Michael Ferguson

I am beginning to use Twitter more and more as a source of news and information from people and organizations I trust. As part of doing so, I am whittling down the number of people I follow on Twitter to a more manageable number. By manageable I mean being able to open up my Twitter homepage and scroll thru the feed in a fashion in which I can find value. Value, for me, is getting news and learning things, being able to share items I think of value to my followers (retweet or share with my comments) or being able to engage those sharing items. I have taken down those I am following to about 550. At one time I was following close to 10,000 and I took that down to less than a 1,000 a number of years ago. But 1,000 followers was still too much for a worthwhile feed on the Twitter home page. Following 1,000 I never used the Twitter home page for news and information. It was too much of a fire hose. Sure, I shared items on Twitter, engaged people who engaged my tweets, occasionally...

I talked with a highly respected legal professional last Friday who was recently let go by his law firm. He had been employed by the firm for four or five years and employed by similar large law firms for a couple decades before. A couple weeks ago I heard of veteran lawyer who joined a large firm with a major client, but whose employment status was now at risk with the general counsel’s leaving his client. These stories pale in comparison to all of the lawyers who have been the victim of downsizing caused by the collapse or merger of their law firms. With the changes in the legal services market, very few lawyers have job (or stable income) security  writes Dan Lear, Director of Industry Relations at Avvo. Lawyers need to build a strong brand or a business, and to do so now, Per Lear, the job security once held by law firm partners and in-house counsel who had reached the the ranks of Assistant General Counsel or Deputy General Counsel is gone. There’s the former gener...

A trial consists of a compilation of complex processes of courtroom procedures and rituals, which can often change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and can seem like a strange and mysterious world if you don’t know what those procedures and rituals are. Since ritual and tradition play a large part in the trial process it is integral that as paralegals we make it our business to

Leave it to legal tech innovator and law professor, Bill Henderson to be part of a new nonprofit, the  Institute for the Future of Law Practice,  that will coordinate the entry level law school market around an updated and modernized curriculum. Traditional legal service models are breaking down. Law students are graduating from law school unprepared for the demands of the consumers of legal services, assuming even law firms are. Law schools, like many law firms, are debating the need for change without the necessary action. They’re often paralyzed by traditional bureaucracy. A core group of lawyers, legal educators, allied professionals and corporate legal leaders (Shell, Cisco, Archer Daniels Midland)  — many of whom I know well via common beliefs on innovation and tech —  believe that the best way forward is to create an independent organization that can coordinate the interests of law students, law schools, law firms, corporate legal departments, N...

I am not sure that an editorial calendar is helpful for a law blog. In many cases an editorial calendar can even be counterproductive Many medium and large firms are using using editorial calendars for law blogs with multiple contributors, often with blogs published by a practice or industry group. More and more I am hearing speakers and “blogging experts” suggest that firms use editorial calendars, especially firms new to blogging. The idea behind an editorial calendar is to get lawyers to blog regularly, to make sure that a law blog doesn’t go dark, for lack of a blog post. Many hands makes light work appears to be philosophy. “How could we ever lack for blog posts with ten contributors sharing the load?’ Editorial calendars are also used to make sure various subjects are covered. By assigning particular lawyers to subjects “needed” to be covered, there’s the necessary coverage and no overlap. With law blogs published by one lawyer, an editorial calendar is not an issue. The law...

However long it takes to say what you have to say. No more. No less. Everywhere I talk these days I am asked what’s the proper length for a law blog post. I give this answer everytime. I fear the question arises out of a lot misinformation on law blogging flying around. This afternoon I read Good2bSocial’s Joe Balestrino’s post  on how to generate leads (I’d call it business) from your law blog in which he called out the importance of long form blog posts. Does the number of words matter? Yes, it does, especially if you want to see your post on the first page of search engines. During the infancy of blogging, it was enough to create a 300-word post and you could expect it to rank high on search engines. But those days are gone because of today’s tight competition. Thousands of blogs are created each day and that means marketers need to be a little more creative in producing content for their business’s blog. High-quality, long-form content with more than 1,000 words tends to ...

As reported by Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post. Silicon Valley’s next hot start-up isn’t likely to be a video chat app. Nor is it likely to be an on-demand service, like Instacart or Uber. But maybe it could be — and this isn’t a joke — a law firm. That is, at least, the ambition of Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who knows a thing or two about hot start-ups. The 34-year-old Kan

Legal librarian and tech leader, Sarah Glassmeyer shared that she logged into Twitter last week to find another legal tech conference with all male panels. Glassmeyer presumably was referring to ALM’s Legalweek Show, long known as Legaltech show. The first session I sat in, a pretty good one on AI, was six men, no women I then noticed the keynote speakers being advertised on large screens. I shared on Twitter that of the sixteen keynote speakers only three were women. Still have a ways to go. Only 3 of 16 keynotes at @ALMMedia ’s @LegalweekShow are to be given by women. #womenintech #Legalweekshow18 pic.twitter.com/12cQHw2AVg — Kevin O'Keefe (@kevinokeefe) January 30, 2018 ALM’s response to my tweet and another discussing the lack of diversity was to point out there were “several women speakers” throughout their show, drawing over 10,000 people. I have to believe they were saying that there were several women speakers throughout each of the separate tracks, as opposed ...