I’m now pleased to report that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Lawyerist.com is currently running a contest to identify readers’ choices for the best law firm website of 2012. Not only is HP’s site a finalist, but (at time of writing) it was also leading the voting! Regardless of the ultimate outcome, congratulations are due to Harrison Pensa’s lawyers and staff and to their web designer rTraction.

If there’s one lesson that I hope other firms can take from this short post, it’s this: experimentation and innovation aren’t negative terms, much as some of your lawyers might believe otherwise. Doing things differently can and does pay off, and the payoff doesn’t have to be years down the road. In a dynamic marketplace like this, the courage to be different can produce immediate dividends. Seize the moment while it lasts.

First, Laurel (Stem’s resident WordPress guru) and I have been hard at work integrating all winners of the Canadian Law Blog Awards (a.k.a. Clawbies) into Lawblogs.ca — check it out:

Now, each winning blog has a Clawbies badge and year annotation(s) — and each year can be clicked to get a list of other winners that year. You can also click the Clawbies Winners link in the sidebar to get a list of all winning blogs from 2006 to present. Nifty, eh?

In other news, since our last update, we’ve added 17 new Canadian law blogs to the site — and here they are:

• Family Law Re-Focused (Hart Legal)
• Canadian Charity Law (Blumberg Segal LLP)
• Fertility Law Canada Blog (Sara R. Cohen)
• Startup. Buildup. Sellup. (Kelly Santini LLP)
• NahmiasLaw Blog (Jordan Nahmias)
• Bradley Hiscock McCracken Blog
• Miller Thomson LLP Education Law Blog
• Empowering Women Law Journal (Hart Legal)
• Dinning Hunter Law Blog
• Adoption & Family Law Notebook (Hart Legal)
• Empowered Conflict Resolution Journal (Hart Legal)
• Iler Campbell Blog
• À bon droit (Karim Renno)
• Divorce & Wealth (Leisha A. Murphy)
• Canadian Labour & Employment Blog (Miller Thomson LLP)
• Inheritance Law Review (Hart Legal)
• Project Law Blog (Lawson Lundell LLP)

We’re always looking for new blogs to add to the directory; if you’re the author of a new blog or know of one we should include, please check out our submission guidelines and and send us the details via the Lawblogs.ca “submit your site” form.

“…shouldn’t it be a requirement that lawyers stay abreast of the law and hone their skills in as good a fashion as they can? And if so, could that make an RSS reader and the use of feeds an ethical requirement for a lawyer?”

I can’t remember when I first started using an RSS reader – probably 2003 or 2004? – but I just can’t imagine life without one now. For work, it’s a priceless tool. (In my personal life, it’s a blessing and a curse. Blessing: it makes it remarkably easy to keep track of hundreds of blogs and sites I’m interested in. Curse: see “Blessing”.)

But Kevin’s idea is an interesting one. At the risk of sounding completely smug, I am always blown away at how many professionals don’t take advantage of RSS feeds (seriously? People just keep… going back to the same website to see if there’s anything new, over and over again? Or worse, they don’t go back at all?). As one commenter says, and I can’t disagree,

“It really is inexcusable to be out of touch given the availability of technology and the wealth of information”

Obviously, keeping on top of developments in your profession is paramount. But for lawyers who are trying to build profile online through social networks or blogging, a well-stocked feed reader offers a constant stream of interesting, relevant content to blog or write about, or share via social networks or personal emails of the “Saw this and thought of you” variety. Now that most websites worth their salt have feeds, it has never been easier to read exactly what you want and need in one convenient place, on any device, at any time.

At one of my old firms, my library colleague and I ran lunch ‘n’ learn sessions on using RSS, but truth be told, back in those days, the argument for using a reader wasn’t as strong as it is today. RSS wasn’t nearly as widely-used as it is now, and the subscription process has become drastically simpler over the last five or six years. Even so, if this prediction of mandatory lawyer use of RSS ever comes true — which is highly unlikely, but would certainly be advantageous — hands-on training would have to be part of the implementation. As a brand-new concept, it’s a tricky thing for some folks to wrap their heads around. They really need to see it in action to understand how it can benefit them.

If you’re not using a feed reader to keep tabs on things you’re professionally and personally invested in, get thee to Google Reader (or one of the other readers Kevin mentions in his post) ASAP!

