If you are seeking ways to reduce your legal research costs, here is one good option: Google Scholar. It is an online research service you can use to find cases and secondary sources for free. If you want to know how to harness the power of Google Scholar — and impress your colleagues and clients with your stellar research skills — here are five good tips to get you started. ... READ THE REST

People expect a lawyer to be able to answer tough questions. But what if you don’t know the answer? I still remember my first day in torts class. Old man river, my respectable professor, called on me to analyze an opinion from some archaic case. “Ms. (unfortunately easy-to-pronounce maiden name), is this paragraph law or […]

Sending an email is fast, and you can transmit at any hour, but that may be where the effectiveness and efficiency ends. Remember the bad old days of telephone tag? You would waste time swapping phone messages until you could finally have a discussion with meaningful, real-time give and take. Wait — what? Meaningful, real-time conversation to quickly iron out issues once you connect? That sounds pretty good. But combining telephone and email for a 1-2 punch may be the most effective communication choice yet.

As if you need any help adding things to your to-do list, right? You are justifiably more interested in removing things — or at least checking them off. But hang on, and I hope you'll see the sense of it.

I’ve been waiting a long time to write this post — almost four years! Ever since Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, I believed it would make the perfect platform for a practice management tool. Attendees at iPad seminars also asked about it: “What practice management tools are available for the iPad?” For a while there, I didn’t have a good answer for them. The major cloud practice management companies eventually rolled out iPhone apps, Android apps, and web apps for their services. While these tools are undeniably useful, I’ve always thought that a mobile practice management tool should offer that full-featured dashboard, so you can see your entire practice at a glance — just like on your laptop or desktop computer. With the recent rollout of Rocket Matter for iPad, mobile lawyers finally have that option. ... READ THE REST

Working together in a law office isn't always rainbows and puppies. There can be some serious dustups, and we all know what that means — somebody's work isn't getting done. We asked a couple of experts from the Association of Legal Administrators to give us their best tips for handling and resolving differences of opinion between people in the office — lawyers or staff. Today Denise Abston and Cindy Schuler tell us what they do when it's time to step in. ... READ THE REST

Research suggests that life experiences, not material things, are the key to happiness. Nonetheless, by and large, people still choose to spend more of their money on material items because they believe they’re of greater value. After all, it’s pretty easy to peg a value to a new flat-screen TV that costs $4,000. But it’s hard to estimate the value of a great memory born of an amazing experience. The same principle applies in marketing your practice.

Lawyers can easily find themselves, very early in their careers, in a predicament of epic proportions. It happens when you don’t know what to do next, and end up in a rut — a long, deep track made by the repeated passage of the lawyers (um, vehicles) who went before. For our purposes a rut has a number of relevant characteristics: • It begins at the start of the road. As a result, you have a tendency to find yourself in it very quickly. • Once you’re in it, it can be hard to get out without a lot of frustration. • Unless you get out of it, you’re going to end up at the same destination as everyone else.

In last month’s column, "Stylin’ It in Microsoft Word," I showed how using Word's default Styles to format documents can make your life much easier — and urged you to "leave ’em as Microsoft set ’em." Still, I had a few requests from readers who really would prefer to change the default Styles settings and wanted to know the best way to go about it.

“I found myself in a rut of doing work … then more work … and feeling stuck in the day-to-day of never seeing past tomorrow,” says Josh Brown, a solo attorney who deals primarily in franchise law. Like most small firm attorneys, Brown’s to-do list kept growing, and no one was around to take something off his plate. If you work in a small firm and your practice is growing, eventually you’re going to need to delegate work — whether you hire staff, outsource tasks, use virtual assistants or take another technology-based route.