News

Upgrade Your Office for the 21st Century

You can listen to the teleconference here:

Use Business Practices in Your Law Firm

Business of Legal

Law firms are businesses, regardless of size. For solo and small firms, launching is like the early days of a startup. Firm owners must think like business people, which means understanding the levers of success in your firm. What can you do to improve client experience and cash collections or your firm culture, including individual timekeeper performance? What technology will your clients demand? What systems and processes do you need to be efficient as a plan attorney? How can you use technology to attract more clients?

Today, we use technology in our everyday lives, and clients demand efficiency. Thinking as an entrepreneur can also mean figuring out how to use solutions to satisfy clients, whether business clients or consumers. However, businesses make technology decisions based upon the return on the cash invested in the products and systems. Below are five business ideas for your law firm, including technology solutions.

Website Optimization

Four years ago, a Yoodle poll reported that 54% of seniors use the internet. And research from the National Law Review indicated that 96% of Americans use a search engine to find a lawyer, and about three quarters of those that start to search online use a phone to contact the potential attorney. Also, over two thirds of searches are done using both a computer and a phone and almost three quarters of clients only contact ONE attorney.

So, do not be one of the 27% of firms that do not have a phone number or 68% without contact email information on the firm’s home page. Better yet, license a solution to set appointments using calendaring software. Also, ensure that your website works equally well on a phone as well as a computer, or in other words is mobile responsive. You will only have one chance when someone visits your website. Put your best digital foot forward.

Strategy

Your firm’s vision or goals are your own, and like business planning in the corporate world, every law firm should have a strategic plan. Are you looking to balance work and family with a moderate case load or are you looking to build a huge practice? Choosing your goals are essential to your strategic plan.

Budgeting

Your strategy will drive your budget. If you are in growth mode, you will need to plan additional resources. Start with your revenue building up from expected billings and be specific month by month; never just divide an annual total by twelve. When you are planning for expenses, start from zero every year.

Legal Practice Management

Businesses have project management systems and other time and billing software that help them manage the workflow as they deliver products and services. The LPM (legal practice management) system will allow attorneys to systematize their delivery and provide a communication platform with clients. Most LPMs are integrated with accounting, time & billing and perhaps client development systems like customer relationship management (CRM) to help create your pipeline of business and manage your contacts.

KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are critical to measure client satisfaction, performance, profitability, and collections, all measures that are more than traditional billable hours and profits per partner. An accounting system and LPM are very helpful for collecting the data necessary to create a set of KPIs that cover your firm’s workflow but KPIs can be tracked using a simple spreadsheet program like Excel. KPIs can help discover what is working well and where change is needed in your firm.

Case Referrals from Canada, Eh!

Our Plan covers members who use lawyers in the United States.

The only place I source to find American attorneys is GLSA.

If you haven’t joined GLSA, you should.

Snowbirds!  Up here in the Great White North that’s what we call Canadians who choose to spend the winter months in a warmer climate south of our border.  Some cross two borders, to reach popular Package Vacation places such as Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, but most long-term Snowbirds spend their winters in the USA.

I am the Executive Director of the Unifor Legal Services Plan.  We have about 80,000 Plan Members, six Staff Offices, and a panel of about 1,000 lawyers, all in Canada.  But we also reimburse members who require legal services in the United States.  We reimburse them, up to our Fee Schedule amounts (posted on our website: www.uniforlsp.com).

I get at least one or two calls every month, from family, friends, other Canadian lawyers and Plan Members, asking if I know any “good” American lawyers they can hire.  And aside from a close friend in Michigan (who is now semi-retired from patent and trade mark litigation at a large Detroit firm and is no longer taking referrals), I have always given people names of GLSA member attorneys.

Why do I refer people to only GLSA member attorneys?   

Trust 

From attending GLSA events, actively working on GLSA Committees and serving on the GLSA Board of Directors I have developed relationships and connections that give me a lot of confidence about the names that I give out to family, friends and Plan Members.  I have either met the attorney, personally, or met someone who has recommended them – a law firm colleague or a Plan Administrator who has them on their Panel.

Loyalty

The GLSA has been very good to me over the past 30 years, and I always am looking for ways to reciprocate.  One way I do that is by referring people to only GLSA member attorneys.

When we started our Plan, many GLSA members were very helpful with their time and expertise. We avoided a lot of start-up mistakes by visiting their operations and learning from them.  To quote something I was taught in grade four (or, as you say in the USA, fourth grade):  Learn from the mistakes of others; you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself).

