney regarding any actual legal issue or dispute. Nothing on this web site should be construed as legal advice or perceived as creating an attorney-client relationship.

Well done. A confident, simple solution elegantly executed. Smallfirmlife's new rainy day project is to figure out how he did all of that and to shamelessly copy it without giving him any credit. Compare 17 U.S.C. Section 107. More comments on Ben's great new blog to come.

Reflective Lawyering Blog: Quality of Life for Lawyers

2006-04-19T15:18:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, one of the first people I spoke to about blogging was attorney Arnie Herz. I asked him questions about his experience with blogging, and I used the information for an article I wrote for the New York Law Journal. Arnie maintains legal sanity - not just in his practice of law, but that's the name of his blog. In the whirlwind of trying to figure out all of the technical aspects of blogging, I did not take the time to visit his site and really spend time with the content. I now have taken the time to do so, and I highly recommend you doing the same. Arnie advocates reflective lawyering, studies the effects of stress on lawyers and teaches skills to help lawyers in all walks of life deal with the slings and arrows of practice. The blog is quite scholarly, usually pointing the reader to late-breaking works of scholarship or practice developments in the field.

If you're feeling burnt out and don't have time to make it to your local Zen dojo, stop by Legal Sanity for a cool, refreshing drink of water.

PS. I tried to get a partial screenshot of the Legal Sanity blog to intro this story. Using the Microsoft Paint program, I removed the bottom part of the screen. As inserted in Blogger, the result is pretty awkward, leaving blank space as you can see.

Paint Beats Adobe For Inserting Screenshots Into Your Blog

2006-04-18T20:27:00.000-04:00

I use a Windows/PC system. To save a screenshot, I hit "Alt" and the "Prt Scr" button on the keyboard at the same time. Then I went into Microsoft Paint (this program is found under accessories in your computer). I clicked on "Edit" then hit "Paste".

That operation pasted the file into the Paint program, which I then saved on my computer. In creating my Blogger post, I hit the photo button, picked the large and center format, then selected the file that I'd saved on my computer.

This seems a pretty easy and organized way of collecting screenshots. I tried using Adobe to convert the screenshots and it simply took a very long time and ultimately did not work. Very disappointing and expensive program. I'm currently using screenshots as exhibits to a complaint I am filing in an Anti-cybersquatting action, which prompted me to think about how to post them to a blog. The Paint program creates bitmap files. I haven't messed around with it, but the bitmap files probably convert into good PDFs.

Schopenhauer on Blogs; Playblogs v Problogs

2006-04-17T21:48:00.000-04:00

". . . much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope's words:
For ever reading, never to be read.

from "On Thinking for Yourself", Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

I was thinking about how, for a lawyer, it makes a lot of sense to have a blog that maintains a spirit of experimentation, personality and playfulness. And then another blog that is designed to impress or advocate a particular viewpoint. Blogging not only facilitates this Jekyll and Hyde behavior, the technology is simply set up for it. For lawyers in small practices, a blog devoted to an area of interest that has no bearing on what goes on in the daily practice, whether law-related or a hobby, has got to be a fulfilling thing.

For example, I am planning to launch a "professional" blog in a matter of weeks or months. It will be devoted to a semi-scholarly inquiry into a rather narrow aspect of one area of legal practice. I hope that it will become a point of reference, a way for me to keep up on developments in the area, and a way for people who like my work product to take notice of me, a way to serve existing clients and to meet new ones.

How many of us have heard speakers move into completely irrelevant and annoying personal topics? Done well, personal topics help to illustrate a point. But when done poorly, one has the impression that the speaker has no one to share more intimate thoughts with, so is constrained to air them in an inappropriate forum - fulfilling a deep emotional need.

So I think that keeping a "Playblog" and a "Problog" would help a lawyer from running into that problem. An occasional link from Pro to Play might be appropriate for those readers interested in a more personal relationship to follow up.

The reason I thought of Schopenhauer is that I thought: I am sure that someone has already thought of all this, written it, and I'm probably going to throw out an obvious observation that anyone grounded in this technology will perceive as self-evident. But, rather than researching the heck out of it, I found solace in Schopenhauer:

"Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts of another that we have read are crumbs from another's table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest."

According to Schopenhauer, we lawyers and our citations must be getting duller and sillier by the minute. So why am I quoting a guy who says a guy who quotes has robbed his writing of all effectiveness? Most of the "best" blogs are strings of links, which are really just quotes. Nothing wrong with that, but I think Schopenhauer would say - if we don't take some risks and share some original thinking - the blogosphere will be the duller for it.

Traffic Index #2: Tax Day in the Blogosphere

2006-04-16T11:04:00.000-04:00

This is Smallfirmlife's Second Traffic Index. Rankings of blogs and websites worldwide by traffic according to alexa.com as of April 15, 2006. Traffic Index #1 is found here at my post of March 10.

bagandbaggage.com no statistics available
google.com 2
microsoft.com 14
blogger.com 18
cnn.com 22
disney.com 24
forbes.com 187
irs.gov 359 (tax day)
playboy.com 774
pagesix.com 887
gawker.com 2,145
westlaw.com 2,890
variety.com 3,689
general electric 3,640
sex.com 4,222
instapundit.com 4,703
lexis.com 4,752
wonkette.com 7,127
the pentagon 10,937
jossip.com 13,987
ftv.com 16,700
overlawyered.com 95,614
us secret service 130,539
Ku Klux Klan 250,171
OPEC 259,884
American Nazi Party 372,751
parishilton.com 442,197 (under construction)
patrycopyrightblog 470,057
skullandbonesjps 518,528
smallfirmlife 1,188,011
Dowd & Marotta 1,478,589
BoiesSchiller&Flexner 5,166,704

Blogging Cures Procrastination!

2006-04-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

Smallfirmlife's author is now writing a book. Excuses to the publisher for missing deadlines are falling on deaf ears. So with all tasks set aside, Chapter 9 on Injunctions and Seizures in Copyright Proceedings and Chapter 14 on Damages to be written on a beautiful sunny Saturday, what to do?

Simple. Blog. This blog post today was intended to be a quickie: on the topic of self-citation for bloggers (citing your own posts or writings) and self-plagiarism (an unethical evil rampant in academe that I'd never heard or thought of until recently).

