The Oklahoma Bar Journal August 2022

L aw P ractice T ips

Takeaways From the 2022 OBA Solo & Small Firm Conference By Jim Calloway

T HE 2022 OBA SOLO & SMALL Firm Conference came back strongly after its two-year hiatus. We had a great attendance and many sponsors supporting the event. Mainly, we all were happy to meet in person again. The conference featured a blend of substantive law programs and practice management/legal technology education. There were programs on the implications of the McGirt decision, cannabis law, estate and succession planning for business owners, guardianships and Professor Robert Spector on recent developments in family law. The opening session for the conference is always “60 Tips in 60 Minutes,” often noted as one of the high points of the conference in reviews. The 60 in 60 format originated at ABA TECHSHOW and soon spread to many legal technology conferences, as well as solo and small firm state bar conferences. With so many topics covered in a rapid-fire manner, it is hard to not learn something useful. In fact, one attendee came up to me after the session saying she had taken three pages of notes. This year’s tipsters included Kenton Brice, director of technol ogy innovation at the OU College of Law; Brett Burney, principal of Burney Consultants, an e-discovery consultancy and co-producer of

you need to keep temporarily or permanently. Brett also singled out the free Microsoft To Do 3 as a simple list-keeping app that synchronizes across all your devices, and it allows you to set due dates and reminders. This functions on all three major phone platforms. Since it has the reminder function, this may be one way to keep personal items off the law office calendar. Solo and small firm lawyers have a particular responsibility to make certain there is somebody to take care of their clients’ matters in the event of their death or disabil ity. When was the last time your firm updated your succession plan? Log in to MyOkBar, 4 and on the list at the lower right is the Attorney Transition Planning Guide. Download this free guide to help with your transition planning. There is free Fastcase training available at https://bit.ly/3PoF6s3. If you haven’t taken advantage of the free training associated with your bar-provided legal research member benefit, we encourage you to do so. The upgrade to Fastcase 7 changed the interface a bit, and a refresher is always helpful if you haven’t used Fastcase in a while. In today’s world, when someone hands you an important document, you might take a picture of it with

the Apps in Law podcast; OBA MAP Director Jim Calloway; and OBA Practice Management Advisor Julie Bays. In this month’s column, I thought I’d share a few takeaways from the conference, including several of the 60 tips. Client development for lawyers used to focus on one-to-one meet ings and in-person events. Today, with very few exceptions, solo and small firm lawyers should devote attention to having a good law firm web page and some appropriate social media outreach. Most of us were not trained for any of this. Video is very effective online. Julie Bays noted that www.descript.com is an easy-to-use video and editing tool. The company promotes it as “as easy as editing a doc,” and there seems to be some truth in that claim. As the co-star of the Apps in Law podcast, 1 Brett Burney was happy to share some of his favor ite apps. Notability 2 is an iOS app that makes it easy to save notes whether written or recorded. The app is optimized for use with the Apple Pencil. There is a free ver sion, but Notability Plus may be worth the subscription fee because it includes handwriting recogni tion and math equation conver sion. This app may be an excellent way to save random bits of infor mation to your iPhone or iPad that

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THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL