Have you read these?

A smattering of interesting posts from the blawgosphere and beyond

• “Welcome to the Future: A View From the Left Coast” posted by Paul Lippe on The AmLaw Daily. In this interview David Baca and Mark Usellis, Chairman and CMO of Davis Wright Tremaine, make very interesting points as they discuss positioning their firm for the future.
  
  
• “In Praise of the Un-Conference” from Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites. This sounds like a great way to run a seminar. It might be too unstructured for lawyers used to giving a standard Powerpoint presentation to nameless participants, but it’s easy to see how much value attendees and speakers alike could gain from this format. What’s keeping you from trying it?
  
  
• “Top 15 newspaper sites of 2008” from Nieman Journalism Lab. The face of journalism is changing. Fast. What it will look like once the dust settles is anybody’s guess, but it’s not hard to imagine situations in which free speech could suffer (see, e.g., “When no news is bad news”). So it’s both encouraging and perplexing to see how many unique visitors the top 15 newspaper sites had in 2008. Where’s the disconnect, and how can the industry fix it?
  
  
• “The rational marketer (and the irrational customer)” from Seth Godin’s blog. Seth’s posts always give me ideas about how lawyers can market their services better, and this one is no exception. You know that your firm, your model, your practice scope and your geographic breadth are better than that of your competition. You know why your client should hire you and your colleagues to do their work. You know it so well that you can’t believe they don’t know it too. But your client doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares about what’s in it for her. Don’t sell what you’ve got. Sell what the client needs.
  
  
• “Does Creativity Still Matter?” from The Toad Stool by Alan Wolk. Why do I like the post? For this: “perhaps the most important thing good creative can do is make us feel even better about products we already like.” Lawyers, this will make sense to you if phrased this way: “perhaps the most important thing good service can do is make your clients feel even better about having hired you.” OK, maybe it’s a stretch, but that’s how my mind works. Read the post. You’ll learn something.