• London, Ontario law firm Harrison Pensa announced it would be representing Canadian members of a class action who have developed IBD or Stevens Johnson Syndrome as a result of taking Accutane. The firm also rescheduled its Claude & Elaine Pensa Lecture in Human Rights featuring Senator Roméo Dallaire – the new date is November 23, 2012.
• Our newest client, Michigan criminal law firm A. Scott Grabel & Associates, which does a lot of DUI, sex crime, and drug charge defense work, blogged about a new state law that makes it a crime to lie to police.
• Kelowna, BC law firm Pushor Mitchell raised more than $3000 for Big Brothers Big Sisters of The Okanagan at a recent charity event; Paul Mitchell shared another mild brain injury myth,  and profiled personal injury lawyer Keri Grenier in their latest newsletter.
• West Palm Beach criminal defense attorney Ron Chapman blogged about a number of recent Florida cases dealing with DUI and the corpus delecti rule; computer searches by police; and whether George Zimmerman will actually stand trial for killing Trayvon Martin.
• Canadian tax law firm Thorsteinssons was ranked in Canadian Lawyer Magazine‘s recent Top 5 Tax Boutiques – congratulations! The firm also issued a tax alert on the recent landmark trust residence decision in Fundy Settlement v. Canada.
• Cloud-based law practice management software Clio shared another couple of #goneclio clients, Rahaman Law Firm and the Scott Law Firm; attended the ALA Expo in Hawaii, and rounded up a bunch of helpful Clio training tips.
• Hissey Kientz continued to add content to various practice group microsites: Actos & the link to bladder cancer; the dangers of metal-on-metal in DePuy hip replacements ; railroad work and Ohio asbestos jobsites and how they relate to mesothelioma; the history of Yaz litigation and info on side effects such as blood clots and strokes; and birth defects related to Zoloft, including ventricular septal and atrial septal defects.
• Fraser Valley law firm Waterstone Law Group was pleased to sponsor the Fraser Valley Brain Injury Association Gala, and firm lawyer Daniel Sorensen was named chair of the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Fraser Valley.
• New Jersey criminal lawyer Jonathan Marshall blogged about how breath-tests can be a double-edged sword in DWI cases and what physical factors can affect blood alcohol content readings.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association named Robert Patzelt, Q.C. the 2012 winner of the Robert V.A. Jones Award, which recognizes leaders in corporate counsel practice. The CCCA also hosted a successful Spring Conference and World Summit, and members are looking forward to the annual conference in August.
• On his FamilyLLB blog this month, Oshawa family lawyer Russell Alexander focused on mobility and custody issues, covering when a non-parent wants custody (follow-up here) and whether a parent has the right to move with a child (see more discussion here).
• Chicago-based Rosenfeld Injury Lawyers negotiated settlements for injured clients; on the Child Injury Laws blog, Jonathan Rosenfeld discussed an unprecedented, $144 million settlement awarded to a family whose child developed cerebral palsy as a result of a trauma suffered at birth.
• BC legal support services provider Dye & Durham alerted its clients to legislative changes, orders in council and BC Registry Services outages.

We’ll be back next month with more notable news to share!

It’s sometimes called the consumerization of IT (CoIT), but I prefer the more colloquial BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Primarily, it’s about enterprises losing control of their IT environments because employees insist on using their personal devices and systems rather than those issued and/or approved by the enterprise.  ComputerWorld has a good summary, while CIO Dashboard explores potential responses and Law Technology News considers the legal implications.

This is not going to be fun for law firms and especially for their IT personnel. Mary Abraham sizes it up as a potential “nightmare scenario” in terms of security: “Suddenly, we have a situation in which the IT department no longer is in complete control and may well have trouble imposing a locked-down computing environment.  Now, if you’re working in the financial or legal services industries, consider what happens when you couple the move to CoIT and external IT providers with growing incursions by hackers.”

But it’s the business-model implications that are most intriguing to me. James Surowiecki in The New Yorker astutely analyzes many of Research In Motion’s difficulties in the context of the BYOD trend.  The BlackBerry, he writes, was designed for businesses: “Its true customers weren’t its users, but the people who run corporate IT departments. The BlackBerry gave them what they wanted most: reliability and security. It was a closed system, running on its own network. The phone’s settings couldn’t easily be tinkered with by ordinary users. So businesses loved it, and R.I.M.’s assumption was that, once companies embraced the technology, consumers would, too.”

Essentially, this is a top-down strategy: sell to one business and get hundreds of users. As Surowiecki points out, it’s a time-honoured strategy in the technology industry, driving the growth of everything from the telegraph to Microsoft Office. But then came the bottom-up explosion of consumer-focused personal devices, starting with the iPhone and erupting from there. These devices “have always been targeted at consumers, and tend to come with stuff that IT departments hate, like all those extraneous apps. Yet, because employees love them, businesses have adapted (and the iPhone and Androids have upgraded security to make themselves more business-friendly). As a result, the iPhone and Androids now control more than half the corporate mobile market.”

