Doug Cornelius .com

Heather Colman has a piece on the use of wikis at her Canadian firm, Hicks Morley, published on LLRX.com: Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley.

I had the pleasure of meeting Heather back in October and heard her presentation on the selection and adoption of wikis at her law firm.

Since our successful launch, 768 pages, 384 links and 530 internal shortcuts have been added by individual users. The most surprising statistic is that 1,445 documents have been added as attachments. This illustrates the wiki’s overall appeal including its use as a mini Document Management system. ThoughtFarmer has become an effective replacement for the cumbersome Shared Drive. The statistics highlight how easy it is for users, including lawyers, to add pages and content. The automatic navigational structure, search engine and ‘browse by tags’ functionality makes it easier and faster to find information resulting in a substantial drop in the number of email queries. The Intranet has also become a Personal Knowledge Management enabler with many lawyers using their profiles to store personal precedent collections, articles, presentations, speaking notes, etc.

In a Bloomberg story By Hui-yong Yu, REITs in U.S. Consider Paying Dividends in Stock to Save Cash, many publicly traded REITs may take advantage of a IRS ruling allowing them to pay dividends instead of cash.

On December 10, 2008 the Internal Revenue Service issued Revenue Procedure 2008-68 announcing that the IRS will treat a cash option stock dividend as satisfying a public REIT’s distribution requirements for 2008 and 2009 so long as shareholders can elect to take at least 10% of the dividend in cash.

According to a REIT Alert from Goodwin Procter, IRS Issues Guidance on Taxable Stock Dividends:

The Revenue Procedure provides that the IRS will treat a capped cash option stock dividend by a REIT as a taxable dividend, and will consider the amount of stock distributed to be equal to the amount of cash which could have been received instead, if:

• the dividend is made by the REIT to its shareholders with respect to its stock;
• the terms of the dividend allow each shareholder the right to elect to receive its entire distribution in either cash or stock of the REIT of equivalent value, provided that the REIT may impose a limitation on the amount of cash to be distributed in the aggregate to all shareholders of not less than 10% of the aggregate distribution; and
• the number of shares to be distributed is determined as close as practicable to the payment date based upon a formula utilizing market prices.

Disclaimers

On January 14, the SEC issued a no-action letter to OMNI Brokerage, Inc., Argus Realty Investors, L.P., and PASSCO Companies, LLC regarding their tenant in common interest program. The SEC said no to the “no action.”

“Based on the facts presented, the Division disagrees with your view that the proposed offer and sale of undivided tenant in common interests pursuant to the Master Lease Transactions and Property Management Transactions (each as defined in your letter) do not involve securities within the meaning of Section 2(a)(1) of the Securities Act of 1933. As a result, the Division is unable to assure you that it would not recommend enforcement action to the Commission unless such offers and sales are registered under the Securities Act or exempt from registration.”

TIC sponsors will need to revisit their platform if they have not been treating their TIC interests like securities. In an article in National Real Estate Investor, Beth Mattson-Teig points out that the no-action letter is limited to the specific facts presented in the request for confirmation: SEC Confirms TICs as Securities.

• SEC No Action Letter to Omni
• Omni Letter Request for Confirmation (.pdf) submitted in 2006

Disclaimers

Omar Ha-Redeye writes on slaw.ca about two new social networks for lawyers: Lawyrs Looking for Alternative Social Networks and Social Network on Jurafide for American Clients.

Jurafide.com is a networking and marketing site that facilitates communication between U.S. clients and non-U.S. lawyers.

Lawyrs.net looks like a social networking platform for lawyers with some group discussions and legal news. 

Omar signed up on Lawyrs but finds that it is missing the ability to pull in your contacts and see who you know is in the site. A fatal flaw.

I did not bother signing up for either one. Legal OnRamp seems to be the dominant site in the world of social networking in the legal field. I previously wrote about my bad experiences with LawLink and ABA’s LegallyMinded. I still hold out some hope for Martindale Hubbell Connected. So, I am skeptical that either of these two companies with no apparent connection to the US legal market can provide an interesting online networking platform.

I assumed that you could not use Google Analytics for your intranet. Apparently I was wrong.

Sadalit Van Buren takes you through the steps on her A Matter of Degree blog: How to Use Google Analytics with Sharepoint (MOSS 2007).

Google Analytics is not the most robust tools for measuring traffic. But these are tight economic times and it is good to have a free tool.

I use Google Analytics to view trends on this blog and some other sites I control. It does a great job of showing trends and the most viewed pages.

I received a request to write a report on social networking for lawyers. It is a bigger project than I want to take on. (Since my change to compliance from knowledge management. Yes, I will be publishing a compliance blog. It should be online shortly.)

