The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

There’s nothing like daylight savings time to get you to observe how dramatic a small shift in time becomes.  Push back one hour, and all of a sudden it’s instant winter.  People are like, ‘Wow, when did it get so dark out?’  And, hot chocolate sales start to rise.   Saving time as a business owner can have a similar effect on you.  But, instead of greeting the coming of winter, you’ll be saying things like, ‘Wow, I just got home, and it’s not even dark yet!’   For law firms, just like for any other business, change start s  small; and, it’s the same thing when it comes to better managing your productivity.  There are some immediate changes you can make to your law firm that will incur massive incremental value.  So, if you buy a second monitor for your desktop, laptop or tablet, you’re eliminating many of the several seconds you spend opening and closing windows every   day.   Over the course of months and years, that time adds...

Nobody has ever liked waiting.  But, there has never been a point in recorded history where people have liked waiting less.  Cave people, I suppose, never had the benefit of the internet and smartphones.  But, I’m not even talking about the Neanderthals; heck, people are far less patient than they were even ten years ago, since things like Netflix have pumped urgency addition up on steroids.  No one wants to wait for anything anymore, because no one has to wait for anything anymore.  Except for hiring law firms. Despite the fact that consumers are simultaneously less patient and have more choices than ever before, attorneys still make those consumers wait.  They call; you wait to call them back.  They want engagement; you give them online forms.  They text; you ignore their texts.  Converting leads starts at first contact; and, if you’re not the first contact back, you’ve already lost the game.  Everything you do in marketi...

You know what’s really scary?   Losing your law firm data.   Even so, many law firms don’t utilize effective data backups. Every business needs to backup its electronic data; but, the imperative is even more important for law firms, which have ethical and fiduciary duties tied to their client relationships.   And, although it’s now 2018, many law firms subsist on remarkably thin data backup systems.   This is true even though law firm data loss is not an extremely rare or impossible occurrence.   Fires, floods, natural and manmade disasters -- those all still wipe out law firm data.   So, if you’re concentrating on securing your law firm data backup, there’s no time like the present to get a handle on it. This is a three-step method to making sure your data is recoverable: (1) Set up a physical data backup.   It doesn’t really matter what it is (some firms still use backup tapes) -- just have something in place.   (If you’re p...