It may be that only a series of security catastrophes will slow this trend. But even at that, personal technological autonomy has proven to be an extremely addictive feature of modern life. And I think it reflects a growing reality to which lawyers and law firms will have to adjust. Individuals, including both employees and customers, are forging new relationships with companies and institutions, based on the concept of “Not your standards, but mine. Not your terms and preferences, but mine.” It scarcely matters whether people are wise or justified in adopting this philosophy: they’re doing so anyway. And service providers will be forced to adjust.

For law firms of all sizes, this will mean joining the worldwide technological struggle to balance autonomy with security. But it will also mean new communication and service protocols: websites and electronic messages adaptable to numerous (mobile) consumption environments, information and services equally accessible through multiple channels, on-demand standards for both content and format, and so forth. Ultimately, it will mean an acceleration of the loss of control, a relentless ceding to users of the power to decide how content, applications and eventually services are provided and processed.

Top-down is losing out to bottom-up; command-and-control is yielding to choose-your-own-adventure. This will create many tactical challenges and headaches for law firms in many different respects. But in the larger sense, it will really be a philosophical change, a structural adjustment that favours individual autonomy over institutional responsibility, with everything that implies. Permanently? I have no idea. But right now? Yes. And the legal profession will need to come to terms with that.

Beyond the FAQ: Building Client-Friendly Websites  was co-presented with Jeff Lantz of Esquire Interactive. It offers advice on how to write client-centric content and how law firms can build their network of content to better serve clients, get more publishing opportunities, and boost rankings.

Click: The Basics of Online Advertising and Search Engine Marketing was co-presented with Lee Rosen (Divorce Discourse). This deck is made up of slides from my portion of the presentation, which gives an introduction to search engine optimization (SEO), and covers keyword research and targets, on-page SEO factors, linkbuilding, local search, and social networking signals.

Lawyers market their services poorly. I don’t think I’m committing heresy by admitting that out loud: we’ve always shied away from promoting ourselves in any but the most circumspect ways. Lawyer advertising continues to labour under bans and restrictions because, let’s be honest, we find advertising a little unseemly. When we must promote ourselves, we focus on qualities that matter to us — experience, expertise, excellence — but that don’t tend to excite our clients. “Non-lawyers” don’t suffer from this handicap, which is why they’re going to blow us out of the water in the marketing and advertising game.

To view Exhibit A, watch this 90-second TV advertisement from Quality Solicitors, a British legal franchise that provides solo and small-firm practices in the UK with a powerful national brand, extensive marketing support, and back-office assistance. The commercial is designed to be a moving, evocative and memorable viewing experience, something that touches you and stays with you. Watch it and tell me if you found it effective. Then tell me how many times it mentioned or suggested expertise, experience or excellence.

This ad is powerful and effective, as Neil Rose says, because of its “effort to link legal services with the emotion of life moments.” Quality Solicitors’ CEO Craig Holt explains it further: the ad “creat[es] an understanding that legal services aren’t really about forms and documents and black-letter law, but about life and emotions and people’s families [and] businesses.” The thing is, if you asked a random sampling of lawyers if they thought that was true, more than a few would assert that no, law is about forms and documents and black-letter law. And they’re free to believe that. But clients think differently.

With few exceptions, lawyer-formulated or lawyer-approved marketing campaigns focus on lawyers’ qualifications and accomplishments. That would make sense if we were selling our services to each other, but we’re not. The QS ad succeeds precisely because it appeals to what consumers will respond to, not lawyers. You’d think that would be elementary, but for the legal profession, this kind of insight seems almost revelatory.

Step back and take a look at your own marketing efforts: your website, your advertisements, your brochures, your RFP responses, your Yellow Pages ad, your radio spots, and so on. Are they geared towards other lawyers or towards clients? And do they aim for the head or for the heart? Most lawyer marketing and advertising campaigns are about what lawyers think is important, not what clients feel is important. (This isn’t applicable just to the consumer-focused practices in the QS ad, by the way; real-life campaigns can be just as effective for corporate GCs whose careers and livelihoods hinge on getting the right advice at the right time from their legal counsel.)

Our collective distaste for our “non-lawyer” competitors could blind us to the lessons we can learn from them. They see the legal market from the client perspective, an approach that dictates all their strategic and tactical maneuvers. Let’s consider the serious likelihood that they’ve got it right.

• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association published the Spring 2012 edition of CCCA magazine and announced that the West Island Cancer Wellness Centre and Project Genesis are the charities of choice for the CCCA Spring Conference and World Summit, respectively.
• Oshawa divorce lawyer Russell Alexander co-presented two sessions on paperless law offices at the 2012 ABA TECHSHOW.
• London, ON law firm Harrison Pensa revealed the results of its Facebook-driven food bank drive: through the help of a local grocery store, the final donation to the London Food Bank came in at 3536 pounds of food. See more details here… and way to go, HP!
• Fraser Valley, BC-based law firm Waterstone  launched the BC Family Lawyer Blog, authored by the firm’s Family Law Group.
• West Palm Beach criminal defense attorney Ron Chapman wrote a helpful post about what you should do if one of your friends or relatives is arrested.
• Cloud-based legal practice management software Clio released the Clio Platform API, which lets third party developers integrate and extend Clio’s functionality.
• A new series on land title e-filing debuted on Dye & Durham‘s BC Law Watch blog. The series is guest written by real property lawyer Susan E. Lloyd.
• Gowlings was recognized in World Trademark Review (WTR) 1000 as a top tier trademark firm in both Canada and Russia, and 12 of the firm’s IP professionals were cited as as leaders in their field. Gowlings was the top-ranked Canadian firm — congratulations!
• Canadian tax lawyers Douglas Mathew, Matthew Williams, and Mark Barbour of Thorsteinssons appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada.
• Product injury law firm Hissey Kientz expanded content on its Zoloft birth defects microsite (see hypoplastic left heart syndrome, transposition of the great arteries; tetralogy of Fallot; and coarctation of the aorta). Details on Avondale shipyards asbestos exposure were added to the firm’s mesothelioma site; the Yaz side effects and De Puy hip replacement sites were also updated.
• New Jersey criminal attorney Jonathan Marshall wrote about the verdict in the Ravi webcam spying case, discussing bias intimidation charges in New Jersey.
• Okanagan law firm Pushor Mitchell published helpful articles on PST re-implementation in BC, whether employers can use social media during the hiring process, and the first in a series of myths about mild brain injury. The firm also joined Twitter (@pushormitchell)!
  
• Chicago injury lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld geared up for the launch of a bike injury law microsite and opened up about what happened when his own mother was injured in a bicycle accident.

We’ll be back next month with more client news to share.

This year’s lineup of sessions looks top-notch. Steve’s sessions fall within the Digital Marketing Track, which also includes:

• Build Your List: How to Use Email Marketing to Grow Your Practice (Erik Mazzone and Lee Rosen)
• Social Media for Litigators (Antigone Peyton and Ernest Svenson)

Those of us not fortunate enough to be attending TECHSHOW this year can keep tabs on all the conference happenings via the #ABATECHSHOW hashtag on Twitter, which is already abuzz with tips on must-see sessions and, of course, the best places to eat in Chicago. (Here at Stem, we’re most jealous of Steve getting to see keynote speaker Ben Stein! Autographs, please?)

• Cameron’s Profits for Partners Blog
• Canadian Advertising & Marketing Law (Steve Szentesi)
• Insights (Kahler Personal Injury Law)
• Simon M. Brown Paralegal Services
• Skunkworks Creative Group Inc. Blog
• Are you getting yours? (Gary Mitchell)
• Condo Development Blog (Robson Carpenter LLP)
• Adam Zasada’s Ontario Construction Law and Litigation Blog
• Lexpert Blog
• Prince Law Real Estate Blog
• Mincov Law Blog
• BC Family Lawyer Blog (Waterstone Law)

We’re always looking for more additions – if you know of a Canadian law blog that fits the bill (see our submission guidelines for more details), please let us know!

We wanted to revisit the topic, so we started by checking the 2009 list to see if it was worth updating. But guess what? Most taglines hadn’t changed, and some firms had eliminated their tagline altogether. So instead, we decided to add to our original effort, and sought out 101 more taglines! (See the list below.)

It turns out that many firms are still using taglines that do little to set them apart from competitors or communicate core values. In “Is your law firm committed to mediocrity?“, Ross Fishman (of law firm tagline generator fame) bemoans the fact that so many firms choose taglines that really don’t say anything about themselves. Fishman says that effective taglines “help define the firm internally and externally.  They set the tone and help the firm stand out in a meaningful way. They give the lawyers something to say in new-business meetings when the prospects ask, “How is your firm different?”"

Neil Rose of Legal Futures makes similar observations, acknowledging that some firms do manage to come up with a fantastic tagline, like Harris Beach’s “Lawyers you’ll swear by, not at”. But of this rare corporate humour, he wonders, “if that is reflected in the client experience – in fact, I wonder if any of these and many other claims are really in the DNA of the firms making them, given the contrary, individualistic, pig-headed nature of many lawyers. To use, reluctantly, a very modern phrase, do firms really live their values?”