But I wanted to open my quickie post with a clever one-liner basically saying that "the God Procrastinus has visited my house". I wanted "Procrastinus" to be lit up. Not being sure that Procrastinus was an actual mythological figure (I didn't think so), I of course googled. Well, according to procrastinationhelp.com, "procrastinus" is a Latin word for "forward to tomorrow". One blogger, perhaps the only "Bog Blog" out there, speaks of the "Many Roads to Procrastinus." Then there's a blogger named Procrastinus who is "so money and he doesn't even know it" according to Vegas Joe.

Smallfirmlife then discovered the little-known Greek God Dilbertus Procrastinus who perfected the saunter on Mount Olympus (this sport has been discontinued in our modern Olympic Games). Plenty of support for my bold-facing the much-secretly-worshipped God of lascivious delay. Smallfirmlife plans to make elaborate sacrifices at this temple.

But for those who want to ward off Procrastinus, or to take a detour from the bog where he lives, there's a very serious website dedicated to procrastination maintained by the the University of Calgary that will permit you to take a self-test, learn theories about combatting an overcoming procastination, and study the personality types that develop these problems. The cures? Learned Industriousness, Energy Regulation, and Goal Setting.

Smallfirmlife will take the survey and figure out the source of the inner immovable object. One of these days.

Green Lawyer Blawg: Energy and National Security

2006-04-08T14:18:00.000-04:00

A number of years ago I served as a Co-Chair of the Entertainment Media Intellectual Property & Sports Law Section of the New York County Lawyers' Association. One of my former Co-Chairs, an attorney named Stephen Filler, moved his office to Westchester and launched a thriving solo practice. Stephen has launched a new blawg called Greencounsel.com focused on environmental and energy issues. He became very active in the safety campaign surrounding the Indian Point power plant and has become politically active because of that. Let's hope that in the near future our state and federal governments will sober up and start treating these issues as serious health, economic and national security concerns. Good domestic energy policy would create jobs, stimulate the economy by reducing costs, reduce the risks of oil dependence, and let us breathe freely. We're drowning in our own waste as our political leaders cheer the process on. As Filler's latest blog post argues, solar panels are very very serious business. Let's hope that smallfirm bloggers will help to bring our government to its senses.

It's gray and rainy in New York City.

Marshall McLuhan on Blogging - Snowballs at the Speed of Light

2006-04-01T10:59:00.000-05:00

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher who looked at media through an anthropological lens. He wrote in aphorisms, played a lot and invented Paris Hilton (long before she was born) in an essay called the Mechanical Bride. He is very readable. He reviewed history and saw how changes in media precipitated wars because they change hierarchical structures. McLuhan would have said that the internet made the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessary, for example. For McLuhan, media is the extension of man.

But smallfirmlife firmly eschews philosophical meanderings and hews closely to the theme of how the little guy lawyer can make her way through all of this nonsense (while paying the rent). Every communication has its emotional tone. Sending a messenger is not sending a fedex is not sending a certified letter is not sending a fax is not sending a first class letter is not sending an email is not leaving a voice mail. And lunch is not a phone call. And an oral statement at a public meeting is not a "reply to all" email is not a conference call is not a podcast.

All of the foregoing are tools in a lawyer's toolbox. We can take them out to fix things or to break things, depending on the occasion. The medium has its consequences, its shelf life and its reincarnation (look out confirmation hearing!!!). Instinct and calculation lead us to choose the proper salves and liniments, or the appropriate weapons. These are the same types of calculations McLuhan made, evaluating these extensions of ourselves.

Chapter 2 of McLuhan's Understanding Media analyzes media as "hot" or "cool". Radio is hot. Television is cool. Cool media requires the recipient to fill in much of the information. Hot media fills the senses. McLuhan goes on and on - every bit worth reading, very accessible now, but years ago I couldn't understand what the big deal was.

Print is a cool medium. I think blogging as interpreted by the acculturated practictioners is super cool. I'm new to blogging, this post is hot (although in a cool medium). Full, expository sentences --- not one link. Very print media. Looking at supercool blogs -- you can't understand many posts without taking action: linking and clicking to sites that the blogger has referred to cryptically. This is the function of poetry in literature - to grab the imagination and make you work.

McLuhan also analyzed the delivery system of a medium. RSS, a blog's delivery system, is superhot. It delivers to nodes that the recipient has hardwired for maximum impact to the exclusion of all else - at a speed approaching the speed of light. Not just one recipient, but a willing community. And that community's superheated response approaches the speed of human cognition.

By launching a blog, a lawyer is entering a superhot snowball fight. I recently noticed one of the top attorney blogger/critics (almost) apologizing for having criticized a consultant for an attorney launching a blog for putting up a 'static' page. When I interviewed experienced bloggers, they talked about the emotional effects of blogging. The Chilling Effects website boomerangs cease and desist letters on lawyers. I think that perhaps lawyers in the blogosphere will be very very careful to be constructive to newbies. For their own survival. Compelling blogging may mean taking emotional risks or exploring ideas outside one's specialty. A confession of ignorance on a blog (in the legal profession ordinarily a sign of weakness) may result in friendships, information and allies. The large firm (all knowing mainframe computer) as opposed to linked small firms (networked small computers). To network properly, the small firm practitioner must be truthful about strengths to receive assignments. To receive proper assistance, the small firm practitioner must confess a need or ignorance.

Is the blogosphere the place for all of that to happen? Tune in. Exchanges of emails or legal briefs fosters petty linear vindictiveness, and the emotional climate of schadenfreude (the guilty pleasure of watching others suffer). I don't think that will be the emotional tonality of the blogosphere. If you've ever been hit with a soft, powdery snowball by a friend, you know it's one of life's great pleasures. If someone threw iceballs, you just walked away. Getting 86'd from a blogroll may be the extreme sanction, McLuhan's global village's equivalent of ostracism and exile that was the ultimate punishment to the Ancients.

USB Plug N Play Hassle - How The Alphabet Can Solve It

2006-03-31T21:12:00.000-05:00

Ok - before I start the topic of this post that drew you in, I have to update you on a few developments. 3lephiphany has quoted Small Firm Life right at the top of his blogosphere taxonomy blog. He's looking at blogs the way Aristotle and Galileo looked at the stars - and Small Firm Life made the cut!

