Doug Cornelius .com

Tim O’Reilly wrote a great peice: Why I love Twitter.

1. Twitter is simple.
2. Twitter works like people do
3. Twitter cooperates well with others
4. Twitter transcends the web
5. Twitter is user-extensible
6. Twitter evolves quickly

Now that I have moved from The Firm to the New Company, I have been using Twitter much more. Since I have shifted my career from knowledge management to compliance, I am trying to grow my network of information flows and people in the compliance area. (There are lots of KM people using twitter; Very few compliance people.)

Twitter is great way to get news and information updates. There are mainstream news story publishers. New York Times (@nytimes), Wall Street Journal (@wsj), CNN (@cnnbrk) and BBC(@BBC and @BBCbreaking) all push out news stories through Twitter. On the legal side, the American Bar Association pushed law related news stories through @ABAjournal.  Individual journalists are also using Twitter to push out information. Some CNN anchors are using twitter during their broadcasts (@donlemoncnn). In local news, veteran new England news anchorman R.D. Sahl joined Twitter (@rdsahl) this week and has a new program on NECN.

I make extensive use of the Twitter Search (formerly Summize): search.twitter.com. I run a search on my name to pick up tweets with my handle. I run a search on “compliance” and other key words that interest me. That picks up both people and stories around the topic.

The one concern I have with Twitter is how it will survive. As far as I can tell Twitter has no revenue. There are no subscription fees and no advertising. Something will have to change for Twitter to survive.

If you are looking for a great list of people in the legal field using twitter go to JD Scoop‘s list of 145 Lawyers and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter. The list has grown to over 500 Twitterers.

Do you use Twitter? Feel free to follow me @dougcornelius.

If not, why not?

There have been some great reports on law firm blogs recently.

Kevin O’Keefe published an update to regular reporting of law firm blogs: State of the AmLaw 200 Blogosphere, November 2008

Greg Lambert put together a list of Large Law Firm Officially Sanctioned Blogs and followed up with a Report Card on Whether The Law Firms Were Blog-Proud or Blog Tolerant. The report card credits those law firms that make it very easy to find their attorney blogs as being “blog-proud.”

Kevin lists 159 blogs at 72 of the AmLaw 200 law firms. Greg lists 141 blogs at 56 firms. Kevin points out 37 blogs were not firm branded. Greg should add a third list of those firms that are “blog-intolerant.”

The remarkable side of these stories is the tremendous growth. Kevin point out that in August 2007, only 39 firms were blogging with only 74 blogs. Over the past 15 months, those numbers have doubled. It looks like Kevin is single-handedly responsible for the growth with 79% of the firm branded blogs using Kevin’s Lexblog platform.

The New York Daily News tried to show that it is easy to “steal” property by filing fake deeds. The story is rather foolish, but if you want to read it: It took 90 minutes for Daily News to ‘steal’ the Empire State Building.

The reporters think that by filing a forged deed, they somehow could control the building and get a mortgage. Sure it is possible to try to steal money by going through this exercise. Of course you are just leaving a paper trail that makes it easy to figure out what happened and get caught. I could also jump into a car and drive off. That is stealing too.

What is wrong with the story? The property manager is unlikely to turn over the bank accounts to some unknown person just because they have a deed. Tenants are unlikely to redirect rent payments without more evidence of a transfer. A mortgage lender is not going to turn over loan proceeds based on mere deed. One reason to insert lawyers into the real estate conveyance process is to prevent scams like this.

Mortgage lenders demand lots of documentation because they try to avoid scams like this. Mortgage lenders get title insurance to protect against fraud and scams.

It was a stunt and created an interesting headline. However, someone is likely to pay a fine or go to jail for it. I am not a New York lawyer but I would guess that there is a law against filing fake documents.

Disclaimers
Image is by David Shankbone from Wikimedia Commons

The American Bar Association launched LegallyMinded, a social networking site targeted at lawyers, paralegals, law librarians, law students and anyone else in the legal market. Being a student of social networks for lawyers, I thought I would sign up.

I encountered my first problem when they asked me to have a username rather than my real name. The statement was to use your real name. But they do not allow spaces in the username.Someone else had already grabbed the “dougcornelius” username. I am stuck with dougcornelius1.

The next problem was the lengthy six step sign-up process. No other site makes you add so much information. I singed in with my ABA identification so I would expect they would carry over my ABA information. I was wrong.

The next challenge was trying to connect with people. They offer an interactive map showing people with similar interests closer to you. It seemed to make little sense to me. Right next to me was someone who runs a small rural practice. Not me.

The site shows people with their username instead of their real names so it is hard to figure out who is who. My first search was to find out who joined as dougcornelius. No luck in being able to search the site for people by name. Of course their real name is hidden anyhow.

I moved on to the group function. There were two dozen in place, none of which held much interest for me. Five were focused on law students or law schools and three were focused on geography. So I set up a group for compliance since I noted Bruce Carton from Securities Docket and Compliance Week was on the site. I could not find a way to invite him to the group.

They have a blog feature so I tried that out. I copied in some posts from my Compliance Space blog to try out that feature. The publishing and editing of the blog platform is really poor.

The ABA Journal published a piece in the December 2008 issue: The ABA Gets Social.

“We set out to do something different,” says Fred Faulkner, the ABA’s manager of interactive services in Chicago. “We looked at a lot of the professional and social networks, and the gap we found was that there truly wasn’t a good site that was a cross between professional and personal networking.”

“We’re filling that gap by offering the best features of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and adding a bunch of content from the ABA and other high-quality content sources.”

I think they missed the mark with LegallyMinded.

Bob Ambrogi is trying to test it out, but he can’t even log in: ABA Launches (Buggy) Networking Site

One of the reasons for moving from knowledge management to compliance was the overlap in concepts and some issues. Sumner Blount summarized a lunch talk from Scott Mitchell of OCEG discussing the need for a unified approach to managing risk and compliance:

1. The high cost of information silos – siloed approaches to risk and compliance result in redundant activities and high total compliance costs.
2. The high costs of poor information quality – the lack of a “single source of truth” for risk and compliance information can reduce the effectiveness and quality of decision-making.
3. The high costs of getting it wrong – an ineffective risk and compliance program can, and does, result in loss of corporate reputation, increased business interruption, and reduced employee productivity.

Any of that sound familiar?

From More Thoughts on the OCEG Session at CA World

Sutherland published a timely legal alert on what a landlord can do with a tenant allowance and tenant build-out obligations when a tenant goes bankrupt: Obtaining Relief From Tenant Allowance and Build-Out Obligations When a Tenant Files for Bankruptcy.

The alert points out that lease provisions that allow the landlord to stop completion or funding upon the tenant filing bankruptcy are largely unenforceable as ipso facto provisions under section 365(e).

The alert notes two cases which came down with different results on tenant accommodations.

In re Postle Enterprises, Inc., 48 B.R. 721, 724 (Bankr. D. Ariz. 1985) found an improvement allowance to be a financial accommodation under 11 U.S.C. § 365(c)(2),(e)(2)(B). Therefore allowing the landlord to limit its exposure.

In re United Press International, Inc., 55 B.R. 63, 66 (Bankr. D. D.C. 1985), that court found a landlord’s build-out of a tenant’s premises to a tenant’s specifications did not rise above “an ordinary lease” and as such was not a financial accommodation.

Thanks to James B. Jordan, David J. Rabinowitz and Garland L. Reid of Sutherland for putting together an alert on a topic that is on the mind of landlords.

Disclaimers