Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Friday, April 4, 2014

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for April 4, 2014

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for April 4, 2014Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing. Enjoy!

How to Increase Focus and Productivity with Mindfulness

So, what exactly is mindfulness and why should lawyers care? The simple answer is that practicing mindfulness will help you be a happier human being and a better lawyer. Read more here… ow.ly/uwTHl

Finding Happiness As A Lawyer: Three Pillars And A Box Of Crayons

Ever wonder what the secret to happiness is? Landing a Biglaw job? Making partner? Saving your innocent cousin from wrongful conviction for a convenience store robbery in the small town south? Whether you’re a currently-miserable attorney who’s pinning her hopes for happiness on eventual career success, or a veteran attorney who could stand to be a bit more happy, I have both bad and good news for you. The bad news: you may have to look beyond the bounds of your career for the additional keys to lasting happiness. The good news: doing so is easy! But how could this be, you ask? Read more here… ow.ly/uwSIT

Why Less Effort Is Far Better for Your Career
This may sound odd at first, but I’d like to suggest you manage your career in such a manner that you avoid wasting a single drop of energy. To be clear, I’m not suggesting you use less energy, only that you stop wasting energy. Read more here…http://ow.ly/v0vhR

Why not disaster-proof your law firm today?
According the American Bar Association’s 2013 Legal Technology Survey results, 58 percent of lawyers surveyed cited security concerns as the top reason that prevented them from using cloud computing in their law practices.
The problem is, the current file storage arrangement and IT set up of most law firms is anything but secure. Case in point — a Pennsylvania law office that literally went up in smoke last month, when the building in which their firm was located was destroyed in a fire. Read more here.. http://ow.ly/v0tyY

Are New Domains an Opportunity for Law Firms?
With so many new gTLDs (“generic Top Level Domains”) coming online this year, I thought it might be worth exploring their value and potential use in law firm marketing. Read more here… http://ow.ly/v0snB

How smart trial lawyers start and finish their presentations with bookends and why you should too!
At the end of the presentation of my evidence (sometimes several weeks later) I make sure the bookend I finish up with, the one on the right, is the person who I feel will make the greatest emotional impact with the jury.

The formula to persuading 12 complete strangers is multi-layered and complicated. But at the top of my success list is making sure I always start and finish with the correct left and right bookends.Read more here.. http://ow.ly/v0rjX

Persuasive Litigator: Know How to Address a “Cold Bench”
If a “hot bench” is one that involves a judge actively participating in oral argument with questions and responses, then a “cold bench” must be one in which the judge just sits silently and watches. By that standard, there is no better exemplar of the cold bench than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Read more here…http://ow.ly/v0qmk

MyCase Enhances Mobile Offering with Launch of Android App
MyCase, Web-based legal practice management software, today introduces a new application for Android mobile devices. MyCase became the first legal practice management software to offer a mobile solution in April 2013, with the launch of its IOS app. This latest release on Android further enhances MyCase’s solution set, offering more attorneys access to all aspects of the software’s comprehensive services at their fingertips. Read more here… http://ow.ly/vmuHI

Thanks for reading and sharing. Stay tuned for next week’s review for Law Practice Tips!

Photo credit: http://abovethelaw.com/

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips for Monday, March 17, 2014

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips & Updates

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips & Updates Here are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing:

Working Remotely: Traits of an Effective Telecommuter:
Find out if you possess these essential telecommuting traits before deciding if working remotely is right for you. Read more here

The Secret of Success in Social Media:
Want to turn social media into a powerful asset for your career or company? Use it to help others.  Read more here

Enjoy and stay tuned for next week’s Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips!

Weekly Review for Law Practice Tips, Monday March 10, 2014

Florica Insurance Law Updates

Florica Insurance Law UpdatesHere are some recent articles of interest that I found this week related to law practice management, law technology, and legal marketing:

 

Enjoy and stay tuned for next week’s Weekly Review for Law Practice!

Are You a Tool to Technology?

Technology and its Indentured Servants

Let’s start with the premise that I am a very big fan of technology.  I crave all tools, big or small, tangible or online, that can help me work faster and more efficiently.  Drafting legal pleadings is accomplished quickly and efficiently with tablets or notebook computers armed with spellchecking, autoformating and advanced document logic that can almost create the documents for you.  Typewriters have been relegated as curious primitive objects in museums.  Storing your client files is now accomplished on portable hardrives instead of in steel filing cabinets.  We conduct legal research wherever we want when we want online.  No longer do we have to go to the firm library or the cold confines of an outside law library during office hours to page through ancient bound paper tomes.  Email, eFax and all other electronic communications are the predominant method of communicating with clients and opposing counsel.  Fading fast from the scene are stationary, envelopes, stamps and the mailman.  

The professed purpose for all of these advances is to help make you a bigger, faster, stronger lawyer who makes more money and can go home earlier.  Looking at it objectively, are we getting the benefit of the bargain from technology?  Is this an instance of a better mousetrap or are we just running faster on the hamster wheel?  I do not think this debate is over and in many ways it may not have even started.  Let’s see if I can get it going.

Notwithstanding all the advantages of technology, I hardly think it is blasphemous to look back fondly on those days of paper, pencils and thermal fax machines.  Do you remember the time when there was no email, text messages or cellular phones?  Imagine the tranquility of a work day when all you had to do was answer the office telephone when you wanted and had to respond to a handful of letters from clients or opposing lawyers per day.  How about the luxury of being able to respond to those written communications when you had the time to do so knowing that the senders of those communications did not expect to hear from immediately?  It is funny how all of this sounds primitive and archaic now but the reality is that it was not all that long ago.

Compare those simple times to now.  Today we have become slaves to multi-tasking.  You can receive hundreds of emails, text messages, faxes and electronic communications daily.  Worse yet, the expectation is that you need to respond to all of those communications immediately.  All this in addition to the handful of written letters that you still receive each day on top of the normal daily grind work that you must churn out.  As a consequence, we think and have pressure to make decisions in nanoseconds.  Our communications are short, terse and in 140 characters or less.  Emotions and personality we are told should be left out of the equation.  Being kind is to exhibit weakness.  Judgment is based on the here and now.  Consideration for the future is to be damned.  When you truly think about it, doesn’t all of this sound like we are becoming the machines?  

I also do not think that being machine-like is a good thing.  Often lost in all of this is the building of personal relationships.  Worse yet, instead of being able to do work quickly and more efficiently so you can go home earlier, the opposite is now true for many people.  You work harder, longer, do more things, handle more projects and go home later.  Scientific studies for the brain suggest that multi-tasking is not healthy and that the brain is not wired for that type of exercise.  Perhaps we may evolve as a species but in the meantime have a bottle of aspirin handy.  Expectations for the amount of work and results are higher but not compensation.  I cannot imagine that that salaries for most workers have trended at the same rapid pace as that of technology.  So the question remains, are we using technology or it technology using us? Given that technology may be cool, neat and fun but perhaps not accomplishing its professed purpose, I would suggest that it might be time for you to reign back control from technology instead of becoming such a tool.

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