Although the different formats are a matter of opinion and budget, here are some considerations that you need to make before purchasing a Flat Panel for your office or conference room.

Warranty – Consumer flat panel televisions (Best Buy, WalMart, Circuit City), are intended for home use ONLY. Installing a consumer flat panel in your office IMMEDIATELYvoids any warranty, even a separately purchased Extended Warranty. Double check all of your documentation.

Connections – Not all flat panels have the connections you may need. Sure there will be Composite (red-white-yellow) and maybe Component (red-green-blue) connections, but are these what you will actually use and need?

In today’s offices, a flat panel needs more than “home theater” hook-ups. A VGA connection (15pin analog computer) for laptop or external CPU monitor should be included. Professional-grade panels offer VGA, DVI-I, HDMI, RJ45 network connections as well as standard Composite inputs.

Longevity – Professional-grade panels are designed for heavy, continuous use. They are designed to be used for long periods of time and are built to maintain cooler operating temperatures over extended use. Their display quality doesn’t degrade nearly as quickly as consumer models.

Pricing – While professional-grade panels are more expensive initially, their life expectancy is greater, and, in some cases, last twice as long as consumer grade panels, making them a better value in the long run.

Even with consumer panel prices dropping at a staggering rate, spending a little more money upfront will provide much better return on investment.

But read that sentence to yourself again. Only this time, put the emphasis on the word you.Now put the emphasis on stole.

The entire meaning of the sentence changes based on the emphasis that you put on each word. In fact, each word’s emphasis will change the entire message of the sentence.

The written word is powerful and final, but actually seeing and hearing somebody testify brings a wholly different dimension to the equation. We have body language, facial expressions, speed of voice, tone, intonation, the list goes on and on.

Always remember that the spoken word carries with it a different dimension of communication. Make sure you are capturing it.

Sounds great, almost too good to be true, I know, but it really is easy to do. You might associate Email Newseletters with Spam, but with the right information they become an educational resource for your clients and a marketing tool for you. Make it valuable enough and your newsletter gets forwarded on to a few of their close friends in similar situations or maybe their entire address book. You’ve just made 1-100 new contacts by word of mouth. Great job. The best part about the whole thing is, you only spent a few short hours to generate that newsletter and now it is shared with hundreds of people.

Where Do I Start?

Excellent question with a ton of different answers. You probably made the intuitive leap that you want to send an email, but don’t make the mistake of sending it out using Outlook or Yahoo.

1. Use a service designed for this specific task. A few to look at are: Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp and Constant Contact [Mail Chimp is an affiliate link]. We use Mail Chimp and I highly recommend it for beginners and advanced users alike.
2. Import your contacts. These applications allow you to import contacts from other online contact management tools or from .CSV or XLS files. They’ll even show you step by step how to import different types.
3. Create & Send your first newsletter. Spend some time to come up with a topic or two that will be benefitial to your clients. You want the information to be useful, but also intriguing so that your client will share it and then call you to learn more or review something in their dealings.
4. Repeat as necessary.

Be Careful

When starting up your list, you’ll want to be careful about Spam laws. Make certain that your list contains people that you have done business with and will appreciate the information you wish to pass on. You’ll also want to be careful about what constitutes legal advice, so be certain to add any disclaimers you feel are necessary. Don’t give away too much information either. It’s a difficult line to explain, but you want give enough for your readers to share but not so much that they don’t want to follow up with you.

There are an endless number of nuances involved in this process and we will touch on those in the future. For right now, do some research, get your list ready and generate some clients. When you run into an area that isn’t 100% clear, give me a call or shoot me an email. I’ll be happy to help design and develop your newsletter.

Learn more and stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Opveon University blog via RSS or Email. Thanks for your time and attention.

Jason Wietholter is the Technology Director at Opveon. Think of him as your technological go-to guy. If you need something that has to do with technology and the legal world, he can handle it for you or find someone else that can.

Digital Video offers a whole host of benefits, not the least of which being a more cost-effective and being more robust in travel and storage.