Ok - you're right, it went to my head. Then - as if my week were not exciting enough - Denise Howell of Bag & Baggage said Small Firm Life was cool! ("Too cool" was the precise quote). Let me tell you why that's gnarly (bag and baggage is Californian). Small Firm Life admires greatly Denise's cheap low-tech podcast that celebrates its lo-fi I'mtalkingintomycellphoneduringmycommute vibe. Not only that, but Denise declared the demise of the large firm as we know it based on tech developments in her podcast of 5/19/2005 based (in turn) on a theory of shared knowledge that was quite smallfirmlife in its take on the future of the legal profession. And if none of that impresses you, she sprinkles her podcasts with stories about buying the Paris Hilton line of costume jewelry on Amazon for girls in the neighborhood while raising a kid and holding down a job at Reed Smith!!!!!!!

Ok. Enough celebrity worship. And enough paragraphs that begin with OK. I had a problem plugging in a 1 GIG Sandisk USB storage device. These are great toys about $50.00 (after rebate) that you can put all kinds of files on. My partner started using them for intellectual property classes that we teach at NYU's night school. He just plugged it into NYU's laptop, hit the drive that said "removable device" and opened up his Powerpoint presentation. I thought he was a geek wearing it around his neck until I tried it. Have Sandisk, will travel. Maybe Paris Hilton can help us on the style front by slapping some bling onto this new neckwear.

So when plugging my Sandisk into my desktop, the drive showed on my network map, and the computer recognized the device, but I couldn't access my files. Last weekend, I bought a USB digital recorder Olympus DM-10 and had the same issue. Both times, the solution was the same. The DM-10 acts as an external hard drive.

Go to "My Computer". Right click. Click on "Manage". Click on "Storage". Click on "Disk management". Wait. When the drives show up, maximize the screen. You will see your problem device. Right click on it. Left click on "Change drive letter and paths". Assign an exotic letter of the alphabet. My Sandisk is now my "Z" drive and my Oympus DM10 is now my "W" drive. Apparently, the Plug N Play assigns conflicting letters of the alphabet.

Since I had to have a tech guy explain all of this, and my googlings on the topic and troubleshooting using HELP were useless, Small Firm Life just saved you a small fortune in time and wear and tear on your adrenal cortex. Go score a gig of bling and say your ABC's.

Reverse Blogging & Obsjur Epiphanies of a 3L

2006-03-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

I check my Sitemeter (the button at the very bottom of my blog) to see who is visiting. Well, I can't tell everything about them, but I can tell what city they are from and if they've linked in from another blog. Sitemeter lists by location and by referral page. I can also tell if they've reached me as a result of a search - I can see part of the search. Interesting.

As I noted in an earlier post, I got a mention on myshingle.com, and the hits keep coming. That blog must have some CRAZY traffic. I checked out myshingle and it had really good material for small and solo practitioners, so I understand why. The other day I noticed some hits coming from The Proper Bostonian which appears to be a photoblog of very good looking young notquitesober people having an amazing party. Go figure!

Today I got some referrals from a site called 3LEpiphany.typepad.com. I visited it and thought: wow! This is exactly the site that I was looking for when I started looking into legal blogs. It breaks down blogs by taxonomy (types of blogs) and by practice area. It's done in a very intelligent manner by an OSU student. I emailed him to find out whether OSU was Oregon, Oklahoma or Ohio - Ohio it was! It's a blog that I spent a little time with and I want to go back and spend some more. I hope he keeps it up. Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage talked about setting up a site like this on a sites she'd reserved - blawgs.com - I think that's the site she said she'd reserved. She was looking for volunteers was setting up a Wiki and I thought of emailing her, but I've got a million projects going in the next few weeks, maybe in late April.

Cruising the blogs that Ian Best (the 3L having the epiphany) put together, I found Ian's link to Obsjur - a Portugese legal professor who has launched a worldwide observatory of the legal blogosphere. It's linked to a blog called LEFIS (Europe) subtitled "The Weblog of the Legal Framework for the Information Society Network". The latest post is "Broadband for All".

I've strayed from smallfirmlife's narrow focus and mission. That's the point. There are some wild things just a click or two away, and some Portugese law professor is studying our blogs and blogging behavior for the Observatorio de la Blogosfera Jurídica. Some wildly ambitious 3L from the Buckeye State is reshaping our legal world and creating free legal resources that will be really helpful to us. Dig in!

Lawyer Podcasting-Extreme 'Casts iPod & Olympus

2006-03-26T12:50:00.000-05:00

I have been doing a lot of digging on podcasting. I'm now getting my new music from the KEXP podcast and the Tartan Podcast (for the funniest podcast award I'm nominating Mark Hunter's tartanpodcast #10 on the dangers of cancelling your television license in Scotland).

I am completely hooked on Denise Howell's Bag and Baggage podcast. Her first podcast was from a cell phone outdoors overlooking the Pacific Highway. She also podcasts from her car as she drives to work. She's an intellectual property attorney from Reed Smith. I think she's an inspiration to small firm potential podcasters because she's using extremely cheap technology in a very creative way that is rough and unvarnished. Big firms usually like to make things perfect before they are published (as do small firms). I think that in blogging and podcasting, we will see the whole range of legal personas emerge - from the rough & ready warts and all to the superslick ultrapremium production.

So, I think that this post may be my first "real" podcasts. Let me explain. First, I broke smallfirmlife's cardinal rule, which is to try it cheap or free. I wandered by J&R and was sold an Olympus DM10 voice recorder. How it happened was that I was looking at cheap MP3 recording solutions and the clerk told me that if I was looking for quality to look at real voice recorders. The DM10 has a cradle to work with your computer, tons of functions and lots to figure out. Food for another blog. So after a number of travails, I made a rather awkward recording of Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Papers #1. I was reading from a 10-point font version of it from Project Gutenberg and was reading it cold, so my voice is quite awkward. You can check the audio quality. I was holding the recorder in my hand in my conference room and you can hear traffic passing by my office.

The second podcast was made from a $39.99 iFM connection to my iPOD. There is a pinpoint tiny microphone recorder in it that I couldn't believe caught ANY sound. I recorded this podcast as Small Firm Life #1 and dedicate it to Denise Howell. I walked quickly and breathlessly down city streets, rode in the subways, and tried to record while doing all of this. There is more info on the process of recording on the podcast itself.

To get podcasts onto the 'net from Blogger, you've literally got to subscribe to a whole 'nother service, since Blogger does not support audio files. Rather than dump Blogger and all of my posts (Blogger is free), I found an article on podcastingnews.com showing me how to use Blogger with another service. I chose libsyn.com, since they were recommended by Todd Cochrane. Denise Howell chose to keep her blogspot, so I'm not moving for now.

