The University of Iowa College of Law is offering free online access this semester to a colloquium on the health care reform act. Starting Aug. 26 and ending Dec. 2, class sessions are presented live every Thursday from 2:20 to 4:20 p.m. Central Time (except Thanksgiving). Anyone who wishes to participate in the live class can register and log in through the university’s Elluminate system.

Class sessions will also be videotaped and put online afterward, along with PowerPoints and other supporting documents. The material will be available for download from the colloquium page.

The class will analyze legal issues presented by the  new health care policy with professors and experts from UI and elsewhere. They will analyze the law from the  perspectives of economics, human rights, antitrust, insurance, employment, poverty and the Constitution. CLE credit is available in some jurisdictions.

Our first show was on  Aug. 31, 2005. Our guests for that first show were Michael S. Greco, then the newly installed president of the American Bar Association, and law professor (now dean) Erwin Chemerinsky. Over the years since, we’ve been fortunate to have a steady stream of fascinating guests, joining us from all over the world. Today’s show features two long-time podcasters to talk about podcasting: Denise Howell, host of This Week in Law, and Struan Robertson, editor of Out-Law.com and Out-Law Radio.

We’ve also won several awards. By my tally, they include:

• Blawg Review Awards 2005: Best Legal Podcast.
• 2006 Blawggies: Best Legal Podcast.
• 2007 Blawggies: Best Legal Podcast.
• 2008 Blawggies: Best Legal Podcast.
• 2008 ABA Journal Blawg 100, Readers’ Choice Award, Best Legal Podcast.
• 2009 ABA Journal Blawg 100 honoree.
• 2009 Blawggies: Best Legal Podcast.

I was fortunate from the start to partner with lawyer J. Craig Williams as a cohost. An ace litigator with a background in journalism, Craig is a master at asking the most challenging questions. Originally, the show was called Coast2Coast to reflect Craig’s base in California and mine in Mass. We later changed the name to Lawyer2Lawyer to avoid confusion with a radio show and to reflect our increasingly international array of guests and listeners.

Although Craig and I cohost the program, the real brains and brawn behind the program rests with the highly talented people at the Legal Talk Network who produce the show. LTN is run by two long-time TV news professionals, Lu Ann Reeb and Scott Hess. Both worked for the CBS news outlet in Boston for many years. Our show is produced by Kate Kenney, who works tirelessly to line up guests, provide background research on topics, and script the outline for each show. Audio engineering is done by Mike Hochman, a radio professional who now attends New England School of Law. The distinctive voice that introduces the show is that of Gary Tanguay, well known in the Boston area as a TV sports anchor. My enormous thanks to all of them.

I sincerely want to thank the people who listen to the podcast. There are an average of 65,000 of you every month, from all over the world. All of us involved with the program appreciate the feedback you provide and comments you offer, not to mention the time you take to listen. Please feel free to let me know of any ideas you have for guests, topics or ways of improving the show.

Now on to number 251!

Judge Ginsburg

Sept. 13, 4-5:30 p.m., Ginsburg & Friends: Conversations on Professional Relationships: The Press, the Courts, the Profession. Retired Judge Edward Ginsburg is a legend in Massachusetts for all he’s done both on and off the bench. This is the first of three sessions he will moderate during September and October on topics that he considers to be of paramount importance to the bar. This first session focuses on the relationship between lawyers and press. The program takes place at MCLE, 10 Winter Place, Boston, and will also be webcast live.

Sept. 21, 4-6 p.m., Social Media Marketing for Lawyers 101. David Harlow of HealthBlawg, Jared Correia of the Mass. Law Office Management Assistance Program and I will discuss the basics of social media marketing. The program is at Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, 10 Milk St., Boston, and is followed, appropriately enough, by a networking reception.

Hope to see you at one — or both.

A study by Pew Internet, Older Adults and Social Media, finds that social-networking use among Internet users aged 50 and older nearly doubled in the last year, from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010.