1. Digital Video is not prone to Generation Loss

Generation loss is the degradation of quality for each copy or generation of a tape that is made. In the analog world, tapes are duplicated, passed out and then duplicated again. After each copy of a copy is made, quality is injured and the effect compounded with each new generation added into the mix. Digital video, on the other hand, is like a file on a hard drive recorded on a tape. If you make a copy via Firewire or computer, there is no generation loss. The quality is still as pristine as the original tape, no matter how many duplications away from the original you are.

2. Digital Video is more Efficient

Using digital video in any form is generally more efficient than analog video, and especially when it comes to cameras that utilize SSD (solid state drives), HDD (hard disk drive) or Flash drives for storage. With analog video, you have to place the tape in a VCR, press play, hit record on your computer and wait. As long as that tape was to record the first time, it will take to record into your computer. With a file based, digital video camera, it’s as easy as copy and paste. This allows for faster work on the tail end of a shoot.

3. Digital Video is more Cost-Effective

Because of its inherent efficiency, digital video is also more cost-effective. It takes less time, the technology is better and cheaper all around so it costs less to work with overall.

4. Digital Video is Better Quality. Period.

It really is hard to explain without actually seeing it. If you view analog video and then digital video, you will notice a difference. The video is cleaner, the audio is more crisp. There are no fuzzy lines or tracking problems. As I said in the opening paragraph, it is almost like the jump from standard definition to high definition.

Which brings up one more point, some technology firms, such as Opveon, offer high definition services. High Definition is your best bet for recording your projects right now. I’ll follow up with a detailed post on why.

For now, get your video captured on digital tapes or digital files. Contact us to learn more about high definition.

If you have never been involved in a videotaped deposition before, the good news is that they aren’t too different from a regular deposition. Adding a videographer to your deposition means that you now have to take into account the fact that the proceeding is recorded and that you need to take specific breaks because of the length of the tape being used. These inconveniences far outweigh the value that videoing a deposition will afford you. Take, for instance, our article on Memory After 72 Hours. Now that you have video, your audience will be much more interested in the testimony as opposed to simply reading it back.

Legal Settlement Documentaries or Day-in-the-Life videos are powerful presentation tools to utilize before and at trial. That’s really the beauty of these videos. They serve a dual purpose. A Legal Settlement Doc is essentially a presentation made to opposing counsel outlining the merits of a case while utilizing video evidence to persuade them. It is extremely effective in advancing negotiations and can save precious time and distress for your client in trial. The dual benefit is that even if settlement does not occur, you now have video evidence that you can take to show the court to better explain the hardships of your client.

There are numerous other formats that legal video can take. We’ll look at each of them in depth in the near future. In the meantime, post a comment below and let us know what other ways you have utilized video in your practice.

Disclaimer, we do advertise Mozy on this site. However, we advertise Mozy because it is a great service, not because they pay us.

With that out of the way, I’m going to give you a brief overview of how Mozy works and why it will be beneficial to you. First of all, Mozy offers Unlimited Backup for $4.95 per month for individuals. The price is right, and in fact, you can try 2GB for free. Past that, Mozy is an online or cloud service. That means, your data gets backed up offsite. That is huge. Imagine if you had a natural disaster or a fire at your office or home. If you had your data backed up to another hard drive, that is great, but that hard drive probably burned too. Mozy offers you the flexibility of having all of your data online and impervious to catastrophes at your location.

Mozy is extremely easy to utilize. You download the software, install it, insert your login credentials and then select the files you want to backup. It even gives you an option to select the type of files you want to back up. You can set preferences to backup at certain times of the day or automatically when your computer is idle. The Mozy preferences even allow you to easily throttle the bandwidth so that you don’t bog down your internet connection. Mozy even allows you to use one account to backup multiple computers. If you run a business, there is also MozyPro.

One of the greatest features of Mozy is its easy restore functionality. You can initiate a restore of your computer from your web control panel, from the downloaded software or you can order a set of DVDs direct from Mozy.

In summary: Backup! Off site is best. Mozy makes it easy to backup and restore. Go check Mozy out, it is free to try and only $4.95/month otherwise. Best insurance ever!

What methods of backup do you use? Post in the comments and share with everyone.

TUAW: 5 Apps for Lawyers.

