In rural areas across the U.S., people are experiencing a unique legal problem: Lawyers are hard to find. Aging rural lawyers are retiring, and no one is around to replace them. This means criminal defendants are more likely to take pleas because they don’t have representation. Rural residents are more likely than urban ones to die without a will. Small-town individuals will tend to handle their own divorces, making crucial mistakes. Those who do manage to find a lawyer drive long distances — sometimes 100 miles or more — just to meet with their attorneys.

Law firm media mentions can be great for business — but are you making the most of them? Here’s a handy checklist to follow.

Chances are, you use a pointing device with your computer today. It could be a touchscreen. It could be a built-in trackpad. It might be a trackball. It could even be that original of the species, the humble mouse. Your keyboard? That’s only for creating text, of course. Who needs it to execute commands? You do — if you value faster computing. Keyboard shortcuts, both built-in and custom-created, give seasoned keyboard jockeys a step or two up on their shortcut-deprived colleagues.

When I was practicing law at a large firm, the associate annual review period was always an interesting time around the office. This may not be true at all firms, and perhaps there’s more frequent communication happening these days, but in my experience, things were always so busy that it was rare that candid, comprehensive feedback was provided outside of annual reviews. I remember quite a few times when I saw fellow associates walk dazed and dejected back to their offices following an unfavorable review. They weren’t performing up to expectations, they were told, and they felt blindsided by the news. The thing is, it was often news only to them. The rest of us could see it coming from a mile away.

A number of years ago, a good friend shared what he considers the "magic business development pill." It's simple. There are only two ingredients: 1) Make your conversation all about the client or potential client) and keep it about them; and 2) Show up with great frequency. According to my friend, keep repeating these steps and everything will work out.

There’s no denying it: Lawyers have the highest behavioral impairment rate of any profession. Research has shown it, and it is spotlighted in the media, as in a recent New York Times feature on a lawyer who tragically spiraled into addiction behind closed doors. The same innate drive and problem-solving skills that make a good lawyer also enable some to present as “high-functioning,” while they successfully conceal addiction for as long as decades. Meanwhile, as with any chronic, progressive disease, it worsens until the lawyer’s behavior and capabilities deteriorate. The good news is once the problems are acknowledged, our community can join together to help remedy them.

Local map rankings are a big deal for law firms. If you’re an attorney with an unstaffed virtual office, share the same building with a law firm in the same practice area, or even have a competitor within walking distance, listen up. This one’s for you. Everyone wants to rank better in Google's Local Maps because the traffic converts at an extremely high rate. And, naturally, law firms want to know how they can get more map visibility. Unfortunately, it’s not a clear-cut science.

As a lawyer and businessperson, you have two jobs in one. Some of us, including me, add the job of professional speaker to our already teeming calendars. Maybe you've considered taking on some speaking gigs yourself. What's a typical day in the life of a lawyer-speaker? The best way to explain it is to share the typical course of events for speaking at a conference, using my recent experience with Content Marketing World.

If you're like most lawyers, you recycle text from other documents a lot. But cutting-and-pasting is a frequent source of formatting disasters in Microsoft Word. Instead of always using CTRL-V to paste, take an extra split second to preview your paste result so you can move on with your editing faster. Here's a quick video tip.

Some words sound like they mean one thing when they actually mean something very different. Using one of these false friends incorrectly could cause you a problem. But It Sounded Right … The term “false friends” traditionally refers to words in a foreign language that sound like English words. If you want a drinking glass in France, don’t ask the server for “glace;” you might get a glass, but it will be filled with ice, the translation of “glace.” You really will be embarrassed if you use the Spanish “embarazada” to mean embarrassed because it actually means “pregnant.”