The survey was presented to visitors at the Traveling Coaches booth.  Altogether, 102 conference attendees participated in the online survey.  Of course we wanted to have some fun with our survey and try something new, so representatives in the exhibit floor booth leveraged the use of iPads to facilitate the survey. The following is a summary of what we learned when we contemplated the responses.

How big of a concern is the changing role of the legal secretary at your firm?

The big question on our mind these days, and frankly many of our clients’ minds, is how concerned are firms about the changing role of the secretary?  The survey says that they are plenty concerned.  Seventy percent of the respondents have a high or very high concern about the changing role of secretaries in their firm.

Secretary to lawyer ratio…

We were also curious to see how the secretary to lawyer ratio played a role.  The majority of responses (56%) maintain a 1: 3 ratio, followed by 20% who selected the 1:4 ratio.  A lucky 15% still enjoy a 1:2 ratio.  Two participants selected the 1:5 ratio and one selected the 1:6 ratio options.  This question allowed for additional comments.  A couple of the responses intrigued me.  One firm does not have secretaries instead they utilize paralegals as lawyer support (I wonder what their billable requirements look like). Another shared that the ratios vary depending on workload and type of law.  Personally, I liked that one the best.  It is rare to find any two lawyers who work exactly the same that can guarantee the right mix of tasks for a shared secretarial assignment.

Managing the secretary workload…

With roles changing and ratios increasing, who is managing the secretary’s workload?  Forty-nine percent responded that the lawyers are managing the work.  Just less than 30% indicated that someone in HR was managing secretarial work.  Followed by approximately 19% utilizing a secretarial manager for the task.  This was another question were we included an option for sharing other responses.  Most responses still fell into the administrative category of office or legal administrators; but some surprised me, like, business managers.  I’ll have to explore that role further one of these days.

If we look at the same data by ratios, as the ratios increase in the number of assigned lawyers to each secretary, the more likely it is that someone in a human resources or administrative position is managing workloads.  As a side note, with only 3 respondents selecting the 1:5 or 1:6 ratio selection, we are only looking at the top 3 ratios right now. Respondents were allowed to pick all options that applied to their firm so numbers may not add up to 100%.

What tasks do your secretaries perform on a daily basis for their assigned lawyers?

We provided a list of common tasks and asked our respondents to select the top 5 tasks.  The top 5 tasks for all responses:

1. Type/Format documents
2. Schedule meetings
3. Submit electric filings
4. Maintain client files
5. Maintain calendar

I did discover through all sorts of tapping, swiping and flicking that this simple little device was easy to use. The ease of using it did leave me wondering if I was using this pricey little invention to its full potential… and so began my quest to discover some of the hidden treasures the iPad offers, all so that I could quickly access information and become more intimate with my new friend.

First I decided to start with the iPad User Guide.  Yes, I am one of those disturbed people who enjoy reading instruction manuals even when I don’t have insomnia.

Finding the user guide was the first challenge.  It is hidden in Safari under the Bookmarks tab and although you may never want to read the entire guide, it is a handy document that you can refer to if needed.

Below are some quick tips I found in the user guide along with some other tips I gathered in my travels.

1. To quickly access your iPad controls, double-tap the Home button and then flick the bottom of the screen either to the left or to the right until you see the Controls dashboard.  You can then control the brightness of the screen, start playing your favorite tune from iTunes, control the volume and turn the mute on/off.
2. When viewing maps you can quickly zoom in/out.  Double tap the screen once to zoom in and tap once with two fingers to zoom out.
3. To zoom in/out on photos and web pages, double-tap to zoom in and double tap to zoom out.  (You can also continue to use the “pinch” method to zoom in or out. This is just a nifty alternative).  
4. To quickly map out an address and get directions for one of your contacts, go to your contact list, locate your contact and double tap on the address. The iPad will display the Map application and also offer driving directions.
5. Are you curious about traffic conditions?  Open Maps, tap the dog-eared page icon in the lower right corner of the iPad, and slide the Traffic overlay switch to On. Slide the page back and you can then view real-time traffic conditions (however, remember that you must be connected to the internet).  Green means traffic is going at the posted speed limit, yellow means traffic is slower than the posted speed limit, and red indicates that traffic is stop and go.
6. ..and last but not least, for those of you wanting to take a shot of a specific screen, press the Home button and the sleep/wake button simultaneously!  The screenshot will automatically be saved in your photos.  You can then email the photo to yourself, save as a .jpg and manipulate the photo with Snagit or a similar tool.

Now if I could only figure out a quick swipe to get rid of all those annoying fingerprints on the screen.

While I’ve done well in most webinars, I sometimes find myself “winging it” when pressed for time. After my last less-than stellar performance, I got to thinking about what it takes to deliver a top webinar that will keep an audience engaged.

1. Prepare and select your content wisely. Include facts, stories, figures and examples to make the information easy to understand and allow your audience to better connect with the content. Presenting is storytelling with a goal – so make sure you have relevant stories that will connect emotionally with your audience.
2. Script your opening paragraphs and closing paragraphs. Start your session with a confident, comfortable introduction and finish strong with a well-planned summary and call to action. The rest of your presentation should be conversational rather than scripted. Use bullet point notes to help you remember the key talking point for each slide, and rehearse your presentation enough to feel comfortable with talking to the audience rather than reading to them.
3. Know your environment. Whether you are using Live Meeting, GoToMeeting, WebEx,  Adobe Connect, iLinc or any other platform, learn what the tool can do and how you can leverage the features to better engage your audience. Each platform has its own benefits and limitations. Most of us wouldn’t go into a face to face training without knowing the room layout and the availability of training tools such as flip charts, white boards, projectors, screens, etc., so don’t go into your webinar environment without knowing the layout, the tools available, and how to use them.
4. Practice!  A few days before your presentation, confirm that all of your technology is working properly and you are comfortable speaking about your topic.  This test session helps you catch any errors in your delivery, practice your pacing as it relates to available time, and determine ideal moments for audience interaction.
5. Have a producer. The producer knows the platform inside and out and can mute participants, monitor chat, setup and start polls, and keep track of questions, eliminating distractions while you focus on presenting.
6. Arrive early. Both the presenter and producer should arrive at least 15 minutes early to get logged in and do a final test to make sure the technology is working, and do one final review of the tools/features to be used.
7. Review the webinar environment with participants. Spend a few minutes doing a brief review of the webinar environment with your audience.  Walk them through playing with the features that they will be using during the webinar (chat, hand raising, polling, etc.)
8. Get engaged! Engage the audience by building in questions and taking advantage of whatever interactive features are offered in your platform. Create the expectation that your participants will not be passive observers. Polls are my favorite way to engage. It allows all participants to interact and can bring relevant information or stats into your presentation.
9. Have a solid ending. Revisit your objectives, allow time for Q&A and have a call to action.
10. Extend the learning. Finally, spend some time in post-production getting the recording posted along with related documents and a copy of the presentation. Let your participants know how to get in touch with you for further questions and comments.

Try these tips that next time you have an opportunity to present a webinar on a topic you love. Good luck!

• Text to speech that actually sounds like speech.  I feel that narration is an important factor in helping the learner assimilate and retain information provided through eLearning.  That’s if the audio doesn’t come across sounding like something spit out of a Speak & Spell circa 1982.  There are more natural sounding text to speech offerings out there, just not in the current offering of Captivate.
• A built in screen snip tool.  Yes, I know Captivate at its very core is just a really fancy screen capturing tool but I want something that will allow me to capture a small area without reworking my initial recording window.  If you’ve worked with any eLearning authoring tool for more than 3 hours you know how necessary it is to have a companion screen capturing tool such as SnagIt or Windows Snip handy.  This allows you to go back and capture portions of a screen that Captivate either missed or did capture and you need to cover in post editing.   Ideally this would be launched from within Captivate and allow me to capture a portion of the screen I designate, and then automatically save into the Captivate library greatly improving workflow.
• Project rescaling for the masses.  By masses I mean the various devices we need to support in today’s mobile obsessed environments.  Sure, by using Captivate 5.5 we can develop for the iPad, iPhone, desktop and so forth – just not all at once.  Captivate leaves us with two choices in that regard: record multiple times with multiple output dimensions in mind or rescale in post editing.  Right now rescaling involves either crunching or bloating pixels or cropping off part of the recorded project.  Now you’re saying “Jim, be realistic.  How can you record once and take full advantage of various physical screen dimensions?”  To that I would answer “I have no idea, but…”.  How about a post-production publishing wizard that allows you to pull only some or all assets (captions, audio, images, etc.) into each platform you are publishing to?  Hey, this is a wish list isn’t it?
• Better JavaScript and now HTML5 authoring would be nice (and helpful with the previous wish).

What are your thoughts?  What would you like to see in future offerings of Captivate?  Sound off and let us know.  You can also let Adobe know by requesting a feature be added to future offerings here.

To help jump-start your own thoughts, here are a few tweets to ponder:

@GinaBuser shared a series of Change Management lessons learned from Lawrence Polsky, Managing Partner at PeopleNRG, a global change consulting firm.   Mr. Polsky shared best practices and combined research from his own study as well as studies from IBM and McKinsey.

• Never underestimate the amount of work change is going to take
• Everything is subject to change.
• You need a big WHY.
• The odds are against you…so overcompensate.
• It has more to do with the track record than the volume of change.
• Confront or die. If you don’t confront, the change will die.

@BrieLeung contributed more wise words from Lawrence Polsky:

• Combined research from various consultancies show 30-50% of all change efforts meet original business goals.
• Change is always going to take more time and work than you expect.
• More people trust influential non-leaders than senior leadership. Something to keep in mind when finding key influencers.

But she also shared some insight by Vicky Jarosz, Owner and EVP of i3Logic, a consulting firm that provides change management consulting along with other services.  Ms. Jarosz presented a Pecha Kucha on the importance of stakeholder alignment to a project.

• Stakeholder misalignment leads to chaos in change initiatives.
• Have stakeholders define what the change should look like in their own words and check for alignment.

Look for more wisdom from @GinaBuser and @BrieLeung as the conference rolls into day 2.  You can also keep up with Traveling Coaches on Twitter with @TravelingCoach. Oh yeah, and if you’d like to see some more of what I find interesting, you can find me @TamiSchiller on Twitter. We’d love to have you add to the conversation!

With that said, as part of a continuous improvement process, documenting those lessons helps the project team discover the root causes of problems that occurred and gives the team the opportunity to avoid those problems in later project stages or future projects. It also provides a clear history and the opportunity to see trends specifically if those lessons learned (whether positive or negative) are actually being repeated during each project.

The session also allows the project team to discuss the processes that worked well and build upon those processes so the next time around the overall project is even better.

Discussing the project with open eyes and a non-judgmental attitude can also bring the project team together as a cohesive unit, giving empowerment and gratitude to those involved.  It’s extremely important to view a “lessons learned” discussion as a powerful and positive tool.  Remember, that the successful experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that were unsuccessful.

When conducting a lessons learned session it is important to carefully craft your questions to gather all the necessary information.  Below are a few sample questions you can use to start the dialogue.

General Questions

• Are you proud of our finished deliverables? If yes, please give feedback.  If no, please specify.

• What was the single most frustrating part of the project? How would you do things differently next time to avoid this frustration?

• What was the most gratifying or professionally satisfying part of the project?
• Which of our methods or processes worked particularly well?
• Which of our methods or processes were difficult or frustrating to use?
• If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the project, what would you change?

Project Plan

• Did we have the right people assigned to the right project roles? (Consider subject matter expertise, technical contributions, review and approval, and other key roles) If no, how can we make sure that we get the right people next time?
• Describe any early warning signs of problems that occurred early or later in the project.

