Off the back of a post on Tungle over at Lawyerist by Allison Shields I’ve been giving the service a try. One week in, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It’s a service to help you schedule meetings across several people and advertise your availability to others.

To me it’s a bit like a supercharged Doodle, which I’ve been using for awhile to help schedule meetings. The added advantage with Tungle is that if your schedule changes so too does your availability for meetings you’re trying to book, which is super handy when trying to book something with those late-to-reply people who end up having you hold multiple slots open for a meeting or make you rebook because you’ve already scheduled something else. Plus Tungle looks better.

The connector program for the Mac is in beta, and has stuck on me a few times but more or less runs smoothly. Currently it refers you to the Tungle website when scheduling, I’d like to see a way to schedule meetings directly on my machine. Syncing works pretty well with iCal back and forth.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be a pricing model attached, so not sure what direction it will head, but this is a great idea, and well implemented.

You can find me at: http://tungle.me/jordanhatcher

This posted started because I was going through my MobileMe settings for an unrelated reason today and discovered Back to My Mac.

It allows for remote access to your machine and apparently it can even be used to catch a thief. My rough impression is that it seems like it is a lighter version of Apple Remote Destop or VNC.

I don’t usually have a need to remote access my machine that much — it’s a laptop and so if it isn’t with me it is usually just shut off. And if it is off with the lid closed, it ain’t likely going to wake up again (though I’m assuming if it was asleep with a network cable attached, it could?).

That being said, I am starting to not take my laptop with me when I’m out of the office for meetings. It’s heavy and I’m frankly trying to save my lower back. Instead just use my iPhpone. Between Safari, Mail, MobileMe, iCal, Address book, and all the other goodies like OmniFocus on my phone I find I don’t need my laptop unless it’s for something specific (such as a presentation).

Now that I’m leaving it behind more, I now can see some limited need to leave my laptop on and be able to access it from my phone, even if just to access files or to have it as a spam filter.

Anyone have any suggestions or further thoughts?

Cnet has a post comparing the old iBook’s to today’s netbook trend. My trusty 12 inch Powerbook was the same — and I’d recommend it over the iBook for probably around the same price. They are faster and feel much more durable as well as being about the same weight.

Mine lasted, after 4+ years, still 3-4 hours on the battery and weighed less than 5 pounds on its own (though they don’t call the charger a brick for nothing). It was fast enough for netbook activities (surfing email and word processing), though when I switched to an MBP I realised it was slower than what I could have.

It unfortunately kicked up a memory problem with the graphics card earlier this year, which since it is integrated into the logic board means an expensive logic board replacement. But instead of a netbook, maybe I’ll just go for a repair? The downside though is being on a PPC machine when Apple has moved solely over to Intel with the Snow Leopard release.

I don’t get a lot of spam, as I actively try to keep most of my email addresses off the internet (and thus keeping them away from screenscrapers). Some of my accounts (I have 8+) are relatively immune, as they’ve never been signed up to email lists or given out to more than a few people.

But I’m not immune. I get about 50-100/week. Apple Mail’s filters have been doing a good job, but lately in the past few months about 5 get through a day, not counting the rules I had to create to eliminate spam from people like (spammers) LawCrossing or Affluence.org who refuse to actually remove people when requested.

So one quick search and a trip to Hawk Wings and enter SpamSieve for a test run. Only one day into it, but it is getting trained up and doing a pretty awesome job so far. It uses a different type of filtering (Bayesian) than Apple Mail so that’s part of the trick.

It also has a handy guide to integrating it with your iPhone (though it involves leaving a computer running back at home…).

I’ll give it a go over the next 30 day trial period to see how it goes.

This is crazy. I almost can’t believe and am assuming I am missing something. I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week, but today was the first day I had to search for a term in Preview, Apple’s PDF viewer. It is horrible! They have some new features in Preview I like with the search (page relevance for one), but I want the list of hits along the side — with surrounding text just like with Google — not what they have now which is just the pages. It makes searching through large legal documents very difficult without word matches on the side.

So much so I’ll have to find a Preview replacement unless there is a hidden way to enable this feature.

The annoying bit is on the side:

As a solo or small firm lawyer, you were a lot of hats and don’t have the luxury of just delegating lots of aspects of your practice to others. As a result of a conversation that I had today with a fellow small firm legal professional, I created this list of sites that I follow that help me keep track.

LPM blogs

Build a Solo practice. Susan Cartier Liebel’s blog and one of the first I started following when I developed my consultancy.

There are quite a few others that I dip in on regularly, such as Chuck Newton and Home Office Warrior. These days I mostly just see what is out there via the twitter people I follow, though I very sorely tempted to join Solo Practice University to give it a go.

Tech for the solo/small firm

Keep up to date with Future Lawyer and for the Mac users, subscribe to MILO and read iPhone JD if you have an iPhone.

SEO

SEO Moz comes in very handy and has lots of tools to help with SEO. My Pro subscription has been useful, but there are plenty of things to get you started for free.

SEO Book. I bought and read Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and it’s been a great help to understand the issues and where to improve (even if I don’t get to do all of what he and SEO Moz recommend).

UK

In the UK we have the SOLO IP group, which I’d hoped would offer more practice management tips and tricks, and still has the potential to be a really useful resource specifically for IP practitioners.

Your apple mac comes with a handy tool for doing screen grabs, funnily enough called Grab. It’s located in the “Utilities” folder within “Applications”.

Applications –> Utilities

If you use an application launcher such as LaunchBar (which is an awesome app that I highly recommend), you can just type “grab” and it will pop up. Otherwise click through all your folders in the Finder.

Grab is pretty self explanatory after that. You can do the whole screen or just a window.

Think about it. Why are you blogging as part of your business?

The answer: to help build your business!

You have a business. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely a solo or small firm lawyer. But this applies whether you are a lawyer in Chicago, a consultant in London, or a widget manufacturer in Kazakhstan. You have a business, and it is not selling advertising on your web content.

Lawyers sell their services, not ads.

Blogging help you sell your services in many ways. Through it, you can increase your SEO, making it easier for potential clients to find you, and build out your networks and reputational capital to build referral business and boost your standing as an expert (and so charge higher rates).

Putting ads on your site sends the wrong message in this environment. It says you aren’t serious about blogging as part of your practice and it’s a distraction to the people you want to stay focussed on your site and your content (and not clicking through to other sites to buy things).

Besides that, those ads aren’t likely to be very successful. That one beer a month that you can buy with the GoogleAds on your blog will be useful to console you when you think about how the blog isn’t helping your business.

Just a quick note to reflect back on a webinar that I was a part of last month. I helped organise the event, but didn’t speak. While all of the speakers were presenting over the webinar, I consistently tweeted supplemental information. For example, links to speaker profiles or relevant papers, links or supplemental materials.

This was admittedly a bit of a last minute idea for me, but realised that it worked pretty well. For next time, I think I’d:

• develop and deliver some exclusive Twitter content given during the event
• and do a bit of promotion around the Twitter feed.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, I needed a reference to insert the copyright symbol (as you do) – wikiHow has a nice list of all the shortcuts on how to make the various symbols on a mac, such as “ALT and g”. ©.