Interested proposed federal legislation today related to limiting employer and school access to social media accounts. Here’s the scoop from MSNBC today:

“A New York Congressman has introduced federal legislation nicknamed “SNOPA” that would make it illegal for employers and educational institutions to require a potential or current employee, or a potential or current student, to divulge personal online information as part of the hiring, enrollment or discipline process.

The bill, with a full name of the Social Networking Online Protection Act, was introduced Friday by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.).

. . .

The legislation would ban employers from requiring that employees or job candidates share social networking passwords or “other means of accessing a private account”; it would also ban post-secondary schools from disciplining students for failing to provide such access, or from discriminating against applicants who refuse to provide such access. Local educational agencies would also be banned from requiring login credentials.”

——————–

Not surprising – something like this was expected soon. I’ll be talking about this very topic at the ABA GP|Solo Spring Meeting in Charleston, S.C. on May 18th at 8AM (info is here) along with technopal Alan Klevan.  I’m sure we’ll see a flood of discussion on this – some variation of it seems necessary to avoid some potentially outrageous privacy and personal digital security issues. Here’s ZDNet’s early take on SNOPA.

And this bill with the acronym SNOPA is not to be confused with this organization, SNOPA.org or this term as defined in the Urban Dictionary.

Why “DocuLaw?” Hold that thought until the end of this post . . .

Every so often I feel the need to answer the questions I get from lawyers everywhere who email me asking questions like, “We really enjoy your CLEs and your blog posts, but how do you actually make a living?” That probably tells me that my company has a branding issue, but . . . the answer is really simple and here it is. For the last almost 27 years since I founded the company, MicroLaw has exclusively focused on a mission of guiding legal entities – law firms of all sizes, corporate and governmental legal departments, government agencies and Bar associations / Law Societies – in the most effective use of technology and how it integrates into the flow of their practices and businesses.

We embody the “Five B’s Approach” that I talk about in some recent CLEs: Best Practices, Being More Profitable, Battling Malpractice, Being Ethically Compliant and Better Quality of Life. We see these five goals as being the right reasons for a smarter law practice management and legal technology approach for any type of law practice, public or private.  Technology for technology’s sake can be a lot of fun as a hobby and it’s great to be enthusiastic about legal tech, but we’ve never thought of it as an end in itself – that just isn’t a sound business strategy.

We’ve always been fiercely independent in terms of any products we recommend – this makes us very different in an age where most “consultants” are really “vendors.” We objectively evaluate our clients’ needs and make recommendations. Sometimes we recommend that nothing new be bought, but rather, existing tools be better used. If we do recommend products, we certainly have our favorites and benchmarks, but we often recommend products that, for implementation, we may need to refer out to a qualified expert rathering than being able to handle it ourselves. This is important – we exist to analyze and advise and manage projects, first and foremost.

Wow – some of that sounds awfully formal, so here’s the informal version. We help with every technology that involves something that plugs in for power or runs on batteries (in a legal practice environment – stop that snickering :-)). That means everything from:

