Best of the 60 Tips presentation

Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a 60 tips in 60 Minutes session with several good friends and follow law-techies. Even though I've done dozens of these 60 tips programs in the past few years, I always wind up learning something. Here are a few of the most interesting tips I picked up:

• 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.

My podcast interview with Enrico Shaefer about my new venture

I got a call from my friend Enrico Shaefer right after I announced that I was shifting out of the practice of law to do more CLE programs for lawyers who were interested in technology. He practices law and tries to innovate wherever possible to do a better job for clients at a lower cost, so he and I have kept in touch (mostly through social media). He has a weekly podcast where he interviews folks about innovation in the law etc., and so he interviewed me. The interview lasted about 20 minutes as I recall. You can either listen to the podcast, or read the transcript.

Two books newly minted lawyers should read

Law school teaches you nothing about conflict avoidance or basic negotiation. In the real world, getting along with people is of utmost importance. Some might believe that you can't teach people diplomacy and negotiation.

Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People has taught millions of people the basic psychology of everyday diplomacy. For lawyers who need to be persuasive (and isn't that all lawyers?), this book is a must read.

For lawyers who negotiate (that is for lawyers who are still alive) the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In is absolutely indispensible. Actually, this book is useful for anyone who negotiates, which is pretty much anyone who spends money.