Thoughts About MILOfest 2010

As my readers are aware, MILOfest 2010 took place last week in Orlando, Florida.  For the benefit of those who were not present, I asked some of the attendees to email me their thoughts about this outstanding conference:

• "MILOFest is the closest thing I’ve seen to a TED Conference in the legal world. The speakers are phenomenal, thought provoking, and on the outermost cutting edge of technology. The attendees range from the most sophisticated attorney power users I’ve come across to newbies to the Mac platform. Too often legal technology centers around discussions of EDD, which is not of interest to a lot of lawyers in their day-to-day lives. At MILOFest, prepare to learn the basics more thoroughly than you’ve ever seen the basics, and prepare to go deep into the nuts and bolts of legal technology." – Larry Port, Founding Partner and Chief Software Architect, Rocket Matter, LLC
• "As was the case last year, the most valuable part of MILOfest this year was the opportunity to establish or build relationships with other Mac-using attorneys and to learn from conversations with them what works for them and what doesn’t. This year, Mark Merenda of SmartMarketing and Victor Medina led a great discussion on key concepts that make or break success in the practice of law. it wasn’t much to do with tech, but incredibly useful, thought-provoking information about making our businesses successful. Brett Burney did a fabulous presentation on BusyCal, but it wasn’t the content (which was quite good) that made it fabulous, it was the expert packaging of the material. Brett chose to use a MacBreak Video interview with the BusyCal developer that was conducted by Merlin Mann. Brett broke the video into discrete, topic-driven chunks, played that segment of the video in a masked part of a Keynote slide, and then emphasized and expanded upon the points made there in explaining what that meant for this program in a law office. In short, Brett’s presentation was a lesson not just in BusyCal, but a master course in effective content presentation." – Mark C. Metzger, Attorney, Naperville, Illinois
• "For two years in a row MILOfest has been my favorite learning event. It combines business benefit, CLE credit in my State, seeing friends, meeting new people with common interests — and is all about something I find fun. Humbly I must admit that some of it whooshed over my head this year but only a few times. However, the presenters are always willing to spend one-on-one time or provide contact information if clarification is needed. Add to all of that the ‘after-hours’ fun for the young and the young at heart at the Disney World Parks. Much gratitude to Victor, Tiffany and all who helped make it happen." – C. Stephen Weaver, Attorney, Nashville, TN
• "Each time I attend a conference I try to summarize key points of interest to our firm. Google Apps with IMAP and the ability to sync with Clio was presented by Jack Newton of Clio. I learned others are using Instapaper on the iPhone/iPad to read articles of interest later at my convenience. While I have the app, I had not been using it; now I have the ‘read later’ button in my Safari browser. Larry Port, of RocketMatter, gave an excellent talk on the value of unplugging from our connected devices. He discussed the book, The Shallows, and the affects of the internet on our brains and our ability to concentrate. Amin, of Daylite, showed us how to make better builds and transitions in Keynote. Victor and Mark referenced a book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Arielly, that I started reading on the airplane. I downloaded a trial of OmniOutliner Pro that Mark Metzger demonstrated.  I enjoyed Ben Stevens‘ Circus Ponies Notebook and Evernote presentations as well. It is always good to see the workflows others use.  There were many other excellent presentations, but these are a few that I plan to investigate further. Overall, it was a very worthwhile conference. As always, the networking is as valuable as the presentations. The most frequently spoken word at the conference? The WORD : Dropbox.  The Clio cocktail meet-up was a lot of fun too!" – Julie N. Kiernan, Business Manager & Paralegal, Buffalo, MN
• "MILOfest this year could be deemed an even bigger success than last year. Attendance was up, and conference had a greater overall breadth of content. We had more introductory-level talks on Mac basics, which really benefited the new Mac users in the crowd. There was some very advanced content, such as Larry Staton‘s AppleScript tutorial, for the technophiles in room as well.  There was lots of great content inbetween the "beginner" and "advanced" ends of the spectrum as well, such as Brett Burney’s fantastic presentation on BusyCal. My presentation on "Putting Your Practice in the Cloud" hopefully cleared up some confusion on what exactly "cloud computing" is and how it can benefit a law office, and highlighted how tools such as Google Apps, Dropbox, Evernote, Rocket Matter and Clio can help a law office be more professional, cost-effective, and efficient.  The crowd was definitely very interested in the results of our Apple in Law Offices survey, and I think the survey provided us a lot of useful data points for future comparison.  We also hosted a "Clio Meetup" on Friday night, something we’ll plan on doing at MILOfests down the road as well. It was a great social get-together for attendees.  Another great conference for Mac-loving lawyers, and one that will hopefully grow substantially again in 2011." – Jack Newton, President and Co-founder, Themis Solutions Inc., Vancouver, Canada 
• "Most important to me at MILOfest: listening to lawyers who use software programs in the trenches and say, ‘Here’s how I do it.’ Second most important: getting to meet – not only representatives of legal-software companies – but the guys who write the code and make the decisions about the software programs! Victor also provided us a lot of time to network with each other. There’s no better way to learn than ask, ‘Oh, you use this program in your practice. How do you like it?’" – Mark A. Cowan, Attorney, Morristown, TN

Even more thoughts and some video interviews are currently posted at Tomasz Stasuik‘s Planet 10 Tech blog.