Law Practice Matters

Starting Out Solo

2009-07-14T18:24:49Z

I am working on starting a pilot program at the North Carolina Bar Association. It's called Starting Out Solo and is based on a group by the same name that started up in Massachusetts (trademark hawks can relax, I have permission to reuse the name). we're hoping to get up and running in the next couple of months.

The Massachusetts Starting Out Solo was begun by a lawyer named Audrey Heidt. It is a working group of solo practitioners who went straight from law school into solo practice (or pretty close to it) -- a situation that I am seeing a lot more of in North Carolina these days. The group members get together every six weeks or so for an evening meeting. Each meeting focuses on some facet of starting and running a solo practice. The group members take turns setting the agenda and running the meeting, and everyone contributes to the knowledge base. No one is set up as the lone guru instructing from the mountain top; instead, everyone shares his or her best ideas.

I'm excited about this program. It is going to be free (though membership in the NCBA and our GP, Small Firm, Solo section is a prerequisite) and limited to twelve attorneys in the pilot. While I hope (and expect) the group to provide a lot of value to the participants, I am particularly hopeful that it will help combat the isolation that a lot of lawyers experience in solo practice. It's hard enough starting and running a solo practice when you are experienced in your craft; add to that the additional degree of difficulty that comes with having to learn to be a lawyer at the same time you are learning to run a business and the task really becomes Herculean.

I hope that our Starting Out Solo, like Audrey's original group, helps makes the transition into solo practice a little less stressful and a lot more fun for the participants. I'll let you know how it goes.

Lawyers Continue Moving to LinkedIn... Faster

2009-06-17T19:43:35Z

Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network.

If you are already using LinkedIn, you'll recognize that message right away. You're also in good company.

Since he first blogged about it in June 2008, Steve Matthews of the Law Firm Web Strategy Blog has kept tabs on how many lawyers are creating profiles at LinkedIn. The growth rate has been impressive throughout and the most recent quarter is no exception. Steve cites that there are 840,000 people in the law practice industry with profiles on LinkedIn as of June 2009.

That is a growth rate of 49% in the most recent quarter, up from 39% the quarter before.

There are a lot of good reasons to create a LinkedIn profile: it helps your search engine visibility, it's free, and it affords users access to lots of vibrant groups, discussion boards and communities. More important than any of these, though, is that it is a low-stress and nearly painless way to begin the process of networking. (Or, re-begin, as is the case for so many of us.) No cold calling, no awkward conversations, no feeling slimy for hitting up contacts for business. In about 10 minutes per week from the comfort of your own home or office you can build and curate a decent LinkedIn profile.

Go on ahead and give it a try. If you like, I'll be your first contact.

I'd like to add you to my professional network.

iGoogle Showcase for Lawyers

2009-06-05T11:00:57Z

If you've found your way to this blog, either through Twitter, RSS feed or by navigating, there's a good chance you are already using a web-based tool that I really like: the custom start page.

In my onoging and so far fruitless attempt to wrangle some kind of royalty out of the "don't be evil (except in China)" folks at Google by relentlessly shilling for their products, I use iGoogle as my start page of choice, but NetVibes and Pageflakes have a lot to recommend them, too.

(Sorry for lashing out, Google, please don't turn the internets off.)

If you haven't had a chance to evaluate and choose a custom start page yet, CNET Australia ran a good article called Start-page Smackdown. It's written in Australian though, so you may need the Google Translate tool to understand it.

As I said, I use iGoogle as my browser homepage mostly because I am already using most of Google's other tools as well and they all play very nicely together. If you're interested in learning a little more about iGoogle, read this article by Jim Calloway and Catherine Sanders Reach and if you'd like the survey course of other Google tools lawyers might like read this article by Jared Correia.

Yesterday evening as I was logging on to my homepage I noticed a little note that said, "New: Introducing the iGoogle Showcase" which, it turns out, showcases the iGoogle preferences of a whole bunch of interesting, smart people. And Ashton Kutcher. Ok, that may be unfair. It's really only a few interesting, smart people.

It's pretty interesting to see the widgets that, say, Donald Trump uses. Never pictured the Donald for a funny cat photo guy... You can page through the widgets that these assorted famous people use and snag a few new ones for yourself. If you simply must have every single widget that Keith Urban uses, you can also add the iGoogle pages wholesale as a tab on your own iGoogle.

