By Jim Calloway  Listening skills are essential for lawyers, as they need to accurately understand their clients, colleagues, judges, jurors and opposing counsel. Outstanding listening skills can help lawyers avoid misunderstandings and build rapport with clients. However, listening skills are not innate and can be improved with practice and feedback.  WAYS TO IMPROVE LISTENING SKILLS…

By Jim Calloway and Julie Bays  This summer’s program, “Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Law Practice,” was held in conjunction with the OBA Annual Meeting. It had good attendance and featured several experts who provided excellent educational content. First impressions are important. The first impression many lawyers had of generative AI tools was learning…

Learn More About AI at the July 12 Conference By Jim Calloway As technology continues to transform every sector, the legal profession is no exception. The Oklahoma Bar Association understands the importance of staying ahead of the curve and harnessing the power of emerging technologies. With that in mind, we are pleased to announce our…

By Julie Bays “It’s time to upgrade.” Upgrades are great when related to hotel rooms, home improvements and airline seating. Technology upgrades (and updates) used to be a slight annoyance that frequently added new useful features and tools, but upgrading a technology tool today is often approached with trepidation. What feature that I use daily…

By Jim Calloway and Julie Bays As our readers know, we consider ABA TECHSHOW a superb annual conference bringing together practicing lawyers, legal technology experts, founders of legal tech startups and many others offering their products and services to the legal community. OBA Practice Management Advisor Julie Bays had a special role this year, serving…

By Jim Calloway Lawyers have held and safeguarded client data for generations. Of course, in the past, it wasn’t called data. Our data was in paper client files, forms to “go by” and brief banks. While it wasn’t planned this way in advance, my most recent Law Practice Tips columns blend as a series. In…

By Jim Calloway Artificial intelligence development dominated discussions of technological advancement in 2023. Judge Scott Schlegel from Louisiana was a speaker at the 2023 Oklahoma Access to Justice Summit. Last year, I noted his conviction that both courts and law firms should embrace text message reminders to reduce failure-to-appear issues. Lawyers want to make certain…

By Jim Calloway Decades ago, I assumed that technology would soon advance to the point where automated document assembly would be fully incorporated in most law offices across the country. While great strides have been made in law office technology tools, and tools for automatically generating documents are much improved over what was available decades…

By Jim Calloway Businesses today find themselves in what seems to be a never-ending process of improving, upgrading and experimenting with changing their business operations. Many of these changes are spurred by technological advances. The internet changed the way many businesses operate. Historically speaking, not that long ago, businesses had no computers and employed many…

By Jim Calloway In 2018, I wrote a column called “Technology Competence for the Family Lawyer” for the Oklahoma Bar Journal. The Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct had been amended in 2016 to provide that competence as a lawyer included an awareness of “the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology” in Comment 6 to…