Yeah, I know. The summit ended Saturday at noon. It's been a busy week for me, but better late than never. I had to skip the Thursday sessions, but arrived early Friday morning. I was backing up another one of my LPMT colleagues in the tech lab, so between his presentations and mine, I didn't get to attend anyone else's sessions, which was a shame, because there were some good ones. I did catch the bulk of Stephen Fairley's morning keynote on marketing and SEO. I can only say this; the man is right on about what he was saying. It was similar to the advice I received from my web guru, Clint Brauer. Bottom line; if you're going to make a serious attempt at creating an online presence, you need to understand how your information will propagate to the 'web before you develop web sites, create accounts, etc.
I didn't know what to expect for my labs on disaster planning, but for both sessions (I did the identical presentation back-to-back) I had full houses. The attendees asked a lot of good questions – which is the first indication they're not bored – and although we had some technical difficulties, I was able to illustrate how, in some cases, a few minutes is all it takes to create a basic backup strategy.
Day three, Saturday, I took in the morning keynote on "Multitasking Gone Mad", or, how the more we multitask, the less we accomplish. Now, this was Irwin Karp presenting – who also preceded me on the LPMT committee – but I'll tell you, the idea of doing one thing at a time is something to strive for, but awfully hard to accomplish.
The second session should really make the eDiscovery people excited. It covered hearsay (civil, for the most part), but guess what the starring attraction of most of the examples was? Electronic evidence! For example, the presenter showed a slide from a traffic camera of a car colliding with a truck at an intersection. Another was a photo of a simple bar code (not a QR code, like the one you see on my right sidebar). In both instances, the question was, is this hearsay? As usual, the answer was, it depends on your jurisdiction.
The third session was one that eDiscovery professionals most likely wouldn't be attending. It covered the activity up to and including the arrest of a client. As you know, I also handle criminal cases, so again, this was a good refresher for me.
So, basically a quick in-and-out, and barring any changes to the schedule, my next presentation will be at Calbar's annual meeting in September.
It’s that time again, folks. The State Bar of California Solo and Small Firm Summit will be held at the Newport Beach Marriott from June 18-20, 2015. I’m presenting program ten this year on Thursday, June 18:
