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GLSA Joint Spring Meeting Preview

Raise your hand if you went to law school to help people. Everyone, right?

So who helps you? GLSA and the GPSolo Division of the ABA are here to help.  The 2017 Joint Spring Meeting (#17JSM) will meet many of your needs.

Start with 13 hours of CLE applied for; that’s almost a full year of CLE for one very low price.

Topics? We have everything from an Adobe Acrobat Masters class to Zombies and their tax issues. There are sessions on ERISA, Traffic Ticket niche practices, and Water Wars. Attendees can learn about practice development and get in-depth tips on KPI, from our own Mary Juetten. All in all, there are 29 opportunities for learning and 3 tracks for lawyers, trustees and a client development/technology focused track.

The planning committee has put together fun sessions with Peter Blauner (writer for “Law and Order” and “Blue Bloods”), and Kelly Minkin (World Poker Tour) that are guaranteed to bring something new, creative and outside the box to your practice, whether you’re a lawyer, administrator or trustee.

On the tech side we have sessions on free legal research resources, eDiscovery processes and procedures, responding to a data breach, leveraging technology for law office efficiency, and balancing ethical considerations with emerging technologies.

Practice development, everyone needs more clients, or at least a good pipeline – we have sessions on building a seven figure law firm, cross-marketing your publications and your practice, how to be successful as a legal plan attorney, and how to build a lead generating system for your firm.

For the trustees, we have ERISA sessions, both the two part session with Kathy Hesse and some practical applications, there is a session on fiduciary duties for trustees, and understanding credit scores.

You want innovation?  How about crowdfunding litigation? How about embracing the law robot revolution and SciFi visions of the legal future?

The speakers are all engaging, entertaining and educational.  We also have two wellness sessions to help you pursue the ever-elusive work/life balance.

The setting will be the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. This spectacular resort has four top-ranked restaurants, indoor and outdoor meeting facilities, spa and fitness programs at Well & Being Spa, six pools,  two 18-hole championship golf courses. The Welcome Reception will be at the brand new Copper Canyon venue – bring your cowboy hats and dust off your dancing shoes. So if you can’t find something fun to do, you aren’t trying!

So you have networking – over 200 lawyers, administrators and trustees and over a dozen exhibitors; you have substantive CLE; you have recreation; you have technology tips; you have great food and shopping in Scottsdale. There truly is something for everyone, so what are you waiting for? Register today.

Don’t take my word for it, come see for yourself.  Or listen to Part I of the Conference Preview.

How Happy Are Your Clients?

I bet you know what your AVVO rating is. And, you probably know your Yelp star rating. But, do you know what you Net Promoter Score (NPS) is? Even if you’re not familiar with the term, I’m pretty sure you’ve been asked to rate someone using the system.

Have you ever been asked, “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend?”

That’s it! That business is asking for you to contribute to their NPS.

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “One Number You Need to Grow.”

NPS is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. People who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called “Promoters,” and are considered likely to be repeat customers or tell others about how great your service is. People who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled “Detractors,” and they are less likely to repeat or promote your service and may even speak negatively. A 7 or 8 response would be provided by a so-called “Passive,” and their behavior falls between Promoters and Detractors but they are unlikely to impact your reputation either way.

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score towards 0.

The beauty of NPS is in its simplicity. How likely are you to recommend the business to a friend? Ingeniously, this business metric is what we use as a rule of thumb in real life. When you’re looking for a real estate agent or a hair stylist or a wedding planner or a [fill-in-the-blank], who do you ask? Your friends and family usually for recommendations of who they’ve used.

Lawyers are no different. In fact, if you ask most lawyers how they get clients, they’ll probably tell you it’s by word of mouth. According to Mary Juetten, author of Small Law Firm KPIs How to Measure Your Way to Greater Profits, “Net Promoter Score is a hugely valuable tool for lawyers, especially because they continue to be dependent on referrals and their reputations.” How better to promote your law firm than to harness this word of mouth by surveying it and putting it in quantitative terms you can use to improve your law practice?

