TechnoLawyer: Law Office Management

Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 60 articles from the past week worthy of your attention, including our Post of the Week. Here's a sample:

Review: Redact-It by IGC

The Digital Lawyer Crosses the Border

Management Lessons for Law Firms (PDF)

Law Practice Building Idea: Join a Nonprofit Board

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Coming today to TechnoFeature: Invariably, successful leaders all agree on one piece of advice — don't delegate recruiting too far down the organizational chart. The people who work at your firm are your firm. In this TechnoFeature article, Scott Christensen, Director of Information Services at Wildman, Harrold, Allen and Dixon, explains how he leaves no stone unturned when recruiting talent. From efficiently reviewing resumes to asking questions designed to unearth red flags to checking references, Scott has written a veritable handbook you'll want to forward to all the managers at your firm.

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Our flagship newsletter never disappoints thanks to its in-depth reporting by leading legal technology and practice management experts, many of whom have become "household names" in the legal profession. It's in TechnoFeature that you'll find our oft-quoted formal product reviews and accompanying TechnoScore ratings. The TechnoFeature newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 59 articles from the past week worthy of your attention, including our Post of the Week. Here's a sample:

Primping Your PDFs

A Guide to Netbooks for Law Firms

Going It Alone

SMADD (Social Media Attention Deficit Disorder)

This issue also contains links to every article in the September/October 2009 issue of Law Practice and the September 2009 isse of Law Technology News. Don't miss this issue or future issues.

How to Receive BlawgWorld
Our newsletters provide the most comprehensive coverage of legal technology, practice management, and law firm marketing, but not the only coverage. To stay on top of all the noteworthy articles published in blogs and other online publications you could either hire a research assistant or simply subscribe to BlawgWorld. The BlawgWorld newsletter has received rave reviews and is free. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on August 31, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

"May you live in interesting times." Thanks Confucius, we now get it. As we approach a full year of living in a tanked economy, the old rules no longer seem to apply to this new legal world. The ABA Journal recently reported that 39% of 14,000 lawyers polled said they expected layoffs at their firm in 2009. Nearly 20% of the respondents expected to lose their own job. Welcome to the new normal.

How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times

After decades of lawyers calling the shots, everything has changed. But not necessarily for the worse. Open-minded small law firms that welcome change and equate "challenges" with "opportunities" may experience a renaissance of sorts provided they know the answer to this question: How can good lawyers survive bad times?

Hot off the press, the ABA Law Practice Management Section's new book, How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times, is here to help. Co-authored by yours truly, along with noted legal technology and law practice management sages, Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway, the book offers immediately usable and practical tips to help lawyers not just survive, but thrive by leveraging street smarts, positive thinking, decisive action, and creative solutions.

How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times consists of three parts: (1) how to keep your job, find a new one, or start your own firm; (2) how to manage and market your firm in a down economy, and (3) how to practice more efficiently with the help of technology. Below you'll find five excerpts.*

Practice and Financial Management

It's Your Money — Watch for Trouble

Reviewing your internal financial reports regularly is an important part of maintaining the firm's profitability in tough economic times. Monthly reviews of your financial reports may no longer be sufficient. Many firms will be well advised to switch to either weekly or bi-weekly review. You would never allow a client to operate a business without checking their inventory, bank balances and financial statements very regularly. Why would your law firm have any lesser standard?

Renegotiate Everything

We can't stress enough — renegotiate your current contracts. You might be amazed at how eager they are to keep your business. This has worked with credit card companies, security services, telephone providers, furniture stores, and the list goes on and on. There is never any harm in asking. Take a look at the major vendors you're paying on a regular basis. Many of them are well aware that you are now doing comparison shopping and will offer a reduction in rates. Some will be willing to change payment terms to allow you, say, 60 days to pay balances rather than 30. Shave the overhead by negotiating aggressively with vendors.

Business Development and Marketing

Thinking Innovatively Is the Key to Surviving a Bad Economy

Can you create more value for clients? Is alternative billing a partial solution? Can you you, at this time, appeal to different clients? Should you firm structure be changed to deal with economy? What can you do with your overhead? Can you merge for strength? Should you break away from a weak firm? As a solo? As a group? Can you find a global market? Can you practice in another area of law? Do you need to change how you market? The questions are endless — and the answers are not pat — they will vary from lawyer to lawyer. Take some quiet, meditative time to think this through. In our busy lives (well, perhaps somewhat less busy for some these days), it is difficult to think amid the phones, faxes, emails, etc.

Technology in Law Practice

Smart Technology Can Positively Shift the Time Bucket

A basic premise to consider when making any technology expense — whether for a replacement computer, a new laser printer, a shiny new smartphone or a practice management system — should always be whether it positively shifts the "time bucket." What is a time bucket? Simply put, regardless of whether a firm tends to bill by the hour, bills flat fees, does contingent billing, does some other kind of project/"not to exceed" kind of billing, there are only so many potential billable hours in any given day.

