IPads are Changing the Way Lawyers Do Business for the Better!

A southwest regional law firm, Fennemore Craig, is changing the way lawyers do business by harnessing the power of the Apple iPad.

Gone are volumes of paper and 24-hour wait times for a client to get a return call. Now, legal materials live on a fleet of iPads that Fennemore Craig pre-loads and loans to clients and adversaries. Communication with lawyers occurs instantly through the built-in FaceTime app or Skype.

The firm’s innovative use of the iPad caught the attention of Apple which is currently profiling Fennemore Craig in a case study on Apple.com/business. “The iPad has revolutionized the way we communicate with our clients and resolve cases,” says Marc Lamber, chair of Fennemore Craig’s Plaintiff’s Personal Injury Practice Group. “The iPad technology allows us to gather evidence faster and engage our clients even more thoroughly,” adds James Goodnow, Lamber’s partner.

View the Fennemore Craig case study on Apple.com/business

James GoodnowLamber and Goodnow, who focus on catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases, provide iPads to clients creating instant “red phone” access to the Fennemore Craig legal team. The iPads enable clients to provide key information as it happens such as photos, video logs and signed release forms. It’s instant access to information for clients to receive and provide information and a lifeline which helps level the playing field against those with unlimited resources. Clients—many of whom are hospitalized—also use the iPad to collaborate with their attorneys through e-mail, instant messaging and video conference apps.

The attorneys also deliver iPads with comprehensive “video settlement demand packages” to opposing counsel, insurance company adjusters and mediators complete with computer-generated images, Keynote presentations, video interviews, scene diagrams, expert witness interviews and photos.

In courtroom situations, Lamber and Goodnow use apps like iJuror to track prospective juror responses during jury selection and then during trial, the duo link their iPads to multimedia systems bringing exhibits and presentations to life on individual screens for juries, opposing counsel and the judge. At mediation, court dates and legal conferences, Lamber and Goodnow . They use apps like iAnnotate PDF to edit and highlight documents and capture digital signatures, add highlights and notes, make corrections and changes to PDFs.

Clients view the new connectivity as an unexpected upgrade. “I can reach my lawyers instantly anytime, anyplace and spend less time in their office,” said Melissa Frankel, a Fennemore Craig client in Phoenix.

Lamber and Goodnow have paved the way for other practice groups at Fennemore Craig that have also adopted the use of iPads for clientele. Fennemore Craig is the only law firm selected by Apple to be profiled concerning uses of iPad. Other companies featured include Grupo BBVA, Medtronic, GE and The Benneton Group.

Email Overload? Use These Tips To Handle it

Recently I received a disturbing email from a friend informing me that he had replied to 7,545 emails in 2011. Included in his email—and the irony is not lost that he sent an email—was an analysis of how much time he had spent replying to those emails.

By his “conservative” calculation, he estimated he had devoted a full 45 days (19 percent of his annual workable time) replying to email last year. Of course this is just the time spent replying to emails; it does not account for his time reading all his incoming emails.


Below are some suggestions for managing email:

Stop and evaluate

Not every email needs an immediate reply, but every email needs an action from you. You can reply, not reply, or save it for later. When determining which to do, keep the following questions in mind:

• Who sent it? If it’s from your boss or client, reply within a reasonable amount of time.

• What is the urgency? Is the email so crucial that you should you drop what you’re doing and respond immediately? Probably fewer than 10 percent of your emails require such attention.

• What is the context? Is the email important to the work I am doing or will be doing soon?

• What is my “call to action”? If I reply, is my reply clear? For example, do I need more information from the sender? Am I going to forward this to my boss? Am I going to put an action on my task list for next week? Be clear to yourself and to the sender about your next steps.


Set ‘to’ and ‘copy’ expectations

This is an important and challenging step. If you’re a manager, it’s vital that you’re clear about which types of emails your subordinates should copy you on and when you would prefer an email to a phone call or meeting.

For example, I tell my colleagues that I want to be copied on all important client deliverable emails—those including a case study article, press release, etc. That’s it. I don’t want emails about their professional development or employment terms; we’ll discuss those issues face to face.

Set these expectations to reduce the emails from your team members. Do the same with your supervisor. Setting clear expectations and following through are essential to any project, and email is no different.

Consolidate topics and actually talk

Whether you are a manager or a subordinate, remember: If you send a lot of emails, you’re going to receive a lot of emails. Try picking up the phone or talking face to face, especially if you have multiple topics to discuss.

Block off ‘email only’ time

You should set parameters for when you will be reading and responding to emails. Communicate this to your supervisor, team members, customers, etc.

