This is where the problem comes into play. Most often when these articles, posts or entries are published they are attributed to the lawyer/law firm on the account instead of the actual author. Unfortunately, misleading readers into thinking something was written by a lawyer runs afoul of most states’ rules of professional conduct, requiring:

A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer’s or the lawyer’s services. A communication is false or misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading.

As the Kevin’s article suggests, these posts and articles written under the auspices of being written by lawyers gives the impression of legal advise or opinions when in fact they are most likely written by college students at best. Of course, this may explain some of the content I have seen on many lawyers’ websites, but more importantly it goes to something far more important that the rules of professional conduct, it contributes to the public’s view of lawyers as liars and cheats who will do anything to make/save a buck. Let’s be honest, most legal blogs are not there to educate other lawyers, though they may do so as a bonus. They exist to increase search engine rankings and to improve the overall status of the lawyer/law firm who write them, to give them credibility in the area of law they practice. Taking credit for an informational article about the law that was actually written by a college student can hardly be deemed credible or trustworthy, neither to the public or other lawyers.

While I am not suggesting any ethics opinions are necessary to curb this practice, I would hope the members of the bar in general would refrain from this blatant degradation of our profession. As a self-proclaimed self-governing body, should not attorneys aspire to be seen better than this? Should we not encourage each other to something greater? Social media is an amazing tool which, when used properly, can be a boon to any business, including the law. But it can also be the converse, just another tool to artificially inflate a company and try and fool the readers into thinking something is what it isn’t. As Kevin O’Keefe aptly put it, “…this would be one that would draw a ton of publicity on and offline. Nothing gets more sensationalized when it comes to legal news today than lawyers and social media.” Or as we used to say in High School, “Don’t be THAT guy”.

A special thanks to Kevin O’Keefe for the article which prompted this post. If you have not read the original, head on over to his blog at kevin.lexblog.com and check it and the rest of his site out.

Rather than leave social media as largely uncharted territory, lawyers can reap the benefits of learning to harness the true power behind these types of sites to further their own careers. These attorneys tend to raise their profiles in the eyes of existing clients and prospective clients alike, which has an overall positive effect on business.

Here are some ways a progressive attorney can utilize social media:

Social Networking

The object of social media sites like Twitter is to gain followers. As a lawyer, you really don’t want to accumulate followers who might potentially need to come to you for advice one day. Instead, you want to connect and network with those professionals who are likely to refer people they know to you.

This means finding a way to increase the number of followers you have who are from a legal or business network. One way to do this is to follow other attorneys and subscribe to blogs that interest you. Leave comments that help to engage the blog owner or other respondents in a conversation.

Once they are following you, it’s up to you to use other forms of social media to let them know about your field of specialization.

Blogging

Using a dynamic platform like a blog can be an ideal way for a lawyer to offer credible legal opinion and expertise. WordPress can be installed easily on a private or corporate domain and makes blogging quick and simple. A blog allows you to establish a professional online presence, whether you have your own firm, or whether you’re working as an employee for a larger firm.

Many employers worry about their attorneys blogging under their own name, as they fear this may detract from the company itself. However, if the message being posted on the blog attracts the right audience, it can be a draw-card for large companies to contact that lawyer as an individual and eventually become a client for the firm.

Insights and Opinions

It should be noted that any legal insights or opinions you do decide to share on social media sites should never be confused as actual legal counsel by your readers or followers.

Wherever necessary, display a disclaimer on your blog, on your Twitter profile or on your Facebook profile. Say something akin to: “Opinions posted to this blog (or feed) do not constitute any form of legal advice”.

Personal or Professional

Perhaps one of the reasons many lawyers avoid social media sites for professional purposes is that these platforms are often seen as being more of a personal nature. However, there are many attorneys who can successfully inject a personal insight or a level of their own personality into their blog posts.

This gives readers a reason to continue coming back to read more, as these types of personalized professional blogs aren’t all about trying to drum up more business. Instead, they highlight that there is a real, living, breathing person behind all that legal talk. This can actually help to instill a sense of trust in your as an attorney, which may be beneficial for attracting new clients in the long run.