Lots more to say, but I have real work to do. Motion to certify a defendant class under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Lighthearted stuff!

Audacity of Podcasting & Popping

2006-03-22T11:18:00.000-05:00

Napoleon's famous quote was "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace". If I'm not butchering the French, it was Napoleon's philosophy of war - always be audacious. A short, insecure balding fellow, he managed to make his mark on the world and impress the ladies. Another famous quote attributed to him "Engage the enemy and see what happens".

Well, I engaged the audacious enemy last night with my first foray into podcasting. At least podcasting as defined by Bart Farkas, who wrote a book about podcasting discussed in one of my earlier posts (I haven't mastered the art of self-citation yet, and I'm in a hurry, so feel free to dig). Farkas said that any time you are creating an MP3 and transmitting it to someone, you are podcasting.

I downloaded the free Audacity software. Go to Audacity.com - you won't find it there, but you'll get a laugh. The software is at sourceforge.net, it's free and open source. In Secrets of Podcasting, Farkas said that it was all you'd need.

It was easy to set up. I had a major hassle figuring out how to get Audacity to recognize my microphone, but once I did, we were friends. I took the online tutorial, which showed me how to make Bart Simpson's yells louder, softer, and bullet-shaped, or to delete a word from his dialogue with his teacher. Fun stuff for someone who knows nothing about audio engineering.

I recorded a passage from New York's Pattern Jury Instructions (I use them to draft complaints). I'm drafting a cybersquatting complaint and wanted to add state law claims that have not been preempted by the Lanham Act. My quote involved around the concept that "one is not entitled to reap where he has not sown." PJI 3:58 (1997 Supp. at 270).

I exported the file to the MP3 format. I played it, it worked. I put it in my Itunes library as "Track 1" of the Album "Procrastination Blues" (I am supposed to be writing a book and catching up on billables for clients). I then emailed it to my partner.

So I'm a podcaster, and it cost me nothing! The process, including my fumblings, stumblings, tutorials, and not understanding a single thing to start with took a maximum of two and one half hours (I actually downloaded the Audacity software in another session).

Problem: I am using a USB Senheisser microphone that I use for my Dragon dictation software. It "popped" all of my "P"s, so the sound quality of the recording was pretty awful. Looking at the recording, you can see from the sound waves that all of the "P"s are off the charts. I will have to explore whether I can eliminate popping through the Audacity software or whether I need new hardware. Consistent with this blog's philosophy, I will first explore the cheap or free solutions before buying a lot of expensive stuff I may never use. Fodder for future posts.

Lesson of the day: if you follow Napoleon's advice on audacity in podcasting, you may get popped.

Create Your Own Blog Workshop

2006-03-15T21:04:00.000-05:00

Ron Katter, Co-Chair of the Committee on Solo and Small Practice of the New York County Lawyers' Association, has invited me to give a presentation called "Create Your Own Blog" at 6:00 p.m. on May 17, 2006 at 14 Vesey Street. In the meantime, I would like to collect success (and failure) stories about small firm practitioners and their blogs, and any tips anyone would like to share. I'll be happy to credit anyone who contributes tips, strategies, dos or don'ts or who can recommend places in the blogosphere that have good information on these topics.

At NYCLA's website, you can visit Ron's committee's page, send him an email and find out what they are all about.

This image looks like it was taken at an angle that approximates NYCLA's distance from the World Trade Center. Before 9/11 NYCLA was in shade and darkness. Today this historic building and St. Paul's Church, across the street, are bathed in bright sunshine due to that tragedy. Every time I walk down Vesey Street, the open sky feels heavy.
http://www.nyctourist.com/images/wtc/wtc1.jpg

Video Emails & Video Skype

2006-03-14T19:43:00.000-05:00

Ok, I bought a Logitech webcam. It takes only a couple of minutes to plug in. I can snap a photo of myself in an instant and plug the file in. I am not sure that I want too many pictures of myself sitting at my desk, but it's fun to do at least once.

I bought the expensive one that adjusts to the light and follows you around $109 at J&R. Not sure that I needed to spend all of that money, but I've been trying to push the tech envelope and you only live once.

It takes only a second to snap a photo or record a video (with sound) and attach the file to an email (the software does it automatically). It seems like a fun way to communicate with family (my cousin got a kick out of it). I'll have to try it on my siblings. I can think of a couple of business development applications, but they'd be more likely to send potential clients screaming in the opposite direction.

I did a video Skype today with my client in Austria. The first videoconference for either of us. It was a lot of fun - we've never met in person, so it was a great icebreaker and helps break down the language barrier. I suspected that he smoked cigarettes while we were talking, but now I know it's true. I think that this will be a good business application, and will be particularly good in diffusing and humanizing tense situations long distance. I like the idea of course, that Skype is free! See my earlier post on how to get free phone calls through Skype.

Podcasting for Lawyers

2006-03-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

I think that I will be writing my next NY Law Journal column about podcasting. Yesterday I finished Secrets of Podcasting: Audio Blogging for the Masses by Bart G. Farkas. Very well written and good intro. I thought he was a little heavy on comparing various MP3 players and a little light on tips and tricks once you've gotten plugged in and set up. But overall a great, easy intro to the topic and tips on doing things cheaply. Very good explanation of what RSS is (Really Simple Syndication). Farkas also wrote "Playboy: The Mansion Official Strategy Guide" - so he's got some real street cred.

Law.com has an article with a brief list of lawyers who podcast. Blawgcast.com appears to be devoted to the subject, has links to some legal podcasts and what look like some good how-to articles. I'll have to read it. Lawmarketing.com has another good article interviewing veteran lawyer-podcasters. Some lawyers podcast their conference calls, others by talking into a cell phone on the highway. Farkas defines podcasting as posting an audio file to the web. Check out audiobooksforfree.com - interesting selection of classics, but you have to pay for decent quality.

I downloaded Audacity sound editing software for free (at Farkas') recommendation. Seems to work, but I'll have to spend more time with it. I will mess around with my current microphone and see where it goes before investing in a nice condenser microphone, preamp, headphones and portable digital sound recorder. I hate to spend money on toys I may not use.

