You are here: Home / Archives for Law Office Management

11 Little Secrets For Running Your Law Office

April 12, 2010 By

Law Office Management 11 Secrets

Last week, Chris Penn gave us his 11 Little Secrets to staying happy, healthy, productive and sane.  A bunch of bloggers have added their 11 cents into the mix, and I’m feeling inspired to jump into the fray.

I don’t have 11 little secrets to being healthy because … well, I’m not a health guy.

I can’t tell you about sanity because … well, some would say I border on insanity.

But I thought it would be fun to contribute in my own little way, which led me back to the old idea of, “write what you know.” So here are my 11 little law office management secrets to help you have a better day.

  1. Listen before speaking. Our staffers are the ones on the front line in the office, and they see stuff we don’t.  They know exactly what the client is worried about, what the judge’s clerk wants, and why the postage machine isn’t working.  Listen to what’s on their minds before you tell them what to do – or what they’ve done wrong.
  2. Check your fear at the door. We come to the practice of law – and our notions of running a law firm – with a set of preconceived notions.  People who work in the office can have amazing ideas about how to run the law firm better, more efficiently, more effectively.  If you’re willing to stash the fear of change and give something new a try, you may find that it works out well for you.  And if it doesn’t, you can always change again.
  3. Never stop learning. You are NOT the smartest lawyer in the world.  Nor, for that matter, are you the dumbest.  But if you don’t take the time to actively learn, you’re going to end up one of those dinosaurs who continues to use a typewriter and carbon paper.
  4. Recognize greatness. Every once in awhile, you’ll hire someone who is truly great.  Someone who cares about clients deeply, who constantly works to make the office a better place, and who wants nothing more than the see the firm succeed.  Always keep looking for that person, and never let them go.
  5. Hire slowly, fire quickly. Most lawyers hire new employees who have some defined skills.  Someone who can type fast, who has a good speaking voice, and who knows Microsoft Windows (or whatever software package makes you feel comfortable).  You should be hiring for someone who cares, who communicates well, and who can connect with your office and client base.  Everything else can be taught.  Take the time to not only interview, but also to learn about this person you’re thinking of inviting into your family.On the flip site, remember that if someone doesn’t fit with your business goals then you need to get rid of them immediately.  It’s good for your law firm, it’s good for your clients, and it’s good for the employee.  Don’t fire people as a knee-jerk reaction, but don’t hold onto dead weight out of fear or obligation.
  6. Look outside the industry. Lawyers are good with the law, but not so terrific at running a law firm profitably and effectively.  Look to see how other industries operate, and seek to emulate their best practices.  You’ll learn a lot that doesn’t make sense for you, but you’ll also gain some powerful insights and nuggets that will help your firm be better.
  7. Read voraciously. Business books are a dime a dozen, but a good business book will send your brain reeling.  Find biographies of powerful people who shook up their industries and showed the world a new way of doing things.  You’ll expand your horizons and learn new ideas that will help shape your firm going forward.
  8. Ignore platitudes.  You can go online and read a bunch of mamby-pamby stuff, with inspirational quotes and soft ideas.  People will tell you to keep going, to work harder, to be smarter.  Avoid those people and their words because they add nothing of value to your practice.  Instead, surround yourself with people and ideas that make you stronger, smarter, and more efficient.  They won’t get you all the way there, but if someone can help you move halfway that’s going to make things a lot easier for you.
  9. Keep records. How do you know if your law firm is making money or is efficient if you’re not tracking every little thing?  Buy QuickBooks and use the heck out of it.  Install Google Analytics and immerse yourself in the wealth of data it provides.  Have everyone in the office track their time, even if you rely on flat-fee billing.  Use every possible feature of your case management system.
  10. Enforce rules when needed, ignore when needed. Rules help make your law firm run more effectively, and they provide a framework within which to operate.  Rules give staff and clients a sense of safety and predictability.  Enforce them, but only when necessary.  There are going to be times when procedures aren’t followed for a good reason – it’s good for the client, it’s good for the firm, it’s good for the court.  You need to recognize those times, and make mental allowances for them.
  11. Go home. You run a law firm because you want to create a good life for yourself.  If you stay at work all the time, you’re failing on all cylinders.  Go home at the end of the day.  Turn off the lights.  Have dinner with family or friends.  Smile.  Laugh.  It makes you more relaxed, and a better version of yourself.  That makes you stronger tomorrow, and better prepared to run your law firm more effectively.
Photo courtesy of cosmo flash.
Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Hire For Passion

