Doug Cornelius .com

According to the Wall Street Journal, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has filed a forfeiture proceeding against 650 Fifth Avenue in New York.

In its press release: United States files civil forfeiture action against ASSA corporation’s interest in Manhattan office tower (.pdf), the DOJ claims that a 40% interest in the building is held by the ASSA Corporation which is acting as a front for Bank Melli. The Government of Iran controls Bank Melli and ownership is considered an export under the Iraninan Transaction Regulations (Title 31 CFR, part 560)

Disclaimers

Kevin O’Keefe, of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, put together his thoughts on what are the best social internet places for a lawyer or law firm to spend their resources: Lawyers and Social Media – It the Big Three. Kevin picks Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As usual, I agree with Kevin.

Every professional should have a profile on LinkedIn. Lawyers may rely on their law firm website, but lawyers do not stay at the same law firm for their entire career any more. I was at The Firm for 13 years, but everyone else I keep in touch with from law school had moved to a new place. I was the last person who was still at the same place. LinkedIn is great at keeping track of your job history. LinkedIn is the place to answer the question: How Ddo I know you? When I am planning to meet someone I always run a Google search and a LinkedIn search.

I have found this blog to be a wonderful networking tool. I have created and maintain many relationships through this blog. There is no better way to stay connected, develop your expertise and showcase your abilities than through a blog. It has been tough for me to give up on this blog since moving from knowledge management to compliance. (And obviously unsuccessful.) Compliance Space will come out of the dark in the near future. Although most of you will not be interested in it.

Twitter has exploded as a idea tool. As with most people, I was skeptical of what to do with a 140 character messaging system. But the open design has produced remarkable results for me.The micro-blogging aspect allows me communicate with people in a quick and easy way. Bigger thoughts end up in the blog. Lots of the background communication happens in Twitter.

I also use Twitter for research. Several times a day I search for “compliance”, “FCPA”, “CFIUS,” “Ethics”, and lots of other compliance terms. These tweets connect me with people, news, thoughts, thought-leaders and a plethora of information that helps me with my new role as Chief Compliance Officer.

One of the challenges of taking the new position, in this new area was the great network I had developed in the knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 areas. LinkedIn, blogs and Twitter are helping me to rapidly build a new network in the compliance area.

Facebook is great aggregator of information. I use it largely by having Facebook applications pull posts from blogs, my twitter updates and other sources rather than using Facebook as the primary creation point.

Unlike Kevin, I am still trying out new social internet sites. I still think Legal OnRamp has a bright future. Martindale-Hubble Connected has huge information repository that could create an incredibly powerful tool.

I try others to see what may develop. Eighteen months ago, I thought LinkedIn was boring and would not amount to much. I was wrong. It took a while for Twitter to catch on. I jump on others just to grab my name and to see what may happen. Usually I just waste 10 minutes to create profile (unfortunately, much longer for ABA’s LegallyMinded), see who else is there and explore the feature set. I have long list of bookmarks for dead social internet sites.

As with Kevin, I spend the vast majority of my time with the big three. You should too.

On April 16, 2008, Professor Bainbridge received the UCLA School of Law’s Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching. This essay consists of a revised and extended version of the remarks he gave on that occasion. In it, he addresses his progression from frustrated Socratic teacher to happy lecturer and his aspirations for incorporating new technologies into his teaching.

One point of contention was whether to block internet access in the law school classrooms. They felt the students were distracted and multi-tasking. Professor Bainbridge made this quote about law firms embracing technology:

Law firms doubtless will resist these trends. Law firms are incredibly slow in adopting both new technologies and new approaches to human resources. Just as Chicago is trying to perpetuate the Kingsfieldian style of legal education, big law firms are trying to perpetuate the 1980s Wall Street model of lawyering. Just as Canute was unable to keep the sea from rolling in, however, these institutions will find that the tides keep coming. They’ll need to adapt or die.

J. Robert Brown over at the Race to the Bottom, notes:

The most interesting insight is his view on technology in the classroom.  Luddites at Chicago have proposed that Internet access in the class room be cut off.  Some professors likewise suggested that computers be banned from the classroom.  As Bainbridge notes, the potential distraction provided by comptuers and the Internet are merely an “up-to-date version of an age-old issue.”