• Law practice management and technology audits – how are you doing? what can you do better? what’s your next set of steps? This includes a detailed review and audit of your network, hardware, security, remote access, mobility plans and backup infrastructure, including reviewing IT upgrade proposals and even VOIP and IP phone system proposals. Oh, and we also speak Mac in case you were wondering.
• Cloud strategies – we help our clients figure out what elements of cloud technology make sense for them and help them select and implement the services that make sense. From practice management to document management, financial management, secure data storage, online backup and fax technologies and more.
• Document streamlining – this means document, email and paper management – that can mean a version of our Paper LESS Office approach tailored to a practice, document/email management with leading tools like Worldox GX3 or NetDocuments or even the DM functions within some practice managers. It can also mean developing scanning approaches and helping practices figure out what to do with their existing and to-be-accumulated paper.
• Financial systems – helping get your money straight and your billings/collections maximized – we’ve worked with many legal financial systems over the years and particularly like the venerable Tabs 3 system for many of our clients, but also systems like Rippe-Kingston, Omega, and others. We also help practices migrate from one system to another.
• Practice management systems – the core of our existence, focusing on our long-espoused belief that it’s all about “building complete electronic cases files.” PM systems are the beating information heart of a practice and we help either select a system and help with the best way to implement it, to migrating from one system to another. We recommend both “terrestrial” and “cloud” systems based on what makes the most sense for any given client – and then we help make sure that PM, document management and financial management work together as one integrated system, accessible from anywhere, anytime, from any device. So whether it’s Tabs PracticeMaster or CLIO, JustWare or anything else, we can help
• Microsoft Office – we help with legal-focused selection, configuration on all aspects of Microsoft Office – Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint. our custom-created training reference materials have drawn raves from our clients as have our CLEs on these subjects – and of course, how they integrate with document management and practice management systems.
• Adobe Acrobat and PDFing – we help educate our clients about everything legal professionals need to know and understand about living in a PDF-centric world, and how to securely use Acrobat to their best advantage – with tools like Bates Stamping, Secure Redaction, Electronic 3-Ring Binders, Typewriter, Security, Editing, Comment and Markup, PDF File Comparisons, Creating Forms and more.
• Remote Access and Mobility – we help clients figure out the best and most secure “work away” capabilities include Windows RDP, Citrix, Logmein and then extension of practice information to smartphones, iPads and Android tablets.
• Litigation technology and forensics – we have a network of the top professionals to help with every aspect of trial practice automation and with forensic examinations.
• IT – yes, we’ve been hardcore geeks having been in the trenches since before some of our clients were born, starting in the DOS and Novell days through modern cloud structures and the bridging of the Mac and Windows gaps. We can help design hardware and network systems from 1-100 users and help our clients get the best pricing on right components, review local IT proposals to make sure they make sense and are fairly priced, manage projects literally anywhere in the world and even provide actual turnkey systems to our smaller clients – shipping them and ourselves to set them up if there is no competent local IT support available.

Why “DocuLaw” then? Because so much of what we help with is wrapped up in the understanding, streamlining and management of documents for our clients. Whether paper, electronic or both. Whether texts or Facebook postings. Whether blog posts or Tweets. They’re all documents and we help our clients find ways to build complete electronic case files so they can feel confident, when working a case or a project, that they’re seeing everything that a responsible legal professional should see before advising a client or taking a position on their behalf.

So . . . does that help? That’s what MicroLaw has been, continues to be, and will always be about.

Oh, and did I mention we do it incredibly affordably – so much so that many solo practitioners have been, and are our clients. If you have a practice or a business, we’ll find a way we can help you in a way you can afford, big or small, in the U.S. or around the world, in any time-zone. And be sure to look at our Spring into Spring MicroLaw CARES (Computer and Resource Evaluation & Study) discounts here.

Ready to chat about how we can help? Email me here.

Okay, the last thing you need today is yet another blog post or article announcing the long-awaited Google Drive – Google’s price-busting entry into the already sort of crowded cloud document storage market. We know it’s cheaper – Google can buy the planet – heck, they could probably even buy Facebook. So if they want to corner the market by low-balling pricing, obviously, that’s a primary tactic. But the real questions Dropbox, Box, SpiderOak, and Skydrive customers are asking is “is there a reason to migrate to Google Drive?”

So it’ comes down to functionality – security, ease of access, integration into a Mac or Windows local file system, mobile apps, collaborative capabilities. All the things that actually matter on a daily usage level. It’s not going to matter to most law practice users whether they spend $10 or $20 per month or get 50 or 100 GB of storage if it doesn’t work the way they need it to. For example. the thing about Dropbox that, to me, beats all other functions is the tight integration into both Windows and Mac native file systems. In other words, your Dropbox space feels like just another drive available in Explorer / Finder. There’s no need to upload or download to/from it – it’s just a drive that happens to not be physically in or attached to your computer. That’s an edge in many situations (especially with a legal document manager like Worldox that can have it’s “base path” for document storage or archival storage pointed to Dropbox folders rather than local storage because Dropbox pretends to be a local drive.