• How should we have reacted to these signs?
• How can we be sure to notice these early warning signs next time?

• Were the deliverables, specifications, milestones, and specific schedule elements/dates clearly communicated? If not, how could we improve this?

Design

• Did all the important project players have creative input into the creation of the design specifications? If not, who was missing and how can we assure their involvement next time?
• Did those who reviewed the design specifications provide timely and meaningful input? If not, how could we have improved their involvement and the quality of their contributions?

Deliverables

• Were the members of our Core Group Pilot truly representative of our target audience? If not, how could we assure better representation in the future?
• Did the test lab, equipment, documentation, and support staff help to make the test an accurate representation of how the system will be used in the “real world?” If not, how could we have improved on these items?
• Did we get timely, high-quality feedback about how we might improve our deliverables? If not, how could we get better feedback in the future and from whom?
• Was our deployment strategy accurate and effective? How could we improve this strategy?
• Did our hand-off of deliverables to the user represent a smooth and easy transition? If not, how could we have improved this process

Remember that learning lessons do not end.  Every project has old lessons that keep popping up and new lessons that you never could have predicted.  These lessons are repeated until learned and may present itself in various forms until you have learned that lesson.  When you have learned that lesson, you can move on to the next lesson.  Discussing those lessons just helps you make a smarter and more proactive move to the next lesson to be gained.

There are three interfaces for capturing: the Normal View, Compact View and Snagit® OneClick. Each view serves a different purpose and function. The Compact View is the one I use about 90% of the time. It’s great for when I just need to quickly show/hide the cursor, or toggle on/off the Multiple Capture option. SnagIt® OneClick is the view I use in conjunction with my custom profiles to rapidly switch back and forth between settings. The Normal View is where I go to access all features.

Compact View

Snagit OneClick

My standard Input setting is the All-in-One profile. I’m able to choose on the fly whether I want to capture a window, a scrolling window, a region or manually select the area. I also prefer to keep the Multiple Area option toggled on, so if there is a button with an options menu that I want to capture as one object, I can cleanly grab both without having to switch profiles. I also prefer to keep the Include Cursor toggled off. Why? Because this enables me to repurpose and reuse the same screenshot for other topics. I also prefer my default Output Properties to be in PNG format with Transparency turned on.

Since the introduction of the Ribbon interface, a point of frustrations in writing curriculum has been that the standard capture profile in versions 9 and 10 do not snap to buttons on the Ribbon. With a little digging in the Normal view, I came across the Other capture profiles (from version 8) section and discovered that the Object profile solves that problem. During my investigation, I also discovered some rapid development tools I had yet to explore.

One of my favorite new development tools is the Multiple Outputs option. SnagIt® allows multiple outputs to a variety of programs. When enabled, I can snag a screenshot and insert it into a Word document, a PowerPoint slide, an Excel worksheet, an Outlook e-mail, and the Office Clipboard, all with one click. I can even choose to bypass the Preview in Editor option and send the capture directly to my designated output locations. While I prefer to apply borders and scale objects after output, the option to automatically apply special effects to screenshots upon output is also available.

In addition to being able to capture images, Snagit® 10 also has the ability to capture text. This feature is useful in times when text cannot be captured using standard selection methods. This includes capturing text displayed in the Microsoft Word 2010 Navigation Pane, the Microsoft Outlook Navigation Pane and the Windows Explorer pane.

Snagit® can also capture video with or without audio. This functionality, however, cannot be compared to Camtasia® or Captivate®, and has significant limitations. For instance, I could not get it to work with any Microsoft Office 2010 application, but could record short videos on Internet-based programs—LinkedIn, Facebook and more. For a just-in-time short video tutorial on using an Internet app, Snagit® could be a viable and inexpensive helpdesk solution. The audio was low-grade, but again for a $50 solution it may just serve its purpose.

