• Asana – An online collaborative project management tool, sort of like Basecamp, but free if you have less than 30 team members. This one was recommended by Catherine Reach Sanders (who just moved from the ABA Technology Resource Center to the Chicago Bar Association).
• Pathagoras – a document assembly tool that works with Word for Windows. It’s free to try for 90 days, and from what Jim Calloway described, it’s a powerful tool for transactional lawyers who create variations of form documents and need a tool that makes it easy to do this.
• How to create a Digital ID for using with Adobe Acrobat, which Nerino Petro says is a surefire way to have true digital signatures that actually get accepted by the recipient. I’m going to start using this for sure.
• Let Me Google That For You – I forgot about this one, but it’s a classic. If you’re adept at using Google but find that you get annoyed when people ask you for information that they could just as easily have googled themselves, you need to check it out. I won’t ruin it for you; just go do a sample search and you’ll see what this tool does.

If you want to see all the tips that we did, here’s the link to our presentation.

I want to do more to help mentor young lawyers.

Law school education has for a long time failed to provide truly practical information to budding lawyers. This is especially true when it comes to information about how to use technology to do a better job in the practice of law. So folks graduate from law school devoid of any sense of how to use technology.

New lawyers are also devoid of money after they pay all their law school bills.

So, here’s how DigitalWorkflowCLE plans to help. First, we’re going to focus some of our attention on helping new lawyers learn practical skills. And we’re going to do it for free. Our first CLE program of the year will be a one hour webinar on Social Networking for Lawyers, and it will only be offered to Louisiana lawyers who’ve been in practice for three years or less.

The February 3rd webinar is limited to 15 new lawyers. Again, it’s completely free and we provide 1 hour of CLE credit (includes Ethics credit). For other lawyers we’ll be doing the Social Networking seminar a week later, on February 10, but we’ll be charging $30 for the CLE credit (Ethics).

Where is the “digital lawyering” angle you might ask? Well, there is none. We aim to provide information that helps lawyers do a better job practicing law. The key to a great presentation isn’t built on technology. Technology can help, but only if you have the basics down first.

Seating is limited because we prefer a more intimate setting, as opposed to a large hotel venue. We do our seminars in the large conference room on the first floor of the IP Building at 643 Magazine St. (behind the US Fifth Circuit). The room will hold about 50 people, which is perfect for us.

Dane Ciolino and I will be doing most of the sessions, but we’ll be having some excellent outside speakers as well. Jeff Richardson of iPhoneJD fame will be doing a session on mobile lawyering that will cover the use of tablet devices such as iPads. And Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan from the Eastern District of Louisiana will participate in a panel discussion of common e-discovery issues.

We’ll be doing an email blast in a few days, which should get a lot of attention from folks that may not have typically been to our seminars. So, if the readers of this blog want to reserve a spot they should sign up soon. For more details, and to sign up, click here. If you were there last year you’ll remember we had a lot of fun with giveaways, and this year we plan to ramp up the giveaways. We’re also planning lots of other things to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.

The answer is: you shouldn’t.  Powerpoint is just a tool, and arguably a poorly designed one.  The question that you need to ask, however, is this: should you care about using visuals and graphics to explain things?  Lawyers have been using charts and foam boards for years.  Why?  Well, because there is a lot of evidence that people understand explanations better if they are well supported with visuals.  Not only do they understand visual information better, they also remember it longer.

So if your goal is to effectively communicate complex information, then you should care about using visuals. Powerpoint is just one tool that you can use for displaying visual information.  You could use a flip chart if you wanted to.  Or you can use a blackboard.  Doesn’t matter what tool you use, as long as the visuals are helpful to the listener.

As between a flip chart (or foam board) and Powerpoint, I’d recommend that most lawyers use Powerpoint.  Having to manually draw one page across on a flip chart can be awkward.  And if you pay someone to create foamboards you need to make sure that you know exactly what you want way ahead of trial.  Foamboards are expensive even if you allow the graphic service some lead time, but if you ask for one-day turnaround it will cost a lot more.

Powerpoint is pretty much the same as a foam board or flip chart, except that it’s easier in a couple of respects.  First, it’s easy and reliable to advance from one slide to the next (no awkward and noise page rustling as with flip charts). Second, you can make changes easily to slides in Powerpoint.  The only thing that you need to pay for to use Powerpoint is the software (about $150, or the cost of a couple of foam boards) and a projector (about $600).  Many courts will supply the projector if you ask, and most will have screens in place.  If you need to buy a screen then factor in another $125 or so.

The cost savings of Powerpoint kick in once you’ve used it a few times.  But once you’ve made the initial investment in equipment you don’t pay for anything except electricity.  The real roadblock for most lawyers is not that they don’t want to buy the equipment, but rather that they don’t know how to use Powerpoint software and are afraid of learning how.

We’ll leave the instructional discussion for another day, but for now let me say this.  If you want to learn to use Powerpoint in a way that can help you as a lawyer, don’t obsess about all the fancy tricks you can use.  Focus on the ‘vocabulary’ of visual explanations.  Today’s average TV viewer is familiar with this vocabulary because they’ve been bombarded with it since they were toddlers.  Most people can’t tell you want the ‘rules’ are for visual explanations, but they instinctively recoil when the rules are ‘broken.’

So, more than software instruction what you need to do is start paying attention to how visual explanations are used.  Movies and dramatic presentations on TV are one way to learn this vocabulary.  But probably the most ‘mainstream’ use is in TV news accounts.  If you watch the news (local or national) pay attention to how the words that are spoken relate to the visual images being presented.  Are the images static for long periods of time?  Or do they transition quickly?  How quickly do the images transition?  What kinds of transitions are common?

Pay attention to this and you’ll learn a lot.  That’s the kind of thing you need to know in order to use Powerpoint effectively.  The software is complicated, sure.  But you only need to know a few things, and what those few things are will be obvious once you understand the common vocabulary of visual communication.

So next time you watch the news on TV start paying attention to how they use visuals.