Doug Cornelius .com

Coming out of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee at Nashville is a decision on whether the phrase “cost and expenses” in enforcing a declaration of easements and restrictions includes the recovery of attorneys’ fees. The court says NO.

Cracker Barrel sued their neighbor alleging that the neighbor’s plan to expand their building violated the declaration of reciprocal rights and easement and restrictive covenant. This declaration governed the use of the Cracker Barrel property and the neighbor’s property. Cracker Barrel ended up winning. The provision in the declaration stated: “All costs and expenses of any suit or proceeding shall be assessed against the defaulting party.”

The Tennessee Court pointed out that Tennessee “follows the ‘American Rule’ which provides that litigants must pay their own attorney’s fees unless there is a statute or contract providing otherwise.” The court goes on to cite a case that the rule in Tennessee requires that the statute or contract specifically provides for the recovery of attorneys’ fees.

The dissenting judge found that the use of “all cost and expenses” should be given its ordinary meaning and would include attorney’s fees. After all the biggest cost of a “suit or proceeding” is going to be attorneys’ fees.

You can follow these links for the decision in Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc., et al. v. Richard Epperson, et al. (M2006-02424-COA-R3-CV) and the dissent.

Remember to always include the words “attorney’s fees” when drafting a contract provision for the recovery of costs and expenses.

In the first draft of this post I failed to thank Mike Frisch of The Legal Profession Blog for pointing out this case.

Common Craft has put together a great video on what is Twitter and why it might be useful to you. I began using Twitter a few months ago.

One thing I like about Twitter is that it is easy to embed into other sites. For example, my Facebook status can be changed by Twitter. Also, there is box on the blog site with my latest Twitter post.

I have thought that Twitter or a variation would be useful inside the firm. I could keep my assistant up to date on where I am and how to get a hold of me (if I am reachable).

If you like this video you should also see Common Craft’s Plain English videos on RSS, Wikis, Blogs, Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

In my previous rant post on Why are Legal Blogs Undervalued? I failed to show a few examples of the power of blogging when it comes to finding information on the internet.

My first example is a Google search for Interwoven express search. It returns two posts from KM Space in the top position. My posts are coming ahead of the Interwoven corporate site.

My second example is a Google search for bad boy guaranty. It returns two posts from my Real Estate Space blog on commercial real estate finance. (Bad boy guaranty is a commercial real estate finance term.)

My third example is a Google search for rule against perpetuities right of first refusal. It returns a post from my Real Estate Space blog in the second position. (The Rule Against Perpetuities is hated among law students.)

Those high search results are not based on any search engine optimization or link-trading. It just comes from writing about topics and joining the conversation about these topics on-line.

Also keep in mind that I do not post as often on Real Estate Space as I do here in KM Space. It also has less than 10% of the readership.

But still, with that small effort, my writings are appearing at the top of Google search results. Do you think your clients are not using a Google search to find information?

Over at the Drug and Device Law Blog one of the authors stirred the pot by posting: Why Are Blogs Undervalued? The post got picked up by the WSJ.com Law Blog: Law-Firm Blogs: Marketing Device or Mere Diversion? Since, the Drug and Device Law blog called him out, Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq. also chimed in: The Marketing Value of Publishing: 1440 to 2008.

The first thing to think about with a blog is how is it different from the other publications from your firm.

Is a legal blog really all that different than the client alerts and updates sent out by law firms? At the core, there is no difference. Information is just published to a website, rather than producing a pdf file and sending it out by email. With a blog the information is generally sent out by RSS feed, but can be sent by email. As of this morning, 15% of my subscribers get my feed by email rather than RSS.

A blog allows easier publishing. If I find an interesting case or story, I can have a post up in minutes. The client alerts do not match that speed. Most publications do not match that speed.

I do not agree with Mr. Hermann’s fourth proposition that blogging is too much work for too little financial reward. It is nearly impossible for most big laws to justify that any particular marketing effort leads directly to new work (with the exception of an explicit client pitch). I never hear anyone saying that should not produce client alerts or substantive articles for public consumption because they do not generate enough business. Clients of big law firms expect to receive regular updates of changes in the law that affect their business.

Blogging, like any marketing or networking activity is about building your brand. With lawyers and other professionals that means showing your expertise, engaging in conversations about your expertise and publishing your expertise. Blogs allow all of these. And certainly do a better job than most firm’s rather static websites. Over at the Drug and Device Law, they measured 25,00o page views per month on their blog. They call that a “drop in the bucket.” But I would guess that number rivals the page views than their law firm website gets. And that is with zero assistance from their IT departments or marketing departments and zero out-of-pocket costs.

All of the dangers that people express are there because people can find the content. Blog posts get indexed by search engines and the linking and and cross-linking are the magic ingredients that makes your blog rise up in the search results ranking. People can find the bad content. But they can also find the good content. All that good content rises up and enhances your brand.

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone’s internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that “story” as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug’s Google Reader
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good “2.0″ tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.

I co-authored LinkedIn to Facebook On My Blog: Social Media for Lawyers and Law Firm Staff with Jenn Steele (of Leading Geeks).

The article appeared in the Marketing Technologies – Putting Your Best Face Forward white paper from the International Legal Technology Association

The article is reprinted here with permission. For more information about ILTA, visit their website at www.iltanet.org.