A simple tool for incorporating NPS into your daily routine is Delighted. You can manually send surveys by uploading a list of emails or sending them one at a time. Or, you can use Delighted’s  API and integrate it automatically with your workflow, for example, when you send out closing letters. Fred Reichheld himself is an advisor to Delighted and has said: “When I first saw the tool, I knew instantly that it could change the way companies measure and manage customer happiness.” Other options for measuring NPS are Promoter.io and Wootric, but whatever option you choose, just do it.  

According to management guru Peter Drucker, “What gets measured, gets improved.”  

How happy are your clients?

 

 

 

 

 

Scottsdale Conference Preview

Listen to the teleconference below:

How to Include Charity in Your Business with Kerry Lavelle

Listen to the teleconference here:

How to Avoid Professional Burnout with Billie Tarascio

Listen to the teleconference below:

GLSA Legal Plans International Perspectives Teleconference

Listen to the teleconference below:

GLSA 2017 Member Benefits

Listen to the teleconference below:

How to Get More Out of Your Time in the Office with Deep Work

The hullabaloo of modern life: it’s inescapable.

Devices beep, buzz, chirp and ring. Just this morning you may have overheard or said yourself: “My inbox is flooded,” “Have you checked your twitter feed?,” “Did you see what she posted on Facebook?,” “Oh those pictures you posted on Instagram are adorable!,” “Have you tried out that bot on Messenger?” And you may have texted, “Don’t forget to pick up some milk! 😘 ”

We’re all inundated.

In a world that’s moving at breakneck speed it seems impossible to step off the digital train, but to do our best work it’s absolutely necessary. Alan Watts, British philosopher, writer and speaker, once said, “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

So how do we do that and still get things done?

Deep Work

I found the answer in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, a book I picked up at a conference with its own fair share of electronic distractions.

Newport contrasts “deep work” with shallow work:

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much value in the world and are easy to replicate.

If you’re like me, you probably recognize that a lot of what you do throughout the day tends to fall into this second category. Checking emails, completing tasks, following social media – the kind of thing that keeps you busy, but doesn’t really create value.

Here are Newport’s rules to achieve deep work (and by the way I never said the answer I found was easy!):

Rule #1 – Work Deeply

To work deeply, it is helpful to come up with a ritual to put oneself in the right mindset. You may have a different approach than me.

Ask yourself where you’ll work and for how long? This should be a location where you can “turn off” all the distractions. Preferably this is not the same place where you usually work because it’s too easy to fall into bad habits. Think of the place where you’ll want to do deep work as a sanctuary. Maybe an unused meeting room or a kitchen table (if you work from home)?

How you’ll work once you start to work? You must establish rules for your ritual, such as a ban on Internet use and metrics of accomplishment (e.g., words per 30 minute interval, 2 problems solved in one hour, etc.)

How you’ll support your work? This may be as simple as ensuring you have a cup of coffee before you begin, to light exercise or walking à la Steve Jobs to clear the mind.

Rule #2 – Embrace Boredom

What? This rule sounds crazy you might say. Why on Earth would I want to embrace boredom? Because many creative and wonderful ideas occur to the reflective mind that is not distracted by entertaining diversions. The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained. To train this skill, you must learn to become comfortable with boredom, through meditation or memorization skills, for example.

Rule #3 – Quit Social Media

Quitting social media is a tall order you say? Newport cites the Internet sabbatical of digital media consultant Baratunde Thurston who said (after shunning social media and email for 25 days), “I was less stressed about not knowing new things; I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on the Internet.”

Newport is not a hard liner on this point. Rather, he advocates a middle ground approach: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a social network tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts (such as irrational distraction).

Rule #4 – Drain the Shallows

Eliminate as much shallow work as possible. Newport points to an experiment by Basecamp, a software company, in reducing its work week to 4 work days. The idea was not to force employees to work 40 hours in 4 days rather than 5. Rather, the idea was that by reducing the work hours, it would force employees to focus on the important stuff during the time they did have to work instead of waste time on water cooler talk, or checking Facebook, or unproductive meetings. The experiment was a success and a win-win: employees get more free time and the company gets higher quality work from workers during the time they are in the office.

How would you implement these rules in your practice?