So let’s look at the best articles I’ve seen today that compare Google Drive to other services like Dropbox and Box – this is the more valuable information from a law practice cloud storage perspective.

Take a look at: http://mashable.com/2012/04/24/google-drive-compared/

And: http://gizmodo.com/5904739/google-drive-icloud-dropbox-and-more-compared-whats-the-best-cloud-option

And also this one from a pricing angle: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/04/24/cloud-drive-price-comparison-amazon-apple-google-box-dropbox-skydrive-and-sugarsync/

And from Down Under, a comparison-focused piece from tomorrow :-) http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/how-does-google-drive-compare-to-the-competition-20120425-1xkee.html

The real question in the law practice technology world is how and when will vendors of terrestrial practice managers and financial systems, as well as litigation support products, and the various SaaS/cloud providers find ways to take an agnostic approach and integrate with ALL of these products so choices can be made on price and storage instead of integration with one but not another. Get with it legal market publishers – allow cloud storage from all the major players!

Is it time to consider some archiving?

More and more of MicroLaw’s clients are moving to a cloud-based/off-site backup system as a secondary line of defense against data loss. Some of these systems, such as Dropbox, can serve as an excellent repository for your archived documents – making them accessible.   The subscription price is governed by the amount of data they store.

Most of our clients use the Worldox legal document/email manager. Worldox can be configured to archive your closed cases to a different drive or location (such as Dropbox folders) making it easy to exclude it from the data being backed up off-site (keeping your backup and related (and more important) restore process faster).  It is also nice to archive just to keep active data lean, mean and clean.

Contact me if you’d like to chat about how we can help you develop an archival strategy that keeps you connected to your older client data but not hampered by it.

Aderant has a voracious appetite for legal software companies. After having munched down RainMaker last year, the Atlanta-based publisher of the AMLaw 200-focused Aderant Expert financial system, has polished off venerable Omegal Legal as well. Now with two mid-market financial/practice management sessions in the corporate fold, one has to wonder if there’s any real competition left in the middle market. Rippe-Kingston remains strong, Orion is still out there and Lexis-Nexis has Juris and the Tabs 3 people continue to move upwards in their suitable customer size. But consolidation seems to be the trend just as strongly in the days when the company f/k/a West and LexisNexis were rampaging through the market on their acquistion warpaths.

What does this mean for customers and prospects of Omega’s capable financial and practice management systems? Who knows. Aderant has had Rainmaker in the family for more than a year – a competitor of Omega’s. Is consolidation of the products in the cards? Will one be phased out and its customers migrated to one or the other, or a unified hybrid of the two? Or will Aderant engagement in GM-style brand management, keeping the Rainmaker and Omega brands both alive? Hard to say (but think “Pontiac, Saturn and Oldsmobile”).  I had the pleasure of sitting down with Aderant CEO Chris Giglio and VP Jim Hammond (formerly head of RainMaker) at New York LegalTech in early February and walked away thinking “these are two seriously focused guys” who can pull off building a legal technology empire for medium-sized to larger law practices.

Related mention – congratulations to Don Gall, founder of Omega – a giant of a figure for decades in the legal financial and practice management world.

And as always, our legal technology product market remains endlessly fascinating. What’s better? More choices or fewer product choices? What do you think – go ahead and chime in by commenting.

An intriguing question came up on the ABA Solosez list today. The question, paraphrased, was “I have a criminal defense practice and wonder why I should have a practice management system. It seems like a lot of work retrofitting what I’m doing now with several separate pieces of software, into what some practice management software would want me to do. Don’t know if it’s worth it – tell me why it would be.”

