My Shingle

Yelp Sets the Gold Standard for the Type of Value Disclosures That Law Firm Marketing Sites Should Provide

March 26, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

According to Techcrunch, Yelp, an online customer feedback site has announced a new feature that will help small business owners quantify the value of their Yelp listing.  To estimate a listing’s worth, Yelp examines customer leads like bookmarking a Yelp business listing, mapping directions to the business, placing a phone call from the Yelp app, [...]

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ISBA Report on the Impact of Debt on the Legal Profession: Accurate Assessment or Unfair Assumptions About Solos?

March 21, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Via Scott Greenfield, I learned about this recent study by the Illinois State Bar Association on The Impact of Law School Debt on the Legal Profession. Whether or not one blames the debt crisis on law schools (for inflating employment results), the government (for essentially prohibiting discharge of student loans in bankruptcy except in very [...]

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Last Call for Techshow Superpass – and MyShingle Vendor Meetings at Techshow

March 21, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Even though it includes CLE as part of the admission fee, the ABA’s annual  TechShow  can still be pricey. To help mitigate the costs, for the past few years, Legal Typist   Andrea Cannavina (who’s also speaking this year) has formed SuperPass groups to secure huge volume discounts for attendees. Andrea is organizing groups again this [...]

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Counsel of Counsel Relationships: Avoid Conflicts

March 19, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Nature abhors a vacuum, so the saying goes.  So it’s not surprising that with big law’s demise,  we’re seeing every flavor of alternative structure evolve, from upscale contract lawyer services  to remained law firms,  some  that rely entirely on outsourced workers  to meet client needs to groups of lawyers who operate separately but hold themselves [...]

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The End of GoogleReader: A Sign of Blogging’s Decline and Lessons for Lawyers

March 14, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

As you’ve probably heard, yesterday, Google announced that it’s retiring Google Reader, a free service for consolidating and reading RSS feeds on July 1, 2013.  Launched in 2005, Google Reader has a loyal following but with user rates declining, the Reader, along with many other products, will now fall victim to another round of spring [...]

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A Lead Generating Website Gone Too Far

March 12, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Update, 3/12/13 (3 pm) Solosez member and contract lawyer Lisa Solomon posted about this on her Facebook page and Richard Komaiko, Attorney Fee’s founder is feeling the heat. The emerging dialogue should serve as a warning to future law-preneurs you don’t go beta when people’s careers and livelihood (even lawyers) are on the line. About [...]

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Reinvent Law: Solos Lost in the Transition

March 11, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

I did not attend ReinventLaw, but would have liked to. With four matters pending in various stages at the D.C. Circuit and my daughters in the height of school activities, traveling cross country even for a day wasn’t in the cards this time. So I settled for tracking the conference via the #reinventlaw hashtag feed [...]

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Future of Law Friday: Marketing With Menus

March 8, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Buying legal services can be confusing. Sometimes – in cases where work is unpredictable, or facts are unknown, opaque information may be acceptable. But for work that is commodity in nature or more predictable, there’s no reason not to make prices available to consumers – if not on your website, then at least in materials [...]

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Could co-learning offer a rescue line for offline (live) CLE

March 7, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Earlier this week, Scott Greenfield asked whether live CLE can survive in a largely online, virtual world? After all, live CLE costs more to produce (room rental and potential travel costs for a speaker) and may attract fewer attendees because a live event doesn’t have the same flexibility as a watch-it-anywhere webinar. Yet, as Scott [...]

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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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