Here are some of the interesting things I discovered:

Al Gore has a widget featuring Jon Stewart quotes, which I guess is a little Chicken Soup for the Snark Lover's Soul.
Deepak Chopra's top widget is.... [drumroll] the Deepak Chopra Blog! Top post at the Chopra Blog: how to cultivate humility in 3 easy steps.
Ryan Seacrest's page has nothing on it but a sign that says "You Must Be At Least This Tall To Have an iGoogle Showcase."

Okay, so a lot of the showcased sites are self-congratulatory and inane. But the idea of sharing and showcasing the iGoogle widgets we all love is a good one.

Here is a screen cap of my iGoogle start page:

As you can see, on my Home tab I use:

Gmail
Google Reader
Google Docs
Google Voice
Google Latitude
Date & Time
Weather

On my News tab I have:

Google News
Google Finance Portfolios
E.J Dionne's column (RSS feed, not a widget)
David Broder's column (RSS feed, not a widget)
Maureen Dowd's column (RSS feed, not a widget)
David Brooks' column (RSS feed, not a widget)
Roger Ebert's movie reviews (RSS feed, not a widget)

The somewhat embarrassing revelation that I lump Roger Ebert's movie reviews in with my "News" tab and prefer the "Misted Forest" theme probably reveals more about me than I might like.

But enough about me, what I would love to know is what widgets do you use and really like? If you have something interesting to share, please leave it in the comments section below. See if we can go all hive mind on this and drum up a good list of iGoogle widgets for lawyers.

Or if that's too much work, we can all just go see what widgets Rachael Ray likes.

5 Tips on How to Effectively Manage Virtual Employees

2009-06-03T11:00:40Z

In the classic business book, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters coined a phrase for a great management strategy: management by wandering around, or MBWA. Peters wrote that if a leader really wanted to know what was going on in her organization, she was best served by getting out of her office and talking to her employees face to face. MBWA would help her stay connected to her employees and get the unvarnished truth of how the business is performing in nearly real time.

In Search of Excellence was written more than 25 years ago, though, and while much of the wisdom in it remains relevant, there have been changes in the way firms are structured that make MBWA impractical. High speed internet, nearly free long distance phone calls and easy remote access have contributed to the rise of a new breed of virtual legal professional, whether attorney, paralegal or legal assistant. These virtual employees are just like any other employees of the firm except they work some or all of the time someplace other than the law firm offices.

Thanks to the march of technology, there are relatively few functions in a law firm that can not be efficiently farmed out to virtual employees:

-virtual intake assistants can answer incoming calls and route them via VoIP lines anywhere in the firm

-virtual paralegals can work with scanned documents and pdf creation software to create digital trial notebooks and exhibits for court

-virtual attorneys can draft documents, negotiate with opposing attorneys, and counsel clients from anywhere they have access to a high speed internet connection

This virtualization has been a boon to law firms, clients, and legal professionals who by choice or circumstance live far from the economic centers that create the majority of available legal work. It has, however, also created a potential management vacuum in the firms using virtual employees. Law firms tend to use fewer formal management structures than other businesses of comparable size, and their leaders often rely on informal, ad hoc, directive sessions to guide and manage employees. Leaving aside the issue of whether these typical law firm management techniques are good business practices, the increasing virtualization of the legal workforce renders these techniques much harder - if not impossible - to use.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it), for most law firms, utilizing virtual employees continues to make sound business sense. Virtualization widens and deepens the pool of available talent, drives down the cost of talent acquisition reduces overhead costs. In economic downturns, these advantages alone make virtual employees worth considering.

If using virtual employees is a sensible and efficient business practice, but typical law firm management practice is ill-equipped to effectively lead and manage virtual employees, what is a lawyer to do?

Here are five tips on how to effectively manage virtual employees:

1. Use Video Chat

There is no substitute for in-person, face-to-face communication. It's the reason most sales people still travel to customer sites to make a sale. Something undefined and essential occurs (or at least can occur) when people are face to face that digital media has yet to duplicate.

However, digital communication has come pretty far in that direction. In particular, video and audio chat provides a relatively strong stand-in for face to face communication. It makes sense: with email, the people communicating are separated by time, voice, sight and proximity; with chat software, they are separated by voice, sight and proximity; with phone, they are separated only by sight and proximity; with video and audio chat they are separated only by proximity. It’s as close as you can get to being in the same room.

With many laptop computers featuring built-in webcams and with services like Skype or Apple's iChat offering free audio and video chat, the only other ingredient needed is high speed internet, which most law firms and virtual employees already have, anyway. If you need to manage teams of virtual employees working together on the same project, video conferencing offers the same benefits as video chat for multiple participants. There are many vendors and products in this space, ranging from free and simple to very expensive and elaborate.