As I said, an intriguing question – whether asked back in the day or today in 2012 when we have such a rich range of practice management approaches. I’m buried today and hesitate to jump in on this but here’s a quick response from someone who has been living deep  inside the practice management industry since the mid-80′s (the days when WordPerfect Office Notebooks were proto-managers):

Toshiba announced a new series of Android tablets, called “Excite,” to start shipping in June. In addition to the expected 7″ and 10″ models, Toshiba pulled a fast one by announcing a giant 13″ model. Here’s an article with all the details and here’s another. Bucking the trend of 10″ tablet makers augmenting their repertoires with more compact 7″ models (to compete with the Kindle Fire?), this one moves decidedly in the opposite direction. At just under two pounds and .4″ thick, it’s definitely not svelte. Citing appeal to the media and gaming user communities, I think Toshiba has it wrong – I’d be willing to use one as would a number of my clients. Think about how this device, on a stand with Bluetooth keyboard, could be a realistic laptop substitute when combined with onboard and cloud storage, inching close to the idea of a PC/Mac-less existence. Interesting, isn’t it?

In my post last month entitled “Weekend Whimsy: You’ve GOT to Play with OnLive Desktop on Your iPad,” I wrote about this seriously cool (actually more than that – it’s jaw dropping) app that lets you run full-screen Windows 7 and the entire Microsoft Office suite on your iPad. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, Microsoft wasn’t too keen on the idea of a zillion people sharing their desktop operating system. Microsoft’s Legal Eagles apparently had some words with the young upstarts at OnLive about this.

The end result is that Microsoft seems to have found a way to achieve licensing happiness by requiring OnLive to use Windows Server 2008 instead of Windows 7 – somehow that’s more licensing compliant in their view. That’s a good thing because this app just completely rocks. AND, it would seem this is in Microsoft’s best interest – anything that gets people used to running app-ized versions of Microsoft products (v. anything else) seems to be a good thing for them. Here’s the article that details the agreement.

Reporting live from ABA TECHSHOW 2012, here’s my broad impressions on the unofficial theme for this year’s conference, based largely on what the marketplace is doing. Based on the buzz and activity in the exhibit hall, there are three things:

1) Cloud everything – whether practice management, document storage, collaboration, discovery, financial and document systems, what gets the crowd excited are any kind of cloud initiative.

2) Mac v. Windows – it doesn’t matter anymore with lawyers able to use both interchangeably when drive by use of cloud apps and services – these serve as the great equalizer rendering one’s hardware platform choice more a matter of preference than anything else.

3) Push harder – in other words, get more out of the software and services you’ve already been using – time to stop fumbling with Word and trying to use it as a glorified, post-WordPerfect typewriter. Stop glossing over the deep range of capabilities within programs like Microsoft Outlook and Adobe Acrobat. Stop being a digital slob with electronic snippets of info all over the place and unify it with tools like Microsoft OneNote or Evernote. Stop accumulating and start really USING the products and services you’ve bought and paid for. A sound message I’ve been preaching for decades. And a message ideally suited to challenging times for legal economics.

These themes shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – but thanks to ABA TECHSHOW and Chair Reid Trautz and his planning team,  as always for being smart enough, sharp enough and sensitive enough to current and emerging legal technology trends to provide a CLE curriculum that is focused on absolute practicality – information attendees can take back to their practices and immediately put to use.

Credit should be given when due. Hardware vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. often take heat for what inevitably are normal, isolated poor service incidents. It’s rare that people take the time to write about the most positive service responses, so . . . I will.

At MicroLaw we were recently the victim of a building break-in. Thieves stole a new Dell server that was in its box waiting to be configured and prepared for a client. We were beside ourselves because we needed to deliver the server in the next few days for a client and realized we faced a typical two week build/ship time on new orders. It would have been a nightmare to try and reschedule the entire network upgrade project and adjust the timing for multiple lawyers and staff at our client’s office.

Enter Jeremy Webb, a Dell corporate sales rep who has services our account for years. Jeremy’s always been responsive, getting us great pricing on Dell services, desktops and laptops for our clients. But this time, Jeremy went above and beyond – he rescued us and our clients. We explained the situation we were in and the wall we were up against. Jeremy expedited the order, even lowering our price for the server to help us wash out the effect of the insurance deductible we had to absorb and we got the replacement server literally in a matter of days, rather than the usual two weeks – he even absorbed the overnight shipping charges.

In short, Jeremy made his employer, Dell Computers look very, very good. To Michael Dell – KEEP THIS EMPLOYEE, GIVE HIM A RAISE AND  A BIG PAT ON THE BACK FOR GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND! (Caps emphasis very intentional!). Thank you Jeremy and thank you Dell for rescuing our client project.