If you are interested in writing a detailed report for a very good publishing house, let me know. kmspace@dougcornelius.com.

Here is the request:

Below is a brief synopsis which highlights some of the areas that I would expect the report to cover, although I’m very happy to receive input from you, of course. I’m also open to different suggestions for the most effective title. With the reports, we normally look at a printed product of at least 70-80 pages (which equates to around 40,000-45,000 words). This should include case study material or practical examples, which the author can write himself or ask a third party to write.

As we approach experts working within the industry, who are in the best position to provide accurate, well-informed content, we do understand that they will be taking on such projects alongside their day-to-day roles. For that reason we seek to offer a fair remuneration package, which would include a fee plus a royalty share of sales.

As this seems to be an issue of particularly topical interest, we would ideally like to publish this report in April 2009 so would need to receive copy by early April. Both deadline and fees are negotiable. The report will obviously be marketed extensively to our law firm database in the US and UK so there is additional value for you from the profile-raising point of view.

Synopsis:

Social networking for lawyers

Social networking and Web 2.0 collaborative tools have enjoyed an exponential increase in popularity in recent years. However, whilst such tools have been embraced by many businesses in a variety of sectors, law firms – and lawyers in particular – have been slower to appreciate the value that they can create in a professional context.

This report will review the substantial benefits that social networking and Web 2.0 can bring to law firms, in particular in the current economic climate (e.g. cost-conscious marketing; maximizing lawyer downtime to develop know-how). The report will also look at how potential pitfalls – such as damage to brand and reputation – can be avoided.

Target readership

Lawyers wishing to gain a more thorough understanding of the application of Web 2.0 in the business context; marketing, business development and HR professionals looking to exploit a new channel

Proposed contents

A brief introduction to some key concepts and how they might be used in law firms

Why use social media in law firms?
• Reputation management
• Marketing
• Recruitment
• Offering value-adding legal services
• Encouraging press contact

Using blogs to raise your and your practice group’s profile

Using wikis as a tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration in the organization

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, Legal OnRamp, LawLink, Second Life – and getting the maximum value from them

Mitigating the risks of social media

Ensuring workers are properly briefed on appropriate/inappropriate usage

Case studies

The report should include a number of case studies illustrating how firms and lawyers use social media for a variety of purposes – to share know-how, recruit, develop new business, communicate with clients and strengthen relationships. Could include some examples from other kinds of businesses too.

Standard & Poor’s announced that Health Care REIT Inc. (NYSE:HCN) will replace Sovereign Bancorp Inc.(NYSE:SOV) in the S&P 500. Standard & Poor’s Announces Changes to U.S. Indices [.pdf] Sovereign is being acquired by Banco Santander SA, leaving a vacancy in the index.

Health Care REIT, Inc. is an equity real estate investment trust that invests across the full spectrum of senior housing and health care real estate, including independent living/continuing care retirement communities, assisted living facilities, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals, long-term acute care hospitals and medical office buildings.

Disclaimers

I have had mixed things to say about Avvo in the past: Avvo’s Online Ratings For Lawyers Come To Boston and Avvo Revisited – I am a 23% Better Lawyer.

Avvo put together a great list of the Top Legal Blogs.

Rather than using the voodoo used by the ABA, Avvo used the blogs Alexa ranking. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The Alexa information may be off because it relies on information from its toolbar users. I wonder how many lawyers have the toolbar installed. (I did not install it until I saw the blog list.) So there are a few oddballs in the list. But there is a great transparency to the list that I have not seen in other legal blog listings.

Sadly KM space does not make the top 100 with an Alexa ranking of only 1,319,459.

Update:
You can certainly argue that Alexa is not a useful tool for measuring traffic and ranking site (as I pointed out). The ranking shows the popularity of these blogs to Alexa users. You can interpret whether this carries over to a different population of lawyers and those in the legal field.

As Brian Leiter argues on his Law School reports blog, even site visitors and page views do not capture the best statistic. He points out that average site visit time should be factored into the number site visits to measure impact.

You also should look at the number of subscribers and incoming links to a site. I have yet to see an effective way to mash this all together in a meaningful way.

Online social and business networking sites are a booming business. Tap into the success of these powerful tools by using them to strengthen your business and personal connections, share your expertise, and enhance your marketing and recruiting efforts.

This is the lead in for the article I wrote,  Online Networking for Lawyers (pdf.), for the January 2008 issue of Trial Magazine, themed Law Firm 2.0.

The article is reprinted with permission of TRIAL (January 2009).
Copyright American Association for Justice, formerly Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA®).