Spending Money in a Tight Economy May Seem Irrational at First

The challenge is overcoming the inertia of human nature. When times are tough and discretionary business cash is tight as a drum, who spends money on new technology? Don't those funds go to satisfy more primal needs like wages and rent? This is where lawyers who are both courageous and smart will hold back their instinctive "bunker mentality" and apply the "time bucket" analysis. If the projected return on the technology expense will positively shift the bucket to a higher percentage of billable time, exceeding in a predictable, calculable period of time, the cost of the technology, the expenditure not only makes sense, but is economically necessary. The converse also being true, a purchase that would negatively shift the time bucket should be avoided.

Let Us Know What You Think

These excerpts merely scratch the surface of what you'll find in the 230 pages of How Good Lawyers Survive Bad Times. Priced at $47.95 for Law Practice Management Section members ($79.95 otherwise), my co-authors and I believe you will find it a worthwhile investment. If you read the book, please let us know what you think.

* Excerpts Copyright 2009 ABA Law Practice Management Section, Sharon Nelson, Jim Calloway, and Ross Kodner. All Rights Reserved.

Written by Ross Kodner of MicroLaw.

How to Receive SmallLaw

Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to TechnoFeature: Many litigators consider themselves "project managers" because they constantly juggle deadlines, people, tasks, and documents. But formal project management is a professional, technical discipline that has become indispensable in litigation matters, especially electronic discovery projects. In this TechnoFeature article, eDiscovery consultant and project manager Brett Burney explains what eDiscovery project management entails, and summarizes the latest advice and knowledge from this emerging field.

How to Receive TechnoFeature
Our flagship newsletter never disappoints thanks to its in-depth reporting by leading legal technology and practice management experts, many of whom have become "household names" in the legal profession. It's in TechnoFeature that you'll find our oft-quoted formal product reviews and accompanying TechnoScore ratings. The TechnoFeature newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 51 articles from the past week worthy of your attention, including our Post of the Week. Here's a sample:

Should You Buy the Neat Receipts Scanner?

Virtual Law Firm Offers Affordable Attorneys

From Twitter to Book Deal for Lucky Lawyer

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How to Receive BlawgWorld
Our newsletters provide the most comprehensive coverage of legal technology, practice management, and law firm marketing, but not the only coverage. To stay on top of all the noteworthy articles published in blogs and other online publications you could either hire a research assistant or simply subscribe to BlawgWorld. The BlawgWorld newsletter has received rave reviews and is free. Please subscribe now.

Originally published on August 24, 2009 in our free BigLaw newsletter.

A chilly breeze has blown over the legal profession for the last year. Did I say "chilly breeze"? Make that a hurricane, with gale-force winds. But recent reports indicate that, while the storm is far from over, the winds may have slowed. The hurricane, it seems, is now a tropical storm.

The prospect of a meteorological shift raises countless questions about what large law firms will look like when we emerge from our storm cellars. Will the leveraged business model survive? Is the billable hour dead? And what will become of the famously — or infamously — generous associate salaries?

Salaries Stand Still …

According to the National Association for Legal Career Professionals ("NALP"), its recently released 2009 Associate Salary Survey "reflects what is likely to be the apogee of large firm salaries, and represents the culmination of increases since 2006." In large markets, NALP announced in a press release, the prevailing salary stood at $160,000 — a figure that, two years ago, had been reached only by firms in the New York market. But, NALP warns, "the fact that during the period following April 1, 2009, some large firms were cutting salaries means that the $160,000 figure may not be sustained in many markets."

Indeed, for firms nationwide the "overall median starting salary was $130,000, and ranged from $70,000 in firms of 2-25 lawyers to $135,000 in firms of 501-1,000 lawyers, and $160,000 in firms of more than 1,000 lawyers."

While some in the legal profession (i.e., associates) view pay cuts and freezes as yet another piece of bad news, a degree of salary depression may be just what the doctor ordered. According to some consultants, inflated salaries and the traditional lockstep system lie at the root of the economic problems experienced by large firms this year.

It's All Good (Macroeconomically at Least) …

"What has hampered the legal profession is the competitive constraint on recruiting," says Tim Leishman, who advises law firms on issues such as strategic planning, compensation, and professional development strategy. "When firms are competing for top talent, they don't want to do anything that sets them apart from their competitors. But this kind of thinking leads many firms to follow the market, in terms of starting pay and lockstep increases, when they really shouldn't be offering such high salaries."

"The legal community tends to judge a firm by its salaries," says Leishman. "The top students from law schools tend to apply to the firms with the highest salaries. Regrettably, there is a misconception that if a firm lowers salaries, in-house clients and others will assume that their hires are of lower quality." In response to that perception, Leishman explains, lower-tier firms began offering higher salaries to appear "competitive" and to attract talent, even when doing so was ill-advised.

According to Leishman, "this dynamic made no economic sense for a lot of firms, but they followed it anyway. Of course, it might be the right approach for some firms which, prior to the recession, were highly leveraged and had a lot of business. But many others simply didn't have enough work to sustain their associates. Thus, the firms were paying big market salaries for associates to do a fraction of the billable work generated at a big market firm."

Firms in the second and third tiers, says Leishman, need to be realistic about how many hours their associates can bill, and adjust salaries accordingly. If associates are not "working New York hours" for New York billables, Leishman asserts, the firm needs to reevaluate its pay structure.

