Teaching Lawyers About IT

August 29, 2006 - I delivered my beta/ever evolving presentation "Be A Real Lawyer" to an existing client, the Zivley Law firm. This blog was inspired by that encounter.

Meet Real Lawyer #1: Harriett Zivley, wife of Zivley Law Firm founder
Perry Zivley and also an attorney herself, has expressed a sincere
passion to start a weblog, and it's my job to show her how to get started and how to keep it going. Her enthusiasm about communicating the behind the scene realities of The Zivley Law Firm's unwavering commitment to its clients is contagious. This should turn out to be an interesting experience for everyone.

The meeting was an enlightening learning experience for all of us. Little glimpses into some very useful technologies that neither Harriett or Perry were previously aware of certainly brought a good vibe into the room. Watching their eyes take in and process what was going on as I scrolled both of them around the workings of an RSS reader was priceless. Linking to a few succesful lawyer sites who have already embraced such revolutionary technologies like blogging, podcasting, flickr, and YouTube seemed to really get their minds clicking into gear!

Keep in mind this is my first attempt to try and teach a law firm about the various angles of IT and all of the possibilities that await. Being the practical hands on kind of teacher that I aspire to be, I thought It would simplify Harriett's learning curve if I were to go ahead and set up a new blog here on TypePad as a teaching tool and living example of how the Internet has the amazing ability of spreading and attracting information and informers. If all goes as I hope, this site should become a small hive of humans swarming in and out sharing links and experiences. Time will tell...

Moreover, I hope this blog will truly demystify some of the froth of the web2.0 halo and show Harriett and other lawyers out there some real world examples of just how quick, simple and inexpensive it really is to start publishing their messages and experiences to the web.

Next week: More about the beauty of RSS and how consistently publishing informative/entertaining posts to a blog greatly increases organic search results in both Yahoo and Google search engines. I'll also be showing the Zivley's a little more around the blogosphere to semi-familiar-eyes them with what's been happening over the past few years.

OK, so check out Harriett's YouTube video debut!

**You can listen to the raw audio from our meeting here.

Comments

[steve]

testing comment faces...

[Jamie Parks]

Looks like they work.

[Quang]

Nice blog