I love productivity tools.  I don’t know which I have more of on my iPhone: productivity tools or camera apps.  Recently, I was asked by a reporter to summarize some of my best tips. So for you, dear readers, in advance of any publication, are the six tips that anyone can use.  They don’t require you to have particular hardware and where I recommend software, I am careful to provide a choice.

1.  Use just one system for your todo’s.  Whether it’s post-it notes or Toodledo on the iPhone and Web (my own favorite), be true to your system.  If you step outside of your system, you are far more likely to lose key actions you need to take.  Knowing that, you’re also likely to lose piece of mind.

2. Use a time segmentation method (like the Pomodoro method) to handle lengthy tasks.  These methods have you work, using a timer, for a specific period of time, say, 10 minutes, then take a break for a specific period of time, say, 2 minutes.  All you need is a kitchen timer and determination to eat that elephant one bite at a time.

3. Set your top priorities (I limit myself to 7) each day before you begin work; or even the night before.  Keep going back to those priorities throughout the day so that you don’t get side-tracked down less-important rabbit holes.

4. Stay on top of delegated tasks daily.  The more confidence you have that you know what you’ve delegated to whom and when you’ll get it back, the more you’ll be able to comfortably delegate.  Its a virtuous cycle that can take hours of work off of your desk every day.

5. If you’re afraid to use the delete key, use the archive key with your email inbox.  Whatever it takes, get that non-essential mail out of there.  I think having an empty inbox is a worthy goal but even if you can’t get to that, you can delete all the spam, newsletters and other non-essentials.

6. Use a todo management system that fits your style and desired level of complexity.  If it’s too complex, you won’t use it.  If it’s too simple, you’ll be frustrated by its limitations every day.  For those who like a full-featured todo system, I recommend www.toodledo.com or www.nozbe.com.  For those who want something simple, a stack of post it notes and a board to rearrange them on can be perfect.

What are your top productivity tips?

Recently, I wrote a blog on How to Create Your Law Firm Procedures Manual in One Week. In that article, I mentioned that an internal wiki – in paticular, one provided as part of the Google Apps suite would be pretty great for hosting your procedures manual. I invited responses if you’d like a blog on the topic of Google Apps and its wiki functionality, and you said “we would!” (well, some of you did).

Before I begin, let me recommend that if you are a reader and you’d like more info on Google Apps than this blog post provides, you buy Google Apps: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner. Its 711 pages should have what you’re looking for.

Google Apps is a robust suite of office applications that can actually compete with Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation software, email and the ability to work off-line. But if you upgrade for $50 per year per user, it also includes 25 GB of storage space for email and Google Sites.

Within Google Sites is the ability to create your own internal wiki. This internal wiki is a collaborative site that everyone in your firm – and no one outside your firm – can access and make changes to. (You can allow access to outside users – like your mentor – if you have administrator rights so I recommend keeping those to yourself and giving your team members “collaborator” rights.) You can also make Google Sites work with third-party applications (see related articles below).

You can make sure you and others are aware of the change by ensuring that everyone “subscribes” to get an email when a page they use changes.

Google Apps is hosted in Google’s “cloud” of servers all over the world, and protected by full-time security teams. All of your Google Apps run using SSL (secure socket layer) protection, just like your bank. That makes the Apps run a little slower but you probably won’t notice the difference. Just always be sure you use a Google address that starts with https:// not http://.

One last note. Google Apps integrates with another cloud application: Advologix. Advologix is a practice management system for attorneys built on the Salesforce.com platform. I use it in my practice and reviewed it earlier.

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• Google Sites now works with third-party applications (venturebeat.com)

You can even house them on an internal wiki (such as the inexpensive one provided as part of Google Apps at $50/year per user) where they can be constantly improved.

Procedures do not turn people into machines. On the contrary, by taking people’s minds and memories off of the rote parts of their jobs, procedures free people up to be more creative and generous with your clients.

Best practice is to have a procedure for everything the client experiences inside your firm and related to your firm. Realistically, you have things to do besides write procedures. So here is Strategic Attorney Mentoring’s Quick Start Guide to Creating Your Firm’s Procedures Manual in One Work Week!

