JD Scoop

Here's an introduction to some of the latest lawyers and law firms to be publishing their work on JD Supra. We're happy to welcome them to the site:

	Babener & Associates, a law firm that represents companies headquartered throughout the United States and abroad. The firm is located in the Bank of America Financial Center in Portland, Oregon, where its practice includes representation of many of the major companies in the direct selling industry. Featured Document: Oregon State MLM Law
	The Divorce Collaborative LLC, focused solely on Massachusetts divorce and domestic relations cases, including modifications and contempt actions surrounding child support, alimony, and custody matters. Featured Document: Mediation to Stay Married
	Patrick Malone, a patient safety advocate and attorney who represents seriously injured people in medical malpractice lawsuits, product liability and other cases. He is the co-author of "Rules of the Road: A Plaintiff' Lawyer's Guide to Proving Liability." Featured Document: Birth Injury - Exploring Legal Options
	Denise Brown's Legal Direction, a full service law firm located in Louisville, Kentucky. Denise Brown and her team of bankruptcy, family and probate specialists are active in Louisville and throughout Kentucky business and legal communities. Featured Document: What "Not To Do" Before Filing Bankruptcy
	Finebloom and Haenel, which focuses exclusively on defending people charged with crimes. The firm has offices throughout Florida including Sarasota, Orlando, Tampa, and Clearwater, and defends people charged with Driving Under the Influence (DUI), criminal traffic related offenses, driving while license suspended, possession of marijuana, and other drug related crimes and traffic tickets. Featured Document: Motion for Formal Review Hearing
	McKennon|Schindler LLP, representing plaintiffs and defendants in insurance cases of all types - life, health, disability, property/casualty, commercial general liability, professional liability, officers and directors liability, employment practices liability, homeowners and business owners property and liability, specialty risks, excess, umbrella, and reinsurance. Featured Document: Unfair Insurance Practices Act Can Give Rise To Private Cause
	Cameron Totten, a California lawyer specializing in consumer bankruptcy, foreclosure defense, mortgage lender liability and general civil litigation. Featured Document: Plaintiff v. U.S. Bank, Credit Suisse, et al., Plaintiff's Opposition to Defendants' Demurrer to Complaint
	Keith Wier, engaged in an active litigation practice which includes: (1) financial services litigation practice defending various professional and industry trade groups and their members; (2) commercial litigation practice; (3) professional malpractice/e&o practice; and insurance defense practice involving transportation and construction. Featured Document: Castro v. Collecto, Inc. Decision Granting Defendants' Motion to Dismiss
	Shawn McCammon of Liberty Law, which offers outsourced general counsel services to Northern California businesses, and estate planning for individuals. Featured Documents: CA Employers Must Reimburse Employees for Business Expenses Even When Policy Is Not Followed
	TexasBarCLE: Education by the Bar, for the Bar. Featured Document: MCLE FAQ

What about you? Are you looking for an effective way to showcase expertise and connect with new clients, colleagues, and the media?

Join JD Supra. Create a professional profile and start posting your legal work online!

For your reference, here is a list of recent articles and alerts to do with the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) regulations that went into effect at the beginning of this year. All documents posted on JD Supra by participating lawyers and law firms:

RESPA Guidelines: A Real Estate Reading List

• RESPA Changes Effective January 1 - by Miller & Martin PLLC 
• New RESPA Rules For Consumer Protection In Real Estate Settlements And Loans - by Duane Morris LLP
• HUD Issues Final RESPA Rule and the Federal Reserve Board Makes More Changes to Regulation Z - by Lane Powell PC - Business/Commercial Law
• Explaining the RESPA Prohibitions Against Kickbacks and Fee Splitting - by Sebastian Gibson
• New RESPA Rules 2010: How To Disclose Settlement Services, Closing Attorney Fees, And Title Insurance - by Richard Vetstein
• RESPA Fallout: Lenders Combat Deficients With New Good Faith Estimate Through Loan Worksheets - by Richard Vetstein
• New RESPA Rules: Help for Borrowers Shopping for Loans - by Cathy Christiansen at Szabo, Zelnick & Erickson P.C.
• Fifth Circuit Denies Class Certification Of Kickback Claims Under RESPA - by Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP
• RESPA, TILA and Show Me the Mortgage Note - by O. Max Gardner III at Gardner & Gardner PLLC

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Lawyers, do you have RESPA-related content to add to the mix? Post it now on JD Supra.

Real Estate Law: On Facebook | On Twitter | On JD Supra ... join us for content and connections!

File under: reputation management, public relations, press coverage - what you will. Here are three recent updates from JD Supra contributors who received press pickup after posting their content on the site.

