The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
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"You'd think everybody would be using something like [Amicus] and the DMS. But when I look at small firms, a lot of them don't. I find it appalling." — LORNE MACLEAN, MACLEAN FAMILY LAW GROUP business comes from for us — about 90 per cent of it, I would say." But the success of a web site, as MacLean has learned, is contingent on constantly developing and supporting it. It's only by continually adding new content that it gets noticed by search engines such as Google and appears prominently in search results. The MacLean site almost always appears on the first page of results when prospec- tive clients use Google to search for a divorce lawyer in B.C. The drive to keep adding content led to his pioneering law blog a few years ago. When everybody in the legal com- munity discovered blogging, MacLean upped the ante by adding Twitter. Initially he was skeptical about its effec- tiveness, but then Google started pay- ing attention to Twitter postings. Now MacLean is a committed tweeter TWO FOR THE ROAD T wo diminutive tools for travelling lawyers: the Lexar JumpDrive SAFE S3000 FIPS, a USB fl ash memory drive that will keep your data safe, and the Planon DocuPen X colour hand scanner. The JumpDrive SAFE from Lexar Media Inc., a market leader in fl ash memory, is available in capacities ranging from 2GB to 8GB and priced from $100 to $200. This is the evolution of thumb drives. The enclosure is built of light but rigid metal. The product is also wa- terproof — exceeding U.S. military standards for impermeability. In other words, it's virtually indestructible. More importantly, it incorporates a microchip that automatically encrypts data as you copy it to the device. The encryption is military-grade (FIPS 140-2 Level 3) AES 256-bit, meaning that if you lose the JumpDrive, you never have to worry about hackers reading sensitive client data stored on it. Mind you, losing it is less likely than with many thumb drives. It's about the size of a BIC lighter but signifi cantly heavier — you'd notice if its weight was missing from your pants or jacket pocket. The DocuPen ($370 to $440 depending on model) is from Planon System Solutions Inc., a Canadian company. It's an astonishingly small hand scanner — imagine two fat pens stuck together end to end, but lighter — yet includes control buttons and a tiny LCD display for menus. With this type of scanner, you drag it down a page to scan. The DocuPen comes with PaperPort optical character recognition (OCR) software for translating cap- tured scan images into editable text. To move captured scans to a computer, use the included USB cable or send data wirelessly with a Bluetooth connection. You do pay a price for this level of miniaturization. It takes a little practice to be able to scan smoothly and evenly enough to get good results. But if you're poring through paper-based documents or legal tomes and just need to extract a few pages or lines, the DocuPen is the tool for the job. — GB (twitter.com/bcfamilylaw). Along the way, he added Facebook and LinkedIn to his web arsenal. The firm also just announced the launch of series of new high-definition online videos called Smart BC Divorce Tips on its forthcom- ing bcfamilylawtv.com webcasts, which will go live this spring. Like any savvy Internet marketer, he has interlinked all of these points of presence on the net. If you land on his LinkedIn page, you'll find links to his web site, blog, and tweets, and vice versa. It's a sign of how ingrained web marketing has become in MacLean's approach to legal practice that when he recounts one of his latest initiatives — devel- oping a personal injury practice in the Fort St. John office — the first thing he mentions is that informa- tion about the new services already appears near the top of Google search results. "That's the power of the media and the technology," he says. "Within five to 10 minutes, we were right up there at number one or two." That rapid rise to the top of the Google hit parade for MacLean's new personal injury practice hadn't actually yielded any new business at the time of writing, but the firm has had a couple of initial contacts. And as he points out, to write a blog post, tweet, or create copy for a new web page takes minutes and costs him little or nothing. Conclusions? You don't have to be a big firm, you don't have to have an IT staff, and you don't have to be a nerd to make good use of technology. Look at what MacLean is doing, and learn. Gerry Blackwell is a freelance technology writer based in London, Ont. Read his blog at http://afterbyte.blogspot.com www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com FEBRU AR Y 2010 27 Gadget Watch