March 17, 2010 By

Passion

The solo and small-firm practitioner decides to start and build a law firm because he or she has a passion for a particular field of law. You have a connection with family law, bankruptcy, criminal law, personal injury … whatever it is, you’re in it for a reason.

The firm you built exists to serve your clients, and to serve them well. To do right by the public and, in turn, to make you money (no, “profit,” is not a dirty word).

When you hire new employees you look for technical expertise of some sort. Good computer skills, perhaps experience in the field. For a receptionist, you look for a good speaking voice.

Technical skills are good, to be sure. But the one thing we as business owners must actively seek is not the ability to use Microsoft Word or Outlook, it’s passion. Passion for what we, as business owners, stand for.

Your potential employees need to have that same fire in their gut that made you open the office in the first place. Be it a drive to do good in the community, to help people get to a better place, or just to make a positive impact in the world. Whatever it is that brought you here, that raw energy should be instilled in your employees before they get the job.

Once hired, it’s your job to focus that passion and guide the employee accordingly, You need to train them to put their passion to use, to give them the tools they need to connect with your clients and provide the service for which your firm has been hired.

You can teach the technical aspects of any field of law – as a judge once told me, this ain’t rocket science. Our paralegals and staffers are trained to use the tools we provide, and the lawyers we hire learn to put their education and training to use for our office.

The one thing you can’t teach, however, is caring. And if someone doesn’t care, their only motivation to get something done is the money. The employee is a clock-watcher, someone counting down the slow hours until the end of the day.

If a client email comes in at the end of the day? If you care and are passionate, you’re going to answer it. If you’re a clock-watcher, you’re out the door and on the bus home.

If a phone call comes in during lunch? If you care and are passionate, you’re going to put down the sandwich and talk with the client. If you’re a clock-watcher, the call goes to voice mail.

How do you interview for passion?

Ask questions that don’t relate to the law. Find out what fires up the interviewee. If you can’t find anything, chances are pretty good there’s not much passion there.

Plug the person’s name into Google. Do they have a ton of Facebook friends? Are they on Twitter? Digg? Do they have a blog about a personal hobby? These are clues as to a person’s passions. Ferret them out to get a better idea of the person behind the resume.

In short, learn as much about the person as possible.  Take your time – this is an important decision, and the one you make will help or haunt you for a long time to come.

We must hire for passion, not technical skills. Our firm deserves it, our clients deserve it.

Photo courtesy of Emily’s mind.
Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Toggl: Track Your Billable Time Easily (And Free!)

February 1, 2010 By

Managing a bankruptcy law office requires the ability to keep track of where time is being spent, by whom, and on which matters. For many bankruptcy lawyers, however, time tracking is costly and difficult. There are a bunch of programs out there to help lawyers track time, but they’re all cumbersome and cost money.

You already know I hate to spend money unless it’s for an awesome reason.

About two years ago I was looking for a simple and quick way to track my time.  I didn’t feel like shelling out a bunch of money for a full-featured case management system (I was using Basecamp at the time for my case management, and it didn’t have a real-time application), and even a program like Time And Chaos seemed like overkill.

All I wanted was something I could click to start and click to stop.  I wanted to get reports showing my progress, and I wanted to be able to print out a PDF for my fee applications.  It had to be free, too.

Too much to ask, I thought.  Then I found Toggl.  And over two years later, it’s better than ever.

Toggl is an online time tracker that tracks the number of billable hours you spend on a client project.  In real-time.

