How can you learn confidence? Sometimes you have to figure out how to act like you're confident until you feel it. Here's one way to go about it.

Big firm or small, there's a single question the partners ask about young associates: "Is she a keeper?" And, while legal skills certainly count, we all know what ultimately swings the pendulum on that question: "Can she bring in clients?" Help has arrived — just in time for fall — in the form of our newly updated e-zine, packed with practical advice on business development for new lawyers.

I am a lawyer and a parent. I also try to have a social life, volunteer, take care of my pets, and run a household (not completely by myself, thank goodness). Recently, a friend — also a lawyer and parent — and I were discussing the challenges of work-life balance, or work-life integration. Here's one question we tossed around: Is it “better” to compartmentalize work and the rest of life or to integrate them? For example, if I am at the pool with my daughter in the afternoon and a client calls, do I answer and handle the issue at that moment? Or, do I send it to voicemail and deal with it later?

Earlier this year, I shared statistics about threats of violence made against attorneys. Stephen Kelson, a shareholder at Christensen & Jensen PC in Salt Lake City, focuses on commercial litigation, personal injury and mediation, but he has also studied violence against legal professionals and prevention for over a decade. He was gracious to answer some follow-up questions on lawyer safety, based on results from his 26 statewide surveys.

Effective marketing is an ongoing journey, especially because the whole landscape of online marketing is always in flux. Your law practice changes over time, and changes at Google, Facebook and other big sites affect your strategy, too. Even online user behavior is changing at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with. Carving out success in this kind of shifting environment often feels like a gargantuan task, but the challenges can be overcome. You just need to be sure that your firm has a plan in place to adapt to the changes.

Jeff Bezos has many powerful mantras for his business, but this is one of my favorites: It's always "Day 1" at Amazon. What he means is that Amazon will never stop being a startup. It’s a message that he drilled down on in a recent letter to shareholders (written from a building he works in named “Day 1”), in which he wrote: "Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."

Email is the global de facto communication standard. Business use of email continues to grow. Email is also a hybrid form of communication — a written form used conversationally. This hybrid nature, coupled with habits developed early in its use, results in email being both the boon and the bane of the modern work world. It is the boon because we can communicate globally, 24 hours a day. It is the bane because everyone else can too! Consider these suggestions to make email part of a more productive day.

The Super Marketing Conference in Boston, a collaboration between MassLOMAP, the ABA Law Practice Division and Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, assembled expert speakers from around the country to provide practical, hands-on advice to solo and small law firms. Five themes emerged. As you move forward with your marketing plans, consider how you can turn these themes into action steps.

You're in a small firm with one or more baby boomer senior partners, and they’ve just made you an offer of partnership. Congratulations. Maybe. Before you accept, there are lots of questions you should ask. Here are just a few, starting with the critical question: Is there a written partnership agreement?

In my last column, I discussed how you can relocate to another state without sitting for another bar exam. One question that naturally stems from that discussion is what to do if you make a mistake in your relocation, and you fail to do something required by your new state’s bar. Receiving a letter from the state bar questioning your fitness to practice, or whether you have followed all the rules permitting you to practice, induces panic. Here is how to handle it.