I joined in response to a couple of “invitations” but I can’t say I’ve made much use of it yet. My focus is on Linkedin, while I also follow Twitter and dabble in Facebook.

Pinterest has reinvigorated discussion in the legal community around intellectual property and content ownership concerns. If a user posts copyrighted material to Pinterest, is the user liable or is Pinterest? Or should the copyright holder be grateful for the exposure? And once the content has been “pinned” by a user, who “owns” it? The user? Pinterest? Somebody else?

Vancouver-based intellectual property lawyer Chris Bennett (who I’ve interviewed in the past for technology articles) recently wrote an article for The Lawyers Weekly that briefly explains Pinterest and explores the legal questions mentioned above. It’s a great plain-language primer on copyright issues all social network enthusiasts need to understand. Download a PDF of the article from the Davis web site – it’s a quick and insightful read.

Maybe I can make it right by offering my design to you.

You’ve probably guessed that “stealing” the design of a professional email signature isn’t a big deal. Besides, what I actually did was modify an email signature I liked to create my own.

You can do the same thing. Just copy a signature you like from somebody’s email and change things like:

• contact information (obviously)
• font type
• font size
• font colour
• sections included (e.g. add a Twitter handle, remove the fax number)

That’s all there is to it. And if you think this is stealing or in any way unethical, talk to a few artists you know about this idea. Don’t be surprised to hear them say they do this type of thing all the time.

Quick note: some people put graphics in their email signatures. Some people even make their signatures into embedded graphics. What such people fail to remember is that graphics in an email, even today, don’t always appear correctly.

If you put all your contact information in a graphic, you’ll earn the dislike of Mac users (like me) who like to use data detectors to quickly turn text-based email signatures into Address Book entries. Put your info in a graphic and we spoiled Mac users need to actually TYPE your information if we want it in our address books.

Maybe. Certainly the technology has arrived. And, step by step, the legal community is warming to the idea of online continuing professional development (CPD).

“I took an online course on January 10, 2012 called ‘Grammar and Proof- reading Skills for Lawyers and Para- legals’ presented online by the Law Society of Upper Canada,” recalls Susan Brown, an Ottawa-based partner with Fraser Milner Casgrain. “After I did the course, I went to the Law Society website and registered for three hours of professionalism credit for taking this course.”

Lawyers at Brown’s firm had also registered for online January Law Society courses, such as “Construction Lien Essentials” and “Title and Off-Title Searching.”

With increasing amounts of CPD offered via the web, it may be possible for lawyers to fulfill CPD requirements with- out leaving the office. But should they?

The advantages

Few lawyers debate the convenience and cost-effectiveness of online CPD.

“Imagine I want to go to the ‘six-minute update’ on commercial leasing, which is generally offered in Toronto,” Brown says. “I used to have to take a day out of my practice in Ottawa, make my way down to Toronto and spend the morning following the subject matter training. Now, I can turn on my computer in my office in Ottawa and get exactly the same training at my desk. I can be available to deal with issues in my practice.”

You might think lawyers sidestepping travel costs would be the prime audience for CPD. Meredith Woods once thought so as well. “When we started, we anticipated that the people who would attend would be from out of town, from outside the Lower Mainland,” says the manager of online education and resources for the Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia. “But a large percentage of people attending Vancouver-hosted CPD are from Vancouver.”

The possibilities

Since online CPD sessions are broadcast, they can be recorded as well. So it’s only natural for lawyers such as Toronto-based Garry Wise of Wise Law Office to envision law societies building up video CPD libraries. “Opening access to libraries, even to the public, gives programs that lawyers work so hard to produce a longer shelf life. It might be good for attracting clients too.”

Speaking as a lawyer obliged to attend sessions, Wise wants scheduling flexibility. “There were times I was scheduled to be at a program and something came up and I couldn’t make it,” he says. “It was a shame and a waste of money.”

Schedules aren’t the only elements of CPD that Wise wants to get away from. He produced an introductory video for a fall 2011 panel he presented with three other lawyers, leveraging the advantages of edited materials over “pure” live recordings. “When I combined images and narration and snippets of live interviews, it allowed me to quickly introduce the topic,” he says. “Maybe CPD of the future is properly produced materials that have been edited, so that those four-hour programs are edited down to two.”

