Screencaps from the Torys iPhone App

Torys LLP has launched what appears to be the first Canadian law firm iPhone application.  Available as a free download via the iTunes app store, the app includes sections incorporating the firm’s twitter stream, publications, a lawyer directory, video content and firm contact information and maps.

While they may be first to market in Canada, this app is not something that has been haphazardly banged together – quite the opposite in fact.  The firm has clearly put some solid thinking behind what information should be included and how it is presented.  For example, the lawyer directory goes beyond a simple list to include the lawyers’ photos, short form versions of their bios and links to the full website versions.  The contact information includes GPS functionality and live directions to their offices.  As already noted on Slaw:

The GPS features might be useful for visitors to Toronto, or the hapless OCI student trying to find their way to an in-firm interview.
The app might even be useful for that cocktail party where you know the lawyer across the room works at Torys, and quite embarrassingly cannot remember their name.

Earlier this year well-known legal blogging and technology thought-leader Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog wrote on his blog about why firms should forget about building an iPhone App.  To summarize his arguments, Kevin says: 1) in a sea of 150,000+ different apps, yours will never get found or widely used, and 2) the logic behind building a law firm app is flawed because that’s like asking people to download a separate app for every content source they follow instead of using well-known destinations where content is already aggregated. For those reasons, he concludes that developing an iPhone app is a waste of resources and time and makes your firm look silly by demonstrating a misunderstanding of how content is consumed online.

I have great respect for Kevin and he and I see the world alike more often than not, but on this topic I think he’s DEAD WRONG.

My position is that the goal of a large law firm iPhone app is not to be magically discovered by the world at large in that giant app-sea of games, productivity tools, and time-wasters.  Rather, it is to provide existing and prospective clients that already have the firm squarely on their radar another access point and contact opportunity, and to strengthen their sense of connection with the firm.  If I’m a new client sitting in the lobby in advance of my second meeting, I might very well appreciate having easy access to the names and faces of lawyers two, three or four that I’ve only met briefly even though I already know my primary contact well.  If I’m a General Counsel sitting at the airport and find myself with a half-hour flight delay, I might well browse through my apps and decide to scan a few headlines from the firm’s twitter feed, which the app makes dead-simple for me to find.

As an end-user, the mere presence of the App on my phone also creates ongoing additional top-of-mind awareness for those firms that do make it onto my system, every time I scan through my phone, which is daily.  Kevin himself points out in his post that the way we consume content is changing at lightning speed.  That being the case, why would we presume to speak for whether or not it is “silly” for someone else to consume law firm content via a standalone app instead of via a blog, a twitter client, or a website?  If there is one thing the 300 channel tv universe and the explosion of social media online has shown us, it is that we don’t all want our content in one homogenous fashion.

Kevin also writes that he thinks the upcoming iPad is going to be “a game-changer”.  Well guess what – those standalone law firm iPhone apps he dislikes are going to work from day 1 on the iPad and could be great high-tech “lobby material” in lieu of the traditional printed firm brochure – that would send a pretty clear message to clients about the level of technological savvy they can expect from their counsel.  My money also says that the firms building iPhone apps now are also going to be the early adopters in getting blackberry versions rolling as well and while there may be apps beyond count in Apple’s store, there certainly isn’t yet in the blackberry world, where a heavy concentration of lawyers, in-house counsel and corporate clients reside.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Torys’ Chief Marketing Officer Stuart Wood earlier today and he made several points that solidified my thinking on this topic even further.  Mr. Wood pointed out that the project was neither expensive nor particularly time-consuming, and will provide the firm with real data about usage and adoption rates, which they can then use to make better decisions about further iterations, supporting other platforms etc.  He also reports that initial feedback from clients in the first week has been both significant and highly positive and is frequently coming directly from the clients to their own lawyers as opposed to marketing or firm management. Other firms’ I.T. departments are also calling their peers at Torys to find out more about the technical aspects. When the client is taking the initiative to make contact with your lawyers directly to congratulate you on a new marketing initiative and have a chat, and the competitors are calling to see how they can replicate what you’ve done, my money says the small investment in developing that free app has just paid for itself in spades.

2010 marks the British Columbia Court of Appeal’s 100th anniversary. Skunkworks is honoured to have been selected to create a new logo, website and conference collateral in conjunction with the Court’s centennial.