Traffic Index #1: Where Small Firms Stand

2006-03-10T20:23:00.000-05:00

Traffic statistics of a few selected small firm websites and blogs in large bold, along with others for comparison purposes. Traffic statistics courtesy alexa.com New York trademark attorney Marty Schwimmer's The Trademark Blog attracts more traffic than Skadden and some major bar associations. Lexblog, a guy who helps lawyers make blogs, gets more traffic than the New York State Bar Association. Alexa.com would not give me the stats on Arnie Herz of Legal Sanity or Paris Hilton. Gov't stats are for English-language websites.

Internet Movie Database 32
USPTO 975
Library of Congress 1,188
New York State Court System 1,841
White House 2,343
Senator Hillary Clinton 4,207
Second Circuit Court of Appeals 4,858
ABA 10,361
Harper's Magazine 33,221
Gov't of France 51,206
Lexblog 98,164
NYSBA 130,007
SCHWIMMERLEGAL (TM BLOG) 192,853
SKADDEN 217,630
Government of Jordan 278,161
ABCNY 513,770
MYSHINGLE.COM 568,345
NYCLA 579,939
FBA 721,077
MASUR & ASSOCIATES 1,325,250
Copyright Society USA 1,979,200
WAHAB RIVELES & MEDENICA 3,503,599
DOWD & MAROTTA 4,814,282
MALI MINISTRY OF CULTURE 5,165,701

Sitemeter II & Coretta Scott King & Myshingle.com

2006-03-09T21:34:00.000-05:00

Here's what my week looked like, according to Sitemeter. For some reason I can't figure out how to delete a picture, hence the blank extra box. You should see a chart!

Last Friday, my column on blogging appeared in the NY Law Journal. So I checked out Sitemeter (the little button at the bottom of my blog) a little more closely. I learned that people from places like Mexico and Reston, Virginia were checking out my blog - even before the column came out.

Reston, Virginia? I figured that's where all of the Patriot Act funding must be going - to spy on bloggers, who by definition are making communications open to foreigners.

You see the spike? It wasn't the NY Law Journal. And my guess is that the Virginia guest was not Pentagon or CIA-based. It was a woman named Catherine Elefant who runs myshingle.com. I got a nice little mention for launching a blog and BLAM - my Sitemeter showed tons of "referrals" and that most of them came from that blog. A real show of blogpower! I would have suspected that the hits would have come in from the NY Law Journal, but times have changed.

Last night I went to NYCLA's (NY County Lawyers' Ass'n) Tribute to Coretta Scott King. Amazing speeches, the fieriest given by civil rights firebrand Norman Siegel. I met Steve Landis, chair of NYCLA's Employment & Labor law committee and a partner at Shebitz Berman. He told me that he'd posted a comment to my blog. I said I hadn't seen it. Sure enough, I checked the Blogger Dashboard, and there's a thingy that says "Moderate Comments". I clicked on it and got my first post!!!

Repetitive Stress, Voice Recognition Software & Macros

2006-03-07T20:45:00.000-05:00

I am writing this post with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8.0 voice recognition software. I took up this software this summer when my wrist was injured from typing too much. It takes a while to learn how to dictate, but within half an hour of setting it up you can really get it to type for you. There are many little tricks to learning how to dictate and punctuate, and to improve the software's accuracy. I recommend it for anyone who is tired of typing and who does not have an officemate who will be bothered by the sound of dictation. It is particularly good for reading in long passages of text that you want to quote, a chore that I never relished. It makes proofreading tougher and it makes you think before you speak, but overall it's a terrific program that should improve your efficiency. You really need at least 500 MB of RAM, and since RAM is so cheap you should really have a gig or two.

Something else I did last summer at my editor's suggestion and instruction, was to create a number of macros. I had messed around with macros many years ago and they brought me nothing but grief and confusion. My new experience with macros was terrific, I found a number of repetitive things could be recorded, particularly for legal citations. I did some research and on the WordPerfect web site there was a lawyer named Doug Loudenback in Oklahoma who had created an entire library of macros for practice in those states. He's written a free online manual called A Common Person's WordPerfect Macro Manual. It looks quite intimidating. The best macro I've written was "Respectfully yours," followed by two hard returns and my signature. I suspect that if I invest more time in it, I'd find a lot of other ways to reduce repetitive work through macros.

Printer Hell - Death and Resurrection of HP 4000

2006-03-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

Last night I was doing research on Westlaw when my printer, which had been cranking and wheezing for quite some time, just kept freezing up. This had happened a few times in the recent past. I looked under the hood, and noticed that the printer - an HP Laserjet 4000N - had been built in January 1, 1998. I figured that it was time to finally make the big move to a new printer. In our eight years together, I'd gotten a tremendous amount of wear and tear out of the incredibly trusty machine.

I did my research online to PC Magazine and for what I want - superfast black and white, to heck with graphics quality - nobody seems to touch HP. They of course discontinued the printer I love and have changed it to the 4250. I don't need the "N" since my printer sits under my monitors and acts as a standalone. "N" stands for network version and adds $500 to the price. We have four printers in our small firm, plus a networked photocopier that can double as a printer/high speed scanner. Early on, I decided that no one should be more than an arm's length away from a printer, since labor costs us a lot more than hardware.

In thinking about a printer, my major concern is that I can never afford downtime and need absolute reliability (lots of motion practice). I grabbed my partner this morning and made him come to J&R with me (it's three blocks away). We enjoy sharing the pain of making big purchases together. He warned that a new printer is not necessarily better. I was impressed by the reviewer's timing it at over 41 PPM. Price - $859. I got them to knock $10 off the price because I am a NYCLA member.

I installed it this evening. The speed is amazing, but it is LOUD. This is a quality of life issue. What was HP thinking? I drilled down a little further on the internet by googling (Hp Laserjet 4250 problems) and found that others had complaints along the same lines. I wanted a printer, not a blowdryer.

I researched even further, and there are kits to maintain HP 4000 printers and you can do things like replace rollers and fusers and websites dedicated to giving you kits so that you can do it yourself like printertechs.com ufix-it.com and printerworks.com.

I'm going to stick with the blowdryer 4250 and try to figure out a way to deaden the sound, but I will probably invest the time and energy into preserving the lifespan of our other HP 4000s.

ATLA & Fordham & Yonah Schimmel Knishery

2006-03-05T15:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I woke up very early and wrote a book review on a three-volume treatise on Art Law written by Ralph Lerner and Judith Bresler. Amazing book, and absolutely essential if you are going to dive into that world. I'm going to let it simmer in my brain, give it a rewrite and submit it to my editor at the New York Law Journal on Monday.