Even more noteworthy, among adult Internet users aged 50-64, social-networking use grew by 88%, from 25% to 47%. That means that nearly half of Internet users aged 50-64 use social networking. And within this 50-64 age group, one in five say they use social-networking sites virtually every day.

Another finding: One in 10 online adults aged 50-64 and one in 20 aged 65 and older uses Twitter or a similar service to share status updates.

The survey is of adults who are Internet users, not of the population at large. Of course, virtually all actively practicing lawyers these days are Internet users. That suggests that the survey’s findings can be applied to lawyers.

If roughly half of adults aged 50-64 are using social networking tools, it seems fair to assume that roughly half of lawyers in that age range are using these tools. That leads to two conclusions:

1. Social networking is not just for younger lawyers. If you are 50 or over and not using social networking, you will soon be in the minority even among your peers.
2. Social networking is increasingly becoming an essential skill. Social networking among lawyers is often viewed as primarily a marketing tool. It is that, of course, but it is also a tool for communications, networking, knowledge-management and even research.

From one north-of-50 lawyer to all you others out there, a word of advice: If you haven’t started to engage in social networking, the time to do so is now.

I like to bike and hike and I’ve been looking for a GPS app for my iPhone that would track my routes. Look for these in the app store and you’ll fine any number of them. I tried a couple with mixed results. Then I tried MotionX-GPS. I’ve now used it several times to track both bike rides and hikes, and it’s worked flawlessly.

MotionX tracks your time, speed, distance and altitude. It shows ascents and descents and degrees of gradients. All of this is recorded and can be stored. You can also mark and save waypoints and photos along the route. You can view the numerical data or see it on a map. You can save up to 101 different tracked routes on your phone (with the paid version). You can also share your routes by e-mail and on Facebook and Twitter.

The first photo on the left shows just some of the basic information saved from my ride today. You can see that I traveled 16.5 miles at an average speed of 12.6 MPH and hit a maximum speed of 30 MPH. If I could scroll down, you’d see graphs showing speed and altitude at two-minute intervals throughout my trip and data showing the total of my ascents and descents for the trip.

The next image shows the map of the route I traveled as it appeared on my iPhone. Of course, you can zoom in and out. You can also select whether to use maps from Google, Bing or MotionX and set other orientation options.

When I was done, I e-mailed myself the saved route and opened it on Google Maps on my laptop. The third image shows the map of my route as it appeared there. The final image shows the same map with the pop-up displaying all the saved route information.

I did all this using the free version, called MotionX GPS Lite. But having now tested it a number of times with consistently accurate results, I just bought the full version, which is $2.99. MotionX has a variety of functions that I have not covered here. If you’re interested in this type of product, go to its website and read more about it.

I started paying close attention to lawyer bios back in 2002, when I went from journalism to marketing and became vice president of editorial for the legal marketing and PR firm Jaffe Associates. During my time at Jaffe, I both wrote and supervised the writing of hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyer bios. Although I left Jaffe in 2004, I have continued to work with law firms on various writing projects, including bios, through my consulting firm.

What was clear to me from the outset about lawyer bios was how poorly written they were. Kelly hit the nail on the head in saying that they lacked personality, life, vibrancy and interest. They also routinely suffered one of the sins of journalism, in that they buried the lead. A veteran lawyer with a litany of accomplishments might have a bio that started out with a standard recitation of law school, law review and clerkships — stuff that happened decades ago.

What a Bio Should Be

So here is my basic philosophy about lawyer bios:

A professional biography should be structured no differently than any other piece of good writing:

• It should have a theme.
• It should use facts to back up that theme.
• It should be written in a compelling style that draws in and holds the reader.
• All of this should be done in no more than six paragraphs.

In the case of a lawyer’s biography, the theme should emphasize what makes that lawyer distinct — what makes that lawyer stand out from the competition.

Where Matt and I Diverge

Up to this point, I suspect Matt would agree with what I’ve said. But here is where we diverge. His diagram suggests that many standard elements of lawyer bios are irrelevant to clients. I don’t buy that.