Thanks to Dallas lawyer/friend, Mike Koenecke today. Watch this – it really needs NO separate commentary. My only advice? Don’t drink milk or soda while watching, unless you relish the thought of it squirting out your nose :-)

SUBTITLE: What ELSE can you use your new decision tree or mind-mapping software for, other than visually laying out your case facts or litigation strategy?

What’s the tech connection? In legal technology and system design in particular, flowcharts help map out complex network infrastructure visually. With baseball season opening next week, if you haven’t yet found your favorite team to root for, check out this flowchart designed to help you logically, rationally and methodically decide on your new favorite team to root for.

My first thought was “WAY too much time on their hands,” but then, after reflecting for a few moments, I reconsidered and decided it was a lovingly hand-crafted work of decision-tree art. What do you think? Who’s your favorite? Nothing like objectivizing the purely subjective :-)

We’ve had a lot of interest from clients recently about moving their email services to the cloud.  This is in the context of most of our clients using a recent vintage of Outlook (most often integrated with their practice, financial and document management  systems). Of course, the gold standard for email data system management is Microsoft Exchange.

While most of our clients with five or more users have traditionally owned their own Exchange server or used the Windows Small Business Server network operating system which comes with Exchange at no extra cost, they are used  hosting their own email.  Exchange hosting with services like GoDaddy and Rackspace has been generating a lot of interest with our smaller firm clients because it has all the advantages of using Microsoft Exchange (i.e. shared calendars, tasks, contacts, even email and someone else to run it/back it up, update it, etc.). But for many firms, Exchange hosting, once you crossed the 10+ user range, could get pretty pricey. Recently, however, Microsoft has been pushing to become very active in the cloud services field and has turned Exchange hosting on its ear.

How does $4/user per month with 25 Gb mailboxes sound to you? It’s pretty much blown us away – compared to the more typical $8-$10/month with 2-4 Gb per mailbox that competitors offer.

You should definitely take a hard look at Microsoft’s newest Exchange hosting offering – we can help you go through the options.  For $4 per month per user, each user gets a 25 GB mailbox, and is able to send  huge attachments – up to 25 MB each (of course, it still depends on the maximum attachment size that can be received on the other end).  ActiveSync (for real-time wireless syncing to iPhone, Android and Windows phones) and Outlook Web Access (browser-based access to Outlook)  is also included for mobile users, and Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (anti-malware / anti-spam)  is included at no charge as well.  It’s a pretty nice package – for 60 mailboxes, that works out to $240 per month for a combined 1.5 terabytes of cloud-based email storage.  They also provide a 99.9% up-time commitment with a Service Level Agreement (terms to protect your info and confidences by contract) and 24/7 live phone support.

Of course, to users, they see NO difference whatsoever using hosted v. local Exchange Server – they just use Outlook as they’ve always been (but with LOTS more storage and no one badgering them to delete old email every week).

All considered, this is quickly becoming our primary recommendation to clients looking to move to Hosted Exchange (or ANY Exchange-based system – so if your current physical Exchange Server is getting a little long in the tooth, we can help you make the transition to a hosted system instead of buying a new “box”).  If you’d like us to assess what it will take to move your existing mailboxes into the cloud, let us know by contacting us here – this is an option that makes sense for everyone from solos to firms with hundreds of users.

Okay, so I’ve deeply involved in computer technology since the mid-70′s – for the most part, I get it at a level that lets me help my clients. But when it comes to home theater, I feel like a true naif, a digital babe in the woods, standing slack-jawed and baffled at the back of a new “receiver” (strange that we call it that still, isn’t it?) and its panoply of connections. The only things that make me feel comfortable, by the way, are the only two really familiar connections: ethernet and USB.

The New York Times comes to the rescue, at least a little, with this article which is a lucid and clear exposition of all the various connector types. It’s not a comprehensive home theater Ph.D study program. Rather, it’s a good place to start. Thanks NYT.