Amicus Creative offers some guidelines on developing a tagline. They warn, helpfully, that “taglines reached through consensus often tend to be bland and less creative” and that “alliteration can be good but it can also be overused”. Other advice is a little simplistic. For instance, using power adjectives is a tricky proposition. Jordan Furlong‘s advice on creating standout practice group descriptions and resisting the temptation to oversell can be applied to taglines, too.

At any rate, back to our list. We figured that mostly rehashed taglines wouldn’t be particularly interesting, so we scouted out 101 new ones, adding a few Australian firms to the list.  Many thanks to all those who sent us their taglines (some, we had to leave out because they were included in our previous list). A a hat tip to Ross Fishman and Neil Rose for the examples in their posts, some of which are included here.

American law firms:

1. Allen Matkins: Challenge. Opportunity. Success.
2. Arent Fox: Smart in your world (R)
3. Aronberg Goldgehn: We Take It Personally (R)
4. Arnstein & Lehr: Mid-market value. Large firm expertise.
5. Bailey & Galyen: Solving your Legal Puzzle. (TM)
6. Bean, Kinney & Korman: Getting It Done. (R)
7. Bone McAllester Norton: Law. Life. Passion. (R)
8. Bowman and Brooke: From boardroom to courtroom (R)
9. BoyarMiller: Practice with Purpose
10. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck: Always There (SM)
11. Bryant Miller Olive: Our name is easy to remember. Our work is hard to forget.
12. Chamberlain Hrdlicka: Your Goals. Our Mission.
13. Chapman and Cutler: Focused on Finance (R)
14. Chuhak & Tecson: Right there with you. (SM)
15. Cox Smith: Practice Advice for the Real World.
16. Dinsmore: Accomplish more. (SM)
17. Dunkiel Saunders: Making a difference is our practice.
18. Fennemore Craig: law that leads (TM)
19. Finnegan: protect. advocate. leverage. CHAMPION YOUR IDEAS. (R)
20. Fisher & Phillips: Solutions at Work (R)
21. Ford & Harrison: The Right Response at the Right Time
22. Gallagher Sharp: Solutions. Not Surprises. (R)
23. Garson Claxton: Quality. Responsiveness. Results.
24. Goldberg Simpson: A law firm that really moves. (TM)
25. Gordon & Rees: Responsive. Resourceful. Results (TM)
26. Gray Robinson: Extremely Floridian
27. Greenberg Glusker: The Counsel You Keep. (TM)
28. Herrick: Committed to Your Success.
29. Hodgson Russ: Where value is law.
30. Hughes Hubbard: Critical matters. Critical thinking.
31. Hymson Goldstein & Pantiliat: Our Business is Your Peace of Mind (R)
32. Ice Miller: It’s a Complex World. Be Advised. (TM)
33. Jackson Walker: Texas Based, Global Read.
34. Klein DeNatale Goldner: Results. Period.
35. Kleinbard Bell & Brecker: Our Most Important Partners Are Our Clients
36. Kutak Rock: National Resources. Local Results. (R)
37. Lanier Law Firm: Redefining Legal Care
38. Levenfeld Pearlstein: Unusually Good.
39. Lewis and Roca: Focus Forward
40. Lewis Wagner: Skilled Advocacy. Practical Solutions. (TM)
41. Massey & Gail: Fewer Lawyers. Bigger Impact.
42. Mayer Brown: Global Solutions, Local Strengths
43. McCarter & English: Our clients do great things. We get the assist.
44. Much Shelist: Thinking business, practicing law
45. Murphy & Hourihane: Ready for Trial!
46. Novack Macey: Small but mighty.
47. Owen & Owens: Every Client Matters
48. Pratt Attorneys: Experience. Integrity. Results.
49. Rothman Gordon: Just right.
50. Russ August & Kabat: Wise Counsel. (TM)
51. Ryley Carlock & Applewhite: The Business of Solutions (R)
52. Sandberg Phoenix Von Gontard: Seriously Unbelievable Client Service.
53. Segal McCambridge: We make the complex simple. (TM)
54. SettlePou: Big firm expertise. Small firm attention. (SM)
55. Schopf & Weiss: Bigger is good. Smarter is better. (SM)
56. Shefsky & Froelich: Putting imagination to work (SM)
57. SmithAmundsen: Top flight counsel. Bottom line results.
58. Soden & Steinberger: Changing the Way People Think About Attorneys, One Client at a Time (R)
59. Spector Gadon & Rosen: Practicing the Art of Law
60. Sullivan & Brill: Personal Attention, Proven Results
61. Taylor Duane: Quicker. Smarter. Better.
62. Unique Law: Illuminating Solutions
63. Vessa & Wilensky: Serious Lawyers…Serious Results
64. Valorem Law Group: Results, not Hours. (TM)
65. Warner Norcross & Judd: A Better Partnership. (R)
66. Weiss Berzowski Brady: All Business.
67. Williams Mullen: Where Every Client is a Partner
68. Woodard, Emhardt, Moriarty, McNett & Henry: Make your ideas untouchable. (R)

