Practice Blawg » Blogging

I’m Leaving, But Not Going Far

Gregory Luce — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:03:30 +0000

I started the Practice Blawg in September 2008 with a short post about producing a “comprehensive” family law judgment and decree. Exactly 105 posts later, this is likely my last. After four years at the Minnesota State Bar Association, I’m leaving at the end of May to pursue other opportunities.

It’s been a great four years, and I hope that the work that the MSBA staff and I completed during that time shows. It includes developing and launching a robust document automation system; a top-to-bottom overhaul of practicelaw; the addition of hundreds of new forms and resources; and the experimentation with other online offerings, such as mypractice or the (still in beta) MSBA CourtOps Online. My favorite project was Off the Clock, which allowed me to get out and meet with solo and small firm lawyers and talk about tech issues, usually over a beer or coffee. I will miss all of these things. I will also miss the talented staff with whom I worked and who have been integral to our success.

It’s been great blogging with Andrea and Nancy, particularly because when we met each Tuesday morning, we managed to spend most of that time talking about the law and the profession, only at the end coming up with what we planned to write in the next week or so.

For those wondering where I’m going, I won’t be going far. I’ll be sticking around the Twin Cities and you’ll probably see me pop up in another venture over the summer. And, as I posted about a bit ago, I’m on my way back to Italy in January 2012, one of the perks of being married to an academic.

My best wishes to those who read my posts, and special thanks to Nancy Hupp and Andrea Hable, who collaborated with me on the Practice Blawg and plan to carry it into the future. It’s in great hands.

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Ten Things I Do After Installing WordPress

Gregory Luce — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:30:45 +0000

Most people know that I’m a big fan of WordPress. We use it for the Practice Blawg and we are increasingly using it for many of the MSBA websites and online projects. I’ve also taught a number of attorneys how to install WordPress and to use it for their law firm websites. Hosting and installing WordPress is pretty easy (Lawyerist just had a post about hosting your site here) and we have some short videos that walk you through the hosting and installation process here.

But what happens after installation? Basically, I run through a list of ten essential things to do after every WordPress installation. Here they are (click on an item to expand it out).

1. Change the Permalinks

2. Neutralize Mr. Admin

3. Nix the Default Category

4. Install Plug-Ins

5. Consider an Under Construction Page

6. Burn It in Feedburner

7. Install Google Analytics

8. Install a Theme

9. Add Lorem Ipsum Gibberish

10. Mess Around

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Your Practice in 140 Characters: a Call for Twitter Poems

Nancy Hupp — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:09:20 +0000

As pointed out in a recent New York Times article, today is both World Poetry Day and the 5^th birthday of Twitter. How can we not celebrate? We invite you to celebrate these auspicious occasions by letting loose your inner poet on Twitter. Because we are a blawg, the one and only rule to our contest is that your Twitter poem involve the practice of law.

Somewhere in my math past I remember if A = B and B = C, then A = C. (I don’t remember it as the transitive property of equality but a Google search tells me so.) Based on this property, here is some solid reasoning:

lawyers and judges can be poets (See this for lawyer poetry and this for poetry in judicial opinions)
poets use Twitter (See PoetryTweets. Or this application for information on writing Haiku on Twitter. Twitter Limericks? There’s an app for that, too.
thus lawyers can write poetry using twitter

If my rehashed, mangled math hasn’t convinced you, then take it from essayist Og Mandino:

“Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!”

There you go. Accept this challenge and stop frittering away all your precious hours practicing law. No more hiding from success. You might be the first Twitter Poet Laureate. Add a Twitter poem below in the comments or try our automated way of adding it directly to Twitter with the following form (it’s not added to Twitter or anywhere else until you actually post it to your Twitter account).

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Post tags: Blogging, Legal Blogs

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Applying Google’s 20 Percent Time in Practice

Nancy Hupp — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:47:14 +0000

I took a sabbatical from writing blog posts for the last six weeks of 2010. Why? Well in November, my boss, Greg Luce, challenged staff to adopt Google’s Innovation Time Off concept for the remainder to the year. For Google engineers, that means they spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Many of Google’s new product ideas hatched during these periods.

Greg, being who he is and in the job he is in, added a twist, that is, that the 20% of the work time should concern technology projects of interest to each of us.

