Introduction

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 3-9

Introduction

We trace the birth of the original idea for this book to a col-

umn we wrote called “The Strongest Links: Instant Messaging

Resources” in September 2005 for the ABA’s Law Practice

Today webzine. For some time we had been cowriting the regu-

lar monthly column on the best Internet resources for lawyers

on a variety of law practice management topics. For fun, and

to find a different way to work together, we wrote the column

in real time as an instant messaging session using Skype’s

instant messaging tools—including emoticons and acronyms

like IMHO and FWIW. It was cutting edge then. It seems a little

quaint now.

Although we were intrigued by how well our column on

instant messaging turned out—it’s one of our favorite columns—

we did not return to Skype or instant messaging as a writing

tool. Our writing practices seemed to lend themselves more to

asynchronous (not occurring at the same time) rather than real-

time collaboration. However, it’s also important to note that we

never returned to our previous practice of one of us writing the

first draft of the column in Microsoft Word and sending it to the

other as an email attachment, then the other making revisions

and additions and emailing it back as an attachment, and so on

until we were done.

In large part, the reason was that in August 2005, the

Writely online word processing tool arrived on the Internet.

Both of us began using Writely in September 2005, and we

began to use it for articles we cowrote with others. Google later

purchased Writely in 2006 and renamed it Google Docs, and

we consistently used it to write our columns and articles both

before and after the acquisition.

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