But, while stagnating (or declining) salaries may seem like bad news, they may leave firms — and associates — better off in the long run. If a firm is paying its associates too much, Leishman explains, there is no buffer if business slows down. If, however, "salaries are leaner, and reflect a firm's projected business — rather than a somewhat arbitrary market rate — an economic downturn wouldn't necessarily result in widespread layoffs."

In other words, the massive layoffs and lower salaries offer a valuable lesson, and may provide a roadmap for firms in the new, post-Great Recession era.

How to Receive BigLaw
Many large firms have good reputations for their work and bad reputations as places to work. Why? Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, BigLaw goes deep undercover inside some of the country's biggest law firms. But we don't just dish up the dirt. We also mine it for best and worst practices and other nuggets of knowledge. The BigLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to BlawgWorld: Our editorial team has selected and linked to 59 articles from the past week worthy of your attention, including our Post of the Week. Here's a sample:

7 Steps to Smarter Law Firm IT Purchasing

Does Law Suffer the Same Over-Consumption as Health Care?

Post Title Makeover: Good Post Titles Are the New Black

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Originally published on August 17, 2009 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Lawyers are intimately familiar with the need to harness time. Even those who work on a contingency or flat-fee basis know that timesheets and expense records are the lifeblood of the profession. But does billing have to be so prone to error and subject to endless second-guessing? Can we ever have 100% confidence that our bills won't be challenged?

Not as it stands now. Sure, software is available to help tame the billing monster, but choices are limited and none of the major vendors offers a true solution. The most popular tool is an electronic stopwatch of sorts, but if you still enter time manually on a computer or mobile phone then you haven't solved the problem. The only reliable way to truly harness and accurately track the billable hour is to empower our office equipment (fax machine, phone, computer, printer, copier, scanner, smartphone) to become timekeepers.

The Problem

Soon after becoming a lawyer I learned firsthand that billing was not about time so much as it was managing client expectations. Billable time and chronological time often do no relate to one another at all. How else could you explain the fact that a document drafted in 6 hours can generate more fees than a real estate transaction that takes the same amount of time to negotiate and close? It's enough to make you wonder whether there's any point in keeping time records at all. And for those willing to try, a number of barriers exist:

1. It is virtually impossible to track everything you do.
2. Some events are just too short to track at all.
3. Keeping records interrupts your workflow.
4. Records are only as good as your stopwatch.
5. Ensuring the accuracy of records is challenging.
6. Predicting the future follow-up time is difficult.

There is a payoff for keeping good records despite the odds. By the time your firm issues invoices the underlying work is usually a fuzzy memory. If clients want to question their bill or delay payment all they have to do was demand proof that a particular event occurred (or at least that it took as long as the bill says it did). Only a solid set of records can address such questions.

Unfortunately for my first employer, he chose not to invest in defensible timekeeping methods so most of the time he had no way of supporting his invoices. I vowed to do better when it was my turn to run a practice.

The Non-Solution

In 2000 I started my own firm and deployed a system to gather time electronically. At first the results were a revelation. Even with 5 timekeepers (3 lawyers, 2 paralegals), I could issue and collect invoices in a fraction of the time it had taken my former employer and still be confident that they were accurate.

Before long however, it became apparent that the system was only as good as the timekeepers: garbage in meant garbage out. Invoices could still be attacked, and employees could still short-change the office by failing to record time. In fact, the more timekeepers we had the more mistakes, duplicates, and stray entries I had to clean up. Eventually the billing process consumed five days per month and I had to admit that the system was broken. I needed a smarter solution.

Web 2.5 to the Rescue

In 2004 Flickr, Digg, Blogger, and others showed us that Web-based applications could thrive by doing one thing well instead of being all things to all users. As innovative as they were however, such Web 2.0 sites did not address the practical needs of small law firms.

In the last few years however, products like Basecamp, Bill4Time, Caseload, Clio, Rocket Matter, Tempo, and others have developed Web-based applications that apply directly to our practices. What's more, applications such as AirTime-A4P, Chrometa, Element55, RescueTime, MonetaSuite, and WorkTRAKR automatically track activity, eliminating the need for you to enter your time. While you must make sense of all the activity captured and convert it into time entries, you won't have to worry about forgetting any activities or having incomplete records should a client object.

Can this group of next-generation time-capture solutions solve our billing problems? My answer is a definite "maybe." But that's okay because whether the winning application is one of the contenders listed above or just an idea taking form in the mind of a software engineering student at Stanford, we already know enough to know that automatic time capture represents the future of hourly billing. The only question is which product(s) will emerge as the killer app in this category — much as WordPerfect changed legal writing in the 1980s. Until we know, we will all just have to keep billing the old fashioned way.

Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.

How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.

Coming today to Fat Friday: William Shilling responds to a recent TechnoFeature about Macs in a law firm, Robert Maize reviews FileCenter's file deletion failsafe mechanism, George Allen reviews 3M's ergonomic joystick mouse, James Moore reviews the Treo Pro and shares what deterred him from buying a Palm Pre, and James Walsh shares some important information about Timeslips and the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Don't miss this issue.

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