Unless I have a meeting, my colleagues know that my time for actively checking email is from 8 to 9 a.m. and from 4:30 to 5 p.m. If I don’t reply to an email during that time and they have an urgent issue for me, they should come find me.

Tailor your communication

After considering steps No. 1 and 2, you should tailor your communication based on the person and the context. For example, I would not advise using email to communicate potentially sensitive or negative news, if you can avoid it. Likewise, email is not the forum to fully detail your five-year strategic marketing plan.

If your goal is to impress your boss and you’ve determined that email is the best avenue, be sure you write sharply and concisely. Remember: Email can be quick, but a phone conversation or an in-person meeting can be more rich and effective. Consider your audience, the topic, and the urgency of the matter.

Be clear

This seems obvious, right? Emails are often written quickly and without much thought, creating a challenge for the recipient.

Murky emails can cause ambiguity, confusion, stress—even an obstacle to productivity. Don’t add to the confusion and the dysfunction. Be clear about whom you are addressing and what you’re requesting or assigning in your email.

Also, specify deadlines. Take a few minutes to craft one well-written email to move the process along efficiently, rather than hastily sending out three incomplete emails.

Below are some additional tactics you can use immediately:

1. Include a strong subject line. Be concise, and use compelling words to get attention. Your email’s worthless if no one opens it.

2. Use numbers or bullet points. This is essential if you’re covering multiple issues; doing so will help the recipient address each one individually.

3. Watch the clock. If you take more than 15 minutes to write an email, it’s better to condense it and augment it with a phone call or in-person meeting.

4. Be careful when forwarding. If you’re forwarding an email chain and there is something of importance in that chain, don’t just use “FYI below” and expect the recipient to see what you’re hoping they see. Point out what they should pay specific attention to.

5. Get closure. Include calls to action and deadlines.

6. Avoid multiple sends. Wait for your recipients to respond before sending out another email on the same topic.

7. Wait if you have doubts. If you’re second-guessing your email, there’s probably a good reason. Listen to that voice in the back of your head. Remember: You can’t “un-send” an email. Better to keep it in your draft folder and think about it for an hour than to regret your haste.

Time is everyone’s most valuable resource. By using smart and effective communication strategies for email, we can free up more time to be productive or do the things we want to do.

Matt Spaulding is the president of Spaulding Communications, a strategic, full-service communications firm that combines brand knowledge and business insight with communications expertise for its clients. This article originally appeared on the Spaulding Communications website at www.spauldingcommunications.com.

What Do PR Consultants Actually Do?

Sandusky Case Costing Millions

(CBS) - Pennsylvania State University says it has run up nearly $3.2 million in combined legal, consultant and public relations fees pertaining to the investigation of child sex-abuse charges against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, CNN reports.

A new Penn State website made the financial information related to the case public. It was launched as an initiative of university President Rod Erikson and board of trustees members to prompt more open communications for students and faculty pertaining to the investigation, said Lanny Davis, legal counsel to the university.

The website says the university will not use alumni donations, student tuition or taxpayer dollars to cover the costs. Penn State believes general insurance policies, and interest from a loan repaid to the school will pay the bill.

The school says almost $2.5 million of the fees stem from Penn State's internal investigation and crisis communications team costs. Almost half a million dollars has been spent on university legal defense services.

Sandusky is under house arrest as he awaits a May trial on the child sex assault charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Cost of Bad PR: So Far Penn State Has Spent $3.2 Million on Scandal

Whenever clients tell me they just don't see the need to invest in a crisis management strategy ahead of potential scandals or even as the scandal is unfolding- I will remind them of this story from Reuters about the expense of digging oneself up and out of a hole inaction and poor decision making created.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The Penn State child sex abuse scandal has so far cost the university $3.2 million including the expenses of an investigation, legal and public relations advice, the school said on a new website designed to promote transparency.

No tuition, state grants or donations will be used to pay the steep bills that Penn State racked up in the months since former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, 68, was charged in November as a serial child molester, the university pledged.

The expenses were posted on a new website, openness.psu.edu, that went live this week.

Among the more eye opening revelations is the salary information that reinforces football's prominent role on campus, blamed by some for the school's failure to report 2002 allegations about Sandusky to police, allowing the allegedly predatory behavior to continue for years.

Website figures show new football coach Bill O'Brien will make $2.3 million in salary and other payments, more than four times what new president Rodney Erickson is due at $515,000.

The national football powerhouse is still reeling from the grand jury indictment in November of Sandusky, who has been charged with 52 counts of sex abuse involving 10 boys. He has denied the charges and maintained his innocence.

The scandal took down legendary football coach Joe Paterno and then University President Graham Spanier, both of whom were fired, and led to the arrests of two high-ranking university officials accused of lying to a grand jury that indicted Sandusky. Paterno, 85, the winningest coach in college football, died in January of lung cancer.

