The "official" launch of the book will be at the ABA TECHSHOW 2008, where Tom and Dennis will be speaking on the topic of collaboration tools, and will be happy to sign your copy of the book.

The book reflects the idea of collaboration that underlies the Between Lawyers blog.

Here's the book description from the ABA Web Store:

This first-of-its-kind guide for the legal profession shows you how to use standard technology you already have and the latest "Web 2.0" resources and other tech tools, like Google Docs, Microsoft Office and SharePoint, and Adobe Acrobat, to work more effectively on projects with colleagues, clients, co-counsel and even opposing counsel. In The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, well-known legal technology authorities Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell provide a wealth of information useful to lawyers who are just beginning to try these tools, as well as tips and techniques for those lawyers with intermediate and advanced collaboration experience.

Collaboration technologies and tools are the most important current developments in legal technology and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Explained with minimal technical jargon, the book focuses on highly practical and usable ideas that you can put to work straight away.

With practical advice on how to use specific tools and concrete action steps to take, lawyers and law firms at all levels will benefit from working together better.

You'll learn:

+ The basics of collaboration and collaboration tools

+ How to select and implement tools and strategies

+ The best ways to collaborate on documents, cases, transactions, and projects

+ How to collaborate inside and outside the office

+ How to collaborate using tools you already have or own

Technology now makes it easier than ever to work with others -- this is the first guide dedicated to the special requirements of the legal world with the practical steps it takes to do it right.

I encourage you to preorder now and take advantage of the 15% discount or to consider ordering the book here if you are reading this at a later date.

Shun Web services, you simply can't control the data?


Use Web services only when you have specific, confidentiality and reliability guaranteeing service level agreements?


Use Web services liberally, but acquaint yourself with the applicable terms of use and make sure clients are amenable?

Money quote:

I could see a metropolis-hinterland kind of effect, where firms put the rainmaker partners in downtown offices, and farm 'the work' out to less expensive premises.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Then: consider how a virtual law firm (or a very forward thinking conventional one) might be in the perfect position to leapfrog ahead by eliminating the CRM (customer relationship management) line item from its technology and marketing budgets, and instead adopting a client driven, "vendor relationship management" approach to business development.

Wikis at work, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP Ramp SOA Spec Efforts: "The group also has setup what they call a 'vendor-neutral Web site, designed as a wiki' they will use to collaborate, communicate and gain feedback from developers. There's a place for news, white papers, public specifications and access to information on early deployments."

And let's assume that there are people I want to practice with, however they don't live within commuting distance of me.

So how would a virtual law firm be organized?

How would the conflict issues be handled?

How would the professional liability issues be handled?

How would such an entity hold itself out to the public?

How would compensation issues be handled?

The Korea Times reports on efforts in South Korea to use blogs or other Internet tools as an alternative to physical appearances in courts.

The money quote:

"Korean courts are now experimenting whether they could operate court trials and hearings just through Internet postings, saving everybody the trouble of actually entering the courtroom," the Korea Times reports. "The Seoul Administration Court recently designated one of its court units,which rules on labor-management relations and industrial accidents,to develop a prototype model for Internet-based trial models by the end of this month. Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court."

A sign of Law 2.0?

I've heard the terms "homesourcing" and "insourcing" to refer to outsourcing work, including legal work, to the US Midwest and other "non-coastal parts of the US. It's an idea that starting to get a lot of discussion and some traction, including in the discussion of Law 2.0. One more piece of "the world is flat" conversation and a new meme to watch..

Thanks to Rob McMay at BusinessPundit.com for the explanation and links.

Technorati tags: farmshoring outsourcing insourcing homesourcing Law2.0

Also included is a new article from Johnson called "The Life of Law Online" that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to think about where law is headed in an increasingly online world.

The new article ends with this paragraph:

Our geographical, sovereign law may be well suited for regulating physical things and protecting us from real world threats. It will undoubtedly persist in its own appropriate environmental niche. But, even in that context, we would do better to treat it as an organism, rather than a mechanism — viewing it as a complex whole, disallowing efforts to redesign it from outside, discrediting efforts to analyze it by reductionist means. In any event, we must recognize that our current legal organism, transplanted online, will not prosper. As we interact globally over the Internet, we create a new non–local citizenry, a netizenry, occupying many different kinds of online spaces that both need and can create rules of their own. The new global metabolism will produce new forms of social order that use fundamentally different forms of repair, goal setting and legitimation. Our old meta–meta–story of citizen consent to a social contract empowering a territorially local government just won’t work in this new context. But new repair mechanisms, new complex systems, new forms of social order will arise. These will involve voluntary navigation and filters, not voting. They will demand and receive deference from local legal regimes, because they will be better than any current legal systems at creating social order online. Long live the new legal organisms of the net.

A profound and fascinating article. Johnson's writings have been a big influence on my thinking for many years and he is one of the giants in both the legal aspects of technology and the use of technology by lawyers. I'm thrilled to learn that Johnson will be speaking at ABA TECHSHOW 2006, where I hope to meet him and say thank you in person.

Technorati tag: Law2.0

The Wired GC notes that the Law 2.0 got some recognition, along with similar ideas in other fields, in Dion Hinchcliffe's excellent summary post called "The Web 2.0 Revolution Spawns Offshoots," which references, among other things, the articles that Tom Mighell and I, along with a few other pforward-looking thinkers, helped put together in the recent issue of Law Practice Today.

The money quote from Hinchcliffe's article:

The interrelated, mutually reinforcing concepts in Web 2.0 like true disintermediation, customer self-service, and harnessing collective intelligence, are resonating with many other industries. As it turns out, these industries are in the process of being transformed by technology including the relentless collapse of formal central controls, pervasive Web usage, rapid technological change, and more. These communities seem to be craving a new model for collaboration, relevance, and usefulness. And Web 2.0 seems to give them both a beacon to rally around and a useful set of practices that can then be used for constructive reinvention.

Technorati tag: Law2.0

Lamb concludes his excellent discussion with this:

For me, I believe that the best answer is better explained using a military metaphor. Sometimes the number of boots on the ground matter. That's why we have the Army and Marines. Sometimes, and almost always for the really tough problems, you're better off with an elite Navy Seal Team or the Delta Force. Small and elite is where you get the best of the best.

Let's discuss.