Then I ran off to a Fordham Law School Alumni luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria. It's always fun to attend. Got to hang out with Judge Loretta Preska a bit - she always wears these great hats and is a lot of fun. Kelly O'Neill-Levy was there - Kelly works for Judge Sherry Klein Heitler and I suspect will be a judge herself shortly. Ran into Tom Suozzi, long-shot candidate for Attorney General. We spoke a bit, I like his clean up Albany campaigns and we have some mutual dislikes. I ran into my good friend Carol Remy who is a happy real estate lawer at Paul Hastings and I discussed my guilt over not yet contributing to the Fordham International Law Journal Alumni Association website. I met John McCarthy of Bainton McCarthy, who was talking to another John McCarthy. They were discussing a third John McCarthy (Class of '29) for whom both had been confused. The Irish have suffered from a terrible shortage of names for quite a few centuries.

I had to leave before getting my rubber chicken and the speeches to go to 60 Centre street to judge a moot court competition for the American Association of Trial Lawyers (ATLA). I thought I'd be a timekeeper or something, but Gary Pillersdorf sat me next to Judge Lou York for the training and proceeded to railroad me into being a judge. I sat in Judge Milton Tingling's courtroom (I hope we left it clean) and watched an amazing round of St. John's v. Columbia Law. St. John's won the round, but wow, these young lawyers were amazing and already practice at a higher level than most attorneys I've dealt with.

On March 8 there will be a charity auction at the New York County Lawyers' Association. I thought that I'd get a gift certificate to the Yonah Schimmel Knishery (founded in 1910). Well, I went in and the woman behind the counter looked at me in disgust "you buy knishes, no certificates". After some haggling, a few phone calls, I was told "come back tomorrow". Since everyone knows that to get a good knish, suffering abuse and yelling back is part of the sacred ritual, I happily returned this morning, scored my gift certificates and ate my blueberry cheese with extra gusto.

Skype & Holocaust Art Recovery

2006-03-02T10:30:00.000-05:00

A client of mine told me to download Skype so that we could talk for free. I was in the middle of a million things and didn't really pay attention. I heard again about Skype through a friend whose father lives in India. He raved about it, but I figured that the quality was not terrific.

I was wrong.

I am now working on a case assisting descendants of Holocaust victims to recover artworks by the artist Egon Schiele. I have a correspondent genealogist in Austria. The image here is a bad thumbnail of a rather racy Schiele artwork currently at the MOMA.

We both downloaded Skype yesterday and were talking for free with an incredible clarity. Much better quality than speakerphone, which requires shouting and cutting each other off, this was a real, crystal-clear conversation.

For me, this was terrific, but my long-distance bills are not that expensive. For Austrians, the long-distance bills are horrendously high. I am looking forward to better communications with people around the world and will be going out to get a video camera to see whether video enhances the interactive experience.

I bought the book Skype Hacks and need to tackle a couple of problems. Apparently Skype lets huge files be transferred attached to emails, which would help us since we've got problems transporting large image files around the world and to multiple adversaries. My firewall is blocking transfers, though, so I will have to figure out how to reconfigure. Very exciting new technology that should make life easier and cheaper. My only concern is not to have another phone ringing from another direction!

Back to Arnie & Oversized Posts

2006-02-23T23:19:00.000-05:00

I just found out that when you post an oversized blog entry, Blogger.com just eats it. I lost about six paragraphs of material - Arnie Herz's wisdom. Sorry everyone. I'm not rewriting it.

To sum up my last post - blogging has raised Arnie's profile, improved his practice, made him money, and makes him happy. He says that blogging really is for everyone and that all lawyers should add this tool to their practice.

Partnertrack & Legal Sanity & Biz-Media-Law Blog

2006-02-23T21:30:00.000-05:00

Last night I attended Partnertrack, a monthly cocktail organized by superstar lawyer Olivera Medenica, Co-Chair of the Entertainment Media Intellectual Property & Sports Law Section of the New York County Lawyers' Association. Olivera always picks a cool new place - this time Gstaad Restaurant on 26th Street. I was running late and the NYCLA website didn't have the details on the party location, so I called Marty Novar, Olivera's Co-Chair to get directions. The place was packed with good-looking professionals - not just lawyers - and everyone was having a good time. Name tags are always geeky, but they make people friendlier and in such great surroundings they almost looked kinda hip. I apologized to Olivera for missing what I hear was her spectacular piano recital at the National Arts Club, given in honor of Judge Buckley, Chief Judge of the Appellate Division, First Department.

With my column deadline looming, I grabbed the opportunity to interview Kaiser Wahab, of Wahab & Medenica. Kaiser said that practically all his new clients come from his blog - that the business he'd gotten was amazing. He said that the clients tended to be younger and tech oriented, and he'd gotten a lot of film business that way. Kaiser built his blog himself and said that his tech-oriented clients would expect that he'd do it that way. He recommended combining the blog with the firm website. I asked him how to do it and he said the fastest and cheapest way would be to hire a tech person, have the person next to you, and to spend a couple of hours learning how to do it yourself. Since that's how my partner and I put together the Dowd & Marotta website, I was very much in tune with that approach.

Kaiser said he would prefer to post weekly, but does it only about twice a month. He says he spends very little time on it. Olivera said that she'd gotten a speaking invitation and some interesting leads from a post she'd blogged on cultural property.

This afternoon I called Arnie Herz. I'm looking at two pages of scratch notes containing information Arnie downloaded on me. Yes, Arnie, you were talking too fast! The first scribble on my legal pad says "tremendous fun" - so I'll rely on my contemporaneous notation to sum up Arnie's reaction to my question of "why blog".

The remaining two pages of notes reflect my brutal cross-examination, during which I teased out the truth: not only is Arnie having fun, but he's got a tremendous audience, is making money, and he loves what he's doing! Arnie and his wife Lori (disclosure - we were all classmates at Fordham Law, Class of '91) - collaborate on the blog and Arnie credits Lori for much of the blogwork.

Legal Sanity posts every other day. They started at zero and over a period of 20 months have built a readership of 18,000. You'll note that the links for Legal Sanity and Arnie Herz take you to the same website/blog combination favored by Kaiser Wahab.

