Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Monday, September 29, 2014

Weekly review for Law Practice Tips

Weekly review for Law Practice TipsHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Law Practice Management: 12 Rules for Turning Initial Consultations Into Retainers
They don’t just happen.

Getting a client into your office for an initial consultation is the culmination of a great deal of effort.
You’ve done your networking, advertising, content creation, and social media, and you’ve finally got someone sitting in the seat across from you.

This is it. The game is on. Everything comes together for this one meeting.Can you feel the pressure?

Now is the time when you convert that marketing energy into money. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Don’t blow it.

Seriously, don’t blow it. You won’t get another chance with your prospects. Make it happen. Be magical. Be amazing. Bring your “A” game.

Read more here

Law Practice Management: Business Development: Save Time and Do Less!
Most lawyers I know jam their calendars each day with more than two people could accomplish in a week. Is this you?

It’s a vicious cycle because we feel terrible not being able to accomplish what’s on the list… instead of feeling great about what was accomplished. We literally sabotage our success and the feeling of accomplishment! Now, how ridiculous is that! Maybe it’s time to start looking at things differently.

Read more here

Legal Marketing & Practice Tips: What to do when people ask you for free advice

Do people ever ask you for free advice? Of course they do. So, what do you do about it?

Do you tell them to make an appointment? Give them the speech about “all a lawyer has to sell is his time and advice”? Or do you answer their question and hope you’re not wasting your time?

I have another suggestion. In fact, if you agree with my suggestion, you will no longer dread calls or emails asking legal questions or seeking free advice, you will encourage them.

The next time someone asks for your advice, don’t answer them over the phone or in an email. Write your answer and turn it into a blog post or newsletter article.

Read more here

Why Successful People Never Bring Smartphones Into Meetings
You are annoying your boss and colleagues any time you take your phone out during meetings, says new research from USC’s Marshall School of Business, and if you work with women and people over forty they’re even more perturbed by it than everyone else.

The researchers conducted a nationwide survey of 554 full-time working professionals earning above $30K and working in companies with at least 50 employees. They asked a variety of questions about smartphone use during meetings and found:

• 86% think it’s inappropriate to answer phone calls during meetings
• 84% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails during meetings
• 66% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails even during lunches offsite
• The more money people make the less they approve of smartphone use.
The study also found that Millennials are three times more likely than those over 40 to think that smartphone use during meetings is okay, which is ironic considering Millennials are highly dependent upon the opinions of their older colleagues for career advancement.

Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Friday, September 19, 2014

weekly review for Law Practice Tips

weekly review for Law Practice TipsHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Tech Gadgets: Apple’s New Watch: No One Predicted It Would Be This Cool
A relaxed, confident and effervescent Tim Cook wowed the Apple faithful with the long-awaited, heavily-hyped (though, as I’ll argue later, underhyped) Apple Watch. Cook’s almost childlike enthusiasm seems entirely justified: Based on first impressions, Apple Watch has the potential to be yet another transformative device for the company. It’s the ammunition needed to put to rest the Haunted Empire/Apple-After-Steve-Is-Dead meme if not once and for all, at least until this time next year when the restless tech press will almost certainly ask: “What have you done for me lately?”

Apple Watch — not iWatch — puts the brand front and center in a sophisticated piece of personal technology that has been smoldering, but hasn’t caught fire. Pebble really got the niche going when its Kickstarter campaign broke all records. But while Pebble has gained considerable techie cred (I don’t leave home without it), few people outside that bubble even know what it is.  Read more here

Law Practice Management Tips: Are Your Clients Losing Confidence at Your Front Door?
Don’t you hate that awkward feeling when you walk into a restaurant and you’re not sure what to do?

There’s no “seat yourself” sign, and there’s no “wait to be seated sign.” There’s something that kind of looks like a host stand, but there’s no one standing there to greet you.

There are people seated nearby and at the bar. They turn to look at you as you stand there looking perplexed, and you only feel more confused as they all stare at your awkwardness.

Is that what it’s like when clients show up at your office? Does it feel awkward? Do they wonder where to go, where to stand, and what to do?

Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: App of the Week: Pomotodo – Manage Your To-Do Lists the Pomodoro Way
Recently, I came across a post on the Lawyer’s Mutual site about how law students can guard their time using the Pomodoro Technique. So can lawyers, or anyone interested in managing their time more efficiently and focusing on tasks more effectively, one project at a time.

