Stress is a natural part of any good lawyer’s life. Recently, however, it's been a bit much, no? Little wonder that soothing GIF that helps sync your breathing has gone viral again. And it actually works, for a while. But, between baseball, the U.S. elections, end-of-year deadlines and the impending holiday onslaught, you may need more robust advice than "Stay Calm and Carry On." For this week's five, we turned to workplace strategy expert and researcher Leigh Stringer, author of the new book, "The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees—and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line."

Microsoft Word is a complex application, so much so that most of us use only a fraction of its capabilities. But you don't have to spend all your waking hours becoming a bona fide Word ninja to extract a lot more productivity out of it. Here are three high-leverage features you should get to know better.

Comma placement can cause a big effect in legal documents. (See "What Broadway's Hamilton Teaches About Legal Interpretation.") In particular, whether or not to place a comma before the word “and” frequently leads to errors.

In the practice of law, dates and deadlines are the currency in which lawyers traffic. As filing dates and appearance dates pile up, the likelihood of missing one increases exponentially — with dramatic results. At best, you’ll lose your case. At worst, you’ll spend years settling a costly malpractice claim. You need a solution that lets you calculate and keep track of deadlines worry-free, but you can't afford to spend hours carefully crafting a calendar either. Thankfully, automation, once the domain of manufacturing and telephone switchboards, has made its way to legal calendaring via Clio’s Court Rules feature.

Lately, thinking creatively about the practice of law has been a theme running through my professional life. While we are a relatively stodgy profession, many avenues for legal innovation exist. From applying new technology to a traditional brick-and-mortar practice to taking law to the street in a converted truck, I have heard dozens of stories about inventive ways to practice law. Interestingly, the lawyers who are thinking creatively about their practices also seem to be using strategies that act as safeguards against ethics violations.

Many refer to the 2008 economic meltdown as the "Great Reset." For law firm business development, it’s healthy to embrace that as a literal expression. The law business was reset from a seller’s market, characterized by demand exceeding supply, to a buyer’s market, where the reverse is true.

Winning the talent war is one of the most important ways that an organization can make more than incremental change in a relatively short period of time. In his book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,” one of Jim Collins’ key findings is that “good-to-great leaders began the transformation […]

In the Broadway musical “Rent,” there is this great lyric: “In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes — how do you measure a year in the life?” It has always stuck with me. Why? Every single one of us has a finite time here on earth. How you spend it can either be magical or meaningless. You can love what you do for most of your days — or wallow in misery. We all have that choice. Ending the old “I do not have time for that” problem is, therefore, much easier than you think.

I’m often asked by friends and clients alike: “What advice do you have for holiday or end-of-year parties?” The first thing that comes to mind is "Don’t get drunk!" — but if you do, have a designated sober driver or use a car service to get home safely. But as time has passed, my thoughts have led to a list of proactive ways to keep the fun and try to avoid the dangers of work parties. Here are my do's and don'ts:

Now that all lawyers and firms are publishers, the demand for quality content has never been greater. And yet serious obstacles remain. How do you feed the publishing beast when you don’t have time to write (or don’t want to waste billable hours writing)? What is the best way to republish content so that it still sounds fresh and new? How do you stand out in the sea of client newsletters covering the same court rulings?