Tag: Kevin O’Keefe

MoFo2Go

Do I care if my law firm has an iPhone App? As client, I care about my law firms delivering useful information to me.

Kevin O’Keefe says your law firm should forget about building an iPhone App. Morrison & Foerster didn’t heed his advice and created MoFo2Go, an iPhone app.

iPhone App versus Mobile View

Kevin’s post was in response to a iPhone app built around a law firm’s blog. I looked at Arnold & Porter’s iPhone app for their Consumer Advertising Law Blog. It required a separate application and was very clunky. All it had was blog content. They would have been better off just having their site enabled for mobile viewing. Kevin was right.

(By the way, Compliance Building uses MobilePress to make a really nice looking mobile view of the site on the iPhone. It looks mediocre on the Blackberry.)

Rather than reading on the commute home, I decided to download MoFo2Go to my iPhone and see if Kevin was right.

Disclaimer

MoFo2Go is the first app I’ve seen that has a disclaimer wrapper that I had to “accept” before installing. Clearly this app had some lawyer input on the design.

Splash Screen

The four functional buttons take up 20% of the screen space, with the new firm motto taking up the majority of the space. Is this an ad or a tool? I think they got that wrong.

Lawyer Directory

This is a nice feature. I can look up lawyers. With one step I can call the lawyer. It also allows me to add the lawyer to my contacts, send an email to the person and view their full bio. I wish the phone number and email were clickable to take these actions instead of menu items at the bottom.

Locations

So assuming I’m trying to get to a MoFo office, I could use this to get directions. It kicks you over to the Google Maps feature in the iPhone.

News

It’s nice enough of MoFo to publish all of these updates. But MoFo is an international law firm with dozens of practice area. Only a small fraction of their publications are of any use to me.

They have four filters: Alerts, Releases, Newsletters and MoFoTech. Please explain why dividing the publications into Alerts and Newsletters helps me to find information. It’s a useless distinction from a client’s perspective.

The Releases are MoFo press releases, so I can just ignore those.

MoFo Tech is a publication focused on tech-based companies. It has all all 7 articles from the single edition of the publication. MoFo Tech Fall/Winter 2009. That seems to be a lot of screen devoted to a small publication.

Play

Yes, MoFo2Go has a game. It’s a classic marble maze. You tilt the iPhone to move a marble through a maze. When you succeed, in addition to a score, you get a MoFo Factoid (“In 2009, Chambers & Partners ranked MoFo Band 1 in Intellectual Property.” I guess I didn’t do very well if that is reward I got at the end of the maze).

So What?

The only useful feature in MoFo2Go is the lawyer directory. The rest is useless or a waste of time.

They should have just made MoFo.com mobile-friendly for the iPhone.  MoFo.com is unusable on the iPhone.

Surprisingly, there is a mobile version of MoFo.com for the blackberry. It’s stripped to the lawyer directory and the office locations. Unfortunately, they stripped the email from the directory. But you can just click on the phone number to call the lawyer. Nice.

Should Law Firms Have iPhone Apps?

From my perspective as a client, No. Don’t bother with an iPhone app.

Make your law firm website mobile-friendly so that your clients can easily to get to the information they need. That means make it easy to get to the lawyer directory and office locations. Just like MoFo did with the blackberry version of their website.

Sources:

Lawyers and the Social Internet

Kevin O’Keefe, of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, put together his thoughts on what are the best social internet places for a lawyer or law firm to spend their resources: Lawyers and Social Media – It the Big Three. Kevin picks Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As usual, I agree with Kevin.

View Doug Cornelius's profile on LinkedInEvery professional should have a profile on LinkedIn. Lawyers may rely on their law firm website, but lawyers do not stay at the same law firm for their entire career any more. I was at The Firm for 13 years, but everyone else I keep in touch with from law school had moved to a new place. I was the last person who was still at the same place. LinkedIn is great at keeping track of your job history. LinkedIn is the place to answer the question: How Ddo I know you? When I am planning to meet someone I always run a Google search and a LinkedIn search.

I have found this blog to be a wonderful networking tool. I have created and maintain many relationships through this blog. There is no better way to stay connected, develop your expertise and showcase your abilities than through a blog. It has been tough for me to give up on this blog since moving from knowledge management to compliance. (And obviously unsuccessful.) Compliance Space will come out of the dark in the near future. Although most of you will not be interested in it.

Follow Doug on TwitterTwitter has exploded as a idea tool. As with most people, I was skeptical of what to do with a 140 character messaging system. But the open design has produced remarkable results for me.The micro-blogging aspect allows me communicate with people in a quick and easy way. Bigger thoughts end up in the blog. Lots of the background communication happens in Twitter.

I also use Twitter for research. Several times a day I search for “compliance”, “FCPA”, “CFIUS,” “Ethics”, and lots of other compliance terms. These tweets connect me with people, news, thoughts, thought-leaders and a plethora of information that helps me with my new role as Chief Compliance Officer.

One of the challenges of taking the new position, in this new area was the great network I had developed in the knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 areas. LinkedIn, blogs and Twitter are helping me to rapidly build a new network in the compliance area.

Facebook is great aggregator of information. I use it largely by having Facebook applications pull posts from blogs, my twitter updates and other sources rather than using Facebook as the primary creation point.

Unlike Kevin, I am still trying out new social internet sites. I still think Legal OnRamp has a bright future. Martindale-Hubble Connected has huge information repository that could create an incredibly powerful tool.

I try others to see what may develop. Eighteen months ago, I thought LinkedIn was boring and would not amount to much. I was wrong. It took a while for Twitter to catch on. I jump on others just to grab my name and to see what may happen. Usually I just waste 10 minutes to create profile (unfortunately, much longer for ABA’s LegallyMinded), see who else is there and explore the feature set. I have long list of bookmarks for dead social internet sites.

As with Kevin, I spend the vast majority of my time with the big three. You should too.

Originally posted on KM Space.