I urge anyone reading this who isn’t already a member, to join GLSA …ASAP.   There is great camaraderie in this group, and I am confident GLSA membership will help you, too.

And you may even get a referral from the Great White North!

What Does “Legal Tech” Mean and Why Should You Care?

“Legal Tech” has a couple of meanings. It can refer to the legal technology that vendors, such as Clio or ROSS, create to provide lawyers and law firms with support services. It can also signify the concept of using technology to solve legal problems. I prefer the latter definition, which is essentially a mindset that allows lawyers the space to creatively problem solve.

We lawyers, as a group, tend to be linear thinkers, deductive reasoners, analytic and skeptical. These are all good traits and serve us well in learning the law and applying it to facts, in arguing from precedent and zealously representing our clients.

But, to be ruled by precedent means to only see progress in incremental change. As Henry Ford said famously, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. Progress sometimes requires us to see things from a different point of view. And gaining this new perspective is  not for any trivial or academic reason, it’s necessary for lawyers to adapt to a changing world and survive.

“[A] great many college-educated, white-collar workers are going to discover that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.”

– Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Would you rather be the buggy driver or the self-driving car engineer?

“Legal Tech” in the sense of the mindset, allows us as lawyers to step away from the way things have always been done and conduct a thought experiment and imagine things as they never were and ask why not. “Legal Tech” is a safe place where we can dream of what’s possible, then learn how we can make that dream a reality.

Here are some concrete ways you can experiment with the Legal Tech mindset:

Follow CodeX. CodeX is the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and it has been focused in this area of legal technology for over 10 years. Its LegalTech Index stores a curated database of over 700 legal tech companies to explore. And, if you sign up for CodeX’s mailing list, you will get invitations to its weekly meetings with legal tech founders who present their latest innovations.

Go to a Legal Hackers meeting. Legal Hackers is a group dedicated to developing creative technological solutions to legal problems with chapters worldwide. Legal Hacker groups usually consist of lawyers, programmers, students and policy makers, and meeting formats range from coffee socials to workshops to panel discussions. You can find your local chapter by doing a search for “legal hackers” on Meetup. If you don’t find a chapter in your city, you can always apply to create a new chapter.

Attend a legal tech conference. Luckily, this isn’t as much of a challenge as it used to be. CodeX has its FutureLaw Conference, there’s the ABA Tech Show, Lawyerist’s TBD Law, the Clio Cloud Conference, ALM’s LegalWeek, Lawyernomics by AVVO, and EvolveLaw has many meetings throughout the year. Whichever conference you choose, make sure you meet somebody new and learn something you had never heard of before.

Follow #legaltech on Twitter. If you’re not active on Twitter, don’t worry, just follow the “legaltech” hashtag and you’ll learn about the latest innovations, tools and strategies in legal technology. You’ll also start to get a handle on who cares about this stuff and follow them as well so you can see what they post on the subject. Twitter is also a great way to stay in touch with those new friends you make at the conferences.

Get your hands dirty. Take a class and learn how to code. There are hundreds of classes available on edX, Udemy, Coursera, Udacity, Code Academy and many others. Or how about David Colarusso’s Coding for Lawyers is a great place to start? And, remember, what you create doesn’t have to be perfect: the journey is just as important as the destination.

[A portion of this article was previously published in the ABA’s Law Practice Today.]

Solo Pilot: LexHelper

Before I started my firm, the piece of advice I received most from successful solo and small firm attorneys was to keep overhead costs low. That meant keeping the bells and whistles to a minimum while retaining a professional appearance and efficiently managing my limited time and financial resources.

In learning from those mentors, I did not immediately hire a receptionist or assistant. Instead, I tried to either automate items that could be automated, such as installing a calendar system on my website or personally making appointments and follow-up calls. Just as my business began to grow, I started experiencing solo attorney burnout, in part because I was spending too much time and energy doing administrative work and desperately needed help.

I looked into several popular options, including some I had come across at various trade shows. I looked into receptionist services, virtual assistants, and several other services. The ones I liked were priced too high or had contracts similar to a wireless carrier (oh, the nightmares!). Several of the virtual assistant companies were based in other countries, so they were available at a lower price point, but I was not confident in their availability because of time differences or their knowledge of the U.S. legal profession. The latter was also a concern for other nonlawyer receptionist services. Unable to find something tailored to solo/small firm lawyers―both because of price and personnel―I gave up on the idea and moved on with my life.