Arnie hired his own web designer. To pull in traffic and host the blog infrastructure, Arnie used Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog. He was very happy with the result. O'Keefe was also recommended by Marty Schwimmer (see my earlier post interviewing Marty of The Trademark Blog). Arnie said that O'Keefe is very busy these days, but that he really knew the legal market. Lexblog listed Legal Sanity in its blogroll, submitted Legal Sanity to search engines, and otherwise made Arnie feel that he got terrific service for an ongoing monthly fee.

Arnie helped me understand some of the Sitemeter (see my earlier post) statistics. If 3,000 people visit your blog 3x per month, you have 9,000 visitors. "Hits" are meaningless, but always the biggest number. Page views are the most important because they tell you how much people actually read.

I asked Arnie whether people could subscribe to Legal Sanity by submitting their email. He said yes, but that very few people used it - most used RSS (see my earlier post on Real Simple Syndication). [[[ Hmm - can I link back to myself?? ]].

Arnie explained the netiquette of blogging: "give props". (Me: Could you spell that?) (Arnie: P-R-O-P-S). Props means crediting people constantly for having come up with ideas. Arnie's a positive guy, so he means thanks, but even the anger bloggers give props to their enemies: it increases their hits.

Sitemeter & Copyright & Park City Utah

2006-02-20T19:06:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in a hotel in in Park City Utah. I just attended the Copyright Society's annual winter meeting. I got to shake hands with Senator Orrin Hatch and hobnob with the Register of Copyrights. Since I'm not a particularly good skier, my entire body feels as if it's been beaten by a rubber hose. Luckily, the outdoor jacuzzi is available for sore muscles.

My column on blogging is due on 2/24. I get back to the office on 2/22. So here are a couple of more observations:

Blogging from a remote location is easy. To log onto my hotel's wireless connection from my laptop, I paid $5.00 for the day. They gave me a password, very simple to get on and check my email. Logging on to Blogger.com was very easy. I entered my user ID and password, clicked on "Small Firm Life" and then clicked on "create post". I'm now entering this information.

I also checked my email and found out that I'd received an email from sitemeter. They emailed me with the number of page views - a detailed day-by-day report. I just gave it a quick glance, but it looked like 15 people checked out 33 pages of content. Since no one left a comment, I suppose I neither offended nor impressed anyone too terribly.

I'll try to set down the bulk of my observations when I return to the office on Wednesday.

Dead Links & Feedburner RSS & Borders Books

2006-02-14T22:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, as you can see, or investigate from my last post, I managed to make a few errors. One, I found a picture of the book Trumpnation on Amazon. I right-clicked, and copied the URL into my Blogger post. I didn't do "preview". I hit "post" and voila, a blank box. The place where the image should have been was blank. Did not have the mojo to figure out how to fix it. Also, one of my links was dead. It was a www spelled out link to the site itself, so I don't know why. Anyway, I did not take the time to figure that out yet. I'm suspecting that hitting the "edit posts" function will help me with that, but that's for another day.

What I did sleuth down in the meantime? Well, if you recall, I tried to get listed in www.blawg.org. They asked me for a "feed url". I typed in the address to this blog and hoped for the best. Since my blog has been up for ages (several days) and I have no hits, no visitors, no comments and not even any spam, I figured that I did something wrong.

My suspicions were correct. There is something called RSS. This stands for really simple syndication. I couldn't figure out what this meant from searching the web, so I bought another book by Biz Stone called Blogging at Borders bookstore on Lower Broadway. They had the Stone Blogging book and another title called something like Blogging for Teens.

The Biz Stone chapter on RSS was completely unhelpful, since it discussed Blogger Pro, a service that no longer exists. There are two ways of making this work for you, each of which I somehow figured out. First, you can install an RSS reader on your own computer. I chose WINRSS. You download it, then it installs an icon on your computer. You then subscribe to various blogs by going to the blogs and clicking on what's usually a colorful little icon.

The other way to use RSS is to "syndicate" your blog. I had my "aha" moment (all this time I have been waiting for something NOT to be free). When going through Blogger, trying to figure out RSS, it will refer you to FeedBurner Feedburner will make up to three blogs attractive to blog search engines (in some way I haven't figured out). I subscribed my two blogs and received feed URLS in return. It will also help to publicize your blog. Let's see if any readers pour in! The cost is $4.99 per month, after a 15 day free trial.

I will try resubmitting my blogs to www.blawg.org and see what happens. They named it Really Simple Syndication just to baffle people like me.

PS While I was trying to figure feedburner out, I sent an email that a real human being responded to intelligently within 5 minutes. WOW!

PPS I also figured out how to put a very cool button on my blogs so that people can subscribe. I will explain and talk about pinging.

The Trademark Blog, Google's Adsense & Sitemeter

2006-02-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

I mentioned that yesterday I read Biz Stone's Who Let the Blogs Out? and saw a mention of Marty Schwimmer and The Trademark Blog. The book was really good and very exciting to someone like myself who writes a lot and would not mind writing a lot more on broader topics. I called Marty, who I knew from meeting at a couple of annual dinners for the Fordham International Law Journal and attending a CLE that he gave years ago at the New York New Media Association.

Marty didn't know who Biz Stone was or that he was in the book. I had already visited Marty's blog and got a sense of it. Short, interesting posts. It's clear he's having fun and not trying to impress anyone by showing off legal knowledge. He seems to keep his content a little racy by including pictures of Perfect 10 Models. Since I stole one of Marty's pictures in my last post, you'll have to search to find it. Marty recommended Mark Partridge's Guiding Rights blog, Susan Scafidi's Counterfeit Chic, and Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs. Partridge's seems like a great inside baseball site for IP folks, Scafidi's is sexy and tantalizing with tons of fashion and intellectual stuff if you're hip on post-post-modernism-post-feminist breathless coverage of the latest fashion stuff. I'm hooked.

O'Keefe seems to be the real deal for any lawyer wanting to get moving on a blog and get a primo practice development tool up and running. Checkout his blogroll (the margin of his blog that lists other blogs) for a list of "real lawyers" and you'll find a lot of examples of what lawyers can do with blogs.

Schwimmer had lots to say - we both stuck on the phone way too long for a blog post to do him justice. He thinks the days of broad topics like The Trademark Blog may be done (I'm crushed, since I just launched a blog called Copyright Litigation on blogger). Marty noted that the blogs O'Keefe touts on his site are very specialized he thinks that the future will be blogs broken down by county and highly specialized practice area.

