Weekly Review for Miami Lawyer and Florida Legal News for Friday, February 20, 2015

weekly review for Law Practice Tips and Florida Insurance Law

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

How To Leave Your Law Firm And Start A Startup
To start a company that grows, you will eventually have to leave your job. But starting companies has never been less expensive. To get the first version of ReplyAll up and running, we spent only $20K on development. It sucked and didn’t gain much traction, but it was something to work with and we were able to use the the first version to iterate and build something a little better. What this means for you is that you can keep your job while having a freelance technical team build a lean version of your idea that you can test on nights and weekends to see if your idea has legs.

Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: How lawyers use Dropbox 
Dropbox is an online storage vault for your files that syncs with a designated folder on your computer and across mobile devices. It’s increasingly popular with lawyers as the 2014 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report indicates, with 65.3% of lawyers downloading Dropbox in 2014, up from only 15.2% the prior year.

Here are stories from lawyers who use Dropbox. Read more here… 

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

Weekly Review for Miami Lawyer and Florida Legal News for Monday, February 16, 2015

weekly review for Law Practice Tips and Florida Insurance Law

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

Florida Legal News: FL Lawyer Says He Knows How People Can Drive Away Legally From DUI Checkpoints
One Florida attorney says drivers are not required to speak to police at sobriety checkpoints in the state, and he believes he has devised a way to legally prevent police from questioning them.

Read more here

Florida Law Updates: Florida considers law to protect digital assets after death
The Florida lawmaker who pushed through a bill to ban the use of biometric data in Florida schools now wants to protect the digital assets of the deceased. Those assets include emails, text messages, online photographs, documents stored in the cloud, electronic bank statements, and social media accounts.

Read more here

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

Weekly Review for Miami Lawyer and Florida Legal News for Friday, February 6, 2015

weekly review for Law Practice Tips and Florida Insurance Law

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

Legal Tech Tools: Wolfram|Alpha iOS App is a Swiss Army Knife for Lawyers
If ever there was a Swiss Army knife of an app for lawyers, it is the Wolfram Lawyer’s Professional Assistant. This multi-function app for iPad and iPhone can perform calendar computations, fee calculations, settlement calculations, interest-rate calculations and more. Use it to research historical weather information or population demographics. Look up legal terms and statutes of limitation. The list of what it can do goes on.

Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: Microsoft Readies Launch of Practice Management Product for Lawyers
Microsoft is quietly preparing to formally launch a new practice management product for lawyers in the coming months. The product was scheduled to be announced this month but the announcement has been delayed. It now appears that the product will be rolled out at or around the time of ABA Techshow in April.

Read more here

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

Weekly review for Law Practice Tips and Florida Insurance Law for January 30, 2015

Weekly Review for Miami Lawyer and Florida Legal News

Weekly Review for Miami Lawyer and Florida Legal NewsHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

Legal Marketing Trends: Who are the 21st Century Companies Connecting Lawyers to Clients?
You may have heard of one or two or all three of the companies I will discuss. Some have huge investment dollars, others bootstrapping it. But each lend a unique value to the legal space and you should consider incorporating one or more platforms if their vision, ethics and toll structure work for you and your practice.

Read more here

The Practice of Law: Developing a Peacemaking Law Practice
Rather than being a financial disaster, my decision to be a non-court unbundled lawyer has resulted in rapid growth of my practice beyond my most optimistic expectations. My gross receipts increased by over 33 percent during the first year following my decision not to accept litigation engagements. My uncollectable fees went down from 30 percent of gross billings to under two percent.

Read more here

Legal Trends: Why Are So Many Lawyers Broke?
Many people don’t believe it. Even lawyers are known to scoff at it. But many of you know the truth — you go to law school, spend a small fortune and come out to find the pickings are lean.

Read more here

Legal Industry Trends: 80% of Americans Can’t Afford Your Legal Fees
It’s 2015. The stock market is sky-rocketing towards the outer edges of our atmosphere. Sounds exhilarating when we see television’s talking heads bobbing apoplectically. We’ve even just started a calendar year that ends in ‘5′ and rumor has it that every year that has ended in ‘5′, the stock market has gone up around 23% on average. Wow!

Read more here

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

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Friday, January 16, 2015

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: NetDocuments Adds Smart Email Management with Recommind’s Decisiv
Decisiv allows NetDocuments to add email management to its already-great document management. And not just email management, but smart email management.