UK law firms:

1. Azrights: Easy Legal not Legalese
2. Bevan Brittan: The public services law firm
3. Blake Lapthorn: the natural choice in law
4. Clyde & Co: Altogether different.
5. Eric Robinson: making law make sense
6. Freeth Cartwright LLP: Answers not options
7. Gordons: Let’s get down to business.
8. Kennedys: Legal advice in black and white.
9. Keoghs: …not your conventional law firm
10. Matthew Arnold & Baldwin: Giving you a lot more than just law
11. McGrigors: Driven by business. Powered by people.
12. Mills Reeve: Infectious ambition
13. Mischon: It’s business. But it’s personal.
14. Nabarro: Clarity Matters
15. Optima Legal: Specialist Lawyers to the Lending Sector
16. Penningtons: fluid thinking. clear solutions.

Australian law firms:

1. M+K: Your firm.
2. Middletons: Straight talking
3. TressCox: connected talent

Canadian law firms:

1. BCF LLP : A Different Kind of Practice.
2. Burchells: Just Right.
3. Burchell MacDougall: Put experience on your side.
4. Burnet Duckworth Palmer: Common sense, uncommon innovation
5. De Grandpré Chait: Your best partner! (TM)
6. Dust Evans Grandmaitre: A people practice.
7. Fillmore Riley: Decisive. Direct.
8. Galbraith Family Law: Resolving Family Conflict With Heart
9. McLennan Ross: Ability to see beyond the law
10. McMillan: Where deals get done.
11. Pushor Mitchell: Leave The Hard Work To Us
12. Stikeman Elliott: Canadian Leaders in Business Law. Worldwide.
13. Thomson Rogers: Your advantage, in or out of the courtroom.
14. Weltman, Bernstein: Lawyers you can trust. (TM)

Which are your favourites? Let us know in the comments.

Lawyers attend conferences. Lawyers tweet. Much like chocolate and peanut butter, these are two great trends that, for the most part, have trended great together.

The integration of these two phenomena was inevitable from the day Twitter made its 140-character debut, and happily, the live-tweeting of legal events has proceeded remarkably well. Compared to technology events, where faltering speakers are often ripped to shreds by the attending twitterati (worse still, with the merciless conference Twitter feed projected onto the screen behind the presenter), tweeting lawyers have been models of decorum and generosity.

Still, the social media platform doesn’t exist that’s not susceptible to errors of both omission and commission, and Twitter is Exhibit B. (Facebook is, and always will be, Exhibit A.) Accordingly, here are my five pieces of advice about live-tweeting a legal event.

1. Prepare beforehand. Arrive at the event about 10 minutes early to get a good seat (preferably near the back, so you can assess audience reaction and identify questioners) and to ensure you’re plugged and logged in ahead of time; you don’t want to “join the event in progress.” Send out a courtesy tweet at the start, identifying where you are and what you intend to do for the next couple of hours. Type out each presenter’s name and credentials in a separate document, so you can paste them quickly into a tweet when they start speaking.

2. Get the details right. Identify the official conference hashtag and use it; if the organizers haven’t chosen one, scan the early candidates on Twitter and go with the consensus pick (if you’re lucky, you’ll get to be the one who makes it up). Spell the speakers’ names correctly and link each salient point to the person who delivered it. Yes, live-tweeting is a hurry-up game; but you’re acting as a broadcaster, and your first responsibility is to be accurate: each individual tweet is a stand-alone dispatch that could be retweeted all over the world.

3. Quality beats quantity. As a general rule, aim for fewer, well-written, more thoughtful tweets, rather than a torrent of sound bites. First reason: someone else will probably provide the torrent anyway. Second: your subscribers would probably rather not be buried in tweets. Third: carefully crafted tweets have a better chance of retransmission (don’t use all 140 characters, either; make it easy for someone to RT you.) Fourth, you’ll have time to offer your own observations and insights on the presentations (being sure to identify them as your own, not the speaker’s). Of course, if you have the rare gift for high-quality torrents, by all means use it.