If you haven't already used video chat to connect with your virtual employees, you will be amazed by how much more immediate it feels than a phone call.

2. Weekly One-on-One Meetings

Part of not being able to wander around to your virtual employees desks means that the interactions and conversations that occur organically with on-site employees must be planned for and scheduled. A great way to do this is to hold standing, weekly one-on-one meetings with your virtual employees. (Actually, you should have these meetings with your on-site employees, too, but that is getting outside the scope of this article.)

Schedule the meetings for an hour in the same day and time slot each week and convey to your employee (and remind yourself) that these meetings are an "A" priority. The agenda for each meeting should always follow the same pattern: check in on the status of open projects; new issues that the employee want to discuss; and new issues that you want to discuss. Make sure that your agenda items go last so that you don't consistently run short of time to discuss the items on your employee's agenda. The purpose of these meetings is to hear about the projects your virtual employee is working on and to communicate with him about any other issues important enough for him to raise.

If you are managing multiple people these one-on-one meetings can comprise a significant time commitment each week - a commitment that lawyers often feel too stretched to honor. The bottom line is that using virtual employees is a tool for running your law firm, in the same way your car is a tool for transportation, and tools require maintenance. If you go too long without changing the oil in your car, you will suffer the inevitable expensive and time consuming consequence of a blown engine, which is why most car owners bother to change the oil in their car. Not because they like the waiting room at Jiffy Lube.

Managing virtual employees is the same: if you do not perform regular maintenance (in this case, weekly one-on-one meetings) you will suffer the inevitable expensive and time consuming consequence of turnover and diminished performance.

3. Invite Virtual Employees to Firm Events

Depending on how geographically distant your virtual employees are, another way to help keep them connected to you and your law firm is by including them in firm events. When a casual firm outing to lunch or happy hour spontaneously generates, it is very easy to overlook the employees who are not sitting in the immediate vicinity, even though they may work from a home office only 30 minutes away.

Over time continually failing to include virtual employees to these informal get-togethers contributes to a feeling by everyone in the firm that virtual team members are somehow less a part of the office than the people who physically show up. Employees who feel less a part of the team often respond by behaving as less than part of the team and in short order the small sin of omission of not inviting them to lunch becomes a firestorm of undesirable work behaviors.

Even if your virtual employees are too far away to include in informal outings, take pains to invite them to events at the firm at least quarterly. If you don't already have quarterly events, this is a great opportunity to start the excellent practice of holding a day-long, all-hands on deck meetings each quarter. Invite all of your employees, virtual and on-site, spend the day reviewing performance and planning ahead, and cap the meeting off with a party or social event.

4. Daily Check In Meetings

I know, you started rolling your eyes when you read the part about hourly meetings each week; you began writhing in your chair when I suggested you have a day long meeting each quarter; now the suggestion of daily meetings is too much to bear.

I understand. I don't like meetings either. I would rather do almost anything than sit in meetings. Here's the thing, though: once you decide to hire your first employee, you have decided to change your job description to include "manager." Being a manager means managing. Managing means interacting with the people who report to you. It's that simple.

The good news is that your daily meeting with your virtual employees should be a lightning fast one. Just a quick check in to make sure everyone is on the same page for the most important things for the firm to get done that day. Any prolonged discussions that arise out of the daily meeting should be taken "off-line" and dealt with in the weekly one-on-one, or sooner if the matter is vital. If it takes longer than five minutes to do these daily meetings, you're doing them wrong.

Since these daily meetings are so brief, it is okay to hold them only over the phone as a time-saver. They should be set at the same time each day and ideally, at the very beginning of the work day before the first client arrives or the first calendar call at court.

5. Manage By Numbers

The previous four tips have all involved interacting with your virtual employees more closely to help you and they stay well connected. This last tip is different; the yin to all that relationship building yang is for you to manage by the numbers.

Each of your employees should have certain measurements, or metrics, of their performance that allow you to measure how productive they are. The metrics will vary from position to position, firm to firm, and practice area to practice area. The traditional metrics that most attorneys have drummed into our skulls are hours billed, hours collected, and the resulting realization rate.

If these are the right metrics for your virtual employees, great. If not, you are going to have to decide what activities or results can be measured that provide the best dashboard for monitoring the performance of your staff. In the beginning, it can be very challenging to find metrics that are mission critical, quantifiable and easily tracked. You may begin with some stutter steps of metrics that are too hard to collect, too hard to measure, or just too random. Some examples of metrics are performance on client satisfaction surveys, time to successfully close small transactions, and percentage of initial consultations which turn into paying clients. The key is to find and use the right metrics for your firm and your employees.