2. What format do you use? Again, the actual format, whether it be MiniDV, HDV or AVCHD isn’t necessarily as important as the explanation they give as to why they use it. Their explanation should include the facts that their format is digital and it saves time and money for themselves, in turn saving you and your client money and time.

3. How do they deliver their video? Does it work with your system? Do they offer to assist in getting it working for you?

4. What kind of microphones do they use and how many? Audio is one of the most taken for granted aspects of video depositions. Clear audio is just as, if not more important than the video that accompanies it. So, your videographer should offer at least four microphones. One for the witness, one for the taking attorney and one for opposing counsel plus one for themselves and as a backup. The microphones should be lavaliere as opposed to table microphones. Their audio quality is superior because of their proximity to the source of audio (everyone’s mouth) and are not as susceptible to table top noise. One last thing to take into consideration: They should be wired mics and not wireless. Wireless microphones have too many variables to be used in various locations without proper testing.

5. How long do they store or archive the footage? We all know that cases take years to complete and things happen. There’s always a chance that you may need to get another copy from the source. Make certain you know the date that the archive will disappear.

• 10% by hearing the information
• 20% by seeing the information
• 65% by hearing and seeing the information

That is an astounding difference and especially important for litigators. When you combine two forms of communication you end up with something very, very powerful. Imagine what would happen if you combined three or four different forms of communication together to get your point across.

Let’s take a real world example for instance: Harry Potter. Probably one of the most recognizable characters from a book in the world right now. But why is that? If everyone had simply read the books, there would be a plethora of images in people heads of what Harry really looks like. But add to the books the movie which has a real person as the face of Harry Potter and instantly everyone has the same idea of who Harry is. Reinforce that idea with billboards, action figures, board games, video games, fan websites and now you have a brand, a force if you will, that ties it all together.

Technology in the courtroom affords you the same benefits. Tie your case together utilizing a witness’ testimony, a map of the area to give context, an image of the site to focus their attention and even video to put them in the event.

At the foundation of Highrise is a contact manager. A lot like the address book on your computer, you can add people, where they work and then contact information for the individual and the company. You can enter all kinds of information into the initial screens in order to stay in touch with the contact, but once you finish entering the contact information the real power of Highrise begins to set in. It is also a full-fledge customer relationship system designed for web users and firms that need a way to organize contact simply and efficiently.

How does it work?

In short, it works the way you do. It has a unique capability of integrating very easily with your email routine. When you first login, you are presented with the Dashboard which provides you with an overview of the most recent activity along with a search box to find contacts quickly and your tasks listed by due date. Along the top are tabs that allow you to jump to the major components of Highrise.

If you search for a contact or click on the Contacts tab, you can drill down and see their contact information along with any tasks specific to them and their own feed of contact history. You can also add important dates, create new tasks regarding this contact and even add a generic note.

The next tab is the Tasks section. This gives you a list of tasks assigned to you. It also allows you to view tasks that you have assigned to others, and, if you’re the Administrator, you can even view all of the tasks assigned to others.

Moving on we come to the Cases tab. Cases are groups that contain multiple contacts and companies surrounding a specific project or event. They can act stand alone with their own notes, but you can also attach contacts’ notes to Cases for tracking. It’s a great way to keep real cases organized together.

On we go to Deals. Deals are a lot like Cases in that it is a container for other notes, but Deals are more akin to prospective work and winning that work. You can set a status and an amount of money the project is worth and some other details such as who is responsible. It’s a great way to keep prospective clients and communications with them organized.

The final tab is Tags. Tags can be assigned to any contact or company and gives you a way to categorize them. Click on a tag here and it shows you a list of tagged contacts.

Now, I mentioned above that it integrates with your email. You can, as with most web apps, have Highrise email you task reminders, but you can also email information to Highrise. Every user is given a Dropbox that they can email to. If you are sending an email to a client and place the Dropbox address in the BCC field, Highrise will automatically recognize the email and who it is to, then attach it to that contact. This only scratches the surface of what it is capable of.

If you want to learn more, visit HighriseHQ.com where you will find training videos and more in depth descriptions of each tab. As we progress here at Opveon University, we will add more in depth and focused articles surrounding Highrise. It’s a wonderful tool, especially suited to small groups and solo firms. Enjoy!