Such programs can also be paused so that lawyers can make notes, take time to consider points, perhaps discuss them with others, even step away from the computer for 10 minutes — all without missing any content.

Lawyers on Wise’s wavelength might want to check out British Columbia’s CLE-TV. “You can buy a subscription to an archive of all our sessions since we started recording them,” says Woods of CLE-TV. “You can get CPD credit if you watch with other people present.

“We’re leaning toward creating online-only products,” she says. “CLE-TV was designed as online-only. It is intended to be more interactive, to make people feel like they’re there with the presenter. The presenter doesn’t look at people in the room. The presenter is with the online audience. Presenters take questions directly from the online chat feature.”

Video subscription systems might tie in to law society CPD registration systems so that completion of courses offered by the society can be automatically noted by the society.

Given the ever-increasing popularity of mobile video devices, such as smartphones and tablets, CPD providers may need to adopt mobile-friendly technology. For instance, it may have to abandon the popular Flash format since Adobe Inc. discontinued support for Flash on mobile devices in 2011.

The drawbacks

Professional development isn’t just about learning. Lawyers can attend events to practice public speaking, mentor younger lawyers and catch up with their colleagues.

“The collegiality, the contact between lawyers, you can’t reproduce that online,” Brown points out.

Technology snafus, while becoming rarer, have not yet been eradicated. When they crop up, having in-house tech support makes a difference. “In smaller offices, I think you have to have people with an interest and a comfort level with technology,” Brown suggests.

Tracking attendance at online events can be tricky. One possible solution: having attendees complete and submit e-learning “coursework” that could serve as proof of attendance as well as of comprehension.

Wise would like to see CPD programs delivered by the Law Society included in the society’s membership fees. “If the Law Society is serious — and I know it is — about ensuring that lawyers are as up-to-date as possible, in knowledge in their core areas and in general knowledge, then rather than creating cost impediments, a library of video materials should be made available to the profession on an on-demand basis.

“I might not watch all four hours of a program. But my knowledge overall would be broadened by that kind of access, since I would be far more inclined to go beyond my core areas.

“I can see charging for live events. Once videos have been in the archives for a reasonable period of time, they should be made free to the profession.

“That would be the Law Society walking the walk.”

This article originally published in Lawyers Weekly Magazine. For a PDF of this article, click here.

Other companies do these things too, but few of them can boast the success Apple reports during quarterly earnings calls like the one on April 24, 2012. This type of news isn’t unusual coming from Apple – check out their investor page and business media reports to read what I mean.

Much of what Apple systemically does is not difficult to figure out, but it is worth learning. That’s why I enjoyed the latest book from brand communications coach Carmine Gallo, who bundled his thoughts on the success of the Apple Store into The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty.

Aside: My interest in this book stems from my experience with my MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, other Apple products and, of course, the customer service experiences I’ve had with Apple, some of which I blogged about here.

Gallo picked apart just about every conceivable element that people encounter when they walk into an Apple Store. He grouped his observations into three parts: 1) serving Apple employees, so they can effectively 2) serve customers, and 3) making sure the retail environment supports both employees and customers.

Gallo backs up the thesis of each chapter using examples both named (like the Ritz-Carlton chain of hotels) and unnamed, large and small. He also throws in mercifully anonymous examples of how NOT to perform customer service.

Chapter 10 especially resonated with me. In a nutshell, “Sell the Benefit” means keeping the techspeak to a minimum when people ask you questions about technology.

It’s what I do any time I play the roles of technology copywriter, technical writer, course designer, trainer or journalist. Here’s the thing: many experts easily talk about things like 3G, WiFi, RAM, USB ports, processor power and other tech details, all the while ignoring the fact that 90 per cent of the population will look at them like deer caught in the headlights when they dive into techspeak.

What these tech experts don’t get is that people need to understand technology to use computers about as much as they need to understand auto mechanics to drive a car. Apple gets this. They sell the sizzle, not the steak, and Gallo does a great job pointing this out.

All of Gallo’s content is great, but said content is presented in a formulaic manner: anecdote, chapter thesis, mini-case-study, explanation, thesis again, Apple example, non-Apple examples, thesis… The sequences are a little different in each chapter, but not enough to eliminate a repetitive undertone, and the formula sometimes leads to stilted passages.