Finding the right metrics for each of your virtual employees is an exercise that is well worth your time. Once you have them, the metrics provide a concrete, objective performance assessment which will provide a great counterpart to all of the subjective, relationship-oriented management you have been doing. The real power of these metrics is that when you come to a point with a virtual employee where you are uncertain of his value to your firm (say you have a virtual attorney who is really great at writing agreements and negotiating, but an unsettlingly high percentage of his clients hate working with him); your metrics will provide a clear, unflinching look at the ways in which he is providing value to your firm. Or not.

Think of metrics as flying a plane. In good weather, pilots can operate the aircraft by looking out the windows, a process called visual flight rules. In heavy fog though, looking out the window yields no helpful information. In these situations pilots have to operate their planes using only their instruments, a process called instrument flight rules. If you are not qualified to fly under instrument flight rules, you can't fly in bad weather.

Your metrics are the instrument flight rules for managing your virtual employees. When you are really unsure of how to proceed with managing an employee, without good metrics you won't know which way is up.

Conclusion

Virtual employees can be a great addition to a firm's workplace, but they require different handling than the faces you see every day. The lawyers who master the skills to make virtual employees efficient and happy members of the team, though, will have a distinct advantage in their own, ongoing search for excellence.

3 Ways to Create an Inexpensive and Professional-Looking Law Firm Website

2009-06-01T11:00:37Z

I don't think it is wildly controversial to say that if you are in private law practice in 2009 you need a web presence. More to the point, you need to cultivate a web presence. That presence does not need to rival the Sistine Chapel for beauty, but it does need to be professional-looking enough to not scare away potential clients.

(In point of fact, you probably already have a web presence. Google your name and see what comes up. If you're not happy with the results, check out the recent article I wrote on Free and Easy Search Engine Visibility for Lawyers.)

There was a time when a law firm could afford not to have a web presence, but that time has passed. Google is the way potential clients research your firm, find your contact information, and locate directions to your office. To be invisible (or embarrassingly unprofessional) on a Google search undermines your credibility and ultimately makes it harder for you to find and keep a desirable client base. (Desirable, in this case, meaning "willing and able to pay your bills and unlikely to drive you totally insane.")

I know the minute I say you need a professional-looking website the image that flashes in your head is a taxi meter spinning wildly with the costs of hiring and using professional web developers. It doesn't have to be that way, though. There are lots of resources available to build an inexpensive but professional-looking site that does not require Bill Gates-esque coding skills or more hours than you put in trying to figure out what happened in the latest Lost episode. (Seriously, Lost, wrap up a story line once in a while before you start yet another new infuriating Dharma riddle.)

Here are my top 3:

1. Do It Yourself Using SquareSpace

My tool of choice, and the one that I use for this blog, is SquareSpace. SquareSpace is a combination hosting service and website building/blogging tool. It breaks everything down into drag and drop modules, so putting together your website is a little like building a Lego tower - but not nearly as bad as this Lego tower. I put this blog together in a couple of hours and I tweak it (in addition to writing the content) once every few weeks for a few minutes. That's it. My wife writes a baking blog using SquareSpace and she had it up and running in about the same amount of time.

Now, before you write this off and conclude that I am some inveterate do-it-yourselfer, believe me when I tell you nothing could be farther from the truth. My wife likes to say that I fix all the problems around our ramshackle mid-century modern home using only two tools: a checkbook and a cell phone. She's mean sometimes.

This is the third iteration of Law Practice Matters, by the way. It began life as a free, hosted blog on Wordpress.com and then morphed into a professionally designed website, to the tune of about $5,000. I moved it to SquareSpace a couple of months ago and I now pay $14 per month for their "Pro" account, though the prices go as little as $8 per month to start. I do all of the writing and design/building (which really overstates it - think legos) of the site myself. Nobody is likely to confuse it with a site designed by a highly-skilled web-designer, but it looks professional enough that it doesn't alienate my core audience of solo and small firm lawyers.

I had a great conversation with Lee Rosen, the blogger behind Divorce Discourse, on this topic that we recorded in the podcast, Building a Website for Under $1,000. If you have a few minutes, give it a listen.

2. Host Your Own Wordpress Blog

Wordpress is an open source blogging software that makes it cheap and relatively easy to build and host your own blog. All you need are a domain and a hosting account. I use GoDaddy for the former and used to use BlueHost for the latter, before I moved to SquareSpace. Oh, and while there are free themes (themes are essentially add-ons to the Wordpress software that change the way your website/blog looks) available, you'll make your life much easier if you purchase a theme like Thesis, which is widely regarded as one of the best ones available. Divorce Discourse is built using Thesis on a hosted Wordpress theme.

