JD Scoop

This month, our newest members include lawyers, firms (from around the world), marketing consultants, corporate counsel and a not-for-profit legal research and educational institute - a sample of the broad range of new contributors joining JD Supra : 

 

	Edward Sim - partner, Hunton & WIlliams, LLC, Singapore office, practice focused on trade remedies (including antidumping and countervailing duties), Section 301, safeguards, customs, foreign investment, intellectual property, antitrust, competition and other issues. represents candidates, political organizations, governmental entities, unions, and business organizations in election law matters and public interest litigation.
	Raymond Ausrotus - Todd & Weld LLP, practice covers a broad and diverse array of matters, including: seeking relief for clients in alternative dispute resolution forums and arbitration; prosecuting personal injury and medical-malpractice claims; helping to defend against criminal and regulatory investigations by district attorneys and governmental agencies; and handling disputes through trial and appeal on behalf of individuals and business entities, as well as shareholders in close corporations.
	Nicole Black - of counsel to Fiandach & Fiandach, a Rochester, New York law firm that that is one of the largest  DWI defense firms in the state. She is involved in the defense of Driving While Intoxicated cases across Upstate New York, including Monroe, Ontario, Erie and Wayne counties.
	Jaffe Associates - a full-service marketing and business development consultancy specializing in helping law and other professional services firms with their business development, marketing, organizational and management needs.
	The Sedona Conference - a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) research and educational institute dedicated to the advanced study of law and policy in the areas of antitrust law, complex litigation, and intellectual property rights. Through a combination of Conferences, Working Groups, and the "magic" of dialogue, The Sedona Conference® seeks to move the law forward in a reasoned and just way.
	Eliott Alderman - Alderman Law Office, which has a dynamic, sophisticated information technology and entertainment law practice, representing individuals and start-up companies, as well as large institutions. They work with songwriters, musicians, and visual and performance artists, in addition to software, multimedia and Internet companies. They also provide lobbying and related support to institutions and industry groups.
	Strohal I Kretschmer I Rebasso -  a boutique law firm with offices in Vienna, Singapore and UAE. Strohal I Kretschmer I Rebasso specialises in international and cross-border corporate, business law, taxation and construction law.
	Lefkowicz & Gottfried, LLP - focused on Real Estate and Real Estate Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Bankruptcy, Estate Planning, Personal Injury, Medical Malpractice, Job Site Accidents, Automobile Accidents, Uncontested Matrimonial Matters, Wills, and Probate. Markus Hartmann - Vice President & General Counsel to Aspen Dental Management, Inc., a corporate generalist attorney with substantial in-house legal experience who places a high premium on providing preemptive legal support incorporating a business perspective.
	Richard A. Altman - Altman Law Office, which has two principal specialties: Intellectual property law, including copyright and trademark litigation, internet law and defamation, and Art law, involving recovery of stolen art, auctions, artists' rights, and artist-dealer relations. The firm has extensive appellate experience.

 

In a recent  KM Space blog post (titled JD Supra Revisited) Doug Cornelius describes how participating on JD Supra created value for him.

Cornelius joined JD Supra in February when we launched the site. He was admittedly a touch skeptical of the unproven service; nevertheless, he participated - he published a handful of documents and created a profile.

Recently, a magazine editor "planning a law office technology and practice management theme" and needing an article on "social networking as an attorney tool" found and downloaded one of Cornelius' JD Supra documents: LinkedIn to My Facebook on My Blog - Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firm Staff.

In an e-mail, the editor told Doug that his piece was exactly the kind of article the magazine was looking for - and asked him for a re-write, or an update from scratch.

The lesson should be clear: content marketing is effective.

Publish your work online to reach a wider audience, expand your network, generate new leads, establish authority, market your experience and expertise, connect to clients... or, in this particular example, gain the attention of magazine editors looking for informative stories for their readers.

We're obviously pleased to see the KM Space post, but we also mention it to make another, related point.

Here's how the magazine editor described his readers to Cornelius:

... they're generally a little slow to move to "new" technology and need to have its pros and cons clearly described. I'm envisioning an article that will describe using social networking sites and other tools to improve both trial lawyer image and a specific lawyer's practice.

A tall order (for marketers, journalists, bloggers, friends): explain in simple terms the current online landscape to legal professionals, many of whom aren't even sure whether they should be online, let alone how to begin.

Start here:

• When it comes to participating online, it's not just a question of who know, it's also about what you know.

Doug Cornelius' online presence includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, JD Supra, the KM Space blog - among others. In this particular case, a magazine editor found him not through his social networks (who he knows), but through a piece he published on JD Supra (what he knows). It was that simple.

As you expand your presence online, each connection you make, each online "success" is going to be different. The trick: cast a wide net and - mixing metaphors - connect the dots:

• Are your friends on Twitter able to jump to your blog?
• Are your colleagues on LinkedIn able to jump to work you've publish on JD Supra?
• Do your blog readers see the work that influences you (your Delicious bookmarks)?
• Can readers who find your work on JD Supra jump to your website, or email you?