Also, by Chapter 3 (“Cultivate Fearless Employees”), I started to place stickies wherever errors or clunky phrasing appeared. (It’s the writer geek in me. I stopped, ironically, partway through Chapter 5, “Foster a Feedback Loop.”) The book isn’t exactly bristling with stickies, but I’d expect a more polished product coming from a major publisher like McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

I don’t blame Gallo for these shortcomings. Formulaic and poorly-edited prose plagues many otherwise excellent business books today, turning what could be engaging reads into merely pedestrian ones. Publishers seem to increasingly ignore the fact that it takes more than a bright author sharing worthwhile insights to produce a great business book. Professional editors improve any writer’s prose, and I can’t understand why some publishers ignore this fact and let books like Gallo’s go to market unpolished. Maybe said publishers ought to read Gallo’s book, starting with Chapter 16, “Pay Attention to Design (actually, ALL) Details” (parenthetical remark added).

Criticisms aside, Gallo’s “formula” includes “checkout” tips at the end of each chapter. These tips alone justify the cost of the book for any retailer or executive looking to take a customer-service-dependent organization to the next level. So do the endnotes business people can use for further reading. And the requisite index makes looking up specific insights pretty easy.

Gallo kept his focus on the Apple Store, but I found myself wanting him to discuss more of the elements in it. For instance, Apple Stores could not succeed if Apple’s wares didn’t regularly rank so favorably among high-profile technology evaluators like Consumer Reports, J.D. Power and Associates, even PC Magazine.

The quality of products shoppers find in Apple Stores undoubtedly serves to bolster the experience, at least for somebody like me who has written quite a bit about business usage and functionality of Apple products. Yet maybe Gallo was wise to leave product quality for (perhaps) another book.

And, of course, there’s the Steve Jobs “reality distortion field” which Apple critics have long used as a term of derision, portraying Apple customers as little more than lemmings to Apple’s pied piper. The store is an important part of that field. Most executives would give their eye teeth to cultivate that field (or whatever you call it), if for no other reason that they could refute the negative stereotype of CEO as a regrettably high-priced, replaceable part of an organization.

Fortunately, Gallo’s book gives business leaders the valuable insights they need to work towards, and perhaps even match, Apple’s success. Let’s hope that happens sooner rather than later – the world (and any “experience-oriented” company’s overall performance and financial results) would be better for it.

Earlier this year, a podcast I follow made five arguments against using ISP addresses. I agree with everything in the podcast except for the implication that a GMail address could be more professional than an ISP’s email address. Neither one is professional – if you run a business and you have a web site, the email address ought to match the web address for your company’s site.

Advertising technology reads the protagonist’s retinas, which are as unique to him as his fingerprints, and then tailors ads with his name as he strides through a shopping center.

We, of course, would never accept such invasions of our privacy. Or would we?

Some retailers are betting that we would. Lawyers Weekly Magazine recently published an article by James Kosa that discusses proximity marketing, in which retailers would ping your smartphone using its BlueTooth radio. Here’s a brief explanation:

Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc., for one, recently announced plans to send electronic advertisements to people who happen to be near its stores. The company teamed with service provider iSIGN Media Corp. to send the messages via Bluetooth technology, which is available on most smartphones.

Would you rather not get digital coupons beamed at you each time you walk through a mall? You can turn off Bluetooth to keep your phone less discoverable, but doing so removes the convenience of things like wireless headsets.

I suspect phone manufacturers may one day implement new Bluetooth (or other) wireless standards to help smartphone and tablet owners avoid unwanted ads. Meanwhile, all of us smartphone owners seem one step closer to becoming John Anderton.

David Beckham’s much-ballyhooed signing with the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer has Toronto fans of the beautiful game on pins and needles. Barring any schedule changes, Beckham will play his first MLS game this fall against the Toronto FC at BMO Field in Toronto.

BMO Field, a FIFA two-star approved pitch, sits on land once partly occupied by Exhibition Stadium, former home of Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays, the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts and the long-defunct North American Soccer League’s Toronto Blizzard.

Exhibition Stadium was a typical multi-use facility – it was adequate but not optimal for any of the sports it hosted. BMO Field, however, was designed specifically for soccer, bringing fans close to the pitch. “It’s all about being in the bowl,” said Bob Hunter, Executive Vice-President, Venues and Entertainment for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.

