Toronto Estate Lawyer : Hull & Hull Law Firm : Trust Mediation and Succession Planning : Serving Ontario, Ottawa, Mississauga, Hamilton

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An abundance of legal information is available online and a new customized search engine that searches for content from law firms has become available. We often begin a search for online information by searching Google or a similar general search engine. Fee Fie Foe Firm is a Canadian law firm search engine that searches content from law firm sites. It allows you to search for articles, newsletters, bulletins, case commentaries, and other legal information produced by law firms in five jurisdictions.

This research tools joins two other free services, Lexology and Mondaq as a way to access publications from multiple law firms in a simplified way. Both these websites provide notification of new commentaries released by law firms by jurisdiction and topic in one daily email to the subscriber.

The growing sophistication of search engines highlights how much easier it has become to find specific information online. Last week, the federal Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart addressed reporters at a meeting of the Canadian Bar Association about her office's concerns that private information contained in federal tribunal rulings is being spread through the internet and suggested the possibility of anonymizing federal tribunal rulings. She promised to revisit the issue in October when the Privacy Commissioner releases their report on the Privacy Act.

Thanks for reading,

 

Diane Vieira

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In yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that the election of the Ontario Bar Association (OBA), Trusts and Estates Section Executive for the year 2008-2009 was confirmed at the Sections’ year end dinner on May 27, 2008.

Kimberly Whaley is the incoming Chair of the Executive with Suzana Popovic-Montag as Vice-Chair. The balance of the slate is as follows:

Past-Chair: Jordan Atin
Secretary: Craig Vander Zee

Members-at-Large: Ann Elise Alexander, Robert Coates, Vincent De Angelis, Shael Eisen, Ed Esposto, Jan Goddard, Eric Hoffstein, Danielle Joel, Sean Lawler, Mitchell Leitman, Helena Likwornik, Jane Martin, Joanna Ringrose, Liza Sheard, Susan Stamm, Dina Stigas, Sender Tator, Mary Wahbi, Laura West and Melanie Yach.

I look forward to again working on the Executive and having a successful year.

Before turning the page on this past year, though, I would like to sincerely thank Jordan Atin for all of his efforts, hard work and counsel as the Chair of the Executive.

Have a nice day.

Craig

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I recently came across two entertaining and informative blogs about practice management for lawyers and law firms.

David Bilinsky is a practice management advisor and staff lawyer with the Law Society of British Columbia. He writes and lectures on the subject of legal practice management and his blog,  http://thoughtfullaw.com covers topics such as record management, technology, and law firm strategies.

This month, he wrote a series a blogs on the security of electronic documents that many lawyers will be interested in reading.

Allison Wolf's insightful blog, www.thelawyercoach.com, discusses business development and legal marketing ideas for lawyers. Wolf, the founder of her own company that coaches lawyers on business development, offers her advice and links to the most recent articles on this subject.

Both blogs also comment frequently on personal development of lawyers and what lawyers can do to renew themselves and their legal practices.

Thanks for reading,

Diane Vieira

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We thought it might be a good idea to follow up on the recent trends in legal blogging. One interesting blog is posted fairly regularly by Doug Jasinski , who writes an insightful blog about lawyers generally.

In his recent December 4, 2006 blog, Doug touches on the ever-important life balance that lawyers must maintain. He takes us to a recent study done by a group called Catalyst , who wrote a report: Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Lawyers State Their Case on Job Flexibility. The study involved 1400 lawyers and there were some helpful tips on what it means as a lawyer to have “flexible work hours”. Obviously, the use of technology plays an important role in allowing a fuller balance between family and work for many lawyers. We encourage you to take a look at this study.

All the best, Suzana and Ian.

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The MarketingMonger Podcast #84 explored a new podcasting trend as the host, Eric Mattson, interviewed Chris Brooks, the CEO of an interesting podcast adjunct, Talkr.

Talkr is a program which takes a RSS feed and converts it into audio.  You can take the feed from a blog or from a media source webpage, such as a headline in the New York Times, and Talkr will pull those feeds every hour and once a new entry is available, the text will be converted into audio format so that it can be listened to at your convenience, just like a podcast.

Another useful source of  Talkr is that you can include a "listen to this" button to your blogpage, and the Talkr program will convert your blogposts into audio and allow those listeners who would prefer to listen instead of read, to access your blog in an audio format.

If you are interested in trying out the program quickly, it is installed on the Talkr blogpage.

Good luck in your review of this interesting and innovative social media tool.

All the Best,

Ian and Suzana

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During Duct Tape Marketing's August 16 2006 podcast, the host, John Jantsch, interviewed Seth Godin, who has just published a new book,   Small is the New Big, which is essentially a compliation of Seth's popular blogs.