The new BCCA100.ca website includes a photo gallery drawn from the Court’s archives including portraits of every Chief Justice of British Columbia, the original ground-breaking of the old courthouse building (now the Vancouver Art Gallery), and significant historical events such as Lord Denning’s visit for the opening of the current Vancouver Courts in 1979, and the first all-woman panel of the Court of Appeal.

Plans for the 2010 centennial include a one-hour documentary “Though the Heavens Fall: 100 Years of the BC Court of Appeal“, a book by author Christopher Moore, and a judicial and academic conference in April 2010 featuring professor and legal futurist Richard Susskind and keynote speaker the Right Honourable Madam Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin P.C.

For more information, please visit the Court’s centenary website here: http://www.bcca100.ca

On a personal note, I must add that this project has afforded me the unique privilege of learning more about both the inner workings of the Court of Appeal’s operations and British Columbia’s legal history. For that I am deeply grateful.

Research in Motion has just announced a new hardware accessory that may be of interest to the legions of blackberry-addicted lawyers out there. The new device “the Blackberry Presenter” plugs directly into a projector and then lets you wirelessly deliver your powerpoint presentations directly from your blackberry. It could make sense for delivering presentations on the road when you don’t want to lug a laptop along but I can also see it being one more piece of equipment that simply lives in the law firm boardroom, potentially cutting down on that 10-minute pre-presentation cable kanoodling that we are all familiar with. It’s listed at Cdn $219.99 on blackberry’s official site. No word yet when it will actually be available – it’s simply reported as “coming soon” right now.

The Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine recently published their inaugural survey of Canada’s best law firm websites in a feature article in their December 2009 issue and I am proud to report that Skunkworks client Bull, Housser & Tupper LLP took home two awards – one for the best law firm website in British Columbia and a second for the best student recruitment website nationally.

In making their determination, the magazine asked a panel of nine legal technology professionals, including web designers and consultants, for their views and rankings, including Skunkworks’ own Client Services Director Marni Macleod, LL.B. (Fans of due process can rest assured however that Marni was duly excluded from pitching or voting for our own work). You can read more of Marni’s thoughts about what makes a good legal website on our agency blog and download a pdf of the full National article here.

Turning to the blogosphere, on New Year’s Eve Stem Legal’s Steve Matthews also announced this year’s winners in the 2009 Clawbie Awards, where two more Skunkworks’ clients fared well. David Bilinsky’s Thoughtful Legal Management blog and the Courthouse Libraries BC’s new blog The Stream were winner and runner-up respectively in their categories.

In reviewing all of the winning entries in both the Clawbies and the National article, I am heartened by how far legal marketing on the web has come in this country over the past decade. The depth of content, the overall level of design, the adoption of current technology and the resulting competitive differentiation that the leading firms display as we enter 2010 makes me excited for what’s to come in the year(s) ahead. My congratulations to all of the firms and lawyers recognized in these recent awards.

Steve Matthews of Stem Legal has just announced that nominations are open for the 2009 Clawbies Awards (for best Canadian law blogs).

Here are my three picks:

1. SLAW Slaw is a perennial award-winner of myriad blog awards. While that might make it a boring pick, it doesn’t change the fact that it continues to deliver the goods month in, month out with a wide list of contributors that collectively provide insight into recent developments and current trends in Canadian legal practice, technology and scholarship that make it the online equivalent of the local watering hole for Canadian law geeks. Essential stuff.

2. Thoughtful Law David Bilinsky’s Thoughtful Law blog is another multiple award winner that covers a broad territory – from change management to technology trends to personal renewal – with aplomb. The difference is that it’s all being powered by a single person instead of the large ensemble cast that contributes to Slaw. (Disclaimer: Dave is both a friend and a Skunkworks client. Don’t hold that against him – the blog stands on its own merits).

3. ICBC Law Blog I frequently use Victoria lawyer Erik Magraken as a poster boy for how younger lawyers and smaller firms can successfully use online content marketing to showcase their expertise, establish themselves as thought leaders, and disrupt the old hierarchies that historically made age and firm size key criteria for winning work. A plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer based out of Victoria, Erik’s blog (and facebook page and twitter profile, and JD Supra documents etc. etc.) succeed(s) because he provides useful, factual information to his readers about his area of practice without resorting to salesmanship. In the process, he also demonstrates his passion for and knowledge of the subject, and gives himself terrific top-of-mind presence to a large online audience. The result is an informative and effective practitioner’s blog that builds business and no doubt makes him a better lawyer for the very act of writing it.