These simple social media tips could be the key to broadening your professional online presence. Before long, prospective clients will begin to connect with you as a potential source of legal advice.

About the Author:  Lior Levin who works for an E2 visa lawyer that specializes in e2 visas for UK and German citizens.

They offer a tiered pricing scale of an annual membership of $96, a 6-month membership for $72 or a monthly membership of $16.  Obviously, purchasing the annual membership affords you the best rate at $8/month. They offer a free trial for 30 days and is available here.

Lately there have been a growing number of stories of jurors doing in-trial internet research into the parties of a case, the attorneys and the witnesses. Now we are seeing jurors providing play-by-play information through Twitter and defendants texting witnesses during trial.

As reported in the Portland Business Journal, Judge Youlee Yim You in Multnomah County Circuit Court has run into these problems since taking the bench. During her first trial, a case involving a domestic violence issue, she discovered that the accused defendant was texting the victim during the trial while she was on another floor waiting to testify.

In two other cases in Arkansas and Pennsylvania, mistrials are occurring as a result of jurors announcing the results of jury deliberations prior to returning to the court room. As one tweeting juror put it, “I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.”

Obviously, such behavior can be detrimental to our judicial system but the question is how to stop it? Some jurisdictions have gone as far as banning the use of all cell phones and computers from the courtroom. In the United States District Court of Eastern District of Kentucky, cell phones must be left at the door when entering the courthouse except by explicit permission granted from the presiding judge. Such draconian measures seem outrageous, however the question remains as to what other options are there?

One option is already being explored in Britain: cellphone signal blockers. These devices, currently illegal in the United States, are used in public places where cellphones ringing are a major annoyance, such as theaters, as well as where security is an issue (to prevent remote detonation of explosive devices through cellular phones). While this would obviously prevent issues of twittering jurors and defendant’s threatening witnesses, this would also prevent lawyers from receiving phone calls while within the radius of the cellphone blocker (a true ‘cone of silence’). Perhaps it is a necessary evil, but perhaps we just need to get back to a time where individuals respected the judicial system and understood the ramifications of their actions. Unfortunately, technology has become another magnifying glass to the degradation of our collective society, with this being just the latest sign of the times.

It doesn’t matter whether you develop lots of WordPress sites for clients like I do,  are just getting started with WordPress, or are somewhere in between you are going to fall in love with the power, flexibility, ease and control that the Headway premium theme puts at your fingertips. Headway makes complex design changes – things that until now have required messing with html, css, php and all that complicated stuff  – as easy as clicking and dragging with your mouse.

Combine that with its power Search Engine Optimization (SEO) control and I’m confident your competition will soon be using Headway even if you’re not.

Why Listen to Me?

First here’s a little background about me before I get into this review so that you can decide if I know what I’m talking about or not.

I’ve been working with WordPress for going on 4 years and it’s been a significant part of my full-time income for over a year and a half. In addition to consulting on new media strategy and training I have built dozens of websites for clients with WordPress, WordPress MU, and BuddyPress.

If you Google the term “WordPress support” (as of this writing at least) you will find our WordPress Support page on the first page of results. Pretty much the only pages that rank higher are for the various WorPress help forums and the like, which means that SuccessCREEations is about the first place listed where someone can pick up the phone and get personalized help to with their specific WordPress problem. And trust me, we do get calls!

My recently launched all-video site ChrisCree.TV is gaining attention as a go-to source for folks to learn about how new media can help them grow their businesses. I speak at national conferences and have contributed to books and periodicals as an author on new media and blogging topics.

I have worked extensively with, and am an affiliate for, several of the most prominent premium WordPress themes and regularly recommend the most appropriate one directly to my clients depending on their specific needs. I know several of their developer/owners and consider them friends. And of course I am using an affiliate link to Headway in this review.

For those of you who don’t know me, reviewing a premium WordPress theme is not something I usually do. Look through the three years of archives here at SuccessCREEations and you will not find blog post reviewing any other premium WordPress theme. Not even the ones with higher affiliate payouts. That’s how impressive I think Headway is.

But enough of my credentials. Feels too much like bragging anyway. On to the review.

Chris’ full review is available here. We highly recommend reading the rest as it describes exactly what Headway can do for you and your practice.