Delivered to you as we first saw this pleasing feedback, via Twitter:

Social media about cocktail conversation not content? Really?

Do you know that Facebook recently became the fourth largest source of traffic for News and Media sites, after Google, Yahoo!, and msn? (Source: Facebook Largest News Reader? Hitwise Intelligence.)

Interesting numbers in that report, well worth a read - and I agree entirely with analyst Heather Hopkins: "Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category."

 Much of what is being written about Facebook as a trusted news source in people's lives resonates with what we've thought (and said) for quite some time about the platform's 400-million-strong-and growing, engaged readers. (Not particularly smart of us, you'd have to be blind to miss Facebook's traffic-driving power in this regard. People see, read, and share links all day, every day, on Facebook. And that's a lot of people.)

Here's what Steve Rubel, noted writer and digital media analyst (with the enviable job title of Director of Insights) had to say in his recent post, Facebook Could Eat the Web (italics are mine):

In addition to using Facebook to check in on what my family, friends and colleagues are up to, I have been using it as a newsreader for months ... This is something that the company suggested everyone do here. Although I suspect that most users haven't taken the steps to create a dedicated news list as Facebook suggests, there's no doubt that the social network is becoming a critical source of information.

This is not limited to Facebook, although the numbers do show the platform leading the way. From Ken Doctor at the Niemen Journalism Lab, The Newsonomics of social media optimization:

A recent study I did with Outsell said that 44 percent of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter.

...Clearly, there's something big going on here. In my book, I characterized it as Law #1: "In the Age of Darwinian Content, You Are Your Own Editor. The old gatekeepers are disappearing. We've become our own and one another's editors."

Great. Facebook and Twitter deliver a lot of readers. Terrific. I'm a busy lawyer, what does this mean to me?

A lot, actually. Especially if you are one of those lawyers who've come to see the value of showcasing professional expertise by producing and dispersing legal content (ie, putting online your own articles, blog posts, alerts, commentary, favorable decisions, briefs, etc.). You are, afterall, a member of the new media - with your particular legal expertise and your ability to show it in your writing.

Remember those days not too long ago when you figured out that email was actually a valuable communications tool? And then - stroke of brilliance! - you realized that if you collected the email addresses of clients, colleagues, and prospects to send regular news and analysis, that would be a terrific way to stay in touch (and market your service)?

And remember when you learned that every "subscriber" to your blog's RSS stream was in some way not unlike every subscriber to your email newsletter? (Both opted in to hear from you - both vetted you as a source of good information. Both said, yes: tell me what you know.)

When we talk about the content sharing strengths of Facebook, we are, among other things, talking about this. Only, now it is on steroids.

As I have said many times before, I am a big fan of Facebook business pages because they're the latest and greatest to allow meaningful engagement between readers and producers of content. (Mashable.com was quick to note this after last year's page changes.)
 
Calling a reader in Facebook a "fan" doesn't seem to sit well with some professionals - and yet these same people are growing more comfortable with words like "tweet" and Twitter and Flickr and ... other cute Web names some of which end in an exclamation point.

Fact is, on Facebook pages, our fans are also our readers, should we choose to think of them that way.

Anyone who becomes a fan of a Facebook page that promises to deliver regular, substantive, tasteful, informed, expert content is opting in (think email signups, RSS subscriptions) to hear from us.

And then there is the engagement. With email newsletters, engagement was limited: delete it, reply to it, forward it. (Think back to the days of the giant email forward - usually something funny, shared between friends.) Otherwise, who knows which emails we like, which ones move and inform us?

With blogs came a big leap forward in terms of engagement: you could write comments (you could begin conversations) and you could (with a click of a button or the cut and paste of a link) share the post with friend and colleagues. 

Facebook's engagement is exciting because, in many ways, it brings a new level of viral transparency. When I "like" a shared link (video, news story, legal article) in Facebook, everyone connected to me sees that. I don't need to forward it; I don't need to click any additional buttons. I just "like" it and people see it.

If I want to, I can also "share" that piece of content by mailing to friends, or posting it onto my own profile. Similarly, when I comment on something on Facebook, all of my connections are also made aware of it - and so begins the easy, viral process of drawing in new people to new content. ("If Adrian likes it, I'll check that out, too..." - click.)

Random sample: here is a snapshot taken from my Facebook stream at time of writing. I'm already a fan of Justia's Facebook page - but if I wasn't, that piece of news (showing my friends connecting to it) would draw me in:



Activity on Facebook leads to increased exposure. Take advantage of it. Give people something to talk about.