I will admit that my first reaction was an observation that Greg just gave birth to an oxymoron, at least as far as I was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I use technology, but admit that I rarely find technology in and of itself interesting. There, I’ve gone public. (Actually I’ve confessed to similar feelings in a previous post.) To me, technology is a means to an end not an entertainment on its own.

Right behind the first reaction, was a second, somewhat snottier observation—that Greg and some of my other co-workers would feel no pain with this assignment, while the long-suffering me would struggle under the yoke of oppression. I explained to Greg that for him, the assignment was essentially “go forth and do more of what you love to do, excel at, and will do anyway” while for me, it was “go forth and spit and swear and struggle and at the end of the period, you’ll still be the tech-lite-est one on the team.”

At this point, you may be wondering how it is that I am still employed. I’d have to credit Greg’s thick-skinned-ness when it comes to my outbursts, which he refers to as necessary and productive “push back.” Also, to my credit, he knows that at the end of the day I tend to be an obedient soul, even enthusiastic, and so it was with the 20% project. I jumped in, kept jumping, swearing, asking questions, swearing, making mistakes, swearing, asking for help, swearing. And at the end of the six weeks, I was converted. Not to technology as my plaything, but to the concept that forcing oneself to travel new territory results in newfound knowledge, but more importantly, in newfound confidence.

I experimented with various presentation software like Prezi and Mac’s version of PowerPoint, learned about jpegs and pngs and such, and really dug into the admin side of WordPress. I also learned some intangible skills:

Anything can be “Googled.” I knew this before but I previously assumed that no one would ever pose the dopey tech questions I have. Alas, dopes abound and more astonishing, there exists techies who answer without making dopes feel dopier. I not only found answers, I found that I understood them, even posed a few to the masses on the Internet machine.
My questions are not always dopey. Even those who know how to do certain things, don’t necessarily know why. I tend to be a “Why” kind of gal, so I pushed others to learn a bit in order to answer my questions and not lose face.
It would too much of a fairy tale ending to say I learned to like the struggle with things I am not naturally adept at. I will say, however, I enjoyed the AHA! feeling that came after the struggle, when I “got it.” In between curses, there were lots of those moments.
I can make my kids proud. “You did that?”

I was unable to carve out 20% of my time to experiment, even taking a sabbatical from the blog and some other tasks. My workload couldn’t be shifted that much on such short notice. So, I worked more hours to enable the experimentation. It was worth it, both for me and for the MSBA. In my experimentation time, I came up with a couple of new ideas for practicelaw. For myself, I finished another 5k, this one virtual. (The first was a real one, in October. You may not be impressed but if you knew how little I like to sweat, how slowly I ran when I first started training, and how naturally clumsy I am, you’d be awed.)

Now that I’ve dragged you through my period of self-flagellation and revival, if you are still reading, you may wonder why I thought this an appropriate blog post. Think of it as a pass-it-forward post. Many attorneys have confessed to having more free time on their hands than they’d like and everyone has things they don’t know, dread doing. This post is my start as a motivational guru, with the hopes that if the encouragement is from a regular Joe, you might hear and embrace the idea of taking some time a couple of times a week to expand your horizons. Encourage your staff to do the same. Good luck. If you need some swear words to help you on the journey, contact me. I have a passel.

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Want Super Simple Blogging? Try Tumblr

Gregory Luce — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 20:59:35 +0000

I’m a WordPress nut, and at times my devotion makes me believe it can solve the world’s problems. OK, not really, but I do think a self-hosted WordPress site is inexpensive, easy and powerful, plus a lot of fun. But it does have its quirks and, for some, self-hosting is a tad bit too complicated if all they want is an easy and super simple blogging platform. Enter Tumblr.

Though it’s been around for a few years, the momentum to use Tumblr as a blogging platform seems to be gaining speed. Why? It’s super simple. And it also combines some of the best elements of social media, like:

The ability to follow other Tumblr users, and list your followers on your Tumblr site;
Having a wide range of default media to add to your blog, including text, photo, quotes, video, chat, and audio;
Integration with Twitter and other social media, including importing RSS feeds (and thus your other blogs) directly into your stream;

I view Tumblr as an easy to use platform that allows you to collect ideas, post them, and also add easily to your social media stream of consciousness. Is it applicable to a law practice? Sure, in the same way you use Facebook or Twitter or other social media: as an extension of your personality and a way for people to find you — an attorney — interacting in the real world. Try it out here and follow me on my Tumblr blog here, which I’m using to experiment and to have a bit of fun.

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