So there you have it – three blogs that make my personal list for some of the best CanCon of the 2009 blogosphere. Check them out if you haven’t already, and be sure to make your own Clawbies picks via email, twitter or blog post as described here.

P.S. A final word – Jordan Furlong’s Law 21 and Steve Matthews’ Stem Law Firm Web Strategy Blog are also both gold medal winners in my view, but have selflessly removed themselves from Clawbies contention due to the small technical complication that they are the ones dishing out the awards. I hope it doesn’t spoil my ballot, but consider this a ceremonial vote for them anyhow.

At last month’s 2009 Pacific Legal Technology Conference I co-presented a session on smartphones for lawyers with Peter (”Pete”) Roberts, Practice Management Advisor for the Washington State Bar Association.

One of the areas of discussion that generated quite a bit of interest was around the availability and utility of full-sized external keyboards for smartphones. I had such a setup WAAY back when for a very early-edition Palm Pilot and found it made the device significantly more useful. Fast forward a decade and despite the almost infinite number of iPhone accessories on the market, I have been unable to locate this seemingly obvious add-on.

However, during my research I did come across one apparent option for Blackberry owners that is both an external keyboard and larger monitor/display screen. One of the session attendees also alerted us to and personally vouched for another external keyboard that she has been using with her blackberry with great success.

In the non-legal technology press and blogs there seems to be some disdain for external smartphone keyboards as being poor value for dollar with the cost of netbooks constantly hitting new lows but that misses the point for most lawyers in my view. Between home and office computers and a smartphone, most attorneys are more than sufficiently equipped with computing power and the addition of another standalone device would complicate, rather than simplify the technology picture. However, maximizing the value and utility of your smartphone just makes good sense. So, without further ado, here’s the two external keyboards I’ve surfaced so far.

Option 1: Celio RedFly External Keyboard + Display

The RedFly by Celio looks very intriguing – essentially giving your blackberry a NetBook-like footprint with a near-full sized keyboard and a much larger monitor. The caveats are that support for blackberries has just been added within the last month, and for Canadians, I don’t see a buy-in-Canada option anywhere on the site yet, although they do note one distributor for the Canadian market.

Option2: The Freedom Universal Keyboard2

Unlike the RedFly, the Freedom Universal 2 is a one-trick pony: it is an external keyboard full-stop. However, it is already a second-generation device which means it’s more battle-tested than the RedFly at this stage, and I have one strong recommendation from a lawyer I know with hands-on experience with the device so that might be the more conservative option at this stage. As with the RedFly though, it’s not clear that the device has been fully deployed in the Canadian market yet (their website doesn’t list a Canadian contact, but does reference a Canadian distributor) so regardless of which option you choose, it might involve a pickup the next time you visit our friends south of the border.

If any readers have hands-on experiences to share about either of these two options, or other choices I might have missed, I’d love to hear from you.

Courthouse Libraries BC have just launched their new website. The revamped online presence can be found at courthouselibrary.ca and represents a completely fresh take on how the organization interacts with its user base on the web. In addition to a significantly updated design, key features of the new site include:

* Integrated search – a single, powerful search application that can search any or all of 10 different library sources (e.g. the library catalogue, their in-house “asked & answered” database, their unreported decisions database, etc.);
* Practice Portals- practice-specific hubs designed to provide practitioners’ with ready access to key resources, texts, legislation, leading authorities and recent news in a single environment. There are five practice portals initially (Civil litigation, Family law, Personal Injury, Wills & Estates, and Practice Management & Technology) with plans already underway to add more;
* User Accounts individual user accounts that can save preferences, order histories and searches;
* News filtering by practice area – self-explanatory; and
* A new blog, “The Stream” which will serve as a platform for Library staff to provide their insight and commentary on law and legal research developments relevant to British Columbia lawyers.

Also of key importance in my view is that CLBC’s extensive involvement in the development and operation of a separate (and excellent) legal information site geared specifically to the public – CLICKLAW – has enabled the organization to focus the new Courthouselibary.ca site squarely on the needs of practicing lawyers. While both sites are fully accessible to anyone, separating out the offerings to cater more specifically to their respective user bases can only result in better user experiences across the board.