Once you register (for free), create a new project for a new client, and “toggl” the on button. Toggl starts tracking the time spent in real-time, right in the web browser.  You can even download an application to your Mac or PC and the data will automatically sync with the web server. Hit stop when you’re done.

Toggl will put together reports – PDF or CSV – for invoicing your clients.  Beyond that, the system lets you look at your time in graphical format.  How much time you’ve billed each day, week, month, etc.  Which days were most productive, least, and stuff like that.

Bottom line?  It’s awesome.

The application is free for up to 5 timekeepers on your team, and the cost is modest for bigger groups.  So go check it out and see if it suits your needs.

Filed Under: Office Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What Does Google Wave Mean For Lawyers?

October 20, 2009 By

Google Wave For LawyersI’ve been fortunate enough to snag a tough-to-come-by invitation to Google Wave, and have been playing with it for about a week now.  Due to the fact that only a precious few invitations have come from the Wave HQ, my contact with others has been limited.  Still, it has not dulled my interest in this remarkable new platform.

Before diving into the Wave (no pun intended – until now) I want to be clear on something.  Nobody knows what this platform will be, nor the uses that will ultimately shape it.  We can only suspect that Google put a lot of time into trying to come up with some ideas for use, if only because it threw a considerable amount of developer power behind it.

What’s odd is that some pretty high-profile tech and social media folks have effectively written off Wave – Robert Scoble essentially called it worthless.  But what they fail to note is that Wave is merely a platform on which to build interesting tools and use accordingly.  It’s a good idea to bear in mind that platforms such as Twitter started out as one thing and then became what the world wanted.  So, too, with Wave.  It’s there, but it’s up to the world to decide what to do with it.

What Is Google Wave?

The first thing we need to understand is Google Wave itself. Billed by Google as “a personal communication and collaboration tool,” it’s essentially a web-based platform that lets you merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking in a single document – called a “Wave.”

Huh?

OK, think about this for a minute. You send me an email. I respond with a voicemail. You miss my call and shoot me an instant message. We finally get together on Twitter and decide to work on a pleading together (you’re helping me because I’m clearly headed in the wrong direction). Rather than email it to you, we work on it at the same time on the same screen.

None of this is new. Except for one major change.

If we’re using Google Wave, we can do all of this stuff on a single screen and keep our disparate conversations together.

Cool, huh? OK, let’s take it one step beyond (cue the ska music).

We’re working on this pleading and decide to get another set of eyes. You reach out to your colleague and ask for help. Colleague agrees and joins our Wave. In so doing, the colleague gets to see each and every communication we’ve had on the subject because the new addition can scroll through the entire history of the Wave.

No more looking in a million different places to cobble together an understanding of a subject, conversation, etc.

Still confused? Here’s a pretty good video to check out on the subject:

Google Wave For Client Communications

You’ve got a new client who wants to talk about a legal problem.  So you open up a new Wave to get a sense of the issues.  Client shows you some documents, points you to a website for more information, and you realize there’s something going on.  You add one of your staffers and another lawyer to the Wave so they can provide insights.

Once you decide to work on the matter, you give the client the retainer.  Client signs electronically and gives it back to you.

All through Wave.

That night you can’t sleep, so you’re researching the issues.  You pop back into the Wave and put up your findings.  Everyone else is blissfully asleep, but the Wave rolls on in their absence.  When they log back onto the Wave, it will be there for them to comment on, update, add to, and the like.

And once you’re done, you simply save the Wave to your files.  A full electronic record of client communications, right there at your fingertips.

Every time you interact with the client, you update that client’s Wave.

Google Wave As A Possible Boon To Virtual Law Firms

Take the above example and move everyone out of the office.  You’re at home in Texas, the assistant best matched to the issue is in California, and the other lawyer you want to work with is on vacation in Jakarta.  The client is in Chicago.

With Wave, it could be all in one place.  Every communication, interaction, thought, citation, pleading, idea … it’s all limitless.

Your social media outlets, emails, voicemails, notes, wikis, ideas, phone records, podcasts, PDF files … all in one place.  The ultimate collaboration.

It Could Be This, Something Else, Or More.