We’re huge proponents of the technique here on the Legal Productivity blog: working in short bursts – usually 25 minutes – focusing on only one thing with no distractions, followed by a 5-minute break. So much, in fact, that we made a video. Watch it here

Law Practice Management: Nine Tips for Handling Unpaid Fees
“As night follows day, a counterclaim for malpractice will follow a lawsuit for fees.”

So said Chicago insurance claims manager Brant Weidner at an ABA-sponsored legal malpractice panel.

And it will surprise exactly nobody that an insurer is not wild about the idea of an insured going around suing clients for unpaid fees.
But the truth is everybody loses in a fee suit. In fact, by the time it reaches that point the lawyer has already lost.

Read the Nine Ways to Avoid a Fee Dispute here

Law Practice Management: Why Your Referral Partners Won’t Refer You
Having another attorney, business owner or colleague recommend you is a great compliment as well as one of the best ways to build your law firm. However, not all law firm referral partner relationships are successful. If you’re wondering why some of your connections are simply not referring new business your way, there may be some very specific reasons why.
If you are looking for ways to build a network of referral sources for your law firm, check out this post and video 4 Steps to Building a Network of Referral Sources For Your Law Firm – it includes great tips you can implement right now.

Read the 5 Reasons Why Your Referral Partners Won’t Refer You here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Monday, September 8, 2014

Weekly review for Law Practice Tips

Weekly review for Law Practice TipsHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Law Business: 12 pieces of LinkedIn advice you’ve (likely) never heard
Did you know there’s a way to make second- and third-degree connections appear in your feed, or that you can message people in the same groups as you? Read on for more LinkedIn hacks here

Legal Marketing: Why Social Media Doesn’t Work For Attorneys and what to do about it
If you’ve seen any of the ‘ALS Challenge’ videos over the last few weeks, you have witness the power of social media. The ‘ALS Challenge’ has captured the attention of millions of people all over the world and at the same time it’s raised millions of dollars over a very short period of time.

The lesson here is learning just how to leverage the power of social media for your law practice. No, you don’t HAVE to do use social media, but if you don’t, your competition will and they will be happy to take your business.

One thing that Joel shared stuck out to me. Do you know what social media is really about? It’s about life. It’s about relationships. It’s about real people sitting behind a computer and they’re just like you – they have successes, they have problems … and they need a solution to those problems.

As a practicing attorney, YOU are the solution to many of those problems.
Here’s what social media is not.

Read more here

Lawyer Tech and Trial Tips: Tips for Better Presenting Photographs in Court
Well-presented photographs are powerful tools for litigators. In this post, I’ll share some samples that show how we’ve helped litigators use photographs in court, along with a number of tips for getting the most from your photographs in litigation.

Read more here

Law Practice Management Tips: How To Run A Law Firm Like A Startup
Most law firms bill clients by the hour. It’s been this way for decades. But the system is fundamentally flawed: It rewards employees for being unproductive.
Social enterprise attorney Kyle Westaway is trying to change that. He works out of his Brooklyn loft and has found some of his young startup clients via social media. He uses virtually no paper and bills on a by-project basis.

Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Friday, August 29, 2014

Law Practice Tips August 29, 2014

Law Practice Tips August 29, 2014Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Tech Tips: Best Gmail features: Unsubscribe button added at last
Earlier this year we heard rumblings that Google was planning to add a killer new feature to Gmail: An “unsubscribe” button at the top of every promotional email that would make it vastly easier for you to get rid of annoying promotions once and for all. Months later, it looks like Google is finally ready to take the wraps off the feature, which it touted on Wednesday in a new post on Gmail’s Google+ page.  Read more here

App of the Week: Pushbullet- Share Anything Instantly Between Your Electronic Devices (Looks like a game changer!)
In June’s WWDC Keynote, Apple introduced their new iOS for mobile devices as well as Yosemite, their new Mac operating system (both of which are due sometime in the fall). One of the most talked about features is the way it will connect your computer and mobile devices. Phone calls and SMS can be pushed to your computer, and with the new “handoff” feature you can pass whatever you’re doing from one device to another.