Read more here

Former NFL Players Advance Claims Over Images in Madden Video Games
Electronic Arts Inc., maker of the Madden NFL video games, lost a bid to dismiss claims by former Los Angeles Rams quarterback Vince Ferragamo and thousands of other retired professional football players that the company owes them money for depicting them in its products.

Read more here

Tech Tips: Five apps for creating timelines
There are many reasons to keep a timeline. You might want to create a chronological map of how a project or company developed, track a family history, or follow your career progress or trajectory. But whatever the reason, you need the right tool to make the timeline easy to work with. You can’t just use a spreadsheet or text document to create a helpful, interactive tool. Instead, you need the right software to do the job.

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, January 9, 2015

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 Tips: Can Free Consultations Pay Off for Lawyers?
Smooth or crunchy? Sean Connery or Roger Moore? Free consultations or no? These are the debates that characterize our times. Because this is a legal blog, we’re going to have to save the first two for another blog (although, off the record, the answers are “crunchy” and “Roger Moore”).

Read more here

Law Practice Tips: 20 Law Practice Empowerment Tips
At the American Bar Association’s annual GPSolo National Solo and Small Firm Conference in October, practice management experts Peggy Gruenke and Alan Klevan presented “60 Practice Empowerment Tips in 60 Minutes” — focused on the nuts-and-bolts of running a successful law practice. We asked the pair to zero in on their favorite practice-boosting pointers.

Read more here

Law Practice Tips: How to eliminate 80% of your law firm’s past due accounts
According to a survey by LexisNexis, 73% of law firms report having past due accounts. Lawyers in small firms reported that up to 39% of their total client base is past due. What causes this? And what can be done about it?

Read more here

Florida Debt Collection Defense: Debt Collectors Hound Millions of Retired Americans
It may be hard to imagine Grandma unable to pay her bills or Grandpa being hounded by debt collectors. But for millions of Americans, this is the harsh reality of retirement.

Read more here

Florida Legal News: Finally, the muzzle is off! Bar drops past results restrictions from lawyer advertising
Amounts that clients have won in lawsuits are again permissible for lawyers to use in television, radio, and billboard advertising.

Read more here

Legal Tech Tips: Lawyers Going Google: How to Use and Supercharge Gmail and Calendar
Millions of corporations, small businesses, solo lawyers, large and small law firms, and federal, state, and local governments have “gone Google.”

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, December 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!

Legal Marketing: Top 7 Internet Marketing Mistakes Law Firms Need To Avoid
I’ve worked with dozens of attorneys helping to enhance their online presence and market their firms. I’ve also studied many more and it isn’t uncommon to see lawyers (often busy doing what they do best) miss obvious opportunities for getting more exposure on the internet. Just like in every industry, people make some really basic mistakes when promoting their brand on the web and lawyers are no different.

Read more here

Law Practice Management Tips: Cloud-Based Practice Management: A Comparative Review
Cloud-based practice management is the future of law practice, especially for small firms or solo lawyers. The fact is, practice management software helps lawyers manage their lives, provide competent representation, and control all aspects of their law practices. Many lawyers try to manage their practices with a combination of calendaring, file folders on a server, or even as an Excel spreadsheet. But as I’ve pointed out, practice management and case management systems add much more value, and help minimize conflicts or other issues.

Read more here.. 

Law Practice Management Tips: The Do’s and Don’ts of Creating the Perfect Business Card
We have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to our pursuit of the perfect business card. There are some major #FAILS you want to avoid and major DO’s you want to embrace.

Read more here

Law Practice Tips: 12 Rules for Turning Phone Consultations Into Retainers
Initial consultations are different on the phone.
Recently, I published 12 Rules for Turning Initial Consultations Into Retainers, which inspired some questions from lawyers meeting with clients via phone and online.  The phone is different—very different.

Read more here

Law Practice Tips: Soloing With Mindfulness In Mind
Solos always need tools to get ahead. The most obvious tool to help you do that is actually inside your head. You just need some training to understand it, and use it to your best advantage. The training is mindfulness training.

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, December 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!

Reconnecting with Your Passion for the Law
At some point, most lawyers express a sense of meaninglessness in their work. While this is not unique to lawyers, their philosophical and analytical tendencies often seem to make these feelings more acute. And the negative public perception of law can compound these feelings, depriving lawyers of the social adulation and approval that may help buoy those in other highly demanding professions.