4. Scan other Tweets. Open Twitter in a separate tab and set up a search for the event hashtag. Unless you’re the only person in the room broadcasting the event, there’ll be other tweets; refresh the search screen frequently to see what others are saying, retweet the best of these updates, and recommend your subscribers follow these fellow tweeters. If it’s a major conference with multiple sessions, do the same with other session streams. It’s both excellent etiquette and a powerful networking tool.

5. Don’t be obnoxious. Twitter has enabled a new type of heckling: the obnoxious or sarcastic tweet. Unless you’re genuinely funny, and not many people are, tweets that mock a speaker or rip a presentation will reflect more poorly on you and your online reputation than on your targets. By all means, disagree vigorously with a speaker whose points you dispute. But abide by this simple rule: if you wouldn’t stand up and say it into a microphone in front of the live audience, don’t say it on Twitter.

1. With the first pen, cross out every sentence and phrase in your bio that also describes someone else in your firm, or that is very similar to a colleague’s description. Examples could include your practice areas, the types of work you perform, the sorts of clients you serve, where you went to law school, organizations to which you belong, and so forth. Solos, of course, can skip this step.

2. With the second pen, cross out every sentence and phrase that could describe another lawyer in your community, town or city, or that could easily appear in a local competitor’s description. Obviously, this won’t be a comprehensive process, unless you live in an extremely small jurisdiction. But based on your general knowledge and perhaps a quick scan of your three or four biggest competitors’ profiles, red-line everything that equally describes someone else in your market.

3. Finally, with the third pen, circle everything that’s left over and jot it down on a note pad. I’m pretty sure that you won’t require much more than a single sheet of note paper for this task. Some unlucky lawyers who do this experiment might find that they have almost nothing aside from their name that they can call uniquely their own.

The purpose of this experiment, I should probably make clear, is not to suggest that you should delete anything in your biography that also happens to describe someone else in your local bar. It should go without saying that your expertise, services, clientele and accomplishments are essential to the success of your online biography. What I’m trying to suggest is that your online fingerprint is probably too small.

Like fingerprints, every lawyer’s biography should contain at least one element or aspect that is truly unique and identifiable in their market — something that virtually no other colleague or competitor can say about themselves. This could be anything from the grandiose — e.g., chair of the board of directors of a European green energy fund, winning co-counsel in a Supreme Court case — to the seemingly mundane — e.g., leading the firm’s record-setting United Way pledge drive, serving as treasurer of a neighbourhood co-operative pre-school.

I guarantee that there’s something unique about you: I’ve yet to meet a lawyer who didn’t have at least one story they could tell that no one else could. It could be work-related — articling for one of country’s most revered litigators in his final years, facilitating the merger of two local micro-breweries, starting a specialty practice group within the firm. Or it could be personal — a Bachelor’s degree in medieval studies, a one-time attempt at stand-up comedy, an earlier career as a New Orleans barista. It’s a conversation-starter, a unique professional badge of honour or a memorable personal anecdote. It belongs to nobody else around — just you.

No two lawyers are the same, and they never will be. But thousands of lawyer biographies are virtually identical. Go through your biography and yes, keep the essentials — what you do, who you do it for, what you’ve accomplished. But whenever you come across something that seems relatively lackluster or rote — the same old biography filler that everyone else includes about themselves — consider replacing it with something that speaks to who you really are. Show the world why you’re someone worth knowing, worth contacting, worth engaging.

Your law practice will only be as successful as the relationships you form with clients, and every potential relationship starts with the question, “Why you, and not someone else?” You’ve already got the answers.