Finally, the Library feature in Snagit® 10 automatically organizes and stores captures by date, application, and web site. It also includes flag and keyword options. Flags help me to organize my research and product development ideas, while my keywords are generally interface-related:  ribbon, button, gallery, dialog box. By entering a keyword in the Search field, the Snagit® Library serves up a hit list of captures, sorted by application and by date. In one click, I can rapidly access and reuse captures. My Library dates all the way back to October, 2010!

These are just a few of the features available in Snagit® 10 that I find useful. I’d love to hear about the tools you use that make development a breeze.

For CLASSclub members only! For a live demonstration of these features and more, catch my CLASSclub webinar Streamlining Curriculum Development Using Snagit on Tuesday, March 27^th at 12:00 pm CST.

As the primary recruiter for talent in our organization, I know what I look for as an employer. Work experience is definitely high on the list, but I also look for what people have done while they are employed. Pursuing certifications and degrees is part of what I look for, but I also look to see what conferences, seminars and professional groups are they part of. Which LinkedIn groups they are members of? What contributions do they make to the groups? What do they do day-in and day-out to remain relevant. How do they invest in themselves?

So what do you do to keep up with trends in legal IT? What publications do you read? Whose tweets do you follow? Which blogs do you read? Which conferences are on your wish list for attending this year? Which certifications, degrees or recognitions are you most proud of? What do you have hanging on your office wall or cubicle partition? For me, I think I’ll track down my kindergarten diploma and get that framed. That’s the one I probably learned the most in achieving. My apologies to Debbie Sparber for clocking her my first week there, but I did learn something very important that day. And I continue to grow and learn every day. How about you? Share with me your Professional Development plans and what you value most.

Either leave a comment on our blog or talk to us directly by submitting your information and insights in the form below. We want to hear from you!

Once installed and ready to go I jumped right in and well, found my expectations needed to be reined in a bit.  Remember this was a developer preview and it was installed through desktop virtualization software.   Due to my virtual machine software I had to wrangle my mouse into submission and get point and click working – to a degree.  This meant several reboots while I worked through the mouse issue and from that I can say that boot-ups are nice and zippy.  Once that was done it was all about plugging in my Windows Live ID (now just known as my Microsoft Account), Exchange account information, Xbox Live gamer ID and so forth to get any useful functionality out of the Metro Desktop.  Let me just say that in its current iteration this slick, simple Metro interface really wants to get to know you and takes a lot of work on the back end as far as plugging in various accounts and IDs to get working. 

My Outlook email setup is still a work in progress since I’m having trouble having the preview build play nice with our Exchange server while setting up existing Hotmail accounts worked without a hitch.  From what I’ve been able to find this is an issue many others are experiencing.

As far as having the foresight to create an account from my existing Xbox Live ID, we’ll just chalk that up as “good to know for next time”.

Windows 8 does look like it will be a social and messaging powerhouse once everything is finalized.  Tying everything into my Windows 8 account is just something I’ll have to swallow at some point in the future.  Ugh, this is going to require me to remember all of my various passwords and accounts.

The much reported removal of the Windows Start button is something to get used to.  Once you choose to navigate to the standard Windows Desktop we’re all used to from the Metro interface you can hover over the very lower left portion of the screen (yep, where the Start button used to be) to have the option to jump back to Metro again.  Progress?  Innovation?  I’ll let you decide.

I do like the customizable aspect of the Metro interface.  IT administrators will like the ability to easily add or remove panels in the Start interface (removing access to an Xbox Live account for example).  This will make providing access to the exact applications and services required by employees much easier while locking down other areas that aren’t necessary for day to day work.  This customizable aspect allows you to work exclusively in the Desktop portion of the OS if you’re not too keen on the Metro layout.  But who are you kidding, you like Metro or probably will, given a bit of time.  I personally find the Desktop interface to be jarring when implemented in conjunction with the Metro interface.  Desktop being the interface of days gone by while Metro the interface of the future.

What are your thoughts on Windows 8?  Have you had a chance to download and install the developer or consumer preview?  Sound off and let us know!

 (Time Zone screen shot)

 (Time Zone Options screen shot)