On Sept. 1, 1994, a man named Marc Duke started The Original Pet Drink Co. in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His vision? Provide flavored bottled water for pets, free of the chemicals found in tap water and fortified with essential vitamins and minerals. Two months later, Duke’s company was shipping 175,000 bottles of beef and salmon-flavored Thirsty Dog! and Thirsty Cat! to stores across the country weekly. Business seemed to be booming. And why wouldn’t it be? The company tested the water on 15,000 pets and tweaked the formula about 100 times before arriving at the final product. But today, Thirsty Dog! and Thirsty Cat! are recognized as among the biggest product flops in history.

Jamie Spannhake | Tal Fagin on the importance of leaving your lawyer at work so you can have a better personal life.

Lawyers spend too much time chasing after unpaid invoices. LawPay’s Scheduled Payments feature helps build a predictable, steady cash flow for your firm. Lawyers spend far too much of their valuable time chasing after unpaid invoices instead of working billable hours. Being able to schedule payments in advance provides both you and your clients with […]

Law firms are busy places, and sometimes the smaller operations are even more chaotic than their large firm counterparts. It’s important to keep that behind the scenes, though. Your clients should see only a well-oiled machine — beginning the moment they first make contact with the firm. Often, the first interactions will involve your support staff. Theirs are the first faces a client sees when she walks through the door, the first greetings on the phone, and they are sometimes involved in the actual pre-screening process, too. So, it’s crucial that each of your support team members understands the message you want to send to the public and conveys it when dealing with clients, whether in person, on the phone or by email.

Many lawyers dictate their thoughts into a recording device, then send the recording to an assistant for transcription. This is a great time-saver for the lawyer. But the human transcriptionist today is gradually giving way to computer versions. When I say “gradually,” I mean that digital transcription doesn’t work well in all situations yet. Consider these uses for transcription (they’re listed from easiest to most difficult for computers to understand)

It’s difficult to attend any legal conference these days without hearing about technology and change, but it’s refreshing to discuss these topics with people who actually do the work. Recently, I moderated a panel for an ARK conference, "The New Spectrum of Legal Services," in Chicago. Our focus was the pressures on legal operations and general counsel. Panelists covered technology adoption, partnerships with law firms and information technology departments, plus their future strategic priorities.

Matter Management Checklist. If you took time to pause and write down the activities that take up most of your time during the day what would be at the top of your list? Realistically you are probably dividing your time between billable and non-billable activities every single day. However, your administrative work is probably requiring more of your time than you realize.

James Jones Jr. bumped up against a problem most new lawyers face when he first hung his shingle: where to find clients. That later led to a big idea. After practicing law for a decade, Jones and co-founder Kristina Jones launched Court Buddy in 2015. Their platform uses instant-matching technology to provide a la carte legal services at flat rates to consumers and small businesses. Court Buddy won the 2017 American Bar Association Brown Select Award for Legal Access.

Get to the Point has previously preached that specificity enhances credibility. In fact, I’m working on a cross-stitch with this aphorism to place on the office wall. Using an unsupported superlative flouts this rule.

Blockchains — a sort of digital ledger best known for powering the bitcoin digital currency — have been getting a lot of attention from lawyers for their potential to change how people transact. Specifically, there are a number of software projects aimed at applying blockchains to create self-executing “smart contracts” (or at least trying to). Lawyers often deal with how people transact, so it’s probably a good idea for lawyers to understand blockchains. Understanding blockchains is hard, though, especially when approaching them from a legal standpoint without looking under the hood from a technology standpoint. Here are some of the best resources for understanding blockchains from outside of law.