Self-employed lawyers rely heavily on their ability to propel their businesses forward — more so than lawyers employed by others or partners of large firms. Fail to keep the engines going and your practice will close. Too much propulsion, however, and you might have the opposite problem: a practice thriving beyond your capacity to handle it. Fear of success holds many of us back from fulfilling our true potential in solo and small firm practice.

Basically, Google is the internet these days. Nobody says, “Go search this on the internet.” They say, “Google it.” Google's goal is to deliver to the searcher — you, me and your potential client — the most relevant content as quickly as possible. And now searchers can get just about all the information they want about you and your business without even clicking over to your website. In fact, today, 34 percent of searches made on Google get no clicks whatsoever.

Figuring out what to write about on my blogs is a challenge I face every week, especially with our firm's patent blog. (I practice intellectual property, but not patent law.) I worry that my posts won’t be helpful or interesting enough to be worth reading, and therefore won’t do anything to help the law firm or my reputation. At Content Marketing World, I always come away with inspiration and practical information to apply to my marketing. At this year's conference, I was reminded that my audience is always telling me what content they’re looking for — if I take the time to look.

Last week in New Orleans, I had the privilege of attending my first Clio Cloud Conference. Though I could talk about the presenters and programs all day, the overall theme that stuck was far more interesting than any one session. I came away with a sense of how limitless the possibilities are in the legal profession today, and of how any barriers in front of us can be not just broken, but blasted.

Most law schools don’t offer courses in branding, so how do you go about establishing a personal brand for your law practice and make your expertise visible? Here’s a checklist that can help get you started.

You’re an unstoppable legal machine. You churn through a hundred pages of briefs and legal research every day. You’re running two phones, a tablet, a laptop and a portable fax machine off a light pole at the airport. Your inbox is an email volcano. You’ve heard of people who go for zero inbox but you figure they’re urban myths like Bigfoot. Your productivity is relentless. Which is great for the bottom line. When your billable hours are like a red-hot furnace propelling your firm's success train at 100 mph down a track that leads to profit, it might be hard to see how backing off the throttle will get you there faster.

I once defended a product liability case where the client was adamant that the product always be called a “personal watercraft.” It most definitely was not, he insisted, a Jet-Ski. The issue was the use of a trademark to refer to a similar product. What's the risk?

It can be tough to keep up with the content hamster wheel. Especially if you are trying to keep pace with bigger firms that seem to push out client alerts 24/7. So don’t drive yourself crazy. Get off the wheel. There’s still a way to publish regularly and stay in meaningful touch with clients and contacts.

Whether you are a solo attorney or in a big firm, the ability to generate business is critical to your success. But we all struggle with how to do it without draining our bank accounts. So here are some tips on how you can get a referral business running on a budget — like I did.

If you've got a certain word or phrase, formatted or not, that you type over and over, and it's driving you crazy, here's a Microsoft Word AutoCorrect hack you're going to love. Creating legal documents often involves some really fiddly typing. Long party names, repetitive phrases, all that Latin ... it can all get a little frustrating. But a lot of Word users don't know they can hack the same dictionary Word uses to automatically correct typos and use it as an automated text expander.