The upside of this approach is that it is extremely cost effective and very nearly infinitely customizable. The downside is that - in order to make your site look good - it requires a little more willingness to get your hands dirty under the hood of your website. Not serious coding work but more, say, than I'm interested in putting in.

The Inspired Solo ran a good article titled The High Cost of "Pretty": Why You Don't Need a $2,500 Blog Design. I agree with her assessment (which is basically that the web design industry promotes the inaccurate idea that your website needs to be beautiful) and she also has built her own site. It's worth checking out.

She is clear though, that she learned how to do some basic coding to make her site look good and add in some of the functionality that it has. I think that is wonderful, and I experimented with Thesis for a while, but it just required a little more from me than I was willing to give. Basically, the more I have to learn acronyms like CSS and HTML the more it feels like I have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

If, however, you are into playing around with your website and tweaking it to get it to look the way you want, I have no reservations at all about this method of building a site.

3. If You Must Hire Someone, Hire Smart

Some lawyers just can't bear the thought of even the small amount of effort required to make a SquareSpace site look good, and Wordpress seems even more difficult. For them, there is no palatable alternative to hiring someone to build their website. If this sounds like you, then at least be smart in the way you hire a web designer.

(Personal cautionary tale about to ensue.)

When I built my expensive website, I had a bias for going to a local web designer. I chose a designer in my hometown, and he and his firm did a really great job. My website was beautiful - it still gets all kinds of accolades in the web design community and I routinely get people asking to buy the theme from me even years later - but it cost a fortune at a time when I had to watch every penny. I was starting a solo law practice management consulting company and I hated to spend that kind of dough on a website, but I just didn't know what else to do.

If I were hiring a designer over again, I would probably forego going local (as much as I value buying local to support sustainable agriculture) and instead would use an auction site like Elance. Elance is a bit like eBay, but instead of bidding on products, you bid on services provided by freelance professionals, like web designers. You post a job that you want done and the global freelancers who sell their work on Elance bid on the right to do your project. You can see their portfolios, what kind of feedback they have received from other customers, and their average hourly rate. It drives down the cost of the services (you will be blown away by the low cost of some of the bids that come in from around the world!) and opens the talent pool literally to the entire planet. I'd guess that you could get a professionally-designed website that looks good for a few hundred dollars.

So, there you have it. 3 ways to create an inexpensive and professional-looking law firm website.

Take a deep breath. The meter just stopped running.

Twitter "Thanks for Following" Messages: What Not to Do

2009-05-29T11:00:05Z

One of the often touted benefits of Twittering to support your law practice is that it can be a great way to demonstrate expertise. You write smart things and link to smart resources about your subject area and eventually people start to think of you as a smart person with smart thoughts; in other words, an expert.

There is a dark side, though. You can focus so hard on demonstrating your own expertise that you come off as a boor.

Recently, a restaurant near where I live started following me on Twitter. I thought it was cool that they are on Twitter talking about their restaurant and using the platform to reach out locally, so I followed them back. This restaurant has been around for a few years and I have never eaten there; with my ongoing embargo against ever cooking anything or eating anything remotely healthy, that's saying something.

Shortly after I started following this restaurant on Twitter, I received this message: "thanks for following us. Stay tuned as we teach you all there is to know about Italian fusion cooking."

Mmm, no thanks.

I was really off put by the whole "let me teach you everything you need to know..." presumptuous vibe. Leaving aside that I don't know what Italian fusion cooking is and that I don't care one bit to find out, it's just obnoxious to assume that someone who follows you on Twitter has given you license to be some weird spaghetti svengali. This message would have had a whole different feel if it read, "thanks for following us. We're really into Italian food and look forward to hearing what you're into."

If Twitter is a conversation, then this message was a pretty bad way to start talking. Imagine yourself talking with people at a party when a new person walks and up joins the conversation by saying, "let me teach you all there is to know about..." You're going to immediately start figuring out how to down your drink, check your watch or fake a heart attack to get out of there.

In other words, what use is it to demonstrate expertise if you are so annoying nobody wants to hear about it?

Later the same day, I received another Twitter "thanks for following" message, this time from a lawyer I just started following. It was simple and straightforward and explained what he is interested in a nice, professional way. I've attached a screen shot below because it's a good example of how simple a thank you note can be when done right.

Simple and straight to the point. An e-elevator pitch dressed up as a Twitter thank you message. A great way to introduce himself at the Twitter cocktail party.

