Michael Ferguson

Are you ready for your paralegal job interview?  Knowing what type of questions that will be asked ahead of time is key. The behavioral interview is a tool that a potential employer will use to assess your work style.  Behavioral interviewing is based on the assumption that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Behavioral interview questions focus on how you handled

Facebook Live is coming to the American courtroom. More than 40 years after the Florida Supreme Court ( @flcourts ) welcomed cameras to its courtroom the court will become one of the first in the world to use social media media for official live video. In a Tuesday press release, the Court announced that Thursday’s 3:30 p.m. event will showcase, on Facebook Live, the annual Florida Bar Pro Bono Awards honoring lawyers who donate services to people in need. Afterward, Facebook Live will be used permanently for all oral arguments, starting with February’s. Chief Justice Jorge Labareleasrga nails it. In the 1970s, Florida became the first state to allow broadcasts of its court cases at a time when every other court in the nation refused it. This Court’s experiment with transparency showed everyone a better way to balance First Amendment rights against the rights of people involved in a trial or appeal. Social media will be our next step in moving this highly successful model of ope...

Facebook’s News Feed changes, as announced  in a Facebook post, by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, ten days ago, are good for lawyers and bad for law firms. Legal bloggers should take note as your blog posts lead to engagement, relationships and a stronger reputation when they “move” socially across Facebook and you have built a stronger reputation by networking on Facebook. Per Zuckerberg: …[R]ecently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. The change, already being implemented: I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions. We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can e...

Although newspapers and legal publications still exist, the best place to find news these days is online. Lucky for you as a paralegal, it has never been easier to stay on top of current events in your field because almost all news and information can be accessed by you through your phone or computer. However, that can also lead to information overload, as you sift through the different sources

Necessity is the mother of invention, and it will certainly be on display in New Orleans this week at the Legal Aid Technology Conference . The annual conference, sponsored by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is the nation’s largest gathering of professionals dedicated to using technology to address the civil legal needs of low-income Americans. The conference, billed this year as Innovations in Tech, brings together technologists, legal aid advocates, court personnel, academics, and other professionals to showcase technology projects and tools being implemented across the country and internationally. I am glad I was able to get in as the conference, expecting record attendance, is sold out. For me, I’m looking for inspiration from some of the most dedicated professionals in legal tech. I last attended the conference fifteen years ago, I was starting a legal tech non-profit to help individuals and small business people. I was blown away by the energy, passion and ideas of the...

Swing on over to the LexBlog website and you’ll see that our marketing website has been replaced by the contributions from law bloggers from around the world. Gone are highly profiled slogans, packages of services, testimonials, profiles of team members, our values and the history of the company. All of things we’ve come to expect of corporate websites. In their place, insight and contributions from legal professionals. Blog posts representing a conversation – what legal professionals have read, oberserved or heard and their accompanying engagement. As my COO, Garry Vander Voort  says, we’re not so much about what we say we are, we are about our bloggers. Legal professionals who are blogging tell our story. Almost twenty years ago the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto  wrote  that markets are conversations. A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. ...

Today’s paralegals need to be proficient in a variety of computer and technology skills. As the role of the legal professional changes and grows, a need for technology knowledge is high on the list of requirements for legal industry job positions. The more technology skills you possess, the more valuable you become as a paralegal. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics lists the following as 

Bob Ambrogi and I have been talking this week about getting people, companies and organizations to blog as way of communicating, collaborating and advancing solutions in their industry as a whole.. Bob, who just joined LexBlog as editor-in-chief and Publisher, is in Seattle all week. In meetings and in discussions over a pint, breaking the silo effect (as I’ll call it) regularly comes up – one, as a problem that should be solved and two, a problem that blogging and LexBlog can help solve. Take legal technology companies, which Bob writes about everyday at his blog, LawSites . How many legal tech entrepreneurs and company founders blog so as to share what they are working on? Hardly any. If they’re blogging as a company, they have a marketing focused blog on their website with posts focused on a new product, a conference they are speaking at or attending or other news that’s often more befitting of a press release. The blog posts are often written by someone with no expertise in the...