• Gowlings was named one of the National Capital Region’s top employers for 2012, and Marion Bailey-Canham, a partner and registered trade-mark agent in the firm’s Ottawa office, won the ILO Client Choice Award, 2012, in the Canadian intellectual property category. Congratulations!
• London, Ontario law firm Harrison Pensa announced that Senator Roméo Dallaire will speak at the Annual Claude and Elaine Pensa Lecture in Human Rights, which will be held on March 23 at the Faculty of Law, Western University.
• Our cloud-based legal practice management client, Clio, shared a new #goneclio podcast, posted training tips, spoke in New Orleans, and explored more findings from their Macs in Law Offices survey.
• Product injury law firm Hissey Kientz developed content about Yaz & Yasmine lawsuits, De Puy hip replacement settlements, Depakote-related birth defects, Louisiana asbestos-exposed jobsites, and the sexual side effects of Propecia.
• Chicago personal injury lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld shared details of new Illinois legislation that will make it easier for families to obtain medical records of a deceased spouse, parent or child, adding transparency to situations where a family has questions concerning the suspicious care of a loved one.
• Kelowna law firm Pushor Mitchell’s Apple Triathlon was named “Best Triathlon in Western Canada” by Get Out There Magazine readers – what a great way to celebrate the event’s 30th anniversary this August!
• Oshawa divorce lawyer Russell Alexander posted a set of Ontario family law videos to his firm’s YouTube channel, on topics like child support, collaborative divorce, transfer of property, and child custody.
• Canadian tax law firm Thorsteinssons issued tax alerts on price allocation principles and punitive TFSA audits, and Brandon Wiener gave a presentation on structuring the sale of a family-owned business.
• West Palm Beach criminal defense lawyer Ron Chapman wrote an interesting blog post about 9 ways to prevent eyewitnesses from misidentifying innocent people.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association released details of its upcoming World Summit & National Spring conferences, which are being held back-to-back, April 13-17 in Montreal. Looks like an excellent lineup of events!
• Fraser Valley law firm Waterstone Law Group was proud to be the lead sponsor of the ChillSpell spelling bee, where partner Ed Kaye (who was recently honoured with the Paul Harris Fellowship Award by the Rotary Club of Chilliwack/Fraser) was the lead judge. The firm also sponsored the Sto:lo Business Conference.
• Arizona criminal defense lawyer Lawrence Koplow, who blogs at the Arizona DUI Defense Blog, is working on the final touches of an independent project that showcases his views on law practice management, Legal Coffee.
• New Jersey criminal attorney Jonathan Marshall explored the Graves Act and gun-related charges in New Jersey, domestic violence legislation,  and Brimage guidelines for drug crime parole ineligibility.
• BC-based legal support services provider Dye & Durham shared its helpful March litigation calendar, and covered the world’s first-ever Twitter moot on their BC Law Watch blog.

That’s all for this time; we’ll be back next month with more accomplishments and accolades!

1. Irrelevant to clients. Alex Novarese pinpoints this disconnect in his article about the LegalWeek Law database of firm content. “External counsel are often focused on the ‘narrative’ or intellectual merits of changes in statue, regulation and case law, and produce briefings accordingly. [Clients, however,] are primarily focused on the law in the context of risk and return to their business. That, and minimizing the hassle of their daily lives. Shockingly, they have little love for law for its own sake.” This is an obvious point that’s been well-publicized for years, yet law firm content continues to resemble law school case summaries.
2. Late to the party. News breaks: a change in the rules surrounding income trusts, or the passage of new regulations affecting environmental standards, or a critical court decision with real-world implications. And then, days or sometimes even weeks later, the law firm publishes an article about it — often suffering from the flaws in #1, spending more time on legal niceties than on client impact, but adding tardiness on top of irrelevance. The best-before date on actionable knowledge is now measured in hours; law firm content needs to meet and beat that kind of deadline.
3. Titled for obscurity. Writing headlines has never been easy, but in the age of Twitter, you need to be not only catchy and informative, but also fewer-than-140-characters concise when naming your article. A title must galvanize the recipient into opening the email or clicking on a link, and must do so in a matter of seconds before the “read-or-ignore” choice is made. Try to craft a miniature story in the title: something unusual, arresting, or quirky, but above all, relevant to the reader’s world. Avoid mere “Updates” or “Roundups” — they don’t give the reader a specific reason to continue.
4. Insufficiently customized. Among the reasons for the decline of the daily newspaper and the general-interest magazine is that, rightly or wrongly, people want to receive news tailored to their own priorities. This is especially the case among business consumers of content: if they receive materials that lie outside their specific industry niche, they will assume (probably correctly) that the sender isn’t aware of or doesn’t really care much about what they actually do. Separate email lists are a snap to produce; industry-specific Twitter accounts are free. Use multiple channels to communicate with your diverse client base.

To counteract these four common errors, make the following choices when planning your legal content editorial lineup:

• Quality over quantity: Reduce the volume of content and redirect your freed-up resources to produce less frequent but more high-quality, thoughtful work.
• Solutions over commentary: Clients don’t care about the judge’s reasoning; they care about how this development affects their business practices.
• Prevention over prognostication: Provide checklists or flowcharts for avoiding legal troubles rather than sweeping forecasts of the law’s evolution.
• Narrative over everything: Tell a story worth hearing, starting with a great title and a concise article that respects the reader’s time and addresses her concerns.

Most law firms are afraid to stand out from the crowd — but that’s exactly what clients want them to do. There’s no easier place for a firm to start standing out than with the nature, quality and format of the legal content it produces.