If you don’t own a mac, or you’re just tired of being left of of the Apple loop and would still like to have similar functionality on your devices, download the free Pushbullet app today.  Read more here

Legal Practice Tips: Review: Presentations by David Sparks — Keynote manual and speaking tips
Most lawyers that I know give presentations from time to time, whether they be formal opening statements or closing arguments to a jury, teaching a CLE, client presentations or even just running a small meeting. Considering this, you would think that most lawyers should be pretty good at it. But I am amazed at the number of presentations I see in which lawyers use PowerPoint slides with almost every word of the presentation typed, typically in a small font to fit all of those words on the slide (so the audience can barely read them anyway), and then the presentation consists of little more than reading those slides.  Read more here

Law Practice Tips: Lawyer mindfulness, best meditation apps for iPhone
Looking for the best iPhone apps to help you relax, track, and make the most out of your meditation time? Sometimes the stresses of our everyday lives can make mental health more important than ever. Even if it’s only for 30 minutes, being able to disconnect from our devices and the outside world can help eliminate stress and clear your mind. The App Store is full of apps to help you make the most of every meditation session, but which meditation apps for iPhone are the absolute best?
Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: What is So Awesome About Dropbox?
Dropbox is awesome. I love Dropbox. What’s cool about it is that you can save things on your computer and access it from anywhere at any time.

So the way it works is that you have an agent on your computer that synchronizes with Dropbox in the cloud. So the files are stored both locally on your computer and in Dropbox. You update any of your files, it automatically gets synchronizes with the cloud, and it’s instantaneous.

Now, imagine this. You can go to another computer and install Dropbox on that, and if you log in with the same credentials, your files are instantly replicated onto that other computer. It’s really amazing because it allows you to work with other people and have a completely synchronized file system.

Furthermore, you can access it from your mobile devices. So if you’re on the road and you need access to a document that’s on your computer, you can get to it.

Read more here

Legal Practice Tips: The Best Subject Line to Get Your Email Opened
Believe it or not, the best subject lines start with “Re:” “RE: Follow Up” “Re: update” “Re: Introduction” and “Re: Checking in”.  Read more here

Law Practice Management: Monetizing your time for solo success
As I approach my 10th year of practice, I have fine-tuned various systems that have allowed me to stay in business this long. Let’s face it, being a solo-practitioner is difficult when you have to wear many hats to do it profitably.

As solos, we have to be responsible for business development, accounting, delivery of legal work, customer service, social media and many other roles. The reality is that we have too many demands to meet in a 40-hour workweek.  Read more here

Legal Marketing Tips: Should Law Firms Focus on Social Media or Search Engine Marketing?

It is difficult to respond to legal marketing questions with a simple answer. For instance, what source of referral traffic should you care about most, social media or search engines?  Read more here

Law Practice Management Ideas: Size Matters – downsizing for retirement.
The most common exit strategies for retiring solo practitioners and small law firm owners typically include recruiting a successor, merging with another law firm, or selling the practice. All of these options have advantages and disadvantages.
However, there’s one strategy that is rarely considered, though it may make the most sense in terms of the retiring lawyer’s financial and personal well-being. That strategy is downsizing.

It’s a rather simple concept, and works well for both solo practitioners and small law firm owners. In a nutshell, the attorney takes fewer cases and works less while reducing overhead expenses.  Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: An Android App – Tasker review: The thing you need to do all the things
Android is an enigmatic and wondrous ecosystem in which many, many things are possible. Unfortunately, many of those things aren’t possible out of the box. That’s where automation apps like Tasker come in.

Tasker helps our supposedly smart smartphones do more for themselves, and do more for us. Tasker is the duct tape that many of us use to bind apps and sensors together into many wacky inventions. Like duct tape it cannot fix everything, nor is it the easiest substance to work with, but almost every house has duct tape, and almost every serious Android user should have Tasker in their back pocket — or wherever they keep their phone.  Let’s take a deeper dive into Tasker.  Read more here

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Friday, August 8, 2014

Law Practice Tips for August 8, 2014

Law Practice Tips for August 8, 2014Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Tech Tips: Video depositions, Lights, camera, deposition
A few tips to help witnesses handle video-recorded Q&A’s
I once believed that when being deposed, the best strategy was to answer the question as tersely as possible. After all, the purpose of the deposition is to know what the other side knows.

It is an attempt to level the information playing field. You get to see inside their file cabinet, and they get to see inside yours. There was no need to wear a suit, sit up straight or be polite. Each side just hunkered down for a few hours or a few days; one side digging and the other side dribbling until it came time to switch roles.

Read more here

Law Practice Management Tip: So you’re not up at 5am to work? What’s wrong with you? Nothing.

I cringe every time I read a story about a person who starts their day at 4am, after surviving on only 5 hours sleep, to get up and start yet another highly productive day. They’ve written their first client brief before their ‘all greens’ smoothie and done a mini-triathlon by 7am.