Monday: Have your key assistant interview your team to identify ten (10) of the most frequent sequences of actions that have an impact on your clients or potential clients. Exclude all legal-technical sequences such as “drafting an estate plan.” We are looking for primarily administrative sequences like “scheduling a consultation and sending out our packet for prospective clients” or “delivering the binder to the client.”

Tuesday: Have each set of people responsible for each of the ten action sequences type up a list of what they do in great detail, as if giving instructions to a new employee. The contents of any mailings should be listed by item. Sample scripts should be included for any likely client conversations.

Wednesday: Your key assistant reviews all ten descriptions to identify and fill in any missing detail by interviewing the appropriate person.

Thursday: You review the ten descriptions and clearly indicate changes you would like to see. Since your proposed changes will be perceived as criticism, be sure to introduce them only after praising the team’s hard work in pulling the procedures together and their fine job in serving your clients. Pass copies of your changes around to everyone involved for review and discussion.

Friday: Open your door for team members to criticize your proposed changes or to propose further changes of their own. Warn your team that you will be closing your door at 2. At 2pm, work with your key assistant to type up the “final” version of your initial processes. Make sure that on Monday morning, when they get in, all members of your team can log in to their own fresh clean “final” version of your online procedures manual.  Or, if it’s an “offline” version, have a fresh crisp printout at everyone’s desk.

You can repeat this process as much as you want, even getting into legal-technical procedures by assigning an associate, paralegal, or yourself the role played by the key assistant in fact-gathering and review.

Once your Procedures Manual is in place, it’s much less daunting to add to it or to revise it (which is why an internal wiki can be so cool). If you want to see a Strategic Attorney blog post on the subject of Google Apps and internal company wikis, be sure to let me know by leaving a comment below.

If you follow the Monday to Friday steps, I’d love to interview you about your experience for a future blog so, please, let me know!

1. Solidify your referral relationships and ask directly for referrals. We’re all in this together and if you tell your referral relationships that you are looking to them to provide you with a referral in the next week, you are more likely to get a referral in the next week. Of course, it’s crucial that you first review (in your own mind) what value you provide to them and then share that with them in a friendly way. Some kinds of value you might be providing include: third-party credibility for their recommendations; making them look well-connected
in the community by giving their clients special treatment or discounts; on-going education through newsletters or events; referrals back to them; and helping them get more business from the clients they send to you.

2. Build your online social network. If you’re not already on Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, your own regularly updated website and a blog that you write for at least once a week, it’s time for you to catch up. It won’t take as long as you fear and you will get clients from it. This can be a DIY project but it will help a lot if you have a Strategic Attorney Mentor pointing you in the right direction.  In fact, if you don’t DIY, your Strategic Attorney Mentor can point you in a different but right-for-you direction.  Most Strategic Attorney clients fall somewhere in the middle and need, for example, a web designer, but can create and write for their own twitter account.

3. Contact your clients regularly. Hold seminars or other events for them. Send them newsletters. Call them. Send them birthday cards. Clients can be your number one source of referrals if you really focus your energies on them. Bring them into all that social networking you’re doing.

4. Leave the office. Meet people. Expand your referral base. Go on the offensive. Get out there and make friends! Hold seminars! Talk to the local Rotary club! Whatever you do, don’t just sit there!  If you really want to reach out to your clients inexpensively, hold a webinar! Your mentor can tell you how.

5. Expand your expertise. You’re an attorney who does probate work but you’ve never done a conservatorship. You can do it if you do the proper research! There’s a first time for everything. Broaden your base of business.

6. If you are really desperate for business, try cold-calling people in other professions who can refer business to you. No, nobody wants to do it but it works. Not as well as some other methods. But it tends to be a fairly quick fix and you control how many hours you put into it so you control how many clients you get out of it.

If you already have a database of advisors, start with warm-calling: calling on professional advisors with whom you already have some relationship — no matter how slight — to ask for referrals. Be sure to tell them how you can help them even though you don’t have a lot of referrals to send their way in reciprocity.

7. If you find that many of your leads come from the internet, spend some time on your webpage and blog. My webpage is still the number one online marketing tool so it just got
completely updated at www.Wachbrit.com.