A few months later, I received a call from someone at LexHelper. While I usually don’t take marketing calls, I quickly googled LexHelper and it looked exactly like what I was looking for, so I signed up for a free trial. After only a few forwarded client calls, I knew I was going to sign up with LexHelper as a paying customer. If I wasn’t already convinced, the tally of how many calls they had answered and how many minutes it took during the free trial would have convinced me. The amount of time they spent on calls with clients surprised me because it made me realize how much time I was wasting on the phone talking―doing intake with potential clients, dodging marketing calls, or even making appointments.

About a month into having LexHelper’s phone answering service, I signed up for the “Add-On” calendaring service so that someone―a human―could call clients to schedule or re-schedule appointments and do phone calls for appointment reminders.

LexHelper offers various “receptionist” type services, and it’s a lawyer-only service, which I really like. You can get your office line forwarded to LexHelper so they are the first line of defense; as an added bonus, the LexHelper assistant always gets contact information from potential clients. They then forward the call to whatever number you give them―in my case, they forward calls to my cell phone because I am often out of the office. In the beginning, I had some trouble forwarding calls and my phone was ringing both at my office and with LexHelper for a while, but as soon as we realized this, the LexHelper team had their tech support contact me and the problem was resolved promptly.

As I mentioned before, LexHelper also can make outgoing calls and make appointments for you. After each interaction―and this is one of my other favorite features―you will get an email notification with the contact information for the caller. So even if they transfer a call to me, they send me an email, which means that I don’t have to rely on my memory in case I am out of the office. Each client call is automatically documented for me, and I can simply look at my LexHelper history to figure out billable time or track previous calls, if needed. A note for outgoing calls, if you send them instructions to place a call, send a time frame as well because they are located on the East Coast so be mindful that they start work a lot earlier than most attorneys on the West Coast.

You can use LexHelper with any carrier or service that allows call-forwarding, such as a regular wireless carrier, Google Voice, or a phone company. If you are planning to go on vacation or will be out of the office, you can simply send them an email and give instructions for calls for that duration. It is truly hassle-free, and you don’t have to log into a complicated system to record an outgoing message or turn the service on or off.

LexHelper is unique in that it is a phone answering service for lawyers only, not for all types of professionals, and it has a low starting price. I didn’t realize before LexHelper how much time I was spending―and could have saved―if I had someone else calendaring, answering the phone, and sending phone reminders for appointments. If you’re on the brink of deciding, I would recommend getting a free trial of LexHelper and compare it with other phone answering services to make your final decision.

Aastha Madaan is a solo practitioner in Long Beach, California, where she practices business law and estate planning. She is a young lawyer leader, a social media disciple, and is on the editorial board for the GPSolo Magazine. She can be reached at aastha@madaalaw.com.

Solo Pilot: Product Review: The 12 Week Year

A few months ago I was telling a friend that while I was happy with the way my practice is progressing, I kept thinking of marketing and business development ideas but was unable to find a way to implement them. Solo practitioners wear so many hats on a daily basis, from human resources to social media manager to bookkeeper, in addition to lawyering. The result is that ideas we have for growth and milestones we want to set for ourselves get lost in the fog of day-to-day tasks and urgent e-mails.

A few weeks later, that same friend gave me a copy of the best-selling book The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. The 12 Week Year is based on the revolutionary idea of redefining the period of time during which we want to accomplish goals from a year to a more manageable and short period of time: 12 weeks. Although the book is not specifically meant for lawyers, I found it to be a game-changer for how I look at my law practice, my professional goals, and my personal goals.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I is titled “Things You Think You Know,” and Part II is titled “Putting It All Together.” Part I is about resetting the reader’s mind-set and introducing concepts the reader should know before heading into Part II. Part II is about implementing these concepts, writing down goals, and creating a plan.

The premise of the book is to make manageable goals and to hold oneself accountable for implementing them in a short period of time, instead of an entire year. The book further breaks down the 12 weeks into weekly plans. “Weekly plans allow you to structure your activities so that you are focused on both the long-term and short-term tasks that are truly important” (p. 30). When I began my 12-week year and wrote my weekly plans, it felt like an epiphany. In the abstract, I always knew the importance of setting short-term goals that are like pieces of a puzzle that will eventually help me attain long-term goals. Actually creating a plan to attain those long-term goals however, was the challenge. As I kept reading the book, I became more and more excited at the possibility of learning how to implement my goals.

One of the concepts explained in the book that resonated the most with me is productive tension. “Productive tension is the uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re not doing the things you know you need to do” (p. 38). I was well familiar with feeling this way—knowing that I had ideas I wanted to implement but not having a plan to actually implement them.