As Bainbridge notes, its more than just a battle with technology (or even behavior).  Its a refusal to find a way to integrate technology into the classroom.  In my securities/corporate law classes, power point slides are augmented by routine use of the Internet.  In securities, it’s to go to the SEC web page and examine relevant SEC filings.  Sometimes it involves a trip to the NYSE web site to look over the company’s definition of independent director.  Bainbridge notes that he has experimented with the use of blogs and is considering requiring students to construct wikis.

Clearly lawyers need to do a better job embracing technology to practice law, learn their craft and deliver their services.

See:

• Bainbridge, Stephen M., Reflections on Twenty Years of Law Teaching: Remarks at the Rutter Award Ceremony(April 2008). UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 08-16. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1122577
• Business Associations Blog
• Professor Bainbridge on Wine

The Boston Globe West has a story from the Newton History Museum at The Jackson Homestead focusing on the impact of the Charles River on Newton: Pages From Newton’s History.

The City of Newton is defined by the Charles. It has the river on its borders in the south, west, and north, and it was on the river’s banks that the city got its start — not as one unified town, but at first as a string of villages that grew up along the watercourse that provided abundant power for mills and manufacturing efforts. Improved transportation — first roads, then rail — gave those factories better access to markets. It also tied together the villages of Newton and brought the 18 square miles of farms and woods bounded by the Charles into a closer relationship with the metropolis at its doorstep, Boston.

. . .

The Charles today is slow and civilized, tamed by dams that have turned it into a series of elongated, picturesque lakes that make the river a marvelous resource for recreation and natural beauty. The original purpose of those dams was almost the opposite. They made the Charles a very hard-working river.

Intel has published their Social Media Guidelines.

I like their approach of giving users guidelines for they should and should not do. The context is to place the responsibility on the individual. It is that person who is creating the content. They are responsible for the content and the consequences. I think it is a great balance of encouraging people to interact with responsible behavior.

These guidelines are actually a great starting point for a law firm. You just need to add in a section about not creating attorney client relationships and a section about attorney advertising disclaimers.

Intel could have added some specific recommendations for some high profile sites. Of course the sites are changing so often that it might be hard to keep the policy up-to-date.

I also like how Intel integrate these guidelines with other policies like the Intel Code of Conduct (.pdf) and the Intel Privacy Policy. (That may be the new compliance side of me revealing himself.)  This modularity avoids duplication and inconsitencies.

Chris McGrath of Thought Farmer presented a great session on the new wave of intranets.

1. Blow up your old intranet. It probably has become a document dumping group. (I  think of it as a roach motel. Documents go in, but they never come out.)

2. Turn Users into Authors. Turn readers into writers. Let people edit documents. Put a big “EDIT” button on each page. Seek information and knowledge. Graymont, a mining company, pushes intranet editing out to everyone, including blue collar workers. The truck drivers have access to and can edit the intranet.

3. Expose the Social Context of the Content. You need to see who created the information, who edited and who commented. Then also what other information they have created and who they report to. (More important as the size of the company grows.) A particular point of information source is the employee directory. There you can aggregate the reporting structure, background and other information creation.

4. Make Things Findable. If they can’t find stuff then the intranet is a failure (An intranet is all about supplying information to the enterprise.) Provide multiple ways to find. Search by words, browse, tags. Chris also mentioned a “work-stream”: a time based view of changes to the intranet. This is a bit more serendipitous. Show recent changes.

5. Add Signals. When something changes, you should signal those who are interested in it. An email notice or an RSS feed accomplish this goal. The key result of signal is that it turns the intranet into a communications platform.

6. Provide Scaffolding. When you do a physical building project, you put up scaffolding then pull it off when the building is father along. It is easier to edit than to create. It is easier to copy than to create. Do not present people with a blank page. Set an initial structure for the intranet like the top level. For example: people, offices, projects. Chris recommended a card-sorting execrise as a way to determine the initial structure. Chris recommended getting an information architect. He also suggested OptimalSort.com as a tool for card-sorting.

7. Hold a Barnraising. A way to create an initial block of good content. Migrate exisitng content or create new content. Get a bunch a people into a room. Set up a page for each employee in the company.

8. Make Them Use It Once. Most people are intimidated by learning something new. peopel need to try it once to see how easy it is to use. Get people in a room with a short training exercise. A great first step is having everyone add some information to their employee page. Then have them comment on a page and have them create a page.