The theme of this book is that big used to matter.  Working for big companies used to be enviable, as big companies could defeat small companies with large marketing and advertising budgets. People were obsessed over the economies of scale and no one ever talked about economies of little.

However,  Seth's view is that when treat people with respect and as individuals, you have the flexibility to react to different changes and circumstances, in a sense you are acting small.

Seth points out that it doesn't matter if you are a big or small businesses, rather he is saying that businesses must focus on how they act, and the way that they operate in their own economic environment. When you act small, you can eventually become big.


Therefore, Seth expresses that in his experience there does not seem to be any core relationship between the size of the business and how the business acts.

One of the significant changes over the past short while, in Seth's view, is that people will now seek out information that they think is either important or interesting to them. As there are more alternatives, people are pickier about what they will participate in. He notes that the minute that you treat the client or consumer like a cog in the wheel, you will find your customer/client immediately looking at another competitive alternative.

Seth makes an important distinction between markets and marketing.

Markets are of course the trading of cash and goods and marketing is the art of telling a story people want to hear and believe. Now with the advent of interactive social media, we are beyond the constraints of focus groups and other relatively inexact resources, and when your story (i.e. marketing) is sent out, it is considered, reviewed, commented on,  often in a much broader and more interactive framework, mainly blogging and podcasting.

The challenge is to first craft a story that is authentic and real and then release it to the appropriate business environment, a group of people that want to hear it and have an ability to understand it.

In the process of telling your story/marketing, Seth points out that the story must be clear enough that it can be clearly understood. No one will spread your story/product to friends, if they don't understand it.

Seth uses the example of his own father's business which builds cribs for infants in hospitals. Although his business was growing big, his father had to think outside of the normal business parameters, as his cribs were so well built they were almost indestructible. Brainstorming, he went to one of the nurses at hospital who was a client, and asked her to imagine the perfect infant hospital bed. Those nurses gave his father a comprehensive input which resulted in a $10,000 crib.

This crib however had all the recent technological advancements built in, and while very expensive, the nurses using the bed were so impressed that they became its enthusiastic spokespersons and essentially its most successful salespersons.

The result is that this incredible infant crib has become his father's number one product line.

Seth demonstrated that it is a tremendous asset for businesses to think small and admit at times that you do not have all the answers.

All the best,

Ian and Suzana

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Some of the great Podcasters note that, in the future, we will have more ear time than eye time.

Ian recently looked at an interesting book by Evan I. Schwartz entitled, "Digital Darwinism". In his book, Schwartz compares the competitive struggle to the battle between species that occurs in the natural environment. He concludes that, in order to succeed, companies must be better than their competitors, much like the survival of the fittest in nature. Whatever market niche they select, they have to be "smarter, faster, more innovative, and more adaptable" than ever, so that they do better than others.

After examining the successes and failures of many different e-commerce competitors, the author identifies key strategies to survive and thrive on the Web. In Digital Darwinism, we are presented with "7 Breakthrough Business Strategies for Surviviing in the Cuthroat Web Economy". They are:

1. Build a brand that stands for solving problems;

2. Allow your prices to fluctuate freely with supply and demand;

3. Let affiliate partners do your marketing for you;

4. Create valuable bundles of information and services;

5. Sell custom-made produces online, then manufacture them;

6. Add new value to transactions between buyers and sellers; and

7. Integrate digital commerce with absolutely everything.

Schwartz is also the author of "Webonomics", which talks about "9 Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web". Blogging is one of those innovative marketing strategies that helps you survive in the Digital Darwinism world. Blogging uses the concept of social software in allowing for direct and indirect interaction from one individual to a group of individuals.

As a good examples of how big the social interaction has grown, the program "My Space", currently has approximately 40,000,000 dating participants. While this program has a wide variety of social interaction, including dating and teenager participants, from a business perspective, for example, the music business, My Space is an essential place to be. Just because a program appears to be on the surface simply something for consumers, such as a dating service, when you look deeper within the service you may find that it incorporates many niche market produces and services. Therefore, it may well be a business opportunity, given the numbers involved.

The key consideration is whether the program is a fit with your business and, presumably, a growth into more social interaction within the legal profession could be accommodated by this type of social software. Obviously, the networking aspect of social software fits well within the legal profession and it also can provide useful professional resources and resourcing. Social software also allows you to create a personal profile. You can use the software to tell others about yourself and express personal feelings about what can often be viewed as purely legal issues.

An important part of personalizing the professional relationships is to refer back to and link to friends and colleagues whom you do work with to allow the reader to better understand the nature of your practice and the nature of your professional context. For example, you can identify in your Blog an opportunity for someone who does a specific type of wok for you and it is essentially an indirect introduction to that resource for the readers.

That's all for now - all the best, Suzana and Ian. --------