The truth is, what I’ve outlined above is nothing more than a bunch of guesses about what Google Wave could be – not what it is.  As Mitch Joel said in his insightful post on the subject:

At first glance, if something is new and unique it’s going to immediately cause us to recoil or shrug our shoulders. Nobody wakes up in the morning and wants their existing patterns changed (don’t believe me? try moving the coffeemaker to a different location in your office every morning and let me know how long you live). After the shock and awkwardness of the newness, and as people settle into a more regular routine with their new applications and platforms, that’s when the “a-ha!” moments start to happen.

Before you go drowning Google Wave, give it a moment to really sink it before passing judgement on it. Inevitably, we all wind up back-peddling on those initial reactions as we begin to realize that the reasons we were chastising it are the exact same reasons that make it so innovative, new, different and relevant.

The true test of Google Wave will come not now, not in 6 months, but only after we’ve all had access to it for a little awhile and have figured out how we want to play with it. It took awhile for Gmail to catch on (threaded conversations confused the heck out of a lot of people). Twitter is still a mystery to most lawyers.

One thing’s for sure, though. Google Wave is a game-changer. The way we communication is evolving, and it’s important for all of us to recognize the opportunities that may present themselves with these new platforms. Our task is to investigate the platforms, spend some time thinking about them, and resist the urge to discount them as tools for our law practices.

For some Google Wave basics, check out Lifehacker’s post on the topic.

Filed Under: Office Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Staffing A Bankruptcy Law Practice $1 At A Time

October 20, 2009 By

Managing A Bankruptcy Law Office

Bankruptcy lawyers are currently experiencing a boom in business such as has not been seen in years.  Small practitioners are finding themselves flooded with new work, and new lawyers are entering the field faster than ever before.  The economy is in the toilet, and consumers need help.

To some extent, the main concern is how to get the work done without losing your mind.  The phone rings off the hook, new clients pour in the door (assuming you’re marketing with any degree of effectiveness), and the court calendar fills up fast.

How the heck do you get all the work done and manage the staff effectively?  My answer for the past number of years has been:

The Best Way To Staff A Bankruptcy Practice Is One Dollar At A Time.

What this means is that whenever you’re taking on a new client or task, opening up a new office or hiring a new staffer (real or virtual), your first inquiry needs to be one of how much much it will cost to accomplish the task versus how much money it will make to do so.

This is, after all, a business.  Make money and you live to fight another day.  Break even or lose money, and it’s curtain time.

Turning down a new client or working without that new legal assistant can be tough to do, though.  We bankruptcy lawyers tend to run on a treadmill like little gerbils, always sprinting to catch that next client for fear the phones will go dead next month.

But think of it this way.  If you take on 3 new clients this month above what your staff can reliably handle, you’re going to need to either pay overtime or hire someone new.  That costs more money than the additional income from those three cases.  Maybe you “cheap out” and decide to just work everyone that much harder.  What happens then?  Reduced productivity, sloppier work product, and a downward spiral into the abyss.

One simple way of managing your practice one dollar at a time is to plan ahead whenever possible.  If you see that things are growing by leaps and bounds, take the time to sit down with your existing staff and find out how much more they can reasonably be expected to handle.  If they’re close to the breaking point, start looking for a virtual assistant to take on some of the well-defined tasks while you determine if it’s just a blip or a long-term growth pattern.

If you’re experiencing a long-term growth pattern, watch for a few months to see where it goes.  If you have a virtual assistant who is handling the overflow more cost-effectively than a staff member then “keep on, keepin’ on,” as they say.  But if you can see the tipping point (financially) coming in short order, start looking for an in-house staffer now.

By beginning the search before it’s an emergency, you won’t feel the pressure to hire the first person who crosses your threshold.  Take the time to interview wisely so that you minimize your chances of making a bad hiring decision.

In taking care to keep the costs of personnel in balance, you can keep more dollars in your pocket while maintaining a consistently high quality of work product.

Photo courtesy of pfala.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Filed Under: Law Office Management Tagged With: , ,