Consumers of any product or service want to feel confident that they are making the right choice. There are two ways consumers most commonly reassure themselves. The first is by word-of-mouth referrals. The other is through objective information. Thus, if we are buying a product, we want to hear from friends and reviewers who’ve used that product. We also want to see data on repairs, safety, reliability, performance, etc.

In the legal context, word-of-mouth referrals remain the most powerful drivers of new business. Whether it is corporate counsel to corporate counsel or neighbor to neighbor, legal consumers are strongly influenced by the positive (or negative) experiences of others. (This is why Martindale-Hubbell now incorporates peer reviews and why Avvo offers client reviews.)

But referrals are not always available to everyone in every circumstance. Even when they are, consumers look for objective information that will help them corroborate a referral, narrow the pool of candidates, and provide further justification for the final hiring decision.

We may not like to admit it, but consumers still put weight in factors such as where the lawyer went to law school, whether the lawyer was on law review, what clerkships the lawyer did, and what cases the lawyer has handled. Different consumers look for different things, of course, and part of marketing is knowing how to position yourself to your target audience.

Let’s take the issue of cases you’ve worked on. I have spoken directly to corporate counsel who tell me they most definitely want to see evidence that the lawyer has handled the type of case or matter they have — and has handled it successfully. Do you need to list everything? Of course not. But should you highlight your core abilities and accomplishments? Of course you should.

By the same token, for a bio to say that the lawyer clerked for the Supreme Court or an appellate court is not simply vanity. Potential clients — particularly corporate clients — will read a lot into that. After all, isn’t there a presumption that it is only the best and the brightest who are selected for such clerkships? And don’t clients want to know that they are getting the best and the brightest?

Matt also puts lawyer ratings on the “clients don’t care” side of the diagram. I have come to believe that these various lawyer-rating lists and directories are valuable to consumers and should be included in bios. Yes, we can all bicker over the reliability of their methodologies and the inclusiveness of their results. But for consumers, these provide some element of objective, outside reference, just as Consumer Reports does for cars.

Bios as Mini-Profiles

To be fair to Matt, the overarching point of his diagram is that bios should be written not to feed lawyers’ egos, but to answer clients’ questions and address their concerns. Three of the points on the right side of his diagram are the questions I think are most important:

• Do you have experience doing exactly what I need?
• What kind of work are you really good at?
• What do your clients think of you?

Your bio should answer these questions, and do so using objective information. It is more powerful to point to actual victories than to call yourself a great lawyer. It is more powerful to say that an international directory ranked you as a top lawyer than it is to give yourself that label.

As a long-time journalist, I like bios that are written as if they were mini profiles for a newspaper or magazine. As I said earlier, they should have a theme and that theme should be developed around the characteristics that distinguish you.

Unless you’re a brand new lawyer, then the law school you attended and the law review you worked on should not be central elements of your bio. But they should be in there somewhere. My preference these days is to have that core information in a sidebar, where it can be viewed at a glance but not detract from the bio itself.

Choosing a lawyer is a slippery thing. Clients are looking for anything to grab onto. Much as we hate to admit it, sometimes that something is as mundane as where we went to law school.

Once you enter your search query, results continue to be updated in real time. Also, Google Realtime includes several features for refining your search results. For one, you can view results by a specific location. For example, you can see what people in a particular city are saying about President Obama.

You can also refine results by times and dates. When you find a thread or conversation from the past, you can replay it in its entirety.

You can read more about it and see an introductory at the Official Google Blog.

You can listen to the program in your browser or download the MP3 file from the Legal Talk Network.

Never miss an episode of Lawyer2Lawyer by subscribing to the show’s RSS feed or by subscribing on iTunes.

Our guests are:

• Douglas Berman, professor of law at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University and author of the blog Sentencing Law and Policy.
• Elie Mystal, an editor of Above the Law.
• Leslie Walker, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services in Massachusetts.

You can stream the show or download the MP3 file from the Legal Talk Network.

Never miss an episode of Lawyer2Lawyer by subscribing to the show’s RSS feed or by subscribing on iTunes.