Our last Legal Current podcast of 2010 allows us to ask attorney/author Ari Kaplan (The Opportunity Maker) to look into his crystal ball regarding some key trends for law firms in the new year.

Also in the episode, we highlight the Thomson Reuters, Legal, partnership with Books For Africa – with audio clips from former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, among others.

We’ve got those interviews, plus our regular segments including “Chaos in the Court.”

You can listen to the episode now or listen later.

We’re also on iTunes (just enter Legal Current in the search box).

Send us a comment or suggestion for topics or interviews, that may end up in future episodes. Just leave a comment to this blog post or send an e-mail with your text or audio comment to contact@legalcurrent.com. You also can talk with us on Twitter, we are @legalcurrent.

Show notes for Dec. 13, 2010:

:00-:40 Open
:40-4:30 Interview/Law firm trends for 2011
4:30-5:25 “On the Blawgs”
5:25-12:45 Topic/Books For Africa
6:21-7:45 Kofi Annan
7:45-10:10 Walter Mondale
10:10-10:45 Michael Davis
10:45-12:35 Peter Warwick
12:45-13:15 “Headnote History”
13:15-13:55 “Chaos in the Court”
13:55-14:20 Closing
14:20-19:16 Employee song/”Gone”

In a news release, Bryan Kay, director, ABA Publishing said: “With this new printing arrangement with Thomson Reuters, we’re able to better manage the production and delivery of our books. We can more efficiently produce and grow the list of high-quality publications, covering a broad range of topics that the legal profession counts on from the ABA.”

Printing and manufacturing services for the ABA’s publications will be performed at Thomson Reuters’ 1.3 million-square-foot manufacturing, distribution and engineering facilities at our Legal division headquarters in Eagan, Minn.

The hourly rates law firms and lawyers charge clients are always under review. Rate growth is a trend that Hildebrandt Baker Robbins watches closely.

“Rates have pretty much gone nowhere for the industry at large and perhaps for many firms,” said Mark Medice, program director of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins’ Peer Monitor. “We’re seeing law firms really look at different approaches, different types of service offerings like fixed-fee arrangements, that are allowing firms to really sustain or grow.”

Medice makes those comments in a new interview edition of our Legal Current podcast, which you can listen to in the player below:

You also can access the Legal Current podcast on iTunes or grab the RSS feed.

If you have suggestions for podcast topics for us to focus on, or people to interview within the practice and business of law, send us an email to contact@legalcurrent.com.

But it also explores how companies benefit from employees who are passionate about researching and implementing new ways to use social technologies within their companies, for both internal and external purposes.

Empowered argues that businesses should encourage a culture where employees feel confident to bring innovative ideas to their managers and that they should have some freedom to use work time – with some organization and oversight – to test new ideas.

I took those themes to Rick King, chief technology officer for the Professional Division of Thomson Reuters. He offered his thoughts on creating a culture of innovation.

Employees have regular duties every day. How do you give them time to innovate?

Rick King: If someone comes to me and says ‘I need 10 people for a year’ for a project that’s a little harder to manage, (the question becomes) ‘How do you make up the work of the 10 people if we move them to the new work?’ Instead, if someone says to me ‘I’d like to spend a little bit of time on this idea,’ it’s easier to make that work.

But the worry some managers have is, ‘I can’t have my people spending time on a new idea, I need their time on the projects they already have to do for me.’ My experience is, if I say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to see your work on that,’ they’ll keep doing what they’re normally supposed to do every day and they’ll still find a way to get their idea done, at least up to a concept point. It’s about having passion for an idea and appreciating the fact that you have employees who want to try to do something to make a difference for the company.

What’s your advice for employees for getting support for innovative ideas, and for management?

Rick King: Ask for permission. If somebody’s got a little passion for an idea and if they’re willing to put a little of their time in, and we put a little of our company time and resources in, the combination can work for these early innovations. I’m not saying it always works, but it can lead to something interesting.

And if people get permission from a manager to do what they’ve asked for, that’s what they get. They need to know that somebody isn’t going to bug them in their cubicle and say ‘Why are you working on this?’ The time they get to work on their idea, and their daily responsibilities, should be fluid for innovation to take place.

Can a company’s focus on the bottom line hold back innovation?

Rick King: Companies that are aiming for 100 percent efficiency across the board don’t leave much time for what’s known as “slack time.” Slack is where innovation happens, where you develop things to improve your customers’ workflow. The way things get invented, generally, is in slack time, not in the middle of trying to meet a deliverable for something else. In a sense, being overly efficient can cost you the time to innovate because you’re just doing what somebody laid out for you and that’s all you have time to do.

We’ve got an informative episode of our Legal Current podcast today that includes analysis of two high-profile legal cases in recent weeks in the United States.

We lead off with a discussion with Michael Dorf, professor of law at Cornell University, on Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n. That case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month, and it involves a challenge to a California law that restricts the sale of violent video games to minors.

We also talked with Marci Hamilton, professor of law at Cardozo School of Law. She joined us for discussion of the amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution to forbid Oklahoma’s courts from applying international law or Sharia law in any case before them.

