There will be a lot of changes at Opveon University as well, so make sure to stay tuned.

To learn more give us a call at 918.359.8900 or email us at info@opveon.com.

Hosted by Steve Tackett of Southern Reporting and Video

Feb 4-6, 2011

Cost $500 for the Full Workshop

Cost $400 for Saturday and Sunday Only

Bonus-Open Discussion Sunday Afternoon

If you have never been to the Whitestone Inn, you will want to attend this seminar for the beauty and serenity alone. This workshop takes place over a long weekend in the hills of eastern Tennessee and is designed with the new litigation video business owner in mind.  Learn the answers to all of those questions every veteran litigation videographer had hope to know when they first started out.  If you are just starting your business or somewhere within your first three years, you will not want to miss-out on this “jumpstart” program.  Whether you are recently certified in deposition Videography or considering the plunge into the legal services realm you will be convinced someone created this workshop just for you, and we did. Much of this seminar was developed from the acclaimed, Videotaping Depositions: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Things No One Told You Presentation.

Registration will begin shortly. Check back for more details.

Hosted by Brian Nix of Brian Nix Films and Media

January 15-16, 2011

Shreveport, LA

Cost $400

Come spend the weekend with us in Shreveport, Louisiana for some straight-shooting marketing discussion. Learn the tricks of the trade from a twenty-two year veteran whose experiences come from working inside law offices as well as an independent litigation support professional. We will explore your target markets and identify what they look for in their service providers. Learn how to turn customers into clients. Learn how to get your foot in the door time and time again. Learn how to identify marketing opportunities inherent to the litigation process. Whether you are a newcomer or a seasoned business owner, the insight gleaned from this real world experience is priceless.

Registration will begin shortly. Check back for more details.

Presented by Terry Thornton

Hosted by Blake Boyd and Dynamic Legal Solutions (San Antonio)

October 23-24, 2010

San Antonio, TX

Cost $400

The 1 ½ day event is nothing short of one of a kind. Nowhere is the country will you find a more comprehensive program on the production of Activities of Daily Living Videos. Learn how to market, research, shoot, edit, present and make real money serving personal injury lawyers in your market. Learn how to avoid objections and develop probative programs required of today’s litigation videographers. See real world examples of Day-in-the Life Videos and get your every questioned answered. When you leave this seminar you will know more than most attorneys know about damage oriented video production. When you leave this seminar you will have the confidence to reach for this lucrative form of litigation videography.

Seminar registration fees, less a 20% cancellation fee, are refundable if notice is received by September 30th, 2010.

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.

Without further ado, Download the Document Imaging for Trial Director guide here. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us!

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.