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.

Online CLE videos for Louisiana lawyers

If any Louisiana lawyers out there just need a few hours of CLE credit, remember you can get up to 4 of your 12.5 hours by watching online videos. Sadly, most of the videos you'll run across look like Al Qaeda hostage videos. But that's not exactly accurate because even heartless terrorists spend some time editing their videos.

If you are looking for CLE credit don't waste your valuable time watching poorly created videos. Dane Ciolino and I have created three videos that are practical, engaging and well-edited. And they're fully accredited by the Louisiana MCLE committee. The videos we offer include the following:

• Paperless 101 - Practical & Ethical Issues in Creating a Paperless Law Practice (includes 1 hour of Ethics credit)
• Paperless 102 - Further Advice on The Paperless Law Office
• Cloud Computing - Practical & Ethical issues (includes 1 hour of Ethics credit)

Our videos are free to watch as much as you want (we want people to learn!). You only pay if you want Louisiana CLE credit. This approach does two things that we think you'll appreciate: (1) it makes it easier for you to start watching the videos with the fewest mouse clicks; and (2) you can check out the video before you pay to see if it looks like it will be useful to you.

Call us crazy, but we think CLE should be easy and useful. Maybe you're "crazy" that way too.