Fortunately, I cleverly defined the term in my article, in no small part to avoid the issues David raises. I use the term “virtual law firm” almost exclusively when my main audience will be the lawyers and technologists who have a familiarity with both the concept and the use of the term as short-hand. I don’t think that it makes any sense to use the term when the audience is the public at large. Even in other contexts, I tend to define the term because I use the term in the sense of non-formalized collaborations, almost in the sense of food co-ops in rural areas, but also in the sense of project teams as Tom Peters might describe them.
Picking your audience helps a lot, but Dennis’ articles appear in professional magazines that are trying to educate and convert a much wider spectrum of lawyers than the technological cognoscente. His terminology becomes fixed, as it’s passed on down the line to the average lawyer (who might not get past the headline of an article saddled with such “virtual English” ). Calling a team or network a “law firm” bends the English language in a way that cannot be helpful for current or future communication.
To me, the time to create nomenclature that is understandable and sellable is when you are first naming a concept. As much as possible, the meaning of the term should be self-evident. That being said, I totally embrace Dennis’ maxim that “The use of technology jargon, especially when combined with legal jargon, is both an occupational hazard and a practice to be avoided.”
Responding to my post on disappeared Comments, Dennis also mentions the issue of using or not using Comments on a weblog, and cites to a good discussion by Megnut. I agree with Dennis that it’s a question that is best left to each website owner/editor, and with Megnut that having the ability to turn Comments on and off for each post can be particularly useful. My main point is that filtering out contrary opinions in comments and through Trackbacks — not for unacceptable tone but for commerical reasons — takes a lot of the enjoyment out of weblogging, as well as a lot of the sense of community.