The Practice

New Medmal Service

Dr. David Frankel from Iowa State and the Cambridge Economics Group has unleashed a new tool for plaintiff's attorneys handling medical malpractice claims. The program, MedMal Express, is an interactive website that allows you to figure out what a case is worth.

From Dr. Frankel:  The program lets the user see expected settlements in up to 20  medical malpractice cases (or case scenarios) in real time. Our predictions are tailored to the trial's location and to other specific case features. One advantage of the service is that a user can easily try out  different scenarios (e.g., to drop a defendant; to stress one accusation over another) to see what would happen if a Plaintiff's condition were to change.

I tried the program and like it. I received a report that provided me with information to help me evaluate a case. It looks nice and has useful information.

Dr. Frankel is offering a free two week trial. Just go to his website and you can sign up. After that, it is only $95 per month.

The Video Venue

WOW! Lisa Solomon is at it again. I am waiting for her to write a book on how to practice law AND run a side business or three. Here is Lisa's latest: The Video Venue!

The Video Venue, a new niche video website featuring humorous law-related videos, is hosting a contest to name the funniest legal video on the web. The Billable Hour Company, which sells humorous gifts and greeting cards for lawyers and legal professionals, operates The Video Venue and is sponsoring the contest.

The Video Venue, at www.video.thebillablehour.com, aggregates funny law-related videos from various web video sites (including YouTube, Revver and Google Video, among others). Videos are grouped into playlists organized by topic (such as law school, jury duty, court reporters and paralegals), practice area (such as contracts, torts and criminal law) and type of video (such as music, movie clips and commercials). Site visitors can also create their own playlists to personalize their viewing experience.

"So many of the law-related videos on sites like YouTube just bash lawyers," observes Billable Hour Company partner Mark Solomon. "But The Billable Hour Company’s success has proved that lawyers and legal professionals appreciate content—like the articles and poems featured in The Timesheet (our monthly e-newsletter)—and products—like our greeting cards and our CDs by groups with names like the Bar & Grill Singers and Bob Noone & the Well Hung Jury—that find humor in the law without attacking lawyers. That’s what TVV is all about." Solomon and his partner, Lisa Solomon, are both practicing lawyers as well as entrepreneurs.

Visitors can contribute to the site by suggesting videos that are already posted on the web, uploading videos, or even recording webcam videos. The Solomons review all submitted videos for content and quality before the videos are posted to TVV.

The widget can even be configured to display videos from a specified playlist. Tech-savvy lawyers can follow the site in their feed readers by subscribing to its main feed (for all recently added videos), or to feeds for individual playlists.

To encourage visitors to The Video Venue to actively participate in making TVV the best site for law-related videos on the web, the site is running a contest to name the funniest legal video on the web. The winner will receive a $50 Billable Hour Company gift certificate.

Site visitors can enter the TVV Funniest Legal Video on the Web contest by posting a video, or reviewing, commenting or tagging any video already on the site. One participating TVV community member will be chosen at random to win a $50 Billable Hour Company gift certificate. The highest rated video will be featured in the Timesheet as February's Video of the Month.

The contest runs through January 31. The winner will be announced in the February issue of The Timesheet.

Great new blog

I like outside the box thinking. Outside the box marketing works. Outside the box soccer. Outside the box anything.

Well, here is an outside the box blog from an attorney. New York attorney Richard Jaffe has a new blog. It is a very good read. I highly recommend you take a look.

How friendly is your website?

Lisa Solomon, famous for Question of Law and The Billable Hour, sent me this website that will help you figure out how friendly your website is.

The Customer Focus Calculator tells you how consumer oriented your website is. From their website:

As proud as you may be of your company and your product or service, most customers only care about how well you can help them meet their wants and needs. If you want more of them to buy, your focus has to be on your customer. How do you communicate that to them? With the words you use on your site. Are you talking mostly about them and their needs or are you talking mostly about yourself?

To help you answer that question, we've developed a unique and free analysis tool that counts certain words on your site that are key indicators of whether your focus is on the customer or not. As you use it, keep in mind this is nothing more than a handy, but rough guide that will help you focus on something important. There are lots of variables and also remember there are no shortcuts to writing great copy.

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From me, again: I checked this out. Interestingly, my website is more focused on the customer than my blogs. And some pages turned out better than others. No surprise that my "About You" page was the most customer focused.

