Reading Time: 7 minutes
“Hey, publisher, I have an idea for a book. It’s called ‘Law Practice Technology.’” Not my most creative pitch, I will confess. It took more than that but I will admit to a certain amount of uncertainty when I decided to see if I could find a publisher for a new
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Purpose Before Product
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am a policy skeptic. Which I think is a bit funny because I am (mostly) a rule follower. This can lead to unintended consequences when rules lead me to playing silly buggers but if you want a different outcome, think before you start rule-making. After working at the ABA and…
The Two Speeds of Law Practice Technology
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 9 minutes
It is funny how you can be aware of something but, until you explain it to someone else, it doesn’t really take form. So far this semester, we have been looking at law practice technology from the perspectives of efficiencies: doing things more quickly and more accurately. Now that we’ve hit…
A Smile And A Handshake
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 6 minutes
We are getting some work done, a bit of gardening. It’s landscaping, which is mostly a word that I use when it’s “more gardening than I want to do myself” because, while I love gardening, I’m an incrementalist. A new plant here, a repotted one over there. We are going to…
A Wander Among Web Browsers
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I have been watching some online colleagues in Denmark engage in a massive withdrawal from US-based technology. #DanmarkSkifter It has encouraged me to continue along this path myself. Years ago I started to spread my internet use across web browsers to try to silo some of their knowledge about me.…
Save It For Later
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been thinking a lot about the resilience of this website. Over time, I have stopped linking to live copies of resources because they disappear. I have been blogging for over 20 years and there are still people looking at posts I did early on where every resource I linked…
My Kingdom For An Index
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am coming towards the end of my book project. I am proofing the pages — which is kind of fun, a bit like seeing a movie trailer before it comes out, the words finally constrained by proper page layout — and thinking about the index. It seems common for the…
Through the Shoals of PowerAutomate
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 4 minutes
We are over a quarter of the way through the initial semester of my law practice technology class. Talk about building an airplane while flying it. My book has provided the skeleton and now I’m figuring out what can be accomplished within a 26-hour semester. In order to keep it practical—because…
Zero Sum Legal Publishing
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Another year, another change in legal information. The AALL Committee on Relations with Information Vendors (CRIV) did a nice write up of American Lawyer Media’s strategic changes. It is not the first legal publisher to (a) center its content exclusively on its own platform nor (b) to create all-or-nothing content…
Scholarship Clout Chasing
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I had a sales pitch from a program inside Elsevier’s SSRN unit. The idea was to create a Research Paper Series that showcases the law school’s scholarship. The Dean pitched the cold call over to me and so I followed up. I was interested to see that part of the pitch…