After surveying the experts, including Marni Macleod, Allison Wolf, Connie Crosby, Carol Fitzwilliam, Warren Bongard, Jordan Furlong, and Omar Ha-Redeye, Luigi Benetton has compiled a list of the leading firms in Canada for digital marketing.
See a summary on Slaw, or read the complete article in the CBA’s National magazine.
The Best in Digital Marketing
In the April 29, 2011 issue of The Lawyers Weekly, Luigi Benetton interviews Omar Ha-Redeye on cloud computing,
Omar Ha-Redeye, student-at-law with Toronto-based Fireman Steinmetz, uses Google Docs. “They’ve made great strides with improving convertibility from different word processor documents,” he says.
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Cloud computing on the rise |
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| Services for cloud computing booming | |
An html version is available here and on Luigi Benetton’s site.
In the March 11, 2011 issue of The Lawyers Weekly, Luigi Benetton interviews Omar Ha-Redeye on his blogging experiences and tips for effective blogging.
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Luigi Benetton interviews Omar Ha-Redeye |
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| RUNNING A legal blog takes commitment | |
In the October 29, 2010 issue of The Lawyers Weekly, Luigi Benetton interviews Omar Ha-Redeye on his podcasting experiences on Law is Cool.
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Interview with Omar Ha-Redeye |
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| PODCASTS for lawyers, law firms to develop ‘strong bonds’ | |
Podcasts way for lawyers to develop strong bonds with listeners
Freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton quoted Omar Ha-Redeye in Going paperless at the office is possible with some astute planning, determination in the April 2, 2010 edition of The Lawyers Weekly:
Reduce wait times, part two
Scanning speed also makes a difference. Since faster scanners generally cost more, law student Omar Ha-Redeye offers the following suggestions: small offices can make do with speeds of 25 pages per minute (ppm), midsize firms may opt for 50 ppm, and large firms can go for 100 ppm.‘If you want to move massive numbers of documents, you don’t want people sitting around,’ Ha-Redeye says…
Making documents ‘findable’
Scanners can create image files from paper documents, but lawyers want more. OCR makes the text in scanned files (Adobe PDFs are the undisputed standard here) machine-readable which, when combined with a powerful search tool, greatly lessens the time it takes lawyers to find documents that contain specific keywords.‘It’s all about searchability,’ contends Ha-Redeye. ‘If you’re not going to use OCR from the get-go, don’t bother scanning. I just don’t see the point’…
Fast finding
Even if everybody minimizes file sizes, PDFs will pile up on file servers.Ha-Redeye recommends getting fast document servers to speed up searches through PDF haystacks. ‘Servers can get bogged down when many people search for documents at the same time,’ Ha-Redeye says…
Software
Scanner makers bundle software like Adobe Acrobat with their wares, but Ha-Redeye’s Acrobat experience hasn’t been entirely satisfactory. ‘For older documents that contain different font sets, it’s more challenging for Adobe to recognize words, so I use ABBYY FineReader,’ he says. ‘It seems to get just about any text or font type that causes problems for Adobe.’
…’It’s becoming an expectation for new lawyers,’ adds Ha-Redeye. ‘If you’re not going paperless, if you don’t have the latest scanner technology, you’re not a place where people want to work.
‘If I can make 300 billable hours more at another firm doing the same amount of work, just because they have better systems there, I feel more fulfilled and I feel like I’m getting more out of my time in the office.’
The Canadian Bar Association‘s magazine, National, has an article in the December 2009 issue by Luigi Benetton on Canada’s Best Law Firm Websites. A copy of the article can be found on Luigi’s website.
Law student and blogger Omar Ha-Redeye believes good bios are the exception today. He sees bios that vaunt lawyers instead of providing useful information to clients. “When looking for a lawyer, most clients could care less about the
things that lawyers care about, [like being a] Gold Medalist, or having clerked with so-and-so,” he says. “I would love to see social media linked from profiles (e.g., a lawyer’s blog), but this rarely if ever happens,” he adds.
The best sites listed in various categories were:
Ogilvy Renault LLP, Hyndman Law, Neff Law Office, Bull, Houser & Tupper LLP, Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP, Torys LLP, McInnes Cooper, Legault Joly Thiffault, Davis LLP, Clark Wilson LLP, Hull & Hull LLP
Runners-up:
Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, Clark Wilson LLP, Hicks Morley Hamilton Steward Storie LLP, McMillan LLP, Cox & Palmer, Bélanger Sauvé, Lavery, Torys LLP
Omar Ha-Redeye was also quoted for the multimedia award given to Hull & Hull LLP,
They’ve probably been doing it as long as anyone, and have fully integrated videos and podcasts into their practice. Experience with these formats has not only resulted in a highly polished product, but also content that is actually relevant to what they do.
See more on Slaw.
In his regular column for Lawyers Weekly Magazine, freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton quoted Omar Ha-Redeye in Draft, edit docs in real time, in the Aug. 21, 2009 edition.
Omar Ha-Redeye, a University of Western Ontario law student, shares Smith’s point of view. “It’s all incredibly inefficient, especially in light of the technology we have today,” he says, adding that lawyers will need to better their productivity using such measures. “If they don’t, their competitors will,” he says.
…“The majority of graduating lawyers are now female, and the majority of practising lawyers are not,” Ha-Redeye notes. “Legal practise is not conducive to having a family, picking up kids, dropping off kids and those types of responsibilities, which are not necessarily gender-specific but tend to be, given our history.”
…Ha-Redeye believes that collaboration systems might strengthen groupthink in organizations as hierarchical as law firms.
“They’re different from anonymous tools like Wikipedia,” he says. “People may be highly deferential to those higher in a hierarchy than they are.”
Reviews on Slaw and Law is Cool.
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