After a quick shower, they ride 10kms to their work and ‘start’ their day by reading all their newspapers in an allocated 30 minute slot. Then it’s the team meet up before a full one day of meetings, workshops, team time outs and a session at the gym topped off with a protein shake. It goes on. You get the drift.

By the time I also learn they have their two, five and ten year plan mapped out, I am weeping.

Read more here

Legal Technology Tips: Persuasive Litigator: Don’t Assume the Camera Is Neutral
Cameras don’t simply record what is in front of the lens. Every movie director knows that the camera highlights, frames, hides, emphasizes and distorts. The Francis Ford Coppola’s among them know that they’re not simply filming, they’re ‘painting with light’ using the film as a canvas. The legal uses of cameras – interrogations, depositions, site visits — are a bit more prosaic than that, but they’re not immune to the camera’s lack of neutrality. In a legal setting, the consequences of mistaking the recorded image for unfiltered reality can be greater. And the practical need to check out the camera’s influence is great as well.

Read more here

 

Legal Marketing: Is it unethical for lawyers to use ghostwritten blog posts?
Kevin O’Keefe says that ghostwritten blog posts are unethical for lawyers. Unlike legal briefs or other work a lawyer may have penned by others, blogs are considered a form of advertising. If you say you wrote the piece but you didn’t, you are guilty of misrepresentation.

O’Keefe says that clients rely on blog posts to choose attorneys. “The ghost-written post may be better written, funnier, or just plain different than the attorney’s own work product. Even worse, the post may have a completely different perspective or contain better ideas than what the attorney is capable of.”

Basically, clients might hire you because you made them believe you are a better lawyer than you really are.

Read more here

 

Law Practice Management Tip: The First Step to Heading Off Unpaid Receivables

I’m addicted to using my law firm to earn points and miles on our credit card expenditures. On top of that, I love getting the signup bonuses.
To further my addiction, I signed my wife up for cards after I’d used up all the offers in my name. She was promptly approved for cards with Chase, American Express, and others.

The fact that she was approved only gets interesting if you know that she hasn’t earned any significant income in more than two decades. Her applications were instantly approved online as she hit the “apply” button.
So with no income, she was approved for credit. That’s interesting, but what does it have to do with your practice? Everything.

Read more here

 

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Monday, July 28, 2014

Weekly Law Practice Tips for July 28, 2014

Weekly Law Practice Tips for July 28, 2014Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Tech Tips: Testing Unroll.Me to unsubscribe from unwanted emails and lists. Learn more about this useful app here…https://unroll.me/?eWRkqPwA

Florida Contract Law: When Should I Review and Revise my Contracts?
If you run a business you are selling goods or selling services. In either case you will be making deals to do your business. The best reference for the terms of your deal is a written contract, not a handshake or notes on a napkin. But you got that covered, you had a contract written up when you first started business… twenty years ago. Maybe you even got a real nice official looking form from an office supply store. Better yet, you recently went online and downloaded a generic contract from the web. I cannot tell you how many times over the past twenty years I have heard business owners tell me precisely this when they seek help for a good deal gone bad. See anything wrong with this picture? As a practicing Miami contract lawyer, I do.  Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: 5 Ways to Keep Email from Ruining Your Life
Email is out of control. For many of us in the working world, there’s just too much of it. Email has become a source of anxiety, a measurement of our failure to keep up.

I’ve done a ton of reading on the subject, trying to peer over my virtual backyard fence to see how other people manage their email tsunamis.
Some people treat email like it’s Twitter: a living stream of communiqués that’s constantly rushing beneath our feet, to be dipped into when there’s a free moment — but otherwise, without feeling any obligation to answer every single one.  Read more here

Law Practice Management: Two Approaches to the Commoditization of Legal Practice
In Richard Susskind’s book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, he predicts that legal work will fragment. In particular, he talks about “bespoke”‘ (a tailoring term for made-to-measure clothing) work. Matters requiring bespoke work need careful crafting and design from scratch; this is because each of these matters are unique, without repetitive elements and workflows. According to Susskind, bespoke matters will become increasingly rare.