When the social networking and the publishing blend together (when the who and the what connect to paint a broad and colorful picture of your experience and authority), that's the beginning of an effective online presence.

Stay tuned for more examples of how to do exactly this, in the weeks and months to come...

 --------

Further reading:

Doug Cornelius: LinkedIn to My Facebook on My Blog ;

Nicole Black: Social Media Latest Networking Tool for Lawyers;

Jaffe Associates: White Paper: Web 2.0 and PR 2.0.

 

Here's a quick look at some of the top subject-based searches on JD Supra for the month of July - organized into their relevant areas:

1. Real Estate/Finance - includes searches on bankruptcy, real estate, lease, forced redemption, mortgage, foreclosure
2. Commercial Law & Contracts - includes: contract, agreement
3. Intellectual Property - includes: trademark, patent, copyright
4. Trusts & Estates - includes: will, wills, trust, trusts
5. Labor & Employment - includes discrimination, erisa, retaliation
6. Family Law - includes divorce and custody
7. Immigration
8. Torts - includes fraud, negligence, defamation
9. Securities
10. Class Action - includes class action, dismissal of class action

If you're trying determine what work of your own to publish on JD Supra, use this list as a guide. Upload whatever filings, decisions, articles, alerts, and newsletters you have that might pertain to these top subject areas and related keywords.

As we wrote last month, contributors ranking highest in the results publish frequently on JD Supra. That's how our Google-powered engine works: the more you share, the more you are noticed.  

A quick note to say that we now deliver via e-mail a monthly digest of the top legal articles, alerts, and newsletters published on JD Supra. Here's how it works:

• Lawyers, law firms, and other legal professionals publish their work on JD Supra. (We're building a rich collection of valuable legal docs freely available to everyone; it grows daily.)
• We put together an annotated reading list, distilling for our audience the top uploads of articles, alerts, newsletters for the month.
  
• The digest covers a wide range of legal subjects from a diverse group of authoritative sources. Once a month, it arrives in your in-box.
• Rinse, repeat.

For an idea of what kind of reading to expect arriving in your in-box, see Aviva Cuyler's Monthly Digest for July, posted recently on this blog. We've been publishing a version of the digest on JD Scoop for quite some time (see others here and here). Now you can stay informed by e-mail.

• And if you have something to offer the mix, be sure to join JD Supra and start publishing your work now. The audience, like the collection of documents, grows daily.

Our first digest is a general list of top work published during the month. Soon we will be introducing additional subect- and industry-specific email offerings. Stay tuned for those.


Sign up for the digest on the site right now. Look on most pages for the "Legal Digests" prompt - including on the JD Supra homepage and here: our JD Supra Profiles page. (Refresh the page if you don't see it, on the right.)

JD Supra contributors have been writing and sharing a wonderfully diverse collection of newsletters, articles, and alerts. Here's a summary of some of the top uploads:

Bush Enacts Watershed Housing Bill Providing New Funding and Regulation for Mortgage Industry - Lane Powell provides insight into "one of the largest housing bills in decades to shore up struggling financial markets and a housing industry slump that is second only to that of the Great Depression. The Housing Assistance Act of 2008, signed after months of contentious negotiations, creates a $300 billion program to refinance troubled mortgages and creates new regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae (“Fannie”) and Freddie Mac (“Freddie”), which finance almost half of the country's $12 trillion in home mortgage debt."

Knocking Infringement Out of Joint - Morrison & Foerster discusses infringement liability in the wake of BMC Resources, Inc. v. Paymentech, L.P. and Cross Medical Products, Inc. v. Medtronic Sofamor Danek, Inc.

Patent Happenings, July 2008 - from Robert Matthews Jr., concise summaries of important developments in U.S. patent law occurring during the month of July, 2008.

Drafting Arbitration Provisions to Mitigate Bad Arbitrator Decisions - TroyGould addresses the California Supreme Court's recent decision, in Gueyffier v. Ann Summers, Ltd., 43 Cal. 4th 1179 (2008), and its implications for arbitration provisions.

The HR Implications of a Privatized War - Jon Van Horne discusses an issue unique to the employees of businesses holding government contracts: "In places like Iraq and Afghanistan (and many other places in an increasingly dangerous world), civilian contractor employees face the very real possibility of injury, kidnapping and death. For the sake of these employees and their families, these risks must be addressed by appropriate insurance coverage, something for which Congress has in fact provided."

Web 2.0 and PR 2.0 - a white paper by Jaffe Associates discussing the importance of the Internet to legal marketing and PR and reviewing a number of Web 2.0 venues for the legal community, including JD Supra.

USERRA Overview - Markus Hartmann provides "a historical context and overview of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA). The Act’s ethical context is framed by the following question: What is the proper amount of protection that should be given to citizen-soldiers and Marines when they return to civilian employment after completion of a period of active military service?"

What Is Probate? - a plain language review of probate law by Kenneth Vercammen.

Continue reading "Digest: Newsletters, Articles, Alerts on JD Supra" »