Robert Vonada has a legal weblog called the Pennslyvania Workers Compensation Blawg. Looks like a good resource for lawyers in that state who practice workers compensation law. No XML/RSS feed. If you don't know what and XML feed is see this.
4:26:51 PM
Knowledge Management, or KM as it is often called, seeks to address the problem of managing knowledge in an organization. There is a lot of knowledge inside the heads and documents of people that work in an organizations. The question is how to tap into that knowledge.
Similarly, there is a lot of information about people in corporations too, like who people know and how they know them (and remember sometimes it's not what you know but who you know). Obviously companies need to know what they know and who they know. And that's where Client Relationship Management software (CRM) comes in. Rick Klau knows a lot about CRM because he works for a company that sells CRM software to attorneys. Rick has a great post called Six Degrees of ... Warren Buffett? It's a good read if you care about "people knowledge."
Franco Castalone of the LawTech blog recommends NoteTab Pro as a replacement for the Windows Notepad, noting that it has "dozens of supercharged features. It doubles as an HTML editor with the use of its Clipbook feature. It allows the user to open numerous text documents for editing, and to define a list of "favorites" for quick opening. " He also praises "The Clipbook as a serious power user's tool. A predefined HTML library can be used to insert paired tags as an HTML document is being edited. The user can also define and use his own Clipbook libraries, to create documents from standard or boilerplate text."
NoteTab comes in three flavors -- the Light version is free, the Standard is $10, and the Pro version is $20.
I downloaded it and I'm going to give it a whirl. Looks like a powerful and useful tool.
The article is available here online, and is going to appear in the print version of the March edition of the ABA Journal. The article opens with a great profile of Marty Schwimmer:
"I’ve started getting fan mail now,” says Martin Schwimmer, publisher of the Web log called the Trademark Blog. 'It’s safe to say that I got virtually no fan letters when I was just a trademark lawyer.'”
The article also features Rick Klau explaining the success of Howard Bashman's blog (which gets close to 10,000 hits a day, and is read by, among others, federal judges and law clerks):
“Howard’s and a few other blogs, most of which didn’t even exist six months ago, have risen above the hundreds of voices self-publishing out there,” says Rick Klau, author of the ABA book The Lawyer’s Guide to Marketing on the Internet. “A guy like that who is authoritative and readable can get noticed.”
I love the quote from Denise Howell, who offers a wonderful description of the Internet's influence on the practice of law:
“The Web is like a big bomb that’s been dropped into the middle of settled legal issues,” [Howell] says. “It’s a fertile legal playground for lawyers.”
No doubt many lawyers who read the article in print (because many aren't going to read it online, or even know about it until it appears in the print version) are going to say "fine, but what practical use are blogs?" Well, perhaps this passage about Marty Schwimmer's trademark law practice may suggest an answer:
"But thanks to his Trademark Blog, Schwimmer has not only stayed plugged in. He also has become one of the top trademark authorities on the Web. In fact, if you search for the word “trademark” on the Google search engine, Schwimmer’s blog is one of the top 10 sites listed, right below sites like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office home page."
I think that Jason Krause did a great job in writing that article and captured the power of blogs in a way that can be understood by the readership of the ABA Journal. And I applaud the Journal for making the article available so quickly online.
Alice W of a mad tea-party has a post entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. She refers to Edward Tufte (Professor Emeritus at Yale) as "the grand-daddy of using graphics to convey information correctly" and says "[i]t wasn't until yesterday that I realized he had his very own website!"
I didn't realize that either. Thanks for the notice. I have three of Tufte's books. He is definitely worth reading if you care about using visuals and graphic information to communicate better.