Instead, because most clients have legal needs that are routine, commoditized legal work will meet the needs for most legal consumers. Employment contracts, incorporations, wills, leases, and more have become products that consumers can purchase. For many, these products will be perfectly sufficient. The law and requirements for many of these services are well established. Form and even content can be prescribed by regulation or case law.  Read more here… 

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Monday, July 14, 2014

Jump-for-Joy-e1297863969313

Jump-for-Joy-e1297863969313Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Productivity Tips: 5 Simple Tools That Unleash Meaningful Work
I recently watched a TED talk by Jason Fried of 37 Signals entitled Why Work Doesn’t Get Done at Work. The message was right on: The office has become a place of endless distraction; so much so that people seek anywhere but there to get their real work done. What happens is the real work ends up getting handled at home, on the weekends, super-early in the morning or days off.
Office distractions are almost an institution in the workplace. They can come in the form of impromptu meetings, Sharon from accounting stopping by your cube to clarify your latest expense report, or a buddy dropping in to kill some time. It’s endless.  Read more here… 

Remote Lawyering: 10 Keys to Running Your Practice From a Beach (or Las Vegas)
How do I make things work while I’m away?

As a preface, I’ll tell you that I spent years tweaking our system to get things to the point where I can be gone without issues. This was not a quick process.

The starting point is creating a vision. If you can see it, you can build it. Then you develop a plan. Finally, you execute on the plan. It takes time and patience. Here are the elements I had to put in place to hit the road…Read more here.

Law Practice Tips: Autopsy Your Dead Files
Remember the television show Quincy? Jack Klugman played a Los Angeles medical examiner, and in every episode, his autopsy would reveal that the decedent (who’d seemingly died of “natural” causes) was a victim of foul play. Using the clues he’d gained from his examinations, Quincy would convince the police a homicide had occurred, and then manage to singlehandedly finger the killer. In a pre-CSI world, it was pretty compelling stuff.

So why all this talk about an obscure 70′s crime-drama? Because if you’re really interested in identifying the work you love to do and learning how to serve your clients better, you may want to spend some time each week playing Quincy. Instead of investigating foul play, however, you should closely examine those things you’ve given up for dead in your office: your closed files.

Read more here.. 

Legal Marketing: Is Twitter dead?
People occasionally ask me if I tweet (I don’t) and what role I think Twitter has in law firm marketing (none). I probably owe an explanation.

I believe Twitter has always been a niche service and always will be; it will never go mainstream in the way that (say) Facebook or LinkedIn has. Lately I’ll take that a step further: I believe Twitter’s mindshare has peaked, that it’s on a path to marginalizaion. and that (if I’m right) all this is one of the healthiest recent developments in the online Zeitgeist.

Read more here… 

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for July 7, 2014

Judgment Collection2

Judgment Collection2Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

When do I need a lawyer for my Florida Debt Collection Case?
Times have been tough, we all know that. Been there done that. The economy has thrown many business plans and transactions for a loop. Often this meant broken promises and non-payment. As a business, you took your lumps but often could do nothing about it. The debtors got a free pass. You had bigger problems of your own like surviving the Great Recession and making payroll. Fortunately times are better and now it is time to revoke that free pass and get what is owed to you.
Read more here

Lean Thinking in the Law Office
Though the ideals of lean were originally intended to be used in manufacturing plants, they can be (and have been) adapted for use in almost any professional environment. Law is no exception.
Read more here

Developing Lawyers’ ‘Soft Skills”– a Challenge for the New Era in Legal Services
The economy is recovering. Law firm business is back (sort of). But the world has changed, and our industry along with it. Lawyers have to be better and do more to succeed in this evolving environment. Better legal skills? That was always a goal of professional development, and continues to be. Great lawyering has come to be expected; it is the price of entry. Our firm, and most successful law firms, have ongoing educational programs to improve and maintain superior legal skills. Drafting skills, oral advocacy skills, trial skills…they are all very important. Beyond those, much more emphasis is required today on the “soft skills.”
Read more here… 

Thank you for reading (and sharing). Stay tuned for next week’s weekly review for Law Practice Tips!

Court Slams Debt Collector for Debt Collection Letter

Debt Collectors beware: Don’t say “could” if you do not mean it.

The 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals recently ruled in Brown v. Card Service Center, No. 4160, that a debt collector who claimed in  a collection letter that the debt collector “could” file a lawsuit or refer the matter to a lawyer will violate the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (“FDCPA”), if the debt collector has no intention to do so or if it can be shown that the debt collector rarely does either.

The appellate court found that making claims without intending to take such action were false and misleading statements under the FDCPA.  Section 1692e of the FDCPA specifically precludes a debt collector from using any false or deceptive means in the collection of a debt.  As such, the lesson here for debt collectors and lawyers alike is, do not claim in a collection letter that you will, may or could file a lawsuit if you do not ever sue or have no intention to do so.  Those failing to heed this advice may see themselves in Court defending a FDCPA claim by the debtor for the debtor’s actual damages plus attorney’s fees as provided for in the Act.

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