Some of these seven tools will work faster than others so you have think like a farmer and don’t put all of your efforts into short-term yields. If you do that, you’ll be stuck on a hamster wheel, always trying to pay this week’s bills with this week’s marketing efforts. If instead you find the time to put some of your efforts into mid-term and long-term yields, you can gradually slow down your short-term efforts and eventually use them just for emergencies.

“Fretzin’s friendly selling techniques are similar to those that Diedre Wachbrit Braverman employs when she networks.  The creator of Strategic Attorney Mentoring calls her approach ‘warm-calling’.

“She says, ‘I call on professional advisors with whom I have some relationship – no matter how slight – to ask for referrals and to tell them how I can help them,” who also credits her website and time spent on social media networks as effective tools behind her company’s success.

Braverman says one of the factors that initially makes selling difficult for services professionals is a certain bias stemming from the idea it can be unprofessional.

“Even those who take a more modern and pragmatic view wrestle with how to ’sell professionally,’ noting that while estate planners may offer a gift certificate to clients, they will never distribute coupons.  ‘Professionals have a fine line to walk.’

But she encourages her clients to recognize that the consumer looks to them for answers, and they expect ‘professionalism and expertise’.”

We can’t rely on old-school methods of not marketing and branding ourselves but neither does any one of us want to be perceived as a salesperson.  It puts us in a difficult position.  But through education and other approaches, such as helpfulness, we can make the public and other professionals aware of what we do and the skill with which we do it so that they can’t help but want to know more.

You may not need books anymore... but there's a lot you do need.

Whether you are just starting out in law practice or are adding Estate Planning to an existing practice, there are 9 decisions you must make that will affect your practice for years to come:

1. How are you going to draft your documents? Almost all estate planning attorneys use document drafting systems to save time and avoid mistakes. You can pay between $700 and several thousand every year. In general, you get what you pay for but how much power you need depends upon your target market.

2. Who is your target market? If it is low to middle income elderly, you might be able to use a more basic drafting system. If you are targeting high income or high net worth families, you want their financial advisor to look at your documents and tell them, “I’ve never seen such a comprehensive plan before.”. This decision will dictate many of your other choices such on this list.

Your Legal Fees are the lifeblood of your firm.

3. What is your fee structure? Almost all attorneys charge flat fees to create estate plans. I know there’s a firm nearby that charges $1,200 for a basic trust plan for a couple. I charge $4-6,000. We peacefully co-exist because they provide a VERY different service/product for a very different market.

4. How are you going to market your services? The methods are too numerous to mention in this article but it’s important to rely mostly (not necessarily entirely – you want to build skills) on methods you enjoy.

5. What is included in your standard estate plan? Everyone includes a trust, a will, a power of attorney, and a health care directive. Again the list of extras is too long for this space. Maybe if there’s interest, we’ll send an exhaustive list to our Insiders’ list. If you’d like to receive it, email me at diedre@strategicattorney.com and tell me about your interest. If enough people respond, I’ll get right on it.

6. What are you going to offer besides revocable living trust plans? You don’t have to offer anything else but in this economy, you might consider taking on probates, LLCs or special needs planning.

7. What is your revenue and total minimum net income goal for the next twelve months? Your total minimum income is the amount you absolutely need to get by.

8. What Practice Management software are you going to use? A few attorneys get by on Outlook. Some are using Google Apps. There are several desktop and server-based software packages you can buy or you can go with a cloud computing solution that you can access anywhere you have an Internet connection.

9. When are you going to participate in the Strategic Attorney Mentoring Program? The sooner, the better.

• We know what doc assembly software is out there; we’ve tried it!

• We know how different target markets work; we’ve tried those too!

• Our fees have more than quadrupled from when we started so we can help you set fees you can live with but that will allow you to meet your revenue target.

• We’ve tried every marketing method there is and they all work *for the right person.*. We can help you find the methods that will work for you.

• We can help you create a standard estate plan that includes bells and whistles that will appeal to your target market at very little time or expense to you.

• Our work with you on your underlying commitments will help us guide you to ancillary practice areas that can lead to more revenues for you without diluting your focus.

• We work with you to create a revenue projection based on your projected costs, your minimum total income and a target profit margin. Each week, we look at your firm’s financial health.