Lesson learned? Don’t update WordPress for the first few months as Grant Griffiths, from G2WebMedia, suggests. Special thanks to Grant and Victor Medina of Jersey Estate Planning for their tireless help of Finis asking them to “please re-load the page” to see if changes were taking effect across the web and not just in his browser’s cache.

What piqued my interest is her Webinar Series on Blogging for Legal Professionals. For $99.00 per class or $490 for all classes, you receive a seven week course on using blogs to increase your visibility online and hopefully build clients from your blog. It’s a great idea, sort of an introduction to online classes much like Solo Practice University.

The syllabus for the classes are as follows and remember, you can buy just one class for $99.00:

Week One: Understanding Why Legal Professionals Blog

Week Two: Style, Structure, & Stats

Week Three: Content. Content. Content.

Week Four: Creating a Blogging Strategy

Week Five: Hi Family & Friends! Attracting (More) Visitors to your Blog

Week Six: Analyzing the Return on your Investment

Week Seven: Blog Moderation; Now What?

TechnoEsq is going to be at the ABA’s TechShow 2009 on April 2-4 at the Hilton in Chicago, Il. The TechShow is a great way to see all of the new product available for lawyers as well as bone up on some GREAT CLE’s aimed at crucial topics for any technology oriented attorney. Of course, you would be remiss to not attend Ben Steven’s multiple sessions on using Macs at Trial, iPhones and Macs in a PC World.

If you haven’t already signed up, it’s not too late. We’re really excited about this event and are even looking at potentially doing some video interviews with vendors, a la TwiT, If you’re going to be there, drop us an email or Tweet Finis on Twitter, we’d love to meet you, talk law, talk tech and even just hang out.

All of our coverage of the ABA TechShow will be consolidated on one page so as not to interrupt the normal flow of posts to TechnoEsq.com.

Here is how it works:

When you buy the pen, you are provided with the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, a spiral-bound notebook of paper for initial note-taking, a USB docking/charging station, a protective sleeve for your pen and three replacement ink cartridges.

On each page of the notebook, iconic controls are printed at the bottom of each page. These controls allow you to begin audio recording, pause, slow-down and speed-up playback and raise and lower the volume of the audio as well as add bookmarks.

When you begin recording audio and move the pen over the paper to take notes, the pen’s built-in camera beneath the writing tip ‘sees’ very small dots which are pre-printed on the page and allow the pen to decipher where the pen tip is at all times. Using this, the pen synchronizes the recorded audio to your notes. When you’re done recording, you simply hit “Stop” at the end of the page and can then either upload your notes to the desktop software or you can press your pen anywhere on your notes to hear the audio recorded at the time they were written.

Battery life of the pen is amazing. Because the pen’s display uses OLED’s (even more energy efficient than LED’s), the pen can record approximately 10 hours of continuous audio on a single charge (tested in a real-life scenario by Finis). Even more amazing is the built-in memory on the Pulse Smartpen, which comes in a 1GB ($149.95) and a 2GB ($199.95) model. While we tested the 2GB version and have yet to fill it up, Livescribe’s website reports that the 2GB can record over 200 hours of audio and the 1GB can record over 100 hours and we have no reason to doubt it. Of course, you most likely won’t need 100 hours of  recordings on your pen all of the time, since you can delete files as they are uploaded to your computer.  given this option, the 2GB version seems like over-kill but since it is only $50 more, it’s hard not to buy the 2GB.

To print your own paper, you simply open the desktop application and print as many sheets as you would like in 25 page increments. As long as you have a color printer capable of printing 600dpi or better (which most printers can handle nowadays) you will end up with the same exact paper as is included in the spiral notebook, just in loose-leaf. If you don’t want to print your own paper, Livescribe sells lined and un-lined journals for $24.95 for when you are on the go as well as additional spiral notebooks in one and three subject varieties.

