As I turned a year older last weekend, I realized that BankBryanCave.com could use a spring cleaning, along with a new feature or two. In addition to simply needing a few changes, I needed to prove to myself that I could still make the changes myself. I’m sure I’ve broken a feature or two, and possibly added services that no one will ever use, but it was time to update the blog.
Most interestingly, we’ve added comments. All comments are moderated, but we would like to encourage further dialogue with our site’s visitors. We don’t expect there to be a lot of comments, but sometimes our readers share interesting additional information that we would like to facilitate for broader distribution.
We’ve also vastly improved BankBryanCave.com’s search results. Searches should now actually result in you being able to find whatever you were looking for.
The last change of any significance is that we’ve added options to easily share each post via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. (I can’t tell you how many readers have asked us to more easily share BankBryanCave.com posts with their Facebook friends!… probably because no one has ever previously had that thought.)
In an effort to make it a little easier to find information about the Dodd-Frank Act, we have created a new page on BankBryanCave.com that highlights our best summaries of the Regulatory Reform Act and also provides copies of several of the presentations that Bryan Cave has given on the Act.
The latest and greatest information will continue to be posted directly on BankBryanCave.com, but if you’re looking for quick overview of the Act or easy links to our most popular posts on Dodd-Frank, please check our our new Dodd-Frank page.
Due to technical difficulties at BankBryanCave.com over the last several weeks, email updates were first slowed by more than 24 hours and then ultimately completely stopped working last week. By switching to a third party provider, I believe we have hopefully fixed those problems for the foreseeable future.
In addition, we are now offering three subscription choices: instant alerts, daily emails and weekly emails. Accordingly, you can now have as many (or as few) BankBryanCave.com emails as you desire. To sign up, simply visit our Email Sign-up page and select the frequency of updates that you would like.
I’ve taken the liberty of converting everyone that had previously signed up into the new system, so if you were comfortable with your prior settings, you shouldn’t have to do anything. If, however, you’d like to change anything, you should have a link at the bottom of each email you receive to change your subscription settings.
Thanks to the diligent actions of one client, we determined that we had a bug in BankBryanCave.com’s daily emails. That bug has now been fixed (we hope), and everyone that signs up should once again receive nightly emails with the prior days posts.
If you would like to sign up for a daily email (and you can always unsubscribe later), please enter your email address in the “Subscribe for Updates” box and hit the Subscribe button. You should then receive an email with instructions to confirm your subscription.
On January 1, 2009, Powell Goldstein LLP merged with Bryan Cave LLP. You can read more about the merger here.
In light of the merger of Powell Goldstein LLP and Bryan Cave LLP, effective January 1, 2009, BankPogo.com has a new name, a new domain, and a new look. The site is now called, simply, Bank Bryan Cave, and can now be reached at www.bankbryancave.com. We think the new look will make it even easier for visitors to find the information they are looking for, while also increasing the speed of the site.
Despite these changes, the most important things are not changing. The site is still being written by the same attorneys; and we still plan to focus on providing up-to-date information, written in plain English, on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Programs, and other items affecting community bankers.
As we complete the transition to Bank Bryan Cave, there will potentially be technical hiccups, and you may encounter a broken link, or other problem. If you notice a problem, or simply have a request, please send us an email. If you’ve previously bookmarked the site or subscribed to receive updates by e-mail (see the “Subscribe” button on the right hand side of the page), then you don’t need to anything, as they will continue to work.
Over the past several days, the website has undergone significant changes behind the scenes to offer additional functionality for our visitors. If anything is broken, or if there are features that you would like to see, please let us know. We won’t bore you with all of the behind the scenes changes, but we did want to highlight four of them:
- Subscribe to Receive Daily Emails. Anyone can now subscribe to receive daily emails from BankPogo.com which will contain that day’s newest stories. To subscribe, please enter your email address in the box on the right hand side of any page under “Subscribe for Updates.” You will then automatically receive an email each morning with the contents of any new posts.
- Improved Search. As BankPogo.com expanded, the limitations of the search engine were starting to be felt. The new search engine is faster, more comprehensive and gives better results. Give it a try in the top right corner of any page.
- Email a Story to a Friend. At the end of every post, you now have the ability to quickly and easily email a copy of the entire post to a colleague or friend. Just click on the “Email this Content” link at the end of the post and complete the resulting pop-up window.
- Related Content. Because the federal regulators are continuously modifying the information about TARP and the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Programs, new information is added to the website that sometimes modifies previous guidance. At the end of each post, you will now be presented with an automatically generated list of related content that you may also find informative.
Offsetting the new features slightly was a decision to remove comments from the website. To date, we had received two useful and informative comments, and almost 100 spam-related comments. While we were able to suppress the spam comments, they were starting to slow down the site without any benefit to our readers. If you would like to comment on any content on the website, we encourage you to contact us.
To our Clients and Friends:
Several years ago, Powell Goldstein adopted a Strategic Plan strongly supported by our Financial Institutions Group to grow by acquisition or merger. For our group, the objective was to have lawyers on the ground closer to many of our clients outside the immediate Southeast and to have a broader offering of services for our clients. We have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to assess a number of alternatives in this process, but, until now, we had not found the right fit. Now we have, and our Financial Institutions Group is very excited about how well the fit works for us.
See the Press Release below announcing the combination of Powell Goldstein and Bryan Cave. We wanted to supplement the Press Release to tell you how this will and will not impact our Financial Institutions Group and our clients.
For us, Bryan Cave provides additional offices in the United States in Chicago, Irvine, Jefferson City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, St. Louis and Southern Illinois, which we did not have before, to go with our existing offices in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas and Washington, DC (where Bryan Cave also has a strong office). Plus, Bryan Cave has seven offices overseas, which we think may prove to be useful to customers of our bank clients. This expanded geographic access supports our current national reach — as we like to say, “Community Based, Nationally Recognized.”
In addition to the increased geographic scope, Bryan Cave has a great complement of Banking and Financial Services lawyers, with whom we are already working. This satisfies our second expansion objective of providing broader services to our clients.
In the end, however, this would not have happened unless we were convinced that the combination would produce a good cultural fit, and we are. In talking and working with our Bryan Cave counterparts, one cultural imperative became clear: The Client Comes First! For our Financial Institutions Group and Powell Goldstein as a whole, this has always been the case and was essential to the combination. We’re convinced that your client experience with us will become even better as a result.
While there will undoubtedly be some changes, our Financial Institutions Group will remain intact and Walt and Kathryn will continue to be its co-leaders. There are no billing rate changes contemplated, since Bryan Cave’s rates are in line with ours. In Atlanta, our name will initially be “Bryan Cave Powell Goldstein,” and apart from our changed letterhead, you should see no visible signs of change, other than for the better!
Thank you for your support in the past and going forward, and do not hesitate to call any of us if you have any questions.
The Financial Institutions Group