Also, a quick tip. Most modern home theater receivers can connect to your home network. Most, however, want to do this via a hard-wired Ethernet cable. Great, except for the fact that your router/switch might be in another part of your home and not exactly in a convenient place to run a long CAT 5e cable. Many receivers do support having a WiFi adapter attached, but generally want to sell you their own high-priced branded adapter, with the less than subtle implication that it won’t work unless you use their over-priced gadget.

A better approach is using ANY WiFi gaming adapter. While normally used to connect Wiis and Xboxes to WiFi networks, these will work perfectly with home theater receivers. So instead of Pioneer’s $150 WiFi adapter for my home theater receiver, I opted for an ioGear Universal Gaming adapter for $35 from Amazon – worked immediately (literally a press of its WPS button while pressing the WPS button on my WiFi router was all it took).

Also, I think I’ve blogged about this before, but you absolutely don’t need insanely over-priced HDMI cables from your local big-box retailer. They LOVE to pad their profits with $30-$100 cables. Not when you can get perfectly adequate HDMI cables for about $4 from sources like this.

Once you’ve digested the NYT’s connection basics, then home theater basics sites abound – here’s a good example. And of course, there’s always Home Theater for Dummies, which in usual “dummies” fashion, is a solid reference guide in plain language.

Oh, and of course you can either buy a long VGA cable or a long HDMI cable to plug in your laptop to work on that mega-70″ HDTV sitting in your living room – there’s the convergence factor, along with your TV and receiver connecting to your WiFi network to stream your PC and Mac content, connect to internet radio, stream your Pandora channels and of course, single-tap connection to your iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches via Apple Airplay. And then the ability to control your DirecTV (or other) tuner and your home theater system with iPad or Android apps.

So caveat emptor in the home theater world is the order of the day.  And as always, it’s just a matter of reading, learning and plugging things in. If they don’t work the first time, plug ‘em in somewhere else until you get a picture and sound :-)

So . . . crying about your failed bracketology attempts over this past March Madness weekend? My two teams – the UW Badgers and the Marquette Golden Eagles have both made it to the Sweet 16 – very exciting! Fingers crossed. I do have to confess though that when I was at Marquette Law School in the mid-80′s, they were still the Warriors and it’s hard to think of them as anything else :-).

My latest CLE materials are up and online at MicroLaw’s CLE downloads page here. These include four session sets from my guest lecture engagement at the Charleston School of Law this past week, as well as my PDFing materials from the Tennessee Bar’s law technology day last month. As always, the materials are free, searchable PDFs – feel free to share them with anyone who you think might benefit from the knowledge they’ll gain.

The latest materials are:

• Social Media Isn’t a Fad: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and YouTube and How to Use Them Responsibly and Ethically in Your New Practice
• The 2012 New Lawyer’s Low-Budget / No-Budget Technology Survival Guide
• Technology for Tightwads: 10+ Tips for Free and Low-Cost Law Practice Management and Tech Tools, Gadgets, Apps and Websites
• How NOT to Commit Malpractice With Your Computer (or Smartphone and iPad)
• The Secret Tech Weapon You Didn’t Know You Had: Acrobat and PDFing Tools, Tips, Techniques to Use Daily
• Increasing Cloudiness in Your Practice – Hardcore Realities of Web-Based Systems and Ethical Issues

Hope you find them useful. As always, if these materials look like they have applicability to your practice (hard not to :-)), feel free to contact me here to chat about it.

Seriously, I just spent the week teaching legal technology and law practice management classes at the Charleston School of Law – in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve done this at a number of law schools around the country over the years, but I have to say, this school stands out for me for many reasons – it was the single most positive experience I’ve ever had with any law school anywhere, including all three years at my alma mater, Marquette University Law School way back in the 80′s.

If you’re interested in viewing my course materials for my classes which included:

• Social Media Isn’t Just a Fad: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and YouTube and How to Use Them Responsibly and Ethically in Your New Practice
• The 2012 New Lawyer’s Low-Budget / No-Budget Technology Survival Guide
• Technology for Tightwads: 10+ Tips for Free and Low-Cost Law Practice Management and Tech Tools, Gadgets, Apps and Websites
• How NOT to Commit Malpractice With Your Computer (or iPad or Smartphone)

You can download the PDFs of the materials, along with all my other recent CLE materials here - feel free to share them with those whom you feel might benefit.

