Each spring when I plant my garden, I have great expectations for all the vegetables I’ll be harvesting. By June, the new plants start to look a little like the pictures in the catalog, but here and there I encounter a few "volunteers" from last year’s crop. Typically, it's a tomato or squash plant embedded among the cucumbers and beets.

The degree to which individual lawyers fail to find professional life personally fulfilling can be a clear indicator of their level of risk of a malpractice claim or disciplinary complaint. So let’s go with that. Ask yourself these quick questions — and while you do, think about the people you work with and how they might […]

I appreciate a nice, tidy “to-do” list — and how moving through the list can offer clarity of purpose, digestible milestones and a sense of accomplishment. But when it comes to mapping out their career paths, lawyers can find a to-do list is tough to create. There are, though, a few core components that are must-haves on the professional investment front. While these five are hardly novel in and of themselves, too often lawyers neglect them. ... READ MORE

Question: There has been so much talk about the Affordable Care Act. We realize there may be a few things we’ve missed regarding coverage of our staff. Help! Jude A. Dainton: Individual open enrollment for the insurance exchanges begins on October 1, 2013. With less than a month to go, insurance companies, government officials and regulators of all […]

News Flash: No one is looking at your law firm website.It’s true. Many lawyers don’t realize this. They equate “having” a website with people “visiting” their website. Ask if people are visiting the site and they say, “Of course.” Ask about web analytics traffic data and you get the puzzled puppy look. How do they know people are visiting their website? “I just know.”

In my early years, when I first started working as a law firm marketing director, I was preaching the benefits of obtaining client feedback but running into major resistance from management. About two years later, however, one of the senior partners came to a meeting extolling the customer survey process that one of his clients had implemented. Lo and behold, we launched a client interview