When I mentioned my Copyright Litigation blog (just launched this past weekend with one three-sentence post!), he told me that there is always room for sharing practical wisdom and specifically mentioned Arnie Herz's Legal Sanity. He said, and I agreed, that there are not enough lawyers sharing the tactics of Getting To Yes in general. Marty mentioned that when he put a practice tip on his blog, the traffic to him increased dramatically.

Marty warned against a few pitfalls. 1. Clear your activities with your law firm. Is your blog YOU or your FIRM. 2. if you speak, watch out that you are not creating conflicts with your clients. We both discussed a prominent blogger who proclaims how judges are WRONG. That can be dangerous. 3. the informality and immediacy of blogging can lead to sloppy thinking. 4. a blog that is not updated is a sign of someone who may underestimate the commitment involved in keeping a blog: not a good sign in a trusted legal advisor.

In terms of getting business, he said that his blog functioned more as an extended social network, that friendships formed, and that was where the real value was. He said that there was no question that it is an extremely cost-effective means of broadcasting your expertise, but that unsolicited inquiries were not a major component of the response, particularly since most of his clients are larger companies.

From my experience, Marty Schwimmer is a real trademark expert. The fact that people are writing books about his blog without him even knowing - is just a sign of how effective the medium can be. Unlike a certain (maybe) billionaire.

Law Related Blogs - Blawgs & Technical Updates

2006-02-13T17:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to the Strand Bookstore on Fulton Street (it was open, despite the blizzard). I bought a copy of Who Let the Blogs Out? by Biz Stone, a book about blogs and blogging. It helped me figure out some things. There are a lot of blogs out there. Stone works for Google and believes that blogs will take over the world. He may be right and there may be many uses for them that are not immediately apparent.

I tried signing my blog up with blawg.org. They said they'd get back to me with an email if I was accepted. I'm on tenterhooks right now. They have lists of law-related blogs. You can submit a link to your own blog or check out the many others that they have listed. Will I make the cut?

I set up "word verification" so that someone would have to type in those goofy letters in order to comment on my posts. This is supposed to avoid spam.

You can create a list of people who will automatically receive your posts. Some sites to investigate: www.sideblog.com www.sitemeter.com www.allconsuming.net . Technorati and Squidoo also sound interesting. I also signed up for a blogroll and heard nothing back from that site. I tried to sign up for a service called "Hello" that makes it easier to put photos on a blog, but the service kept rejecting me.

To find law-related blogs, I used the search function on blogger.com and looked for "copyright law" - a topic of interest to me. Lots of interesting posts.

I managed to learn enough HTML code to modfiy my template. I put links in to the New York County Lawyers' Association, to the Federal Bar Association to the Copyright Society of the USA.

I figured out how to put a photograph of myself in the profile. I put the file on my first post by hitting the "Add Image" button that appears at the top of the Create Post template. Then, on the image, I right-clicked and hit properties, which gave me the URL of where my photo is on the web. I then cut and pasted the link into my profile section and the photograph appeared.

This system can be used to take photographs from anywhere on the web. Just now, I went to The Trademark Blog and took an image from Marty Schwimmer's blog without asking.
It appears above. Serendipitously, New York Magazine came out with a cover story titled Blogs to Riches

Posting an Audio Recording To a Blog & Testing Links

2006-02-12T14:56:00.000-05:00

To create the previous audiopost, I went to http://audioblogger.com and it took only a few minutes to set up my account. To make an audio post, I had to call a number in San Francisco (415) area code, then enter a PIN that I had preselected. It was so easy to do that I thought I'd made an error.

It doesn't appear that you can select an audio file the way that you can just select a photograph from your computer (unless I am missing something). I don't know why not.

For my audiopost (made late last night during a New York City blizzard) I chose to read a motion that I made on behalf of the Federal Bar Association http://www.fedbar.org, the New York County Lawyers' Association the New York City Bar to the Second Circuit on November 15, 2005 to admit over a hundred new members to the court. It was the first time that the court ever had a swearing in ceremony.

Reading the document over the telephone was a bit awkward. Like an answering machine, I was given the opportunity to rerecord it, review it or delete it before posting it. I would think that you'd in most instances prefer to post a better quality audio file that you had a chance to edit. It's an interesting novelty, but I'm not sure of the use for lawyers. Perhaps in a future column on podcasting, I'll figure out why posting pre-recorded audio files is not possible.

In trying to test the links in the earlier paragraph, I found that what you should do first is to hit "Save as Draft". Then hit "preview" in the upper right hand corner. To create the links: highlight the name of the organization: "New York City Bar". Then click the links button. Then enter the URL of the organization. That way the URL does not appear in the text.

I found that when I jumped out and tested my links, the program threw me out and I lost the sentences I'd written in this post. Hence the importance of hitting the "Save as Draft" button.

It is still snowing, and I can hear the snowplows scraping the streets 13 stories below as I look into the snow-blanked Hudson River from my office at Broadway & Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan.

Column on Creating Blogs for Lawyers

2006-02-11T23:35:00.000-05:00

I thought that I would write a column for lawyers in small and solo practices on how to create a blog. It took me four minutes to sign into blogger.com and actually creat the blog. During the four minutes, I picked a password, picked a URL for my blog, and picked a template named "minima". I didn't pay anything. No credit cards, nothing.

After the four minute intro, I'm faced with a screen that looks just like an email. Down bottom, there are two buttons. One says "Save as Draft" and the other says "Publish Post". Below are listed "Post and Comment Options". I may change the time and date, or permit or deny new comment on the post that I am about to make.

There is a button that looks like a photograph. When I place the cursor over it, it says "Add Image". I tried adding an Adobe file of my website that I had put comments on, using Adobe's commenting tools. For some reason, Blogger.com would not let me do it. I tried again, and easily put up a photograph of myself taken in 1999, which reminds me that it's time for a fresh professional headshot.

The toolbar contains such options as "blockquote" which indented the text by a tab. Bulleted lists, numbered lists, justification. There is a button called "link". When you hit it, you can type in any webpage, and a hyperlink immediately appears. http://www.dowdmarottalaw.com.
I can also change the text color at the click of a button, as well as italicize, or bold. Huge fonts are available, as well as tiny.
It was so easy to start, that I quickly ran out of material for my column. I am going to post this, then see how I can promote this miniblog.

Audioblogger - My Motion Before The Second Circuit

2006-02-11T23:09:00.000-05:00