And it’s not just because they invited me to my favorite city in all of North America :-) (although that didn’t hurt). The reasons I was so impressed with the Charleston School of Law, in no particular order are:

• The intangibles – the sense of community between faculty, the administration and the students – not three distinct groups as I’ve normally experienced at law schools, but rather a genuine community of people who actually like each other and have a real sense of camaraderie. What better way to instill a future sense of law practice collegiality than to plant the seeds in law school.
• Genuinely, some of the warmest, nicest people I’ve seen in any academic environment – the administration takes very good care of their students. For goodness sake, they feed them pizza and lunch – that didn’t happen when I was in law school. I heard that in a typical year, the school spends into the five figures just feeding their busy students.
• An attitude of open-mindedness and willingness to experiment with new, progressive and practical ways to educate their students – something I’ve seen in short supply in most law schools who lean towards traditionalism. In a traditional city like Charleston, there’s an educational revolution happening here, especially with what appears to be a sorely needed and growing commitment to including practical aspects of law practice life – legal technology and law practice management – into the curriculum.
• The students I met and had the privilege of teaching were engaged, appreciative and seem thrilled to be learning not just about substantive law, but the practical side of what it will be like to actually practice law – and they seemed appreciative of their school’s willingness to make such classroom focus available to them. These students showed an intense passion and interest for absorbing information about the practical elements of law practice – clearly the initiatives taken by Dean Saunders and Judge Kosko – teaching lawyering skills and law practice management courses – are paying off – these students will be more ready than any I’ve seen to jump into firms and even their own practices after graduation and be functional, responsible and contributing members of the legal communities wherever they end up residing – very impressive “kids” (most did seem young enough to be my children, but there were plenty of second-career folks too).
• The administrators I met – Associate Dean Abby Saunders, Assistant Dean Mark Moore, Assistant Dean Jennifer Summers, Brett Barker, Roland Jones, Assistant Dean Jennifer Summers, Betsy Marchant and  especially Judge George Kosko, one of the founders of the school and a member of its board of advisors – were delightfully hospitable, engaging and fascinating conversation partners talking about progressive legal education and showed a touching level of affection and concern for the academic and personal well-being of their students.
• Being smack dab in the heart of Charleston’s famed Historic District certainly doesn’t hurt – with facilities ranging from restored, renovated and reclaimed historic structures like the city’s old railroad depot (transformed into an architecturally impressive law library and student center – a place I would’ve killed to be able to study in in my academic days), a wonderful art deco theater on vibrant King Street, among others. It’s hard to imagine students coming here and ever wanting to leave.

If any of my children wanted to pursue a legal career, it would be a privilege – and my first choice – to send them to the Charleston School of Law. I hope that I have the opportunity to help them in the future with further educational offerings for their students. If it seems like I’m completely enamored with this school, it’s because I am!

Special note of thanks to my dear friend and colleague, Courtney Kennaday, Practice Management Advisor for the South Carolina Bar. Courtney’s syllabus has served as the original base for the school’s efforts in injecting these elements of practicality into the curriculum and was instrumental in making the connections that yielded the invitation for me to be able to contribute. I think that the legal community in South Carolina is truly fortunate to have her as a law practice management resource.

As I reminded all the students I met, if any of you have any questions at all about the courses I taught, please don’t hesitate to contact me here.

Thank you to all my new friends and if it’s not too presumptuous to say, colleagues, at the Charleston School of Law for a rewarding experience. I just hope that your student body benefited as much from my classes as I benefited from the entire experience.