Using Twitter to demonstrate expertise is good. Behaving in a way that your followers will continue to care about your Tweets is essential.

How to Reduce Your A/R to Zero in 120 Days

2009-05-27T14:34:19Z

Would you stiff this guy if you owed him money?

There is a great scene in The Dark Knight when the Joker makes his first extended appearance before an assembled gathering of Gotham's organized crime figures. He offers to rid the cabal of their arch-enemy, Batman. When the hoodlums ask if it's so easy to get rid of Batman why hasn't he already done it, the Joker replies, "if you're good at something, never do it for free."

While it is admittedly disconcerting that I draw law practice management inspiration from movie villains, there is a lesson here for lawyers: be exactly like the Joker. No, wait, that doesn't sound right.

The lesson is: don't work for free.

In my job I get to meet with lots of dedicated, talented lawyers working in a variety of practice areas, firm sizes, and geographic locations. With astounding regularity, these smart, hard-working lawyers have accounts receivables ranging anywhere from "enough to care about it" to "these dead beats better start paying me fast." These lawyers have done strong, creditable work in representing their clients and yet somehow have closed a file in the red.

It's understandable.

Billing is not most lawyers' favorite part of practicing law - it's no fun asking clients for money. Most lawyers would rather hone their craft than pore over financial details like trust account balances. Yet, paying insufficient attention to billing in private law practice is like trying to sail a boat without hauling in the anchor. At least I think it's like that. I really don't know anything about sailing boats. Whatever it is, it's not good.

But I digress.

Ideally, when a case closes you want have a little bit of unearned money in your trust account to return to the client. Few things in law practice buy you as much good will as returning money to a client and telling them you were able to finish their case under budget. It doesn't cost you anything but a little planning and most clients will be delighted to get a check back from their lawyer instead of always sending money in the other direction. Failing that, the next best thing is to finish a case at the same time the last dollar in the trust account from that client has been earned.

All of which brings us to Project A/R Zero.

Project A/R Zero is a challenge to whittle your accounts receivable down to zero and maintain that. Not some time in the undefined future, not when the economic picture gets better, now. Right now. Depending on how, umm, robust your A/R is, this might sound like an impossible task, but it's not only possible, it is essential to running an efficient practice while not running yourself ragged at the same time.

Practicing law can be a rewarding profession and running a law firm can be an engrossing and satisfying way to make a living. These things are not so rewarding, engrossing and satisfying, though, that they ought to be done for free. It really is this simple: if you are not going to be paid for your work, don't work. Go read a book or hang out with your family or just sit and relax. Any of these things will be infinitely better for your long term law practice than working for clients who are not paying you.

A common justification is that failing to collect A/R is a service to clients, particularly in a down economy. I'm all for public service and charity, but uncollected revenues are not the same as pro bono. Clients who can pay for your services but for whatever reason do not value them enough to do so are not the same as clients who can not afford to pay for your services. The latter is worthy of your pro bono efforts; the former is worthy of promptly becoming an ex-client.

So, assuming you are now convinced that achieving A/R Zero is important and the right thing to do, hHere are the steps to get you there in 120 days:

Establish a written collection strategy for your current A/R. I would suggest
- send a letter when the fee is due
- send a follow up letter and courtesy call 30 days out
- send a follow up letter and courtesy call 60 days out
- send a stronger follow up letter and courtesy call 90 days out
- close the file 120 days out
Establish a dashboard (think of a "low fuel" indicator light on your car's dashboard) to alert you when trust account funds need to be replenished -- BEFORE the funds run to zero.
Replenish trust account funds when your dashboard indicates that funds are running low in a given case.
Before hearings and other lengthy litigation events, replenish with 50% more than you think you need.
Stop working on files until trust account funds have been replenished; if the client delays and the file is in litigation with hearings or other sizable events pending, file a motion to withdraw.
Bill in pre-paid, fixed fees whenever possible.

Follow these steps and in 120 days your case load will be lighter, your A/R will be zero, you will be receiving payment for every hour of client work you do and you will have more free time.

You might even have enough time to rent The Dark Knight.

Free and Easy Search Engine Visibility for Lawyers through LinkedIn

2009-05-15T21:16:35Z

What happens when you google your name? What shows up?

For a lot of lawyers, the answer to that question is that a random series of links appears in the top of the search results: 10k race times and court dockets, school boards and bar association committees. It's not a disaster, but it also isn't very helpful if you are trying to build a law practice. It's inescapable: a hugely significant portion of your online identity depends on what search results appear when someone types your name in Google.

