One of the fundamental "tools" of the attorney arsenal has long been the yellow legal pad. I keep an abundant supply of these around my office, but as my law practice has evolved from paper to digital, I depend more on my Android tablet and smartphone for notes and reminders. Android has an abundant number of apps for note-taking, some of which are fantastic, and some that fail miserably. Here are a few favorites.

Sometimes a law firm name tells us a lot. A firm name composed of three guys, some of whom may have passed on, tells us the firm has been around for a while. "The Divorce Clinic" tells us what they do. If you need help with a merger, don’t bother calling them. "The Resolution Center" tells us how they approach matters. Don’t look for the pit bull lawyer there. You would think that the ethics rules governing firm names would be consistent from one state to another, but they do vary and are worth noting. If you build up a brand name and then find out you need to change it, you’ve wasted a lot of time, energy and money. So when naming, or renaming, your firm, you want to be ethical from the get-go. ...

"Serving 21st Century Clients" was the theme that drove 11 fearless speakers to the stage at last week's LexThink.1 to pitch their personal angle—in a mere six minutes! How did they fare? For this week's Friday Five we asked writer Gwynne Monahan—aka the legal Twittersphere's "girl in the blue hat"—to report her impressions of the event, held the eve of ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago.

Most lawyers eventually supervise other lawyers. How you handle this new responsibility can make all the difference in the quality of work you get and in your relationship with lawyers you may work with your whole life. Here are some tips on doing it well ...

I have served as the commissioner of my fantasy football league for a decade. I've also never won. Perhaps I am a masochist. Or maybe insane. Regardless, I remain in charge of a frustratingly painful organization that requires me to spend hundreds of dollars and hours watching men I will never meet perform a sport I will never play. Normally, the commissioner position is despised, avoided and disrespected. After all, who in their right mind would want to schedule a fantasy draft and collect dues from a mixture of strangers and friends? The position is a three-headed monster: Frustrating, thankless and pro bono. I have, however, learned a lot about management that correlates directly to my job as a young lawyer ...

In part one of this two-part post, Jared Correia reviewed Google’s revised search protocol, represented as "Search Plus Your World"—how and why it works, and how to opt out if you prefer to keep your social media and search functions well separated. Today, Jared explores some of the ways you can use the new functionality to your benefit....

If you decide to tackle email marketing on your own (as opposed to outsourcing the task), there are many online services that promise to help you build beautiful templates quickly and easily while also managing and maintaining your mailing lists. These services have become significantly more user-friendly in the past few years, but it's still wise to take any promises for a spin before committing. So step number one is to look for sites that allow free trial subscriptions. ...

It's true, of course, that very few people come even close to using all of the features in the software they own. We learn only enough to get by, with perhaps a couple of extra nifty tricks so we can feel smug. Then we tell ourselves we'll do some extra training ... next month. Meantime, we Google for answers and troll the online help forums when we get stuck. But what do we do when the software just won't do what we want it to do? Enter the world of add-ons—those nifty little utilities that customize the programs we use every day, like Microsoft Office.

How many emails do you usually delete having read no more than the "from" line? Has your fear of adding to that in-box clutter—and recipiant irritation—kept you from including email in your marketing plans? Well, the truth is that there are lawyers using email as a very powerful marketing tool with absolutely no offense. Done right, email marketing beats almost all possible ways to deliver a targeted message to a receptive audience. . .

ABA TECHSHOW 2012 takes place this week in Chicago, March 29-31, and there's enough legal technology product news to keep the exposition hall buzzing way past closing time. In addition to the launches and upgrades we announced earlier in the year, today we've got highlights from some new product announcements released just in time for this conference. (Pssst. If you're in town, be sure to stop by the Chicago Hilton's exposition hall to run these new products through their paces—expo-only passes are free—and watch for special deals. We hear there's a new iPad or two up for grabs!)