Michael Ferguson

Effective August 1, Facebook will no longer permit third-party tools to automatically post to “Profiles.” Facebook is sunsetting its API which allows users to automatically post updates to their “Profile Page” or News Feed. Only the Facebook API allowing automatic posts to Facebook Pages, will remain. This technique is used by thousands of WordPress blogs, including hundreds, if not thousands, of law blogs. WordPress blogs mostly accomplished this through the Jetpack plugin owned by WordPress.com’s parent company, Automattic. LexBlog platform customers will not be affected. We have steered clear of the Jetpack plugin and the protocols for making the connection to enable automatic posting as it posed a security risk to our customer’s sites. LexBlog is also of the strong belief that posting on social media varies by medium. Personal posting results in greater engagement because of its authenticity. Nothing Facebook is doing prevents bloggers from sharing their blog posts on Faceboo...

A report  (pdf) commissioned by the State Bar of California found what most of us recognize already. Bar associatons are impeding access to legal services. As a sizable portion of the public struggles to afford a lawyer and a sizable portion of the bar struggles to find sufficient fee-paying client work, legal regulators need to seriously evaluate whether the consumer protection benefits of these ethics rules are worth the cost. The study and report perfomed by William Henderson , a professor at the University of Indiana Maurer School of Law and well known for the study and execution of legal innovation, was done as part of California Bar task force’s consideration of changes to ethics rules that limit the use of legal technology and forbid nonlawyers from owning legal service companies. Reviewing the report for the ABA Journal, Jason Tashea makes clear the decline in legal services market. National Center for State Courts report, cited by Henderson, that looked ...

Marketing consultant and author, Euan Semple writes  that marketers and “professional communicators” have polluted our networks with industrialized social media. He’s right. Not only has social media drifted from real and authentic engagement as means of making strangers less strange, we have consultants teaching industrialized social media as the way of the land and companies selling industrialized social media as a service. Share your blog posts this way and that way. Use the right image. Use these magic words. Run analytics on what and when you share to garner data on the right people, the right mediums, the right words and the right times. Here’s prepackaged articles for sharing. Have us share your “words,” you’re too busy. You don’t even need to know how to log into your social media accounts – or that you even have a social media account, for that matter. Sharing the same items across multiple people’s social media accounts – for maximum effect, of course. Rather...

ReCode’s Jeff Wagne r reports this morning that when Facebook reports its second-quarter financial results, after markets close today, analysts are expecting another outstanding quarter, including 43% revenue growth. Facebook hasn’t missed an increase in quarterly revenues in this decade – if ever. All of this despite the speed bumps the last year with apps leaking users data and information and Facebook struggling to filter misleading, if not sinister, news and information.  Add to this CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and COO, Sheryl Sandberg living under a rock compared to their open and authentic public engagement via Facebook Live and the like over the last few years. So despite Facebook maybe trying to shoot itself in the foot, the social network is going as strong as ever. What does this mean for lawyers? Facebook is not going away, nor are people leaving Facebook in any significant numbers. The public, your clients, referral sources. and the influencers of these two, do not fe...

Maggie Haberman , a White House correspondent for ther New York Times, shared  in an op-ed last week that she’s quitting Twitter — because she needs to. Not that the New York Times wants her to quit using Twitter. Most of their reporters not only use Twitter, but the Times’ encourages them to do so – along with other social networks, including Facebook. For Haberman, Twitter has become a flawed medium. Twitter has stopped being a place where I could learn things I didn’t know, glean information that was free from errors about a breaking news story or engage in a discussion and be reasonably confident that people’s criticisms were in good faith. The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs, with no end in sight. It is a place where people who are understandably upset about any number of things go to feed their anger, where the underbelly of free speech is at its most bilious. Twitter is now an anger video g...

I belong to several Facebook paralegal groups that I keep up with on an almost daily basis.  Hearing the stories other paralegals are telling about their jobs and daily work is always interesting and enlightening.  Today a paralegal had a good one and it had to do with an attorney boss that was obviously micro-managing his employees to the point of madness. Being micro-managed is

By Greg Lambert Over the weekend, I had a nice conversation with some of my peers in other law firm departments (Marketing, IT, and other administration leaders), about the American Association of Law Libraries’ (AALL) letter to Lexis, asking that Lexis cease their current sales requirement of tying Lexis Advance to non-related materials, including Law360, Lex Machina, print material, and other

It’s time to do some soul searching. Do you see the glass as half empty? Are the majority of your posts on Facebook negative? Do you hold a grudge forever when you think you’ve been wronged? Are bad things always going to happen to you? If you answered "Yes" to those questions, you're probably not a happy paralegal.  Do you want to be happy? Absolutely! But how?  A person can’t just

Machines today are presenting lawyers with law they should see without the lawyers even searching or looking for the law. When I practiced, when I wanted the see the law I needed to search for it, and not via a computer but in books, lots of them. The closest I came to machines and AI was an annotation to a code section or a case which told me there was an American Law Review article on point. Today legal tech and legal research companies deploying AI (machine learning) are white hot and so is investment in them ($200 million invested in legal tech in the last couple months, mostly in AI ). My friend and colleague, Bob Ambrogi, wrote  this week about the World Economic Forum recognizing 61 early-stage companies as tecnology pioneers for their design, development and deployment of potentially world-changing innovations and technologies. Only one was a legal tech company, Casetext , which has been a key player in pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to enhance lega...

LexBlog is launching a new aggregation and syndication platform this month that will power the LexBlog site . Earlier this year, LexBlog’s new editor-in-chief and publisher, Bob Ambrogi both set forth the future of LexBlog and challenged our team in stating: We want to make the LexBlog network valuable for both publishers and readers of legal blogs. For publishers, we want to help them extend their reach to a global audience. For readers, we want to offer as wide a range of content as possible, but curated to make it useful a reader’s specific interests.” LexBlog’s mission was now to aggregate all legal blogs, worldwide, and syndicate them in which the blogs and bloggers could be discovered and read. The technology that ran LexBlog was equipped to aggregate and syndicate, thus the build of the new platform. As with any platform, it’s impossible to know where we’ll end up going with new features, new technology and new products that will emanate from the platform.   Core to th...

Whether it’s a bar association website, a monthly lawyer magazine or a blog, they are all publishing — and today, digital publishing running on software. There are fifty state bar associations and, I assume, about fifty or seventy metro/county bar associations with websites and other digital publishing. Maybe more. Strange thing is that as I look around the net and talk to bar professionals, I find that the bars are mostly operating on different publishing platforms. The core software, for example, WordPress, may be the same, but custom development, custom design, custom hosting architecture and custom support rules the day.. Why wouldn’t bar associations use the same website software for their digital publishing? Better yet, a SaaS based solution so that the bar staff or people/companies on behalf of the bar could run the design, set up and changes, as often as they wanted and to the extent they wanted. Designs and lay out would be different, but the core software, development, h...

Unlike LinkedIn, where I accept requests to connect from people with similar interests and a common professional background, on Facebook I accept friend requests from people who regularly share items of value to me.   If they’re not regularly sharing items of value to me, I’ll delete their friend request. How else can I receive information/news from someone I trust or get to know someone better? Value could be posts of a personal or news/professional nature. For example, personal items are of great value in getting to know people I want to get know better. Relationships grow by seeing a family’s vacation or a collegue’s speaking engagement across the world. News items could come from people who follow niche subjects and share items with their commentary or stories from main stream reporters and bloggers who are Facebook friends. Facebook relationships/connections blossom based on what is shared. On LinkedIn, though people share from time to time,  connections are largely ...