The website, operated by the university, says Penn State paid $3.2 million to investigators, lawyers and PR specialists deployed in the wake of the grand jury indictment. Those costs will be covered by insurance, interest earnings or from athletic department payments to the university for a Beaver Stadium expansion, according to the website.

Included in the breakdown of the scandal-related expenses was $1.1 million paid through December 31 for a special investigation headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh and an additional $283,000 for public relations help from Freeh.

The university Board of Trustees, which has been under fire from alumni for firing Paterno in a phone call, also spent near $500,000 for crisis management advice.

In addition, one of the state's biggest law firms, Reed Smith, was listed as receiving just over $500,000.

"This is a reminder of the commitment to open communications to the fullest extent possible," said Penn state president Rodney Erickson in a statement about the site.

Disgruntled alumni, galvanized by their anger over Paterno's abrupt firing, were less than enthusiastic about the site.

"I think transparency can't be solved with a branded site called openness," Maribeth Roman Schmidt, spokeswoman for Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship, with roughly 5,500 members, told Reuters on Tuesday.

"I think all of the information on there is extremely controlled and it smacks of back room review and approval, which is exactly what we are trying to get away from," she said.

(Editing By Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune)

Legal Spending Metrics: Get on the Bus

Recently, my cousin described her approach to dealing with a family crisis: Chase the bus, get on the bus or drive the bus. Being an action-oriented person, her preference was to learn everything she could about the issue, gather expert advice, and then make decisions and address the situation head-on. In other words, she chose to drive the bus.

General counsel, chief legal officers and other law department leaders confront similar choices, as the legal profession is in the midst of an industrial revolution in legal services.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines an industrial revolution as "a rapid major change in an economy (as in England in the late 18th century) marked by the general introduction of power-driven machinery or by an important change in the prevailing types and methods of use of such machines."

Other commentators point to a confluence of socioeconomic changes characterized by a mechanization of manufacturing — moving away from hand-crafted and guild-oriented practices — and new power sources. At the same time, new sources of capital, increased global trading opportunities, and more knowledgeable and demanding consumers play a key role in creating structural changes and upheaval in economies and societies that undergo their own versions of England's experience in the 1800s. (Gavin Weightman's recent book "The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914" covers these topics in a very readable fashion.)

Doesn't this sound a lot like events in the legal services industry? Consider these examples:

• the rise of the types of automated tools that an Oct. 11, 2011, article in The Wall Street Journal dubbed "robo-lawyers";

• lower-cost lawyers in lower-cost locations or — in what will likely be the next phase of outsourcing — nontraditional legal-services suppliers that are high quality, technologically innovative, and able to scale up or down as needed;

• the United Kingdom's legislation permitting the injection of outside investment capital into firms; and

• the host of metrics and process-oriented acronyms featured in the legal trade press, including legal process outsourcing (LPO), legal project management (LPM), knowledge management (KM), key performance indicators (KPIs) and so forth.

Of course, lawyers and firms are, in general, not at the leading edge of any adoption curve (technology or otherwise). They are more likely to be chasing the bus. In a piece for Law360, Dave Dolkas wrote about a firm sending lawyers to Six Sigma training, which is a technique for increasing quality and decreasing costs popularized several decades ago. He argued that the attention the firm received for using this long-established approach shows just how far behind lawyers are in adopting quality improvement and cost-control measures.

Despite this, a GC or CLO might be wary of moving away from a traditional legal services sourcing strategy — business speak for "hiring the firms we've always used." But as boards of directors and executives demand more value from the legal department — without necessarily having much of a concept of how to measure the value of legal services — the risk of doing little or nothing far exceeds the risk of implementing a plan to measure and increase the value of every dollar the company spends on lawyers.

In other words, it's time to get on the bus. No GC wants the board to measure success in managing legal costs solely on a procurement-oriented model, which typically asks, "How much less did we spend this year than last year?" But failing to implement at least a few simple but meaningful metrics can lead to that outcome.
Driving the Bus

So, how can in-house counsel get in the driver's seat? It's time to draft a new set of operating principles. Counsel should consider these five steps as one possible template for taking action.

1. Define five key performance indicators for each major outside firm . These should be easily measurable. The GC should review the results each quarter and then spend 30 minutes with each firm, reviewing their improvement opportunities.

2. Identify where project management responsibility lies for significant M&A, litigation and other projects. Does the in-house or outside lawyer or other professional responsible for project management have the training and tools necessary to bring the project in on-time, on-budget and on-targeted outcome?

Measuring the effectiveness of project management requires first defining what constitutes a successful project. Clear standards are necessary for improved performance.

If the requisite training and tools are not in place, consider hiring specialized project managers to guide major projects.