We've seen the power of information sharing on Facebook both in our analytics and in the anecdotal evidence filtering back to us. Most recently, for just one example, we featured a new JD Supra article on one of our subject-specific legal news pages (Immigration Law) and within half an hour the attorney who'd written the piece was contacted by a reader (who'd read it on Facebook) who was looking for help with an immigration issue.  

So, what to do? A handful of suggestions:

1. Set up a Facebook page and regularly program it with useful content that showcases your expertise (including content from your blog, if you have one).
2. Post your work on JD Supra, because we'll also do this for you, via our subect-specific news channels/pages.
   
3. Install the JD Supra Legal Publishing application on your page and profile (of course I'm going to say this! We created the app and the above pages to leverage the viral quality of the Facebook platform).
4. Encourage your contacts, clients, and readers to connect with you on Facebook via a professional firm page.
   
5. Use social media to make new friends and to converse. But also use it to deliver content that breaks the ice on your behalf and creates new friends, new contacts (new clients!) you otherwise might never have met. While you're busy at work being a lawyer, no less.
   

Here's a list of some of the legal marketing blogs I read regularly. Such a list is personal and unlikely to be comprehensive; even so, I've compiled it with the hope you find value at the end of a few of these links.

The list reflects no more or less than what grabs my attention today, and yes I'm using "legal marketing" in a broad sense. (Some of these blogs, for example, also focus on Law Practice issues, among others.) And yes, I am missing a few. (Some blogs are popular enough already - I need not point you to them.)

Legal Marketing Blogs:

• Amy Campbell's Weblog
• The Marcus Letter (Bruce W. Marcus)
  
• Law Consulting Blog (by Cordell Parvin)
  
• Law Firm Web Strategy (Stem Legal)
• Legal Marketing Blog (Tom Kane)
• Rants & Raves (Patrick McKenna)
• In Black & White (Paula Black)
  
• Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices (Gerry Riskin)
• The Legal Watercooler (Heather Milligan)
  
• Law Marketing Portal
• Lawyerist > Marketing
• 22 Tweets (Lance Godard)
• Virtual Marketing Officer (Jayne Navarre)
  
• Myrland Marketing - Plan to Grow (Nancy Myrland)
• Jasinski On Legal Marketing (Doug Jasinski)
• Legal Ease Blog (Allison Shields)
• Law Practice Matters (Erik Mazzone)
  
• AttorneySync Blog
• Legal Practice Pro (Jay Fleischman)
  
• Law Marketing Blog (Larry Bodine)
  
• The Rainmaker Blog (Stephen Fairley)
  
• Real Lawyers Have Blogs (Kevin O'Keefe)
• Divorce Discourse (Lee Rosen)
  
• Rent My Brain (Jonathan Ginsberg)
  
• Law21 (Jordan Furlong)
• LawBizBlog (Ed Poll)
• Marketing Strategy and the Law (Adrian Dayton)
  
• What About Clients? 
• Legal Practice Pro (Jay Fleischman)
  
• the [non]billable hour (Matt Homann)

I plan to add others as the spirit moves. Suggestions? Please share your links in a comment. Or tell me via Twitter.

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Also see:

- JD Supra's Legal Marketing Articles
- Legal Marketing on Twitter | on Facebook

We're pleased to announce the arrival of Lane Powell Legal Updates, a new iPhone app that streams by subject the articles, alerts, analysis, and briefs posted on JD Supra by Seattle-based law firm Lane Powell.


       

Freely available in the iTunes app store, Lane Powell's Legal Updates streams legal content (and expertise) covering bankruptcy, business law, construction, environmental law, health care, immigration, insurance, real estate, and other fields for which the multi-specialty, 135-year-old firm is known.

Lane Powell's mobile audience can read the firm's latest content using the iPhone's Safari browser or via PDF reader, which includes landscape (horizontal) view and zoom functionality for easy viewing. Readers can also easily contact Lane Powell lawyer-writers directly from the app, with the click of a button.




We've written before about Lane Powell's excellent content marketing efforts (see Aviva Cuyler's: Lane Powell Knows the Landscape - Inside and Out). It seems a natural next step for a law firm that understands the marketing value of showcasing legal expertise via substantive commentary and analysis now to take their content to a growing mobile audience.

Download Lane Powell Legal Updates from iTunes

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Related:

- Lane Powell iPhone App Puts Legal Updates in Your Palm
- JD Supra's 'Legal Edge' iPhone App Allows Lawyers to Connect with Mobile Users


Want a custom iPhone app for your law firm? Find out more here:
Law Firm iPhone Apps by JD Supra: Your Legal Expertise Everywhere