Meyling Ly Ortiz | Here are a few questions to consider asking when you get your first assignment. (Or any assignment!)

Mark C. Palmer | "Can I continue to properly serve a client who may have diminished capacity? What if he continues to decline?" Ask the Experts at 2Civlity.org.

"How much capital should I have in my firm?” It’s a question I hear frequently from lawyers and business owners. It seems like a simple question, but the answer is rarely simple. The level of capital you need depends on your practice, and how quickly you can convert your services or inventory into cash. A grocery store, for example, generates cash every day the doors are open — but a law firm might not get paid for 60 days or longer after delivering a service. So the capital requirements for these businesses will be considerably different.

Jay Harrington | If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. This simple maxim may sound trite, but it's essential to improving your marketing and business development.

Mark C. Palmer | Benefits of client portals include improved 1) security, 2) communications, 3) payments and 4) marketability.

Imagine this scenario: Your client is about to be deposed in a case with significant damages at stake. Knowing what hangs in the balance, you spend hours preparing the client. This involves an extensive review of the likely areas of inquiry, followed by a mock deposition in which you ask the kind of questions, both in tone and content, that are likely to be asked at the actual deposition. The client answers your questions concisely and clearly. You walk away from the meeting feeling confident that he will perform well when he has to answer questions for real the next day. The client appears for his deposition and begins to answer the questions. His responses are not only rambling and inconsistent, but he also volunteers facts that severely damage the case.

Using multiple programs while executing a given task is nothing new. That's why I, along with legions of computer users, use multiple monitors when we work. Consider these advantages of doing so.

So, you’ve decided to leave your firm. One of the first questions is whether — and when — you can tell clients, your firm, colleagues and staff.

Learn to deal with your own anger and that of the people around you.

Do your presentations suffer from "hanging fragmentitis"? When you hear yourself starting sentences over, help yourself bring that sentence to an end by doing three things.