Microsoft’s idea of attractive headings doesn’t suit most legal documents. But you can permanently change your default heading styles so you can start every new document with headings in the right typeface and font color. One of the first things that legal users of Word want to change is the default font settings, particularly for headings. After all, legal documents don’t generally have big blue text.

Online lawyer directories offer an array of benefits, for both marketing your practice and SEO. These include the ability to participate in community discussions, position your firm as an authority in a specific practice area, obtain reviews and earn links. If your goal is to gain more leads from search and the internet, the directories named here offer some of the best opportunities to help you get there.

If you’re wondering whether blogging helps with your search engine results, it does. Here’s what happened when I started blogging about a new law. My goal was to break this law down into the elements that businesses need to know about and that relate to their operations.

How much should you actually save for retirement? Everyone from your brother-in-law to your favorite (or least favorite) financial pundit has a view. But, are those opinions even remotely accurate? As opposed to pontificating about retirement rules of thumb, let’s use financial planning software and look at an example. Before we dive in, note that […]

Ask the Experts at 2Civility.org: "I have heard of email tracking software, often used by marketing companies to monitor email traffic. While this would be helpful in my practice at times, are there ethics considerations to tracking email? I mean, I send some important documents through the U.S. mail with a return-receipt requested, so is this similar with email?"

Search engine optimization, or SEO, can be a swirl of should-do, could-do, would-do-if-there-was-time … suddenly it’s an alphabet soup and not much has changed for your website. But an SEO workshop earlier this year at LMA Tech West struck me as particularly helpful and actionable. As the panel discussed trends in search, questions flew left and right. Amid the high energy, I realized that legal marketers are hungry for some quick, relatively easy-to-accomplish SEO tips to start optimizing their website and content.

Many lawyers are intimidated by technology issues, including how to keep their data safe. Yet in a world where large cities can be held up by ransomware attacks and hackers can shut down multinational law firms, we are far past the point where solo and small firm lawyers can ignore cybersecurity issues. Plus, under the ABA Model Rules, we have a duty to maintain technological competence. And it is hard to see how operating with no security in place can possibly meet this burden. One simple step every solo and small firm lawyer can take is the use of a VPN.

At first glance, communications may seem like a bygone problem for lawyers today. Haven’t smartphones made it easier to stay in constant contact with your clients? It’s true that smartphones offer you more mobility and instant, real-time communication via text messaging, but those tools alone are relatively one-dimensional. They may foster contact, but they limit comprehensive engagement, as they lack the abilities to easily archive and organize client calls and voicemail messages or handle faxes.

As you edit your work product, pay special attention to instances where a stronger verb could replace a verb and its direct object. Besides being less persuasive, weak verbs plus explanatory words lengthen your writing [not, “make it longer”].

Let me tell you a story about a brainy brief writer. She was smart, hardworking and loved practicing law. But she had few clients of her own. This made her beholden to others at her firm. Over the years, she came to believe she could never be a rainmaker. Then one day, the brief writer had enough. She left and started her own firm. Suddenly responsible for her own fate, she let go of the belief that she could not attract clients and embraced the idea that different people do it in different ways. And she soared. That brainy brief writer with no clients was me. If I can do it, you can do it. Here are five steps to get you started.