The other concept that resonated with me was intentionality, which is covered in Chapter 7 of the book. “The reality is that if you are not purposeful about how you spend your time, then you leave your results to chance. Although it’s true that we control our actions and not our outcomes, our results are created by our actions. It stands to reason that the actions we choose to take throughout our day ultimately determine our destiny” (p. 39). Chapter 7 also provides time-management strategies that the reader can begin implementing immediately and effectively.

Part II of the book introduces more concepts and also functions as a workbook of sorts. There are places for readers to write their goals in several of the chapters in Part II. There are also tips for success and common pitfalls to avoid.

Chapter 14 walks readers through creating an effective plan and provides almost a checklist for things that a good plan will contain. The subsequent chapters inform readers what to expect and what to do in each of the 12 weeks in their newly acquired mind-set of a 12-week year.

Part II of the book is meant to be tailored to each reader to a certain extent. It is meant to be a guide, holding the reader’s hand through the 12 weeks and letting the reader know what to watch out for and how to stay in the mind-set of the 12-week year.

As a testament to the power of the new mind-set, I am glad to report that within my first few weeks of the 12-week year, I have been able to accomplish some things I have been wanting to do for years with my practice. One of them was to create a video for my website. Another was to install and start using some productivity tools to streamline day-to-day and repetitive tasks in my practice. I have been able to accomplish quickly some short-term goals that I had been putting off for years because I was too busy. In turn, these new tools have freed up more time for me that I can dedicate to my family and to actually practicing law.

One caveat about the book is that it often directs the reader to the website for the 12 Week Year online program and frequently mentions the program to the point that it can seem like a sales pitch. A seasoned solo practitioner can spot a sales pitch and move past it easily. Some might be bothered by it, but it was not a big enough part of the book to deter me from reading or taking the book seriously. If anything, the success stories of implementing a 12-week year motivated me more; I was glad to know that there are people and organizations for whom this had made a difference, and I was able to trust the concept and new experience more because of it.

To wrap up, I highly recommend The 12 Week Year to solo practitioners who have short-and long-term goals they wish to achieve, are serious about making a change, and are willing to make the commitment. While the book is not geared specifically to lawyers, it is geared to entrepreneurs and business owners, so solo practitioners will likely find the book helpful in their practice and life.

Aastha Madaan is a solo practitioner in Long Beach, California, where she practices business law and estate planning. She is a young lawyer leader and a social media disciple, and she is on the editorial board for GPSolo magazine. She can be reached at aastha@madaalaw.com.

Interview with CodeX’s Roland Vogl

Greening Your Law Practice

The words “green,” “sustainable,” “eco-friendly” and other variations of these words are thrown around a lot in the professional world! And I mean, a lot! But what does it mean and more importantly, what can we do to self-analyze and actually become more “green.”

In the last few years, I started becoming more mindful of using resources and producing less waste in my personal life. As I began applying similar principles to my office, and eventually, to help other small business owners, I realized that moving towards a less wasteful and more mindful work environment was really challenging! Here are some key issues and challenges that I observed, and I look forward to sharing the solutions with you at the GLSA/GP Solo Joint 2016 Spring Meeting in Key West!

Main challenges in being less wasteful and more mindful at work:

• We don’t think of our workplace as a place of permanence. We feel more comfortable using single-use items, such as plastic spoons, forks, cups etc. at work, which we less likely to do at home.
• Office=not my money! As a solo practitioner, it is easy to think of everything in the office as “expenses” for tax purposes, so its not coming out of your pocket. It is easy to print a lot at work! It is even more difficult to be mindful when you work for someone else. When I worked at a litigation firm, one of the paralegals had a stack of barely-used yellow legal pads by her desk because she would pick one up anytime she wanted to write something and she was near the supply closet! They all ended up in a black hole in her office.
• Easy access to a trash can. It sounds silly, but having a trash can close to you can make it easy to create trash; throwing away paper, pens, packaging from vending machine food, microwave meals, and mail.
• Not evolving. Are you asking to create waste by demanding that your clients send you checks or sign hard copies of retainer agreements? Do you send closing letters and other non-court correspondence to clients via snail mail? What kind of practice management tools are you using? A giant desk calendar? All these could be signs of not evolving in your practice, and thus leading to more clutter and waste that can be easily avoided.

Solutions to these challenges and some other tips to be less wasteful and more mindful will be offered during the program “GreeningYour Practice,” at 9:45 a.m. on Thursday, May 12^th during the Joint Conference!