Craig
Bayer
Craig is the
principal at Lawtopia Legal Consulting. From 2002 to 2011,
he was a legal consultant at Law Office Technology and before that he was the head of IT for a Baton Rouge based
Law Firm, where he managed the network as well as several
Legal Specific Software Packages. After several years he
decided to get into consulting full time. He now travels
all over the southeast consulting with solos to firms with
fifty or more attorneys. Craig was a graduate of Loyola
University of New Orleans.
Craig also
speaks regularly for the Louisiana State Bar Association on
technology topics. His latest interest which he blogs about
regularly, is how firms can implement hosted SharePoint and
Exchange solutions in legal environments.
Tom O'Connor
Tom O'Connor is a
nationally known consultant, speaker and writer in the area
of computerized litigation support systems. He is a New
England native who graduated from The Johns Hopkins
University in 1972 with a BA in Political Science. After
attending law school for one year at The University of Notre
Dame, Tom returned to Baltimore and undertook a career as a
paralegal specializing in complex litigation.
His initial exposure to
a document intensive case came several years later when he
assisted several public interest firms in Boston with a
class action voting rights suit brought on behalf of
patients at state hospitals. Over the years he has worked on
asbestos litigation, the Keating case, the San Diego Civic
Center construction litigation, California class actions
against crematoriums, national breast implant litigation,
tobacco litigation on behalf of the Attorney General of
Texas and various phases of the Enron litigation.
Tom's involvement with
large cases led him to become familiar with dozens of
various software applications for litigation support and he
has both designed databases and trained legal staffs in
their use on many of the cases mentioned above. This work
has involved both public and private law firms of all sizes
across the nation and, over the past several years, has
expanded to include electronic document depositories, trial
presentation systems and, most recently, electronic
discovery.
A frequent lecturer on
the subject of legal technology, Tom has been on the faculty
of numerous national CLE providers and the advisory board of
the national American Lawyer Media LegalTech conferences. He
is also a member of the American Bar Foundation and former
member of the Governing Council of the Law Practice
Management Section of the ABA. A prolific writer, with
articles in numerous legal publications as well as being the
Editor of several legal newsletters, Tom is also the author
of The Automated Law Firm, a guide to computer systems and
software published by Aspen Law & Business, now in its
fourth edition and The Lawyers Guide to Summation, published
by the ABA.
Sometime over the past
20 years, Tom also found time to return to law school and
earn a J.D. He and his best friend Gayle, along with their
son Seamus, the philosopher king of Western Washington
University, hope someday to have their own float in a Mardi
Gras parade down the Mississippi down in New Orleans, where
Tom now resides.