We’ve got those interviews, plus our regular segments including “Chaos in the Court.”

You can listen to the episode now or listen later.

We’re also on iTunes (just enter Legal Current in the search box).

Send us a comment or suggestion for topics or interviews, that may end up in future episodes. Just leave a comment to this blog post or send an e-mail with your text or audio comment to contact@legalcurrent.com. You also can talk with us on Twitter, we are @legalcurrent.

Show notes for Nov. 29, 2010:

:00-:50 Open
:50-13:35 Interview/Violent video game case
13:35-14:15 “On the Blawgs”
14:15-24:50 Interview/Oklahoma and Sharia law
24:50-25:45 “Headnote History”
25:45-26:40 “Chaos in the Court”
26:40-27:00 Closing
27:00-29:57 Employee song/”The Green Grass of Toronto”

I recently talked about two of the changes, new expert disclosure and discovery rules and a new federal Summary Judgment Rule, with Steven Baicker-Mckee and William Janssen, co-authors with John Corr of the new 2011 edition of the Federal Civil Rules Handbook.

Some of the changes were inevitable. Baicker-Mckee says the current rules, as they apply to discovery of experts, have led to “a number of bizarre practices,” including when it comes to draft reports.

“Historically, draft reports have been discoverable and that’s led to a number of practices where attorneys avoid creation of draft reports,” Baicker-Mckee said. “So they do telephone calls or they do net meetings to avoid the creation of draft reports.” So, under the new rules, draft reports are no longer discoverable.

As for the Summary Judgment Rule, Rule 56, Janssen says the procedures were “reworked, rewritten and redeveloped for the way we practice” for the first time in more than 40 years.

Baicker-Mckee and Janssen recently paid a visit to our headquarters in Minnesota. While here, I asked them to provide a few thoughts about the amendments to the Federal Rules on video.

The Federal Civil Rules Handbook is available on the West website.

For a law firm website, searcher intent is a critical concept to understand. Helping visitors find what they want can obviously increase their satisfaction with the site.

Kalev Peekna provides some analysis and law firm examples on the Hubbard One blog, Hubbard Perspectives, in a post titled “Build it, and they will search: Searcher intent within your site.”

Peekna is a manager in the Web Solutions Practice for Hubbard One.

In his blog post, he outlines three recently emerging trends and tools in search functionality that relate to searcher intent:

1) Search As You Type

2) Keyword Type-aheads and Best Bets

3) Categorized Results

The post also provides interesting examples from Morrison Foerster and Baker Donelson.

To read Peekna’s full post, click here.

When life gets legal, where do you turn for help?

FindLaw.com provides the answers many people are looking for, as the most popular website for free legal information and the largest legal directory available.

Now FindLaw wants to recognize and reward someone who turned to FindLaw for help with a legal need. They’re running a contest that could earn you $5,000 and a chance to be in an ad.

Entries must be on video – nothing professional or polished is required, you could just use your cell phone camera – featuring you talking about how FindLaw figured into your search to help you solve a legal issue.

Video entries will be voted on by visitors to the “When Life Gets Legal” contest page.

The video with the most votes wins.

You must submit your video by Dec. 12, 2010 to be considered for the contest and voting ends on Dec. 31, 2010.

Again, for more information visit the contest page.

It might be safe to say no one is more excited about the new Mexican Legal Dictionary app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch than Jorge Vargas, editor of the dictionary and a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law.

You can hear it in his voice in this excerpt from an interview I did with him.

“I think this is going to contribute both to the prestigious reputation and ability of American attorneys to apply Mexican law, and also for judges to become more familiar with this interesting aspects of Mexican law,” said Vargas.

The Mexican Legal Dictionary app from Thomson Reuters includes 2,300 legal terms, providing a quick reference guide for judges, government agencies and legal professionals with clients with business in Mexico, as well as law students and faculty studying Mexican law.

The app also features English and Spanish audio pronunciations and convenient search functionality, which builds search results as terms are entered that match the dictionary’s database of English to Spanish and Spanish to English terms.

The Mexican Legal Dictionary app is available for $29.99 from Apple’s App Store.

Rick King, chief technology officer for the Professional Division of Thomson Reuters, is featured in an article published in several regional newspapers about the global economy and the economic growth potential for Minnesota in particular – where our headquarters for Thomson Reuters, Legal is located.

In the article, King says Minnesota’s economic future at the government level is tied to three key strategies:

1. Invest in R&D

“…strategic investments in Minnesota’s innovation engines, including our university system, must be an important economic development strategy for the state.”

2. Build our idea infrastructure.

“The broadband internet is today’s interstate highway system – a complex network designed to move goods to markets far and wide. It has the potential to connect the state’s businesses, innovations and ideas to markets around the world.”

3. Expand transportation to move our greatest product: Our people.

“More than 80 percent of Minnesota’s economy is in the knowledge and service sectors — industries that rely on human interaction to succeed.

You can read the full article from King, online.