While the former stadium had long been demolished, the former Hockey Hall of Fame still stood where the north end of BMO Field now sits. The Hall’s basement contains both Bell Canada and Rogers Communications hubs, so these facilities became part of the stadium. “There’s quite a bit of conduit running through there that we had to maintain and protect,” said Lawrence Lippold of Brisbin Brook Beynon Architects.

Visitors who remember the Hall may have flashbacks when they visit BMO Field. Features from the demolished historic building now grace the stadium’s west entrance. Original flagpoles stand in front of recovered exterior granite and pre-cast panels on the building. New interior mosaic tile and the concrete roof structure closely resemble that of the Hall. The pièce de résistance: a 50 square meter mural from the Hall occupies a wall inside the stadium entrance.

Seating for 20,000 fans, including a 500-seat club section and 30 private boxes, surrounds the pitch to the east, south and west. Gravity seats made by Slovakian firm Seda Seating Ltd. and similar to those used in stadiums that hosted 2006 World Cup games in Germany, will be low-maintenance compared to the spring-loaded variety. The horseshoe design opens to the north on a fenced-in plaza where the scoreboard/video screen sits. Spectators in the upper west section get an extra treat. “The entire upper bowl looks onto the Toronto skyline,” said Hunter.

The design team sought to make BMO Field resemble its neighbours, the buildings of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), one of the oldest fairs in North America. “It had to fit in Princes Boulevard, the major viewing corridor from the Princess Gate at the east end of Exhibition Place,” said Lippold.

To make this happen, designers set the playing field as high as possible so that the open plaza at the north end fit with neighbouring buildings. Sean Donovan, Project Manager for PCL Constructors Canada Inc., noted that the yellow brick on the exterior of the facility closely resembles the brick used to build the Horse Palace and other nearby structures. “When patrons are inside the stadium, they’re going to have a real feeling of being in touch with the surrounding facilities,” said Donovan.

The east side, a one-tier structure that sits closer to neighbouring buildings than other parts of the stadium, matches the scale of those buildings. “We really stacked the west side to put all the program space, dressing rooms and support space down on the lower level,” said Lippold.

Since many stadiums produce glare in the night sky, designers used louvers and hoods to focus lights on the field. These measures cut glare, make the lights more efficient and, as a side benefit, reduce the wind resistance of each lamp. Consequently, the poles were made lighter, using less material.

Upping the good neighbour quotient, facility owners will cover the entire field with a bubble from November through March. Local soccer players can access the field via a selection of eight change rooms set aside for community use.

Planners for the 2007 FIFA Under-20 World Cup promised a stadium in Toronto as part of Canada’s winning bid. (Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Victoria and Burnaby will also host games.) Construction timelines got tighter as plans for the venue at other sites around Toronto fell through. The city of Toronto eventually donated land at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), which offers 6,000 parking spaces and is well-serviced by streetcar, bus and commuter trains.

Crews broke ground in January 2006 to have the stadium ready for the June 30, 2007 tournament kick-off. Then, in May 2006, Major League Soccer officially announced the Toronto FC Franchise. BMO Field will hold its first MLS game on April 28, 2007.

Having just successfully completed the renovation of Ricoh Coliseum, the hockey arena next door to the stadium, with Brisbin Brook Beynon Architects and Halcrow-Yolles, PCL Constructors Canada Inc. reassembled the team to create the winning proposal for the late 2005 RFP.

“It’s not that complicated of a building,” said David Watson, a partner with Halcrow-Yolles, the structural consultant. “A good portion of the seats are framed with a pre-engineered bleacher system, consisting of structural steel with aluminum decking on top.”

“We had such a tight schedule that it had to be simple to build,” said Hunter.

Design challenges included an abandoned roadway that ran across the north end of the field. “All the existing services were left in place, so we had to design around all that,” said Watson.

Mother Nature helped the project stay on schedule with a mild beginning to 2006 and a 2006-07 winter that didn’t really start until mid-January. “We expect substantial completion on the 31^st of March,” said Hunter.

