MacGomery Law

Archive for December, 2008

So you may have seen the footage of the people being rescued from their cars on River Road in Potomac, MD after a giant water main break on a frigidly cold morning. I travel that road all the time so it hit home just a little too close. One of the issues during the rescue was that the bitter cold, combined with the water and the rotor wash from the rescue helicopter was that the windows could not be rolled down as they were frozen. Someone in the office said “Why didn’t they just break out the windows?” to which another said “It is impossible to do from inside the car. I saw it on Mythbusters”. And it got me thinking… what would you do?Turns out there is a whole set of products for helping you get out of a car that you are trapped in. So as a belated Christmas present, my family are all getting the ResQMe, the keychain version of the LifeHammer. This little baby cuts the seat belt off of you and breaks out the window with little to no effort.Next, I’ll post a list of items, culled from a series of email responses, we all ought to have in our cars in case of an emergency. 

This blog has been left kind of dormant for a long time. The last couple of weeks I have been researching what some call Web 2.0 technologies and in particular the concept of using social networking to promote my law firm. As a solo practitioner, I do not have a large marketing budget. The more I read about products like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs, the more I came to understand how powerful they may be to attract clients and drive them to my practice. So I did the easy things first. I opened accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. With them I have been having a lot of fun seeing how they can play together. Now I am dusting off this blog (I hope to update its appearance and then some once I figure out how) and together, the four technologies are going to be my marketing platform. The blog is going to be the hard one to start with because I don’t remember how it was set up initially. So upgrading and adding content is going to be a challenge for awhile. But in the end, it is the blog that appears to be the cornerstone of such a marketing plan. Perhaps that’s why so many people are trying to get onto this bandwagon.So for me, this is fun. It’s a lot better than spending thousands of dollars on print advertising and the like that is not likely to work in today’s world. Besides, I already did that – with the expected results. While on a family vacation this holiday, I wrote down a bunch of ideas for blog posts and I have enough to get me started. I’ll be writing on the ups and downs of starting a solo law practice, using cool technologies (both hardware and software) to enhance that practice, and I’ll add my two cents worth to the chorus building around using social networking and its related tools to promote your practice. Along the way I’ll try and review some of the Mac products I use or would like to use. And since I am in downtown Rockville, perhaps there will be a comment or two regarding what’s going on in the courthouse and the legal community here in Montgomery County.So I would like to invite you to join me here. Leave me a comment. Tell me what I am doing wrong or right. And we’ll see where this goes…