• We have experience with a variety of practice management systems and can make a recommendation of 2 or 3 for to check out based on your technical skill and interest, your long-term practice vision, your budget, your must-have features, whether you are running windows, mac or both, and everything else we’ve learned about you.

For more information, please contact Diedre Braverman at diedre@strategicattorney.com or (805) 276-1620.

Strategic Attorney Mentoring

Bing is Here and Demands Your Attention

The new search engine by Microsoft, Bing, requires another look at your website to make sure your html formatting is in good shape, you’ve got plenty of text on each page, and you haven’t excluded the Microsoft webcrawler from your site.  Read the first tips for Bing SEO here:  Bing SEO Tips.

Advologix Practice Management SaaS

Our 6-person firm just implemented AdvologixPM.com, a SaAS practice management system, and we are very happy with it. It’s built on the salesforce.com platform which gives me confidence in the company’s stability. The technical support has been beyond superb. The company is still small enough that I can call or email Jonthathan Reed, the Advisory Board Chair, or Paul Duchenes, CEO and Tech Guru anytime and get a same-day or even same-hour response. The AdvologixPM folks even added functionality for JungleDisk when they learned we were using that to store our client files (we’re moving everything to the cloud after our Great Server Disaster – but that’s the subject of another post).

iPhone App Screenshot

AdvologixPM works with an iPhone Salesforce.com true App so I can see my contacts and calendars, and record my billings anywhere.  (That was an absolute requirement when I was looking at software options.  In fact, it was a deal killer with Clio and Rocket Matters because Clio only offers a mobile-optimized browser interface and I don’t have the patience for that. I’m not sure that Rocket Matters offers even that much.)

We have only begun to get into the functionality, but besides the integration with JungleDisk (and any WebDAV platforms), it fully integrates with Google Apps (an email transition we made for only $9 per user with an Advologix recommended service-provider that we were very pleased with) and other email platforms.  Full integration with Outlook is due out in the next few weeks.  Data migration was a snap with a combination Advologix tools and the help of a third-party tech who knew our old software (Time Matters) and our new Advologix software.

Within the software itself, we have full billing support including trust accounting.  AdvologixPM has everything you could want for your contacts and matters and task functionality that I plan to customize to look a little more GTD, like nozbe.com.  Not that you have to customize it to use it.  It works fine just as it is.  It also has the ability to template docs and record and use “best practices” — sequences of records that fit cases or operations in your office.  But the best practices together with a Google Apps office manual wiki and you’ve got a powerful back office process machine.

The Wachbrit Braverman PC Team right around the time we switched to AdvologixPM

The software is very customizable, which means that some of my staff thinks it’s hard to learn.  That’s because they haven’t taken advantage of the substantial 2-minute video training library, which I love.  But my team loved being able to change the tabs that appear at the top of the program and to default to everyone’s favorite calendar view. It has had a few bugs, but every single bug we’ve found has been fixed overnight or faster.

Perhaps most importantly for SaAS, it’s speedy enough on a 1.5 internet connection, though I may upgrade that connection to make it even speedier because there are slight page load pauses.  Because it’s Software as a Service, there is no such thing as a synchronization issue.  Any computer, anywhere, always has the very latest version of all the data.  The beauty of the cloud… I love it.

Because licenses are per user, I recommend it to any sized firm.  It’s perfectly scalable.

Finally, let me tell you what it doesn’t have that we used to get from Time Matters.  It doesn’t freeze.  It doesn’t lose its connection to the server and suddenly go blank.  Its email integration is with a variety of external programs so it’s not your choice of Microsoft or the-worst-email-software-ever (Time Matters’ native email interface).  It doesn’t force you to use PCs (we’re switching to Macs).  Its customization doesn’t require you to guess whether what you want to change is at the “user” “workstation” or “program” level.  We don’t have to call an expensive technician or pay the developer a support fee when we have a problem, question or want to customize something.  We don’t have to drop thousands of dollars on maintaining a server and occasional updates that are never much better than what we had before.

My Happy Face

And the next time that damned server goes down, taking three backup systems with it, I’m going to smile, knowing my client data is safe in the cloud and on an uncomplicated local backup drive. (Advologix will email you a weekly link to download all of your data so that you can back it up locally.)