Give it a shot. It really is a useful tool.

Top 25 + 1 more! (Plus some books)

I can't believe I left AccessLaw off my list. Thankfully, Julie Goren of Litigation By the Numbers reminded me.

By the way, if I were putting together a list of books you need, I would tell you that you need:

1. Litigation By the Numbers;
2. Rules of the Road;
3. Ball On Damages;
4. Ben Glass' Great Legal Marketing (not really a book, but reading materials).

Enjoy!

Top 25 + 1

Okay, in my research I missed one product. Now, I could debate why I missed it: not enough marketing, not marketing to the right groups, it slipped through the cracks or I wasn't looking for it. But, alas, I missed it.

The Daily Case Report is a website you want to see. These guys, two attorneys in San Jose, CA give updates on California slip opinions - via video! And you can get MCLE credit for it. How cool is that? From them:

Daily RSS feed announces all new Slip Opinions.  Subscribers also get Slip opinion alerts by email that they can personalize to notify them only of new cases in the areas of law that they practice.  And, best of all, when you watch 15 minute video programs discussing the new cases, you earn MCLE credit. If you find something interesting only once every 2 and a half weeks, you can easily earn all the MCLE you need, just by keeping current on the cases that matter to your practice.

Hey, its free and it looks pretty cool. Give this a spin and let me know your thoughts. I like it!

My top 25

No, I am not going to give you my top 25 college football teams this year. (Although, I do think USC should still be #1 and LSU #2, but I also don't think they should release a preseason top 25 since no one knows how good anyone will be until they play a game. But, that is for another post.)

I just got back from Anaheim and the California State Bar annual meeting. I gave a CLE program on technology and the law firm. In doing so, I prepared a list of 25 programs you should have for your firm. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Audacity
2. Mirra Personal Server
3. Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0
4. Webex
5. ProDoc
6. Basecamp
7. Verizon EVDO
8. Paperport Pro
9. Logmein.com or Gotomypc.com or gotomeeting.com
10. Dragon 9.0
11. Skype
12. DepoSmart
13. Scanner
14. Dual monitors
15. Listserves
16. Etran manager from RealLegal
17. Snagit
18. Copernic Desktop
19. Google earth, Myspace, Friendster, Google, Zillow
20. Cybersecretary (www.speakwrite.com)
21. Accurint
22. TimeMap and TextMap
23. Stamps.com
24. Ureach/efax
25. Activewords

Let me know what you think is missing. But, this list is what I think you need, after spending quite a bit of time last week researching this.

Nominate bad legal writing!

We have all seen it - bad legal writing. Some of it is worse than others. "By all men these presents known" is how an old insurance release started. What? Huh?

Well, now you can nominate it for the Party of the First Part hall of shame. Now, I don't know if I would nominate opposing counsel for writing a letter where, say, he claims how smart he is, how busy he is and how great he is. (Yes, it comes from a real letter.) I would, however, send it in while taking off one's name from it. (No, I haven't done that yet. It reads better as an exhibit to a motion.)

By the way, from the fine folks who bring you the website:

The debate over Plain vs. Precision English rages on in courtrooms, boardrooms, and, yes, even bedrooms. In The Party of the First Part, Adam Freedman explores the origins of legalese, interprets archaic phrasing (witnesseth!), explains obscure and oddly named laws, and disputes the notion that lawyers are any smarter than the rest of us when judged solely on their briefs. (A brief, by the way, is never so.)

Enjoy!

BlawgWorld Launch

Okay, so I am late with my post. I thought it was tomorrow and not today. But, Blawgworld has launched with the 2007 e-book. Next year, they will call it Blog World, at least if they listen to me.

You can get it here and read my posts about soccer and the law. Give it a read and share your thoughts with me.

New Payroll Company

I hate doing payroll. Even paying myself is a pain. Its just not fun. I can't imagine doing it with employees. YUCK! But, I have a solution: Compupay. And here is my contact's information:

Michael J. Pyefinch
916-690-3541 (cell)
916-929-1900 (office)
916-405-4349  (Fax)
michaelpyefinch@compupay.com
www.compupay.com

Michael does payroll nationwide. Give him a call if you need this service. And remember that if you let them do it, you have more time to do what you need to do: practice law.