The desktop application for both the Mac and PC are very easy to use, allowing you to scroll through virtual notebooks containing your notes and listening to your recordings with the click of the mouse. You can export the pages as PDF’s for emailing to others, though they won’t be able to hear the audio attached to your notes at that point. Livescribe also offers a service through their website that allows you to upload your audio/written notes for sharing with others, but it is not in a secured environment which is why we do not recommend sharing notes and recordings this way (it woul be a reat feature if you could password protect your shared notes). Perhaps most impressive of the desktop program was its ability to recognize block print hand-writing. Performed automatically as your notes are uploaded, you can then search by using keywords quickly finding anything you wrote down. Amazingly, the program has yet to stumble over Finis’ block-printing  and we didn’t have to go through any kind of training period to learn his chicken-scratch.  Cursive print is recognized with the purchase of a $30 plugin.

The effortless and instantaneous playback of notes is perhaps the most appealing of the product. Finis has used the Livescribe in depositions and he was able to confirm exactly what a deponent said by simply clicking on that area where his notes were written and hear the exact testimony.  When using from the pen, both the microphone and speakers used by the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen are amazing in quality and almost negate the need for the external headphones.  With the optional headphones, you can connect them to your Livescribe pen to listen in a more discreet manner to the audio recordings. The included headphones also double as external stereo microphones when you’re taking notes.  this is great for recording lectures or speeches where the audio isn’t always clear or when you are recording a question and answer session in an auditorium.

UPDATE- We have a lot of users not understanding what the LiveScribe is actually used for and wanting to see it in action, so we recorded a quick video using our phone so you could see how the LiveScribe works.  The audio coming from the LiveScribe sounds much clearer and louder in person, but we think the video does a good job of explaining how the LiveScribe works.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

While the Livescribe has proved indispensable in client meetings and depositions, using this tool at a lengthy trial would seem to be of great value. This would allow you to replay exactly what a witness ‘ testimony was later that day as you prepare for closing arguments.  You now have the “perfect recall” of the facts presented at trial literally at your fingertips.

The Livescribe Smartpen is available at Livescribe’s website (includes free-shipping), also at CostCo, Target or Amazon and is only $149.95 for the 1GB model and $199.95 for the 2GB pen. Quite honestly, this is may prove to be the best spent $200 investment you will ever spend as a practicing attorney.

P.S. They’re great for students too!

WHAT is Solo Practice University™?

A web-based educational and networking community for lawyers and law students.

WHY join?

* Learn about the practical aspects of running a law practice, in addition to substantive areas of law, from quality instructors.

* Interact with your instructors by asking questions and adding comments directly below the course material, having discussions in the forums, or engaging in private conversations.

* Connect with lawyers and law students in a private, secure environment with the social networking functions, including groups, blogs, and mini-communities, that are built directly into the University.

HOW does it work?

Solo Practice University™ is a private, membership-based website. University students can log in to the website and access the course materials whenever they choose. Instructors will upload videos, podcasts, presentations, live lectures and more to their classrooms. Most importantly, students and instructors can interact in a variety of personal and meaningful ways.

WHERE is it?

It’s right here at http://solopracticeuniversity.com/! We’re actually testing the private part of the site right now. And we’ll be giving this public part of the website a bit of a makeover when we launch.

HOW MUCH will it cost?

We’ll be publishing the exact tuition

costs very soon. We can tell you that tuition will consist of a low monthly fee that will be affordable to just about everyone.

WHY are we charging tuition?

We want to maintain a level of quality within the university and encourage interaction between instructors and students. The low monthly tuition will help to ensure that each member is committed to the community and willing to invest their time and effort in learning and helping others. We also want to provide excellent customer service and charging tuition will make this more manageable for us.

We also don’t want to be held hostage to advertisers in order to keep our doors open. Nor do we want to endorse services and products we do not believe truly benefit solo practitioners. Tuition from students allows us to keep it honest and real. Therefore, when you see services and products in our Co-Op you know we believe in them. (More on that in the future.)

We also are very committed to providing financial scholarships to new solos who could use a hand getting started.

WHEN do you launch?

Soon! We’re talking weeks not months. We’ll be posting more details about launch date and tuition very soon.

WHO is behind all of this?

Susan Cartier Liebel of Build A Solo Practice, LLC and David Carson. Follow both of them on Twitter (@SCartierLiebel and @davidtcarson)  or meet them in person next week in New York at LegalTech 2009.