The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Almost every state bar association ( including yours , by the way)  has adopted a  new comment (inspired by the American Bar Association Model rule)  to Rule 1.1 respecting lawyer competence.   In essence, the comment indicates that a lawyer’s competency  is, in part, based on her familiarity and understanding of technology.  This comment has recently been adopted, but it was probably long overdue.   But, with real life stakes (potential discipline) on the table, the comment to the rule begs the question: How tech competent are you and your law firm?  Do you reach the reasonable level of competency that the comment requires?  If not, it’s time to get up to speed.   If you’ve never paid much attention to your law office technology infrastructure, now is probably the time to start doing so.  If you need to build or rebuild your law firm technology suite, this would be a good time to look into doing so.  As a l...

Quick: What are  the  two things that lawyers do the most ?   If you answered: respond to email and create documents, you’d be right.  Yet, even as lawyers spend more time answering emails than maybe anyone else, they’re still using antiquated methods for managing conversations with clients and colleagues.   So, if you’re looking to get a better handle on your inbox, here are a few tools you can apply:   Apply an email management tools that can automate some of your workflow.   If you’re a Gmail  user,you  already see notifications and tools flowing through that system design to save you time and effort, with respect to automated or  suggested replies ,  nudges  and  priority inbox  options.  But, even if you’re not using built-ins, you could buy into a standalone program, like  SaneBox , that will help you to better organize and manage your email.   Push conversations elsewher...

Quick: What are  the  two things that lawyers do the most ?   If you answered: respond to email and create documents, you’d be right.  Yet, even as lawyers spend more time creating documents (pushing electronic paper) than anyone else, they’re still using antiquated methods for building documents from templates.   Attorneys are very good at creating specific documents for clients from existing templates.  But, when they run through that process, they’re often using antiquated tools, like ‘find and replace’ ,  or making edits by hand.  That’s one of the reasons that legal services are so expensive, is that lawyers’ old school methods make it that way.   The average solo lawyer would pay less than $100 per month for document automation software; and still, most law firms don’t implement  it .  Think, however, about the advantages of doing so.  What if you could finalize an estate planning package in 1/4 of the time.  Imagine t...

Lawyers have always been good at networking because they know what they do like the back of their hands, and they’re good at talking about it.  Other marketing avenues, including online marketing, well . . . not so much.  Law firms often drop advertising without a clear call to action.   Don’t know what a call to action is?  Here’s the only thing you need to know: if you look at a piece of marketing, and you can’t discern what to do next, the n  you’ve failed as a marketer, because there is no ‘call to action’ , no invitation to take the next step .   You can write  Don Draper-level  ad copy; but, if your potential law firms clients don’t know what to do next, you’ve already lost them.  This is especially true of web-based marketing, where it’s not enough to just throw up a phone number.  Instead, you need to create a click-to-call link, or you need to move the potential client into whatever lead funnel you’ve established.   If y...