MARK YOUR CALENDARS! Next year's LMA Conference will take place from March 21st - 24th at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta. The theme is "Diverging and Converging: Shared Industry... Different Paths". As stated on the LMA Web site:

The 2007 conference will address our diverging and converging industry and the impact it is having on the career paths of legal marketing professionals.

I've heard that they're going to put a heavy focus on more advanced marketing programs, as previous years' conferences have been described as targeting "newbies" in the legal marketing arena. Dr. Maya Angelou was recently announced as the Keynote speaker, which should be great.

You can get all the details at the LMA Web site or you can call LMA Headquarters at 847-657-6717 for details.

An article in this week's Boston Globe discusses how things have changed and law firms must now compete with one another as they did not before. Here's a quote from the article:

"... law firms are no longer protected in their own little Shangri-La," said Leonard M. Fuld, who spoke at this month's competitive intelligence seminar, where he ran a war game that taught law firm marketers to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a rival firm. "They're like any other industry undergoing change, and they need a better way of developing intelligence."

Read the entire article here.

A recent article on the OregonLive site discusses a trend where individuals intentionally harm others by posting fraudulent blog messages meant to damage reputations. As quoted:

"It's high time to fill the gap in a system that allows defamation in the blogosphere to go unchecked. The harm can be wide-ranging and devastating. Until the law catches up with technology, innocent parties have little or no protection in the volatile world of cyberspace."

You can read the full article on the OregonLive Web site.