9. Lead By Example. The more senior people ou get involved the more likely the intranet will be successful. CEO comments and pages tend to be the most popular. The CEO’s blog will be the most read blog.

10. Get the Intranet “in the flow.”  Most intranets store the artifact of information instead of the acting as the agent to create the information. You can also hijack the flow. Grab an email and have it published onto the intranet (respecting security of course).

Bob Buckman’s ultimate idea-sharing system:

• one transfer step
• all employees have access
• all employees can contribute
• available anywhere
• available at anytime
• indexes every word
• users contribute in their native language

Bob proposed this in the 1980′s (before the internet and intranets).

For a large company, the intranet should be rolled out in smaller groups. If the company is 200 or smaller, then roll it our across the entire organization. You take lessons from smaller groups and apply them up to the larger organization.

Chris thinks the “Turning Users into Authors” is the most important. Most companies do not succeed in “getting the intranet in the flow.” Can your company operate without the intranet? Would anyone notice if the intranet went down?

There is a repeat of this webinar on Thursday December 11 at 1pm PST: Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy-Steps. 

The Canadian Law Blog Awards are seeking nominations for this year’s awards. Between now an Friday December 27th you can nominate a Canadian authored legal blog by writing blog post about three Canadian law blogs. (You can also send an email to Steve Matthews (steve@stemlegal.com) if you do not have a blog. He did not mention Twitter, but I bet he will take a nomination through twitter: @stevematthews)

One of my favorite legal blogs in Jordan Furlong’s Law21. Jordan has a very insightful look into the practice of law and law firms.

Connie Crosby offers great insights into how lawyers can use social media.

Slaw.ca covers a broad range of topics with an all-star line up of contributors (including Jordan and Connie.)

The awards are grouped into categories, but the judges will take care of that. Just let Steve know which blogs are your favorite.

You may be wondering why a Bostonian like me is writing about Canadian law blogs. Last year I won a “Friend of the North” CLawBie for frequently reading, commenting and linking to Canadian Blogs.

Since The Son and The Daughter came I have become an armchair adventurer rather than an outdoor adventurer. The tale of Shackleton’s adventure to Antarctica has always fascinated me; Trapped in ice for months and sailing to rescue in a small boat to an island hundreds of miles of away. I am always stunned that his entire crew survived in a situation where none should have.

I came across a blurb about Tom Griffiths’ Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica in National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.

The author traveled to Antarctica and kept a diary. This book mixes entries from his diary with the history exploration of Antarctica and settlement on the icy continent. The book is about the enduring power of the “heroic era” stories of exploring Antarctica, as Edwardian figures sledged across the inhabited expanse of snow and ice.

[Antarctica] is a place where nature is lethal, humans are always just visitors and the land is covered by ice kilometers deep. This is a landscape in which the laws of chemistry and physics – and indeed the power of metaphysics – predominate, and terrestrial biology looks very marginal indeed. The ocean is where life is: the largest land animal is a mite. The ice is massive, deadly and – in spite of its own variety – reductionist. It simplifies and universalises

Griffiths does a great job of summarizing the history of exploration, living on Antarctica and the implication of Antarctic research on human behavior. He puts in contrast the easy death of humans on the continent with the abundant life in the ocean just offshore. He moves onto the current technology and climate research at the Antarctic bases. In this place where humans can barely exist, we are learning more about our world.

In the end, people go South to Antarctica “for purity, solitude, otherworldliness; they go there for the silence.”

Back in June of 2007, I came across a story about Facebook at Law Firms. A Magic Circle firm had banned Facebook, then abruptly lifted the ban. The decision was made because Facebook has “business benefits as well as social uses.”

In the 18 months since then, web 2.0 and the social internet have grown immensely. Twitter has come roaring onto the scenes. There are three attempts at creating social networking sites for lawyers: Legal OnRamp, Martindale Connected and the ABA’s Legally Minded. The number of law firm blogs has nearly doubled in those 18 months.

Are any law firms still banning access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, YouTube or other web 2.0 sites? Let me know. You can leave an anonymous comment or drop me an email at kmspace@dougcornelius . com.

If you have been reading this blog, hopefully you have come to the conclusion that web 2.0 tools are great for lawyers, create lots of professional development and create business opportunities. Maybe there are some firms out that there that have not seen the light. Let me know.