ROBO-LAWYERS! ROBO-LAWYERS! - National

JACKIE BESTEMAN
Tech Talk
Techno Truc
Video made the lawyer a star
Torys pioneers the North American use of lawyer videocasts.
T
Think of all the clients who’d love
to sit down for a face-to-face
with you and hear you talk
about the latest developments
affecting their business or
industry, but who are too far away
or too busy even to grab lunch.
And for that matter, think of all
the lunches you’d have to sit
through to deliver those insights.
Well, thanks to the latest marketing
assist provided by the
Internet, your clients can watch
you deliver your insights without
ever having to leave their desks.
Videocasting, the natural evolutionary
successor to podcasting, puts lawyers’
faces on clients’ desktops 24/7. And
Toronto/New York-based Torys is leading
the way.
Starting this past spring, Torys has
been providing a series of free, downloadable
video podcasts from its website.
Averaging about four to five minutes in
length, the videos feature Torys’ lawyers
discussing cogent legal matters of the
day, from mergers and acquisitions to
shareholder proxy contests.
Burgeoning blogs
One major law firm gets serious about blogging.
According to Technorati.com, there are now more than 52 million
weblogs on the Internet — and that number is still skyrocketing.
The Net’s authoritative blog search engine estimates
that 75,000 new blogs pop up daily and nearly
50,000 blog entries are made every hour. Hundreds of these worldwide
blogs are being written by lawyers.
The latest example is Lang Michener, the 80-year-old national firm
that has become one of the first in Canada to systematically set up
lawyer blogs. Pamela Denecky, the firm’s director of business development
in Vancouver, says she first began toying around with the idea in
early 2004.
“We had witnessed people in the U.S., particularly small practitioners,
who were able to get their names nationally known because they were writing
[a blog] about a specific area of law that was very obscure,” Denecky
says. “Researchers who were searching the Internet for information on
[these areas of law] discovered them.”
Inspired, Lang Michener launched its first blog (“Forestry Law Blog”)
Stuart Wood, the firm’s director of
strategy and business development, says
the lawyer videocasts — apparently the
first of their kind in North America —
were a natural progression from their
past efforts at client service.
“Our client breakfasts and seminars
have always been very well attended,
which suggested to me that clients like
the personal delivery of the content from
OCTOBRE · NOVEMBRE 2006 www.cba.org
our partners,” he notes. “We thought the
video might be a convenient way to do
this on a broader scale.”
Visitors to Torys’ website seem to
agree. One week after the first videocast
was posted, the site logged nearly 1,000
downloads from users around the
world, including the U.S., England,
China, India, France and Germany.
It’s easy to see the attraction.
In addition to being free, the
podcasts are everything you
don’t expect from non-professional
actors: they’re well-produced,
straight to the point and
informal even a little warm. In
short, they feel like a confidential
conversation you might
have over lunch.
The lawyers’ performances
aren’t scripted, Wood says. “The
lawyers just spoke on the pre-determined
topics. We did hire a videographer
to come in and do the filming and
the editing.”
Torys also gets extra marks for thoroughness:
its videocasts are viewable in
both Windows Media or Quick Time
media players, and are available as simple
audio files. What’s more, users can
also print off a written summary of the
videocast. And no one has to pick up a
lunch bill. N
— Brad Mackay
in April 2005. Within a year, lawyer-author Christine Mingie in Vancouver
was fielding calls from the media after Canada and the U.S. announced
a settlement in the softwood lumber dispute. Other Lang Michener
blogs, focusing on the law of franchising and commercial real estate,
have since followed.
The experiment has yielded unexpected benefits, like the ability to
share breaking information instantaneously. “It gives us an opportunity
to get news and comment out and into the newspaper that day, rather
than waiting a month or a week,” Denecky says. Blogs, she adds, are an
easier and far more efficient way of communicating with clients thanenewsletters.
”Blogging is always there, and you can go back to the site and find
it archived in different ways,” she says. “Or you could have it connected
to RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and that gets it to people even more
personally than an e-mail would.”
Denecky is quick to advise any blog-curious firms to focus on the
content. “If there’s any downfall from blogs, it’s that if you have nothing
to say, then you really shouldn’t be out there saying it,” she notes.
”We still run it very much like the way we would do a publication: you
comment on issues currently happening and share that information. It’s
less about personal views on issues, and more about interpretation of
those issues in a way that makes sense.”
— Brad Mackay
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