Oh, and if you haven’t been to Charleston, South Carolina, what’s wrong with you?! A magnificently preserved historic district, a city dripping with history from the Spanish colonial era through the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Civil Rights to its present day mix of spectacular and world class dining, wonderful weather (okay, it gets steamy in the summer), a seafood lover’s paradise, with beaches that delight children and the young at heart, it’s a perfect place for a family vacation, a romantic weekend, or a history buff’s adventure trip. Just go – trust me on this – I’ve been to the city more than 20 times and can’t wait to come back. Oh, and if you go, be sure to get reservations well in advance for Husk, voted Bon Appétit Magazine’s best new restaurant in the U.S. in 2011 – trust me on that one too. Or Grill 225 – truly the best I’ve had of a lifetime of steaks (no hyperbole or overstatement intended – it’s just fact – better than Peter Luger’s, better than Manny’s in Minneapolis, better than all the steakhouse chains – better than the classic “5 O’Clock House” in Milwaukee, my hometown) and . . . well, I could go on and on about the great dining, great sites, and all the reasons why a Charleston stay should be on your travel bucket list.

For the life of me, I routinely scratch my head whenever I see an iPad stand someone is peddling for some surrealy (can “surreal” be made into an adverb?) absurd price . . . like $99. Here’s an example.

Here’s what I’m baffled about - look at this. It’s $7.72. Or this. It’s $2.99.

C’mon folks, have we lost our fricking minds when it comes to iPadiana? (the answer is “yes’). Do you need a billet aluminum $100 stand to hold your precious iPad? My precious iPad is held up by a wooden tabletop photo easel I found when unpacking in our new home. I think someone gave it to me, so my cost was zero.

Here’s what a $100 iPad stand does: it holds up an iPad.

Here’s what a $2.99 iPad stand does: it holds up an iPad.

Here’s what my free iPad stand does: it holds up an iPad.

So exercise some common sense and spend money on things that actually matter . . . or even better, take the extra $97 you didn’t spend and put it in your childrens’ §529 plan for college. Or in your IRA for you. Or take your significant other out for a wonderful meal. Or spend it on apps if you really must. But seriously, don’t be stupid about iPad accessory prices. Your iPad is an inanimate chunk of glass, metal and plastic and it absolutely positively doesn’t care how it’s held upright. Really. I know you’re thinking, “No, you’re wrong Ross! My iPad deserves a $100 billet aluminum stand!”

But I’m not wrong.  Just don’t, okay?

Neil Squillante of Technolawyer fame reminded me that I had posted previously about best use of Word styles (in a Word 2007 context, but applicable to 2010 as well). The article is here and I think you’ll still find it quite useful. Our earlier post from last week about styles is here.

Thanks Neil for the heads up!

On the subject of the iPads being able to finally get over the air (OTA) updates starting with IOS 5.0, my friend and colleague, as well as renowned legal security expert John Simek suggested to me that caution is warranted:

“Frankly, I would NEVER update over the air. Main reason…there is no backup prior to the update. Even though iTunes is a crap application, at least it prompts for a backup prior to the update. Twice I’ve ended up with a bricked device when trying to update Sharon’s iPad 2. Thankfully, I had a backup each time although getting it back to a functioning sheet of glass took a couple of hours more than it should have.”

And John has all sorts of important initials after his name so I trust everything he says :-)

So, it appears that if I want to attract lots of comments to a Ross Ipsa blog post, I just need to write about, and ideally, criticize, an Apple product :-), as I did a few days ago here. I have to issue a “duh” on my observation that over the air updating of iPads (sans PC/Mac connection) should be possible. . . . because . . . they are! Amusingly, the IOS 5.1 update prompt popped up on my iPad One literally an hour after I posted about it (I momentarily thought, “Holy crap, these guys really listen!”). Since it was my first update since manually installing IOS 5.0, I didn’t realize the updates are not automatic if you adjust the Settings | General | Software Update to allow over the air updates. Yay.

But the display issue remains – it’s not enough for me to just mirror the iPad display on an external monitor – that’s not what I want – although the new iPad’s higher Retina Display resolution might make a difference, I don’t just want huge characters showing on an external 24″ or 27″ display – I want a real external display presentation like I’d get on a Windows or Mac system (hey, someone write an app for that!).

Anyway, thanks for all the comments folks – they are all approved and posted!