For the month of March, I am going to highlight blogs that I think are interesting and useful. Some may not be directly related to personal injury or Social Security disability law, but all of us who represent injured and disabled people occasionally need help in other areas. A few have been featured here before, but they keep getting better. Today’s entry in March of the Blogs:
The hyperactive Dennis Kennedy became an in-house counsel to MasterCard last year. Before that he was an intellectual property lawyer in St. Louis.Dennis seems to pop up everywhere the words “legal” and “technology” appear together. He speaks and writes frequently, in addition to his terrific blog at DennisKennedy.com.
I was going to write a long description of Dennis’ activities in the legal and technology fields, but he has a great biographical section on his site, so I’m going to cheat, and just quote him here:
Dennis Kennedy is a well-known lawyer, consultant, speaker and writer who is considered among the most influential authority on the application of technology in the practice of law. He is widely-praised for his ability to communicate complex technological and legal issues into language that non-experts can easily understand. His focus on practical applications and understanding of business issues have won him favor his clients and his audiences.
In March 2008, Dennis joined the law department of MasterCard Worldwide on a full-time basis, where he focuses on information technology law matters and works out of the St. Louis office. As a lawyer, he is well known for both his technology law expertise and his experience in computer and Internet technologies.
Dennis was named the 2001 TechnoLawyer of the Year by TechnoLawyer.com, received a 2001 Burton Award for Legal Excellence, is rated “av” by Martindale Hubbell and has taught as an adjunct professor of law at Washington University School of Law where he co-taught a class on IP and E-commerce Licensing and Drafting. He was named the 2003 TechnoLawyer COntributor of the Year. In 2007, he was named one of the Top 100 Global Legal Technology Leaders by London’s CityTech magazine.
Dennis formerly worked as a lawyer in the Intellectual Property and Information Technology Department at Thompson Coburn LLP in St. Louis, Missouri, and is the former Director of Legal Technology at NetTech, Inc. Dennis was a partner of The Stolar Partnership, a St. Louis law firm where he practiced estate planning from 1988 to 1998 , when he left the firm to found DennisKennedy.com, LLC, the legal technology and Internet consulting firm he founded before joining NetTech.
Dennis writes the technology column for the ABA Journal. He has also written monthly legal technology columns for Lawyers Weekly USA and The Indiana Lawyer. The columns on Internet marketing strategies he co-wrote with Jerry Lawson and Brenda Howard called “The Internet Roundtable” are considered the best collection of practical materials on law firm web pages. Dennis is a frequent author and speaker on legal technology and Internet topics. He edited and published Legal Technology Strategies, a monthly legal technology e-mail newsletter from 1998 to 1999.
Dennis and Tom Mighell are the authors of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, published in March 2008.
He was born in 1958 in Garrett , Indiana , graduated magna cum laude from Wabash College in 1980 and cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1983. He served four years as a law clerk for the judges of the Twenty-second Judicial Circuit of Missouri ( St. Louis City ) after leaving law school. At The Stolar Partnership, he was in charge of the firm’s summer associate program from 1992 through 1995, a member of the firm’s hiring committee for six years and the firm’s representative the the St. Louis Minority Clerkship Program’s Steering Committee. He was actively involved in the firm’s commitment to technology, particularly in the area of document assembly and use of the World Wide Web, and a member of the firm’s Technology Committee.
Dennis has served as a member of both the TechShow and the Webzine Boards of the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section and is also a member of the LPM Council. He was a founder and an editor of the LPM Section’s webzine, Law Practice Today. He has also served as a co-editor of Works & Days, the alumni magazine for the Wabash College English Department. At Georgetown , he was the Production Editor of the American Criminal Law Review. At Wabash, he majored in English, with minors in mathematics and philosophy, and was awarded the Walter L. Fertig Prize for being one of the top two senior English majors. Dennis was named one of the top 20 Indiana high school graduates in 1976 , was a National Merit Finalist and salutatorian of his high school class, attended Indiana Boy’s State and was an Eagle Scout. Dennis is married and has one daughter.
