Year after year, I refer to ABA TECHSHOW as the “relationship” conference. It’s where you spend time with old friends, make new ones, provide and receive mentorship, and come away energized with lots of new ideas to try out with a community of support behind you. In the past couple of years, this community has included members of the Startup Alley. This year, 15 innovative legal startups were showcased in the Expo hall after winning a Start-Up Pitch Competition put on by a joint effort between ABA TECHSHOW, Above the Law, Evolve Law and Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites blog.

The opening ripple of ABA TECHSHOW 2018 last week was the conference's second annual Startup Pitch Competition, where 14 legal technology startups competed. Voluble, a social media data analyst provider, won. Here's more on the pitch contestants, new product launches, notes from the expo hall and other TECHSHOW tidbits.

Ryan Nevin’s article “Ways to Get Clients After Hanging Out Your Shingle” has some great tips. He’s right that you should network with attorneys who don’t do what you do to get referrals. But that’s only part of the answer. You should also make a point of building relationships with the most successful lawyers who do what you do. The reason?

It’s highly unlikely that your law practice is anywhere near as noisy and chaotic as Times Square. Quite the contrary: When you go to meetings, or present to groups of lawyers or potential clients, the space is relatively calm and quiet. Most significantly, your audience arrives with at least some intention of hearing what you have to say. You don’t have to compete for attention like a billboard in Times Square. That doesn’t mean you should take audience interest for granted.

In previous columns, I have talked about the concept of tribes and building a network to support you when your practice takes off in a major way and you need extra help. But have you thought about ways to broaden the scope of your community to help avoid violating ethics rules?

Straight out of law school, I joined a small law practice. I didn’t start out as an associate with a large salary and plenty of document review projects to hit my hours. I had to eat what I killed and immediately begin bringing in clients. If you've recently hung your shingle and need some ideas for generating clients, here's what worked for me.

ABA TECHSHOW 2018 is bringing lawyers and technology together starting today, March 7-10, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago (a new location for the 32-year-old event). The conference is showcasing advances in law practice management and offering educational sessions and continuing legal education programming on practical technologies to help provide legal services to clients. The exposition hall, which opens Wednesday evening and closes Friday at 3 p.m., includes more than 100 vendors.

Just because you see a word or phrase in public media doesn’t mean it is being used correctly. Here are five common incorrect usages. Nicole Kidman’s husband is real. Because a person is famous does not make that person an urban legend. Keith Urban has won a number of music awards. He is celebrated in his field. You might say he is legendary. You could say the same of John Legend. Despite their names, neither Urban nor Legend are urban legends.

Welcome back to our "Year of Publishing Strategically." Having covered a variety of writing tips and tactics in this column, this year we are exploring the ins and outs of content strategy. Put another way, we are all about getting your content to work harder and smarter for you by doing more thinking upfront. You accomplish this by crafting a well-designed content strategy before you ever sit down to write.

In the past, if you wanted to put call-tracking numbers on your local directory listings, you'd get some dirty looks. That's because 100 percent consistency in your NAP (name, address and phone) is critical. The thinking was that adding call-tracking numbers would ruin your citation profile and your search rankings. Well, things have changed: You can use call tracking on your GMB listing. Here's how to do it.