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Future of Law Friday: API Your Law Practice for Future Growth and Collaboration

March 1, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

A week or two ago, I observed that many lawyers are opting to use a combination of platforms for storage, practice management, client portals and other law office functions rather than settling on a single general solution.  The rise of API’s, or application programming interfaces that enable different systems to communicate seamlessly have been driving [...]

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Sponsored and branded legal briefs: Appealing or appalling?

February 27, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’ve often griped about 21st century advancements like  attorney bidding sites or listing sites not because I’m trying to defend lawyers’ turf, but rather, because I’m  skeptical as to whether these sites really expand access to law in a meaningful way.  As I’ve written here, many of [...]

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Logos on Spec, Revisited

February 21, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

More than three years ago, I wrote one of my most popular and widely-circulated blog posts, Would You Work on Spec? Why Should Your Logo Designer.  My post listed several disadvantages to design contest sites like 99Designs (potentially poor quality submissions and possibility of stolen work), but mainly, I griped that it was hypocritical for [...]

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Could 3-D Printing offer a new dimension for law firm business and marketing?

February 20, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

At a time when law firms are replacing conventional printers with scanners to facilitate a move to a paperless practice and the cloud, three-dimensional printers might seem like a step backwards.  To the contrary, though, they’re rapidly becoming mainstream as the costs of 3D printing are declining faster  than anyone could have predicted with home-based [...]

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The Age of the Poly-platformy

February 11, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Once upon a time, a law firm committed to a practice management system for life.  Whether TimeMatters, Amicus, Abacus, Needles or a paper-based numerical filing system set up by a law firm secretary, most firms opted for a single system, invested heavily in consultants to customize as needed and continued using the system for the [...]

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LegalForce: Forcing Law to Be Accessible

February 7, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

For me, the above LegalForce  brand concept — a scales of justice anthropomorphized — encapsulates all that excites me about the launch of the exciting new LegalForce business model conceived by lawyer/entrepreneur Raj Abhyanker that I attended last night in Palo Alto, California. For so long, images of the scales of justices have served as mindless [...]

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Are data-driven matches between lawyers and clients always made in heaven?

January 30, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

With the dawning of the Age of Big Data, increasingly, we’re seeing the rise of the data-driven match.  Yesterday, I came across a primitive example of this concept (primitive because it’s based on user-input rather than analytics); a new matchmaking site, Same Plate.com where users can select dates based on food preferences. Likewise, some colleges [...]

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The Siren’s Song of the Unlaw Firm: Will Today’s New Business Models Help Solos…or End Their Careers?

January 25, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Call it the un-law firm.  As big law crumbles and some solos struggle to compete with national non-lawyer providers like Legal Zoom, new business models for law firms are cropping up to fill the void.  From Virtual Law Partners  and  Rimon Legal  to branded networks of solos and franchise offices, alternatives to the standard law [...]

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Open Letter to New Lawyer: You should be dragging me into the 21st century not the other way around

January 17, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Dear New Lawyer, At 48 years old, I am old enough to be your mother.  And you should be ashamed of yourself.  Here you are, coming to me for a legal job when you don’t know the first thing about RSS feeds, blogging (reading them, let alone writing them), Twitter, Pinterest or YouTube.  And what’s [...]

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Serving The Needs Consumers Didn’t Know They Had

January 10, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

So, I’m finally back to work and blogging after some highly aggressive bout of flu or sinusitis knocked me off my feet for almost five days.  When my symptoms reached the point where I felt too nauseous and feverish to leave my bed, I knew that it was time to seek medical help. As has [...]

Read more Marketing Lessons 2 comments

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