As my readers are aware, I attended the inaugural MILOfest last week in Orlando, FL, where I presented a session called "Computing in the Clouds". Overall, I thought that the seminar was superb and that it offered something to everyone, from the novice to hardcore Mac-using attorneys.
Since I returned, I have wanted to post my thoughts on the conference, but it’s been a busy week in my office. Although belated, my thoughts on some of the other sessions are:
- Justin Kahn demonstrated many tips and tricks which can make Adobe Acrobat even more useful to lawyers. He covered everything from OCR to bookmarks to indexing to portfolios to creating PDFs from webpages to redacting to Bates stamping.
- Gerry Oginski explained why lawyers should use video in their marketing efforts, and after hearing his presentation, I am convinced to try this myself in the new year. If you want to see how Gerry uses this in his own firm, check out his channel on YouTube.
- Jack Newton from Clio discussed the "10 Things that Every Lawyer Should Know about SaaS" and explained why web-based software is ready for prime time and everyday use in law firms. You can view one of Jack’s previous presentations on this subject here.
- Larry Port from Rocket Matter then stressed the importance of using standardized repeatable processes in your office to the extent possible, including Getting Things Done concepts and agile techniques. You can learn more about these topics here.
- Elise Hunt demonstrated the many ways that BeeDocs’ Timeline 3D can help attorneys tell stories and convey their context efficiently and effectively to help listeners retain information. She also gave attendees a "sneak peek" at coming features. This is truly a "must have" application.
- Grant Griffiths (a/k/a the "BlawgFather") explained that blogging is a way for attorneys to build relationships not only with potential clients, but also with other attorneys. He advised to "write for the human search engine and the online search engines will find you." Grant then wowed the audience by showing the many features that makes Headway Themes the premier platform for blogging lawyers.
- As mentioned above, my presentation was called "Computing in the Clouds", and I showed how it is possible to run your law practice using web-based (SaaS) software, such as DropBox as part of a document workflow, Evernote as a digital filing system, and Gmail for email. I also discussed the possibility of replacing traditional servers in small firms with a SaaS program like DropBox or SugarSync.
- There were several other excellent presentations, including Victor Medina‘s "50 (or so) Free Apps in 50 (or so) Minutes" and Tomasz Stasiuk‘s "Beyond Paperless | The Anywhere Office". Unfortunately, I had to leave to catch my flight home, but I heard great things about Albert McMurry from Omni Group‘s "Focus Your Graffle on This!" and Mark Merenda‘s "Branding & Your Mac."
If you were unable to attend MILOfest 2009, you should begin making plans to attend next year. In the meantime, you can read the blog posts from Gerry Oginski and Larry Port to get their thoughts about the seminar. Also, several people (including me) were covering the presentations via Twitter, and you can read the numerous tweets here.
Finally, I want to publicly thank Victor Medina for organizing such a great seminar and including me as a small part of it. Also, thanks to all of the attendees that took the leap of faith to attend this first year. I enjoyed getting to catch up and spend time with friends that I hadn’t seen in a while, including Brett Burney, Kern Lewis, Julie Kiernan, and many others.