Last week while driving to an appointment, I listened to a morning interview show on the local Public Radio affiliate. I live in Colorado where the snow is really starting to pile up in the mountains, so the topic could not have been more timely: "Things Colorado Skiers Should Know About Their Liability and Safety." The expert was Evan Banker, a personal injury lawyer at Denver's Chalat Law, which specializes in cases involving collisions at ski resorts. It was a beautiful example of how lawyers can focus their law practice and use that focus to market their services.

A few weeks ago, a member of my business mastermind group posed a simple but profound question: What word encapsulates your hopes, goals and feelings for 2017? It’s a challenging question. As an entrepreneur, December is a time to wind down this year’s projects, clearing the decks for what’s to come. This question forces me to think about my theme for the next 12 months and where I want to be, personally and professionally, a year from now.

In "Evernote vs. Quip: A New Productivity King?" I introduced you to Quip, the collaborative workspace app invented by former Facebook and Google executives. Quip's creators wanted teams to be able to collaborate and share information without having to rely on email to exchange documents or use an old SharePoint site — and to do so without constantly exchanging multiple versions of a document with confusing redlines and comments. On top of all of that, enterprise customers would want the highest level of security. Essentially, if Evernote, Google Drive, Microsoft Office 365, Skype and Slack all had a baby, its name would be Quip.

I wasn't optimistic about finding a job that would fulfill the dreams that led me to law school. So, I started my own firm with a law school friend.

About this time each year, law industry publications are rife with advice about “holiday marketing.” The advice tends to be about gift-giving protocols and using social events to network and create relationships.

Law practice management software provider Clio released its first annual Legal Trends Report on October 17. The survey is a compilation of data aggregated from 40,000 Clio subscribers in the continental U.S. The data, representing usage events in Clio, is anonymized; the analogy the report draws is that of a turnstile at a sporting event, turning over numbers, without collecting identifying data.

Mountain climbers are fastidious about the lines they trust their lives to, and scuba divers are constantly checking the tanks and regulators on which they depend. In the hectic world of practicing law — when one interruption is so often itself interrupted by yet another call — are you taking the time to take care of your connections to others? Have you recently spoken with your bridesmaid or best man? How about those cousins you played with when you were little? Any calls to them recently? Your law school roommate or moot court partner?

Attorneys frequently ignore this basic journalism rule: Start with your strongest point. Your lead or “lede” should entice the reader to continue reading. The phrase “bury the lede” appears to be the only use of this alternate spelling. Perhaps your jurisdiction has rules or customs that require you to present information in briefs in a certain way or in a certain order. That might include sections for identification of parties, statement of facts, or itemization of damages. Within those confines for legal briefs, as well as in articles and letters, you can write better when you don’t bury the lede.

As we usher in the holiday season, there is no doubt that 2016 has been an audacious year, from hurricanes to the Rio Olympics to the U.S. presidential election. So, as you shop for your favorite lawyer this holiday season, consider these five ideas from my annual “Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers” that celebrate the […]

Most lawyers deal with the printed word all day long. They’ve been trained to take in and share knowledge as text. As a writer, it’s a stretch for me to even conceive of presenting information in a simple Excel chart. My bible starts, “In the beginning, God made Microsoft Word, and He saw that it was good (except for auto-formatting, which still needed work).” So it's natural that some of us would overlook visuals in our marketing content and social media, whether it’s a photo, illustration, infographic or chart. But if you resolve to make just one change in your approach to content, let it be to tap the power of visuals.