Working from home — even for part of the time — has many advantages. It saves money on office space, reduces time wasted on commuting, and can help you achieve greater work-life balance. According to the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Survey Report, the percentage of lawyers with virtual practices has more than doubled since 2011. Disruptive Innovation, a recent study by the University of California-Hastings' Center for WorkLife Law, reports on the emergence of new practice models that aim to offer lawyers more control over their work and better work-life balance — and in large part, flexible scheduling and teleworking make it possible. But working from home or in a virtual practice also comes with challenges. Communications issues can contribute to a feeling of isolation and lost productivity. And without the camaraderie that develops from seeing your colleagues every day, it can be difficult to establish trust and a feeling of togetherness.

Recently, on a particularly spectacular day at work, two victories came my clients’ way. I couldn’t help reflecting on the emotions coursing through me — it was as if the events of the day belonged to me, to my life, when in fact they belonged to my clients. Ultimately, what I realized is that when you are really passionate about your practice, when your niche is your calling, you truly feel as if you are in the client’s shoes.

It’s nearly June. Time to update your LinkedIn profile again! After the inevitable January “fresh start” updates, many people leave their LinkedIn profile alone the rest of the year. If you’re a savvy social media user, you update it every three months with new pro bono work, awards and cases. So, if you haven’t refreshed your profile yet this year, I hate to break it to you, but you’re behind. General counsel may not post much on LinkedIn, or like or comment, but they are there. Data confirms that for a growing number of in-house attorneys, LinkedIn is the first place they look to learn about you. That means a well-curated profile is vitally important.

To truly succeed, a law practice can’t rely on growth that results only from isolated circumstances, seasonal trends or provisional impulses. Instead, you establish continuity and sustainability by developing a strategic growth plan, and by managing that plan with data. But simply collecting data is not enough — it has to be the right data. Unfortunately, many firms fall into the trap of collecting “vanity” statistics or one-dimensional measurements that don't give meaningful business information.

As of 2015, millennials are the largest age group in the workforce, according to American think tank Pew Research Group. More than 33 percent of American workers are millennials, and 20 percent of lawyers are millennials. And, according to an Ernst & Young study, in 2025 millennials will make up 75 percent of the global workforce. Here's another statistic to ponder: Heather Morse-Geller and Jonathan Fitzgarrald researched in-house counsel ranks as well as corporate C-suites and learned that millennials are found in greater proportions in those quarters than among law firms. Eight Things to Know About Working with Millennials. So what does this mean? It's time to improve communications with millennials to make the most of the valuable skills and resources they offer.

If you are a solo practitioner, of counsel, or a partner at a law firm, you have at least two roles: attorney and entrepreneur. Your time and energy are split between performing client work and making sure new business is coming in the door. Try on a Fresh Perspective. One way attorneys educate themselves about effective business and marketing practices is by attending CLEs. But knowing how important it is to market yourself to your prospective audience, why limit yourself to only legal industry programs?

Using social media incorrectly or ineffectively can be damaging to your professional reputation. It comes down to one thing: expectations.

Lawyers have been conditioned, from time immemorial, to believe that successful marketing means broadcasting superiority. You must have won more false awards, and higher verdicts, and would have established further contrived rankings. To a point, it’s helpful to show that you’re good at what you do; but continually attempting to avenge yourself as best is necessarily a losing game. The perceived superiority of this one-ups-manshipper strategy leads to the creation of massively hyperbolic ads.

It’s 6 p.m. You are about to put the final touches on a brief that is due tomorrow when a message pops up on your laptop. It informs you that a third party has gained control of your system and encrypted all your files. To unencrypt your files, you must pay a ransom. Every single file you have on your computer system is now unreadable. Thanks to this ransomware attack, your practice has basically been shut down while your system is held hostage.

Yesterday, at 2 p.m. Eastern, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a second batch of the “Panama Papers” in a live and searchable (but stripped-down) database of more than 200,000 entities. Many of the activities unveiled in the papers are not illegal but many are, including laundering money, hiding evidence of crimes, avoiding sanctions and tax evasion.