3. Adopt a process orientation . Process mapping can identify chronic problems: work that needs to be re-done, inefficiencies, and inappropriate staffing, such as having senior lawyers do work that could be automated or completed by lower-paid associates or paralegals. These routine tasks probably aren't going away, but they often can be resourced and completed more efficiently.

4 . Document, evaluate and continuously improve the sourcing strategy or outside legal services. Using a portfolio approach — segmenting legal needs into substantive areas, with an assessment of risk and value, and then sourcing legal services for each segment accordingly — can help demonstrate how legal spending aligns with the company's opportunities to get more for less and mitigate risks.

Use technology to measure the costs and outcomes against the strategy's success criteria. Show the board of directors and C-suite colleagues metrics that align with the reports they already receive from other parts of the company. One example would be to show the total cost of ownership (TCO) of key types of legal projects.

5. Make collaboration a key word among the team, and put it into action every day. Use technology to improve oversight of major matters and to interact more effectively with outside counsel (and I don't mean "send more emails," by the way).

Institutionalize a protocol for every matter sent to outside counsel: The responsible in-house lawyer must engage in a dialogue with the lead outside lawyer to create clear, yet flexible, metrics by which to measure value and success. Some outside firms may resist. But staying clear and firm about the company's requirements will result in the best firms accepting that the legal department is serious about defining value.

It's time to get started — jump on the bus, take the wheel and drive on down the road.

Jim Boeckman, president of Right-Tasking Consulting, helps general counsel get the best legal services for their money. He consults with in-house leaders on projects that optimize the sourcing, cost and management of their legal resources. For more than 20 years, he practiced at major firms in Austin and Dallas and as in-house counsel at high-tech companies in Austin, Dallas and Australia. His blog, Boosting Legal Value, is at www.Right-Tasking.com/blog.

Online Newsrooms: New Survey Shows What Journalists Want to See

What’s in? Online newsrooms. Call it the new ‘black’, the must have Social PR communications tool that today’s journalists expect and publicists -turned -content- marketers need.

TEKGROUP International officially released the results of a national survey today highlighting the importance of creating a content rich and up-to-date online newsroom, known as the centralized hub of digital communications for organizations large and small.

Close to 100% journalists said online newsrooms are a must!
Publicizing, optimizing and socializing the company news comes in many forms. The art of reporting today ranges from +1 feeds, Likes and Tweets to Shares and now even Pins leaving journalists a candyland of chicklets to subscribe to. The result? Almost a 100% of journalists gave a thumbs up to several online newsroom aspects and the powers they possess.

Journalists surveyed expect organizations small and large to:

have an online newsroom available to the media.
provide access to news releases within their online newsroom
find PR or media contact information readily available within an online newsroom
offer the ability to search news archives within an online newsroom

Do more with less time and be twice as good!
Today’s journalists and public relations professionals are expected to do more in less time. With news breaking in a tweet, journalists need quick access to a company’s expert resources whether it be a fact sheet, blog, Twitter stream, images, video or audio.

24/7 Reality: Online newsrooms get your voice heard
Journalists working on fast moving stories often seek background information and quotes from expert sources. Online newsrooms designed with a CRM function or blog-like architecture empower companies to react to news in real-time without the red tape of having to go through a traditional website. Online newsrooms help a company easily and quickly push stories and opinions out to the media (and the search engines).

Google Karma: More online visibility and branding with online newsrooms.

Content marketing and the online newsroom
Considering Google’s Search plus Your World update, online newsrooms that are updated frequently with quality news and content can only be a bonus for a company’s branded online visibility.

More than 50% of journalists are visiting your online newsroom once a week and 64% on a monthly basis, that number should motivate company newsmakers to deliver fresh content and package it in a way that is organized as well as user-and social media friendly.

Size does NOT matter to journalists!
Expertise in a subject comes in all sizes with 87% of journalists surveyed said they visit both large and small-to-medium sized organization online newsrooms.

Once known as the placeholder for archived press releases, today’s online newsroom is the command central for all company news activity actually helps level the playing field for small companies to compete with Fortune 100 companies.

Email is not dead…yet
Email is in, phone call and text are out! The results of this year’s survey point to a strong reliance on e-mail as the preferred method of news and pitch delivery. 95% of working journalists prefer to receive news, information and story pitches from a company via e-mail alerts.

As more and more people use mobile devices, it is no surprise to see that more than 60% of journalists see the ability to receive news via their mobile device as important.

Check list
What else do 2012 journalists expect an online newsroom to have?

Press releases
Photos – high res and low res
Logos
Video
Social media networks
Corporate blog via the online newsroom

While content might still be king, the online newsroom might be the PR ace.