Skunkworks is proud to have been involved in several aspects of this project although full credit goes to our friends at Habanero Consulting Group for the top-notch site build and to the Courthouse Libraries’ team for their vision both in engaging in extensive user consultation and research into what users wanted from a new library website and in their willingness to explore new approaches and priorities even where such choices represented fundamental shifts away from established library processes. It’s accepted wisdom in marketing circles that brave clients make for interesting work. For me, this has been a textbook example of exactly that.

I have recently started exploring an extremely interesting new online application called Dipity. Simply stated, Dipity allows you to instantly visualize information in 4 different ways – as a timeline, as a flipbook (similar to Apple’s “Cover Flow” if you are familiar with that) as a simple list, or as a map if your entries have a geographic component to them.
A very interesting aspect of the service is that it allows you to pull in all sorts of content (RSS feeds, twitter streams, photos, video, you name it). Feeds update automatically and you can also create manual entries.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I created a quick topic of “Canadian law firms on Twitter” by adding the rss feeds from the firms’ respective twitter accounts. (The firms I have included are: Borden Ladner Gervais, Clark Wilson, Davis, Gowlings, Hicks Morley, McCarthy Tetrault, Ogilvy Renault, Oslers and Torys). Have a look below. The buttons in the top left corner let you switch between the 4 different types of view available, and the +/- slider bar directly underneath them is similar to the zoom feature on Google Maps, except that it is adjusting for time (i.e. view in hours, days, weeks, months, years) instead of space.

I think the potential of a visualization tool like this for lawyers is considerable. More on that in a future post. For now, consider this an introduction to the concept.

CNW Group (formerly Canada NewsWire) has just released an 11 page white paper on Social Media Use by Canadian Law Firms. The report covers familiar ground for those who are already deeply immersed in the area, but for firms and lawyers who are just coming to the discussion, it provides a good overview from an independent 3rd party and introduces many of the key players in the Canadian legal social media community.

A hat tip to the one-man/law student publishing empire Omar Ha-Redeye for highlighting the document on SLAW.

Several articles are hitting the wires yesterday and today about the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia’s decision to sue Stainton Ventures Ltd. the owner of the www.icbcadvice.com website for unauthorized use of ICBC’s official marks. The website offers free advice to the public on dealing with ICBC, links to a variety of “recommended service providers” including plaintiffs’ counsel, doctors, chiropractors, physio and massage therapists, and also offers for sale an ICBC advice Claim Guide book for $19.95.

According to ICBC’s official news release the Corporation does not object to the content of the website or the manual but rather “it is concerned about the unauthorized use of its official marks and brand for commercial purposes.”

In this Vancouver Province news story, ICBC spokesman Mark Jan Vrem says “the issue is they are using our name in their website address”.

The Globe and Mail and CBC have also has also picked up the story – find the Globe article here. Find the CBC article here.
The story seems to have hit a public nerve, with over 80 comments on the CBC story online already but there are a couple of aspects that seem particularly relevant to the Plaintiff Personal Injury Bar in BC:

First, in answer to the “why now?” aspect of this lawsuit, it is interesting to note that in the Province story, the Corporation’s spokesperson references the fact “ICBC is our registered trademark”. A search of the CIPO trade-mark database indicates that the formal trade-mark application for the actual term “ICBC” was allowed by CIPO less than a month ago.
Second, ICBC’s own press release as well as the news reports to date suggest there is more to come on this front, potentially setting the stage for a series of hotly contested legal battles with plaintiff lawyers who are using the term “ICBC” in their website urls or otherwise. Consider the following:

From the ICBC press release: Owners of several other websites have adopted and used ICBC’s official marks for commercial and other purposes. ICBC considers each situation on a case-by-case basis, but always with the objective of doing what is required to protect its brand and the public.”

From the Province story: “ICBC is our registered trademark, it is definitely something we have to protect going forward.” [emphasis added] “He added ICBC is contemplating going after other websites like Stainton’s that have ‘ICBC’ in their domain names.”

From the Globe: “Mr. Vrem said the car insurer, in the future, will take a harder line against websites that use its name.”
I have a sneaking suspicion we haven’t heard the last of this one.