Read more here

Reaching the turning point in a legal career
No career is without routine frustrations and even some major hurdles. However, I felt free to really enjoy one of the best parts of my practice — my conversations with clients — because I knew that I could usually offer them immediate valuable feedback.

Read more here

Break The Bonds Of Depression: Be The Happy Lawyer You Were Meant To Be
It’s well known that members of the legal profession are plagued by depression and substance abuse. The causes are many. Lawyering is a contentious, combative line of work. The pressure to bring in new books of business combined with the relentless requirements of the billable hour cause undue stress. It’s a demanding job full of constant and unexpected deadlines. And, sometimes, despite your best efforts, you’re unable to achieve the desired results for your clients.

Read more here

The Happy Lawyer: Change Your Mindset
Great news for lawyers since our profession has the distinct honor of having some of the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. That’s why we’ve embarked on this 15 post blog series devoted to helping lawyers make choices that increase their levels of happiness. As we discuss in that post, one way to increase happiness is to take steps to change your mindset.

Read more here

Creating a Walk-Away Law Practice
How do you build a law practice you can one day own but no longer run? It starts with wrapping your mind around the concept that you don’t have to do everything yourself, or even closely supervise everything yourself.

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, December 12, 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!

Florida Debt Collection Law: To Collect a Debt or Take a Loss …That is the $Question$
The economy tanked several years ago. There is no way to sugar coat this. A lot of customers, income and sales were lost. And with bad business came bad debts. Often the bad debts had to be ignored as the more pressing problem was operating expenses, rent and payroll.

For those that survived, efficiency and automation were the key to survival. We now see tighter budgets, virtual employees, virtual offices, online stores, outsourcing and streamlined workflows. There are less workers doing more work while wearing more hats. As a consequence, business is stable and growing.

Read more here

Florida Debt Collection Law: Debt collectors target the elderly
For succeeding generations, retirement has been the time when older Americans reaped the benefits of their years in the workplace. Oftentimes at ceremonies, workers would receive a gold watch – a symbol of their entry into retirement and an era of “golden years.”

Today, few if any count on getting a gold watch. And what should have been the proverbial golden years are often tarnished by a struggle to keep pace with rising costs of living. These financial challenges are often worsened by aggressive debt collectors who hound older Americans about debts they may not even owe.

Sometimes, these collectors threaten to garnish their limited benefits.

Read more here

Florida Legal News: Undocumented immigrant to practice law in Florida
It’s never easy to become a lawyer.

But it was a different dimension of difficult for José Godinez-Samperio, whose quest to practice law in Florida took him not only through law school but also through the state Supreme Court and the Legislature.

Godinez-Samperio was sworn into the Florida Bar last week after lawmakers rewrote state law to allow an undocumented immigrant to practice law in the state.
“It was so incredible,” Godinez-Samperio said after taking the oath of admission at a Hispanic Bar Association gala in Tampa. “Everybody was there from so many parts of my life.”

Read more here

Florida Collection Law: Top consumer outrage? Debt collection for medical, other bills
Debt collection is the nation’s No. 1 complaint by consumers, a federal financial agency says — and hounding about medical debt is a big piece of the story.
A new report says consumers complain that their medical bills are often inaccurate or still unresolved with insurers, yet many say debt collectors resort to profanity or derogatory names such as “deadbeat,” “liar” or “fraud.”

One woman said a collector tried to get her to pay the medical bills of her late husband: “After my crying through the whole conversation, he offered for me to pay (three quarters of the balance due) on the doctors’ bills of my husband. No one told me I was not responsible for the debt.”

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, November 28, 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!

The Do it Yourself Lawyer – is it really a good idea?
The DIY trend is in high gear. Everyone wants to do things on their own to save a few dollars here or there. Hardware stores encourage this activity. I get that. It is one thing to be a weekend warrior around the house. It is an entirely different thing to be a professional with no professional training or experience. Yet, many people these days take that leap and act as their own lawyer. How hard could it be? Looks easy enough on television. Just be confident, brash and yell louder than the other person. And all the required instructions, procedures and legal answers can now be found online. Just Google it. See anything wrong with this picture? If not, I would urge you read on.

Read more here

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

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