Yes!!  Now you can add your voice to the mix!

Through the mysteries of the interwebs and the grace of K7, you can now call in your questions, comments and general verbage directly to the podcast.  Just remember that comments can (and probably will) be played on the podcast.

The number: (206) 203-0102

So give it a try!

-Kevin

At its heart, this podcast is a search for ways to survive as a young lawyer long enough to overcome the financial hurdles and lack of practical legal skills to earn a career.  Newly minted law grads face a radically different world at the beginning of their careers from the one that hiring committees walked into.  Legal education has remained in the early 20th century while market forces have rocketed the business of law to heights undreamed of, leaving the legal profession behind.

This podcast is part search, part chronicle and mainly a different point of view of the legal industry than the one normally presented.  The present view of the law is dominated by the culture of BigLaw firms which influences bar leadership, legal press, public impressions and the expectations of law students.  BigLaw does have its place in the legal landscape and fills its niches very well, its just casting too long a shadow over the rest of the law for other stories to be told.

I want to look at these other stories and other paths or definitions of success in the law.  We'll look at the forces that have shaped the legal industry's past and present to try and predict where it will go in the future.  These questions are geared to young lawyers who are trying to start their career, but the topics will be of interest to law students who will soon enter the workforce and prelaw students who are thinking of going to law school.  The three different stages of people all have the same ultimate goal: to become a successful lawyer.  Each one has a different point of view of the business of law with different questions that I think will surprise and inform the others.

This is a search for a different model of success, for many models to fit different people in whatever way they seem fit.  Lend me an ear.

A podcast is simply a different way of delivering content to an audience.  The main difference is that it is the audience chooses what and when they will consume.  Through the magic of Adam Curry and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds content authors can set up feeds that will deliver that content to the audience when and where they choose.

Unlike traditional broadcast media which decides what programs to run and when to run them, you as the audience member can choose what programs you wish to watch or listen to and you receive them in your podcatcher as soon as they are placed in the feed.

There is some debate as to where the name "podcasting" comes from.  It is commonly thought that it comes from Apple's iPod which helped popularize podcasts, but others consider it to be a shortened version of Programming On-Demand casting.  Like all legends, there is probably a little truth to both stories.

Podcasts are consumed through RSS aggregators, also known as podcatchers.  The single largest and most used podcatcher is iTunes which has helped with the popularity of podcasts with Apple's iPod media players.  Or was that the other way around?

Podcatchers:

iTunes
Juice
Doppler
Songbird
Podcast Ready
Zune Marketplace
PodNova
Google Reader

For more information, check out the following resources:
Podcasting Article at Wikipedia
Podcasting for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi and Evo Terra

Avatar Image from Face Your Manga

It's finally getting a little quiet around here with the leaves turning color and the air cooling to a crisp.  It also means that the cicadas that live in the tree right outside my window are finally falling silent.  That's one set of the bugs that have been plaguing me here as I continue to get everything ready.

I've also worked out a number of technical bugs that have held me back.  I've plugged the pipeline allowing me to convert recordings to MP3, which was such an incredibly easy fix that I'm embarrassed that it held me up.  I've also figured out answers to my image and music issues.  The last technical glitch is ambient noise which is partially dealt with by the passing of the cicadas, but I'm also working on a collapsible rig to assist with that.

Another big bug in everyone's bonnet is the extremely accelerated rate of change present today.  Most of that has to do with the current economic downturn and the resulting media play the economy is getting with the presidential election.  Law firms and lawyers are also going through a number of changes due to market forces.  The first large change was the amount of chatter generated by Professor Bill Henderson's blog post on the rise of the bi-modal distribution in salaries.  I would like to take more time in the near future to discuss his findings, but for now I'll just say that the amount of discussion this generated has been eye-opening.  But Professor Henderson did not stop there and his posts kept coming and coming.  Before we could digest the ideas presented by Professor Henderson, the economy hit us very hard.  Firms have broken up, delayed incoming classes of new attorneys, fired dozens of lawyers and then Wall Street blew up.  Market forces are in play and they are going to change the way law operates as a business in the same way that market forces drove up associate pay and partner profits.  There will be much to discuss.

But the biggest bug has been myself.  In late August I started a contract gig that quickly fell into a hard burn of 80+ hour weeks and that just sucked the life out of me.  That job is over now, another victim of the credit crunch.  While it might happen for a week or so in the future, I do not want to go this long again without placing something in the feed.

You'll hear from me soon.

-Kevin

Avatar image - Face Your Manga