According to Wikipedia: “MLS commissioner Don Garber has been adamant that expansion teams must have plans for a soccer-specific stadium in place to be granted a franchise. These facilities are thought to improve overall crowd atmosphere.” Lippold noted that soccer promoters believe a dedicated stadium helps give a sense of stability to the sport. Hunter believes BMO Field hits both marks. “Watching the game here will be better than anywhere else in Canada,” he said.

HIGHLIGHTS

Location

Exhibition Place, Toronto, ON M6K 3C3

Developer

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.

Owner

The City of Toronto

Architect

Brisbon Brook Beynon Architects

Project Manager

PCL Constructors Inc.

General Contractor

PCL Constructors Inc.

Construction Manager

PCL Constructors Inc.

Structural Consultant

Halcrow Yolles

Mechanical Consultant

The Mitchell Partnership

Electrical Consultant

Mulvey+Banani International Inc.

Interior Design

Brisbon Brook Beynon Architects

Landscape Architect

MBTW Group

Geotechnical Engineer

Terraprobe Ltd.

Total Area

14 836 S.M., 159,693 S.F.

Total Construction Cost

$63 million

There’s an easier way to space elements of contiguous lines in your document – put them in tables.

Take this example from a prior blog post in which a table gets created using manual tabs (OK, there’s an exception to every rule). Look at the last line, in which the first element is “Price”. The last two columns run multiple lines.

Here’s how the same table would look (more or less) using tabs:

Imagine trying to line up the last two columns using manual tabs, then having to change column widths later on. Each line would have to be fixed separately.

Contrast that needlessly fussy mess with the ease each column width gets adjusted in the short video below. You can drag both column borders as well as table border “squares” in the ruler.

I dwell on Microsoft Word not just in trade magazine articles but also in my TechnoZen blog. Why? As a  technical writer and trainer, I both know the formatting shortcuts Word offers and see how inefficiently most people use Word, so I offer tips in my blog. (I’m accumulating said tips into a book on designing business documents using Microsoft Word – the easy way.)

Check the list below for articles and blog posts mentioning Microsoft Word and its use as a business writing tool:

• Avoid using manual tabs in Word
• Viewing two pages at once
• Bookmarking your document
• Speed up your writing
• Creating image captions
• Resizing images
• Inserting images
• Word TOC shortcoming
• Creating fields
• Is your document readable?
• Troubleshooting tables in Word
• Out with unused styles!
• Inserting table rows
• Make long Word tables understandable
• Before you send a document...
• Automating a Word document
• What page was that on again?
• Get your numbers right
• Troubleshooting by TOC
• Rearranging a long document the easy way
• Tabling your prose
• Reuse your own genius
• Creating new Word styles – the easy way
• Find (and create) the look you want for your document
• Avoid overformatting your documents
• Using Print Layout view for a document
• Better Word formatting in 20 minutes
• Find and eliminate double non-printing characters
• Layout tips for legal documents
• Changing the look of a Word style
• Using nonprinting characters (formatting symbols) in a document
• Great document layout tips
• Save multiple open documents with one click
• Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line...
• Simplifying a word processing document
• Applying a word processing style
• Evaluating productivity software training options - a white paper
• Creating a table of contents
• Which Word styles should you use?
• Quick Word tips for busy lawyers
• Introduction to styles
• Online tools can deliver, but choose wisely
• Five not-so-cool things about Microsoft Office:Mac 2011

Adobe Acrobat generates those PDFs, and its capabilities extend to the software as a service (aka cloud computing) platform Acrobat.com.

PDFs can even include video and audio now that they can contain Flash, an Adobe web standard. Photoshop enables professional photo manipulation, InDesign enables layout of thousands of periodicals and professional documents, Dreamweaver does the same for untold numbers of websites…

These descriptions of Adobe software are as cursory as the list of Adobe software is incomplete. Suffice it to say Adobe produces tools that enable publication of just about any type of information imaginable.

Check the list below for articles and blog posts mentioning Adobe products and their uses as business tools:

• Scoping the scene for the right scanner
• Signing PDFs without printing them
• Annotating PDFs – for free!
• Fixing file associations
• Pencasting professional development
• Layout tips for legal documents
• Getting computer help from friends
• Services for cloud computing booming
• Adobe Acrobat tips for lawyers
• Going paperless at the office is possible with some astute planning, determination
• Properly Redacting Documents Crucial
• What you need to know to run a paperless office
• Acrobat 9: review