A lot of search engine optimization experts, like Steve Matthews of Stem Legal, get paid big bucks to help lawyers and law firms effectively manage their visibility in Google searches. But what do you do if you don't have the financial bandwidth to pay a search engine expert?

Ground zero for a lawyer on search engine visibility is to have a professional presence highly visible when her name is searched in Google, and that presence really needs to be at or near the top of the results. If you're not on the first page of results, you may as well be invisible. Sure it would be nice if your firm is visible when potential clients search on terms that involve your geography and practice area (such as Raleigh NC real estate attorney). After all, that's how most of us use Google -- we define the generic thing we are looking for and then sort through the possibilities.

For a lot of lawyers whose practices are sustained largely through referrals, though, it is less critical to be highly visible in a search engine search. Once a referral has been given your name he is less likely to care whether you show up in a search for "Raleigh NC real estate attorney" and more likely to Google search you by name. It's during those searches that it is helpful to have a highly visible search result of something you would like potential clients to see.

There are a lot of different ways to make that happen, but one free and easy ones is to maintain well curated profiles on LinkedIn and Google profiles.

LinkedIn, the professionally-oriented social networking community, makes it free and easy to create and maintain a profile. Once you create a profile, it automatically creates a public profile that is visible in search engines even to people who do not have LinkedIn accounts. The public profile (for an example, here is mine) is a stripped down version of your more robust profile that other LinkedIn users can see. It features your basic headline, current job, recent work history and education.

You can, of course, choose how much of this information you put into LinkedIn in the first place. So if you don't want your potential clients to know you spent your summers during law school as a rodeo clown, you can just leave that out. The public profile is basically a bare bones online resume.

Is this as good a solution as having a great professional website? No.

Does it solve all of your online marketing problems? No.

Is it better than having a random and desultory set of facts about you appear when your name is searched? Yes.

Is the price right? Definitely.

Gotta go Google search my name.

Capitalizing a New Law Practice

2009-05-14T18:39:52Z

Not long ago I wrote an article on How Much Money Do You Really Need to Start a Law Practice.

Due to the positive response the article received, I expanded it and it is featured in this month's Law Practice Today. Check it out.

Goldilocks and Three Strategies for Marketing a Law Firm

2009-05-12T23:44:14Z

"At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge."

Goldilocks, as we lawyers all well know, is a story of a blonde juvenile delinquent who, after breaking and entering, eating all of the food, and destroying certain articles of personal property (to wit, a chair), proceeds to sleep off her porridge-bender in the owner's (to wit, an exceedingly well-dressed family of bears, see above) bed.

Leaving aside the troubling topic of the moral of this felonious fairy tale - eat little trespassing vandals quickly before they can escape, I assume - the 3 choices that Goldilocks was confronted with at each turn put me in mind of another 3 choices that lawyers are confronted with: strategies for marketing a law firm.

I know, if fairy tales make you think of law practice management, it is probably a diagnosable mental illness.

I'm not referring to the ever-expanding roster of business development tactics (cultivating referral sources, placing advertising, blogging, etc) a lawyer might employ to market her practice, but rather the big picture strategies that undergird them. There are only 3 strategies that lawyers can employ, fundamentally, and they represent a sliding scale of marketing sophistication and efficacy.

1. It's all about ME.

The first strategy is the "it's all about ME" strategy. Unfortunately, this strategy is in fairly wide-use among lawyers, as any cursory review of the Yellow Pages (assuming that someone, somewhere still has a hard copy of that increasingly useless waste of paper) will reveal. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyer advertisements span the pages, almost inevitably featuring the headline "Smith & Jones" and "Joe Blow, Attorney at Law." The firm name is in the biggest font and is most clearly displayed.

Not to unduly pick on the Yellow Pages ads, because lots of law firms websites feature the same strategy. I regularly encounter law firm websites where the most fully developed page is the "About Me" page. Ditto efforts at social networking (here's a good article on the topic from Chris Brogan descriptively titled "Shut the Hell Up You Self-Promoting Turd" - no burying the lede with him), face-to-face networking, and pretty much any other business development undertaking; there are always people around employing the "it's all about ME" strategy. Their easy to spot because they are always, always, always talking about themselves.

It's tempting to assume that an attorney who plasters his name on everything he can find is an egomaniac who cares more about ego-gratification than successfully marketing his law practice. I don't agree. In most cases, the it's all about ME approach is employed because the attorney just doesn't know any better. He's out of ideas.

Sidebar: It reminds me of the old Seinfeld bit when Jerry riffs that the reason men typically use such hackneyed pickup lines is that they are simply out of ideas:

Jerry: I swear, I have absolutely no idea what women are thinking. I don't get it, okay? I… I… I admit, I, I'm not getting the signals. I am not getting it! Women, they're so subtle, their little… everything they do is subtle. Men are not subtle, we are obvious. Women know what men want, men know what men want, what do we want? We want women, that's it! It's the only thing we know for sure, it really is. We want women. How do we get them? Oh, we don't know 'bout that, we don't know. The next step after that we have no idea. This is why you see men honking car-horns, yelling from construction sites. These are the best ideas we've had so far. The car-horn honk, is that a beauty? Have you seen men doing this? What is this? The man is in the car, the woman walks by the front of the car, he honks. E-eeehh, eehhh, eehhh! This man is out of ideas. How does it…? E-e-e-eeeehhhh! "I don't think she likes me." The amazing thing is, that we still get women, don't we? Men, I mean, men are with women. You see men with women. How are men getting women, many people wonder. Let me tell you a little bit about our organization. Wherever women are, we have a man working on the situation right now. Now, he may not be our best man, okay, we have a lot of areas to cover, but someone from our staff is on the scene. That's why, I think, men get frustrated, when we see women reading articles, like "Where to meet men?" We're here, we are everywhere. We're honking our horns to serve you better.

On a semi-related note, I watch too much television.

2. It's all about X.

The second strategy for marketing a law practice is a quantum leap over the first. Rather than prattling on about the highlights of our biographies, "it's all about X" (where X equals your particularl practice area) features marketing that centers around the display of expertise in a practice area.

Most of the lawyers and law firms that have started blogging as a marketing tactic (a tactic that I heartily endorse, by the way) fall into this camp. Their blogs tend to be practice area-oriented, providing news, insight and commentary in their field. Blogs are not the only tactic lawyers use for the it's all about X strategy; speaking at CLE, giving free trainings to clients and potential clients, writing articles published in other media than the web (there are still some other media, right?) are all different ways lawyers use this strategy.

Some great things happen when a lawyer shifts from it's all about ME to it's all about X law; she displays expertise without having to read her resume to anyone who will listen; she increases her visibility in the world of people who care about X, enhancing her reputation; and perhaps most valuably, she starts to look like a scholar of her practice area instead of a used car salesman trying desperately to attract clients by plastering her face on the side of a city bus.

Whereas it's all about ME marketing tends to dim an attorney's reputation among his colleagues at bar, it's all about X tends to do the opposite.

3. It's all about YOU.

The third and most sophisticated marketing strategy a lawyer can employ is "it's all about YOU" (where you equals the lawyer's clients and potential clients). This represents another quantum leap.

It's all about YOU concerns itself first, last and entirely with the client and potential clients of the firm and their needs. Lawyers using this strategy (and there seem to be fairly few) choose the tactics and craft the content so that it solves the problems and gives the clients and potential clients the tools they need to solve their problems.

On the surface, the it's all about YOU strategy can look a lot like the it's all about X strategy. It frequently includes tactics such as blogging, teaching seminars and speaking to groups, just like in the it's all about X strategy. The difference is that it's all about YOU is concerned less with making contributions to a practice area and more concerned with how the clients and potential clients can use the information to improve their lives.

The thing about this strategy is that it is very hard to get right. If you have been stuck in it's all about ME marketing and want to move to the next level, it is pretty straightforward. It may be challenging to do well, but mastering the tactics and strategy is not complicated. It is both more difficult and more productive to go from it's all about X to it's all about YOU. The key needed to make that leap is to understand your clients and potential clients better than they understand themselves. If you don't understand what they need, it's impossible to give it to them.

In practice, it is the difference between blogging about things that are interesting to you personally and things that will be interesting and useful to your clients. You may find dissecting some novel, arcane piece of dicta in an appellate decision to be a fascinating academic exercise, but it may be something that will only affect 0.5% of your clients. The rest of your clients might be more interested in a checklist of things they need to do before a house closing or divorce.

I struggle with this myself with this blog. I could (and some might say, do) write endlessly about Twitter and social networking, because I find that stuff personally interesting. At the end of the day, though, I want this blog to be about helping lawyers, and particularly solos and small firm lawyers, to run their practices more efficiently. And sometimes in law practice, as I recall, an attorney has to do stuff besides Twitter...

Much like Goldilocks, attorneys have a choice of these three strategies for marketing their practices. Take a look at your marketing; which strategy are you using? Are you always talking or writing about yourself? Are you making contributions to your field of expertise? Are you giving clients the things they need?

You'll know you've got it all together when you find yourself exclaiming: "This porridge is just right!"