County & Municipal Legal Services, LLC

Most state bar associations have a section or division for local government lawyers (though some lump them in with state government attorneys, who arguably have a very different set of concerns). However, in my experience, not many of them are taking full advantage of technology to bring their members in closer contact.

This is the first post in a series about organizing your state’s county & municipal bar. This post will outline a few tools that can help you get your fellow county and municipal lawyers together and talking on a regular basis. Tomorrow, the series will conclude with a list of tips on managing list/group email and discussions.

Google Groups

Google Groups is a free message and website service offered by Google. Anyone can set up a group and invite members to join via email. You can also add members directly though you should be extremely careful using this tool, and make certain you have their permission first.

Each Group is also given some limited webspace that’s easy to use. You can upload files to the site that will be downloadable only to Group members. You can also write pages (useful for collections of website links for resources or books for sale on Amazon or at any online store site, such as the ABA Publications store). Members can communicate via email or by logging on to the website and checking the new messages in a threaded format.

Members should be encouraged to use the Google Profile feature to disclose their backgrounds, current positions, contact info, and areas of expertise. This helps encourage getting to know each other, and also facilitates off-group communication in the event one member has a particular question; she or he can readily see which members have experience in that area.

The other particular use for this kind of site is as an archive. Once the group’s been in existence for awhile, it will accumulate a number of posts on various topics, all of which will be archived at the Group’s site. Future members can then search the archives for useful information when a problem arises.

Another site similar to this, and also free of charge, is the Yahoo! Groups feature.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a tool I use with CLS clients (that’s a referrer URL, by the way — if you prefer the non-referrer site, it’s here, though I’d appreciate it if you’d enter my referral code of EGR6U87F6C when prompted in sign-up; it costs you nothing, but helps me offset the expense of this site).

It’s not free — a basic membership starts at $24 a month (there is a free version but it doesn’t have the file-sharing feature enabled, which in my opinion is the single most useful feature of this site, among many useful features). However, for functionality and ease of use, it’s hard to beat Basecamp.

Here’s how it works: You sign up for your account, and Basecamp sets up your website at a particular URL related to the account name you choose. You establish Projects, and can upload documents (up to specified limits — for more info on the various packages see here); then you specify which individuals have access to which aspects of the site. You can track and manage tasks, projects, deadlines, and more with Basecamp. It truly is colllaborative project management of the best kind, and worth every penny in my view.

Blogs

You can easily set up your own free blog specific to your state’s government law issues, or perhaps dedicated to a particular aspect of county/municipal law (the Zoning Blawg, anyone?).

There are two main free blog hosting sites: WordPress.com and Blogger.com. Either will work well, though I find WordPress a more feature-rich and useful platform.

After you sign up for your free account at either site, you’ll be “walked through” the relatively painless processes of setting up your new blog. You’ll have limited options for templates for either platform; for more choice and customization, you can go the self-hosting route by registering your own URL, signing up for hosting, and installing your own WordPress files, However, this can be daunting for many attorneys who aren’t familiar with FTP and working behind the scenes with websites.

Blogs can be used as a rudimentary knowledge management system. Using categories and tags, you can accumulate posts on specific sub-topics within larger contexts, in whatever organizational taxonomy makes sense for your purposes.  Allowing others to post creates a group blog and harnesses the unique skills and expertise of others; it also lessens the burden of administering the blog by sharing the load.

Wikis

Wikis are another content management approach. The best known wiki is probably Wikipedia.  You can set up a wiki for your own group at sites such as PBWiki.com. Up to three users can use the site’s services for free; other group sizes and the associated costs are set forth here.

The advantage some see in setting up a wiki as opposed to a blog is one of layout and format. Wikis make use of internally hyperlinked pages, whereas most blogs rely heavily on links to outside pages. You can create entries based on other people’s work and thereby create an ever-expanding body of reference work. For this reason, wikis are best suited for explorations of topics, rather than new developments (at which blogs excel).

Are there other tools? Without doubt. Drop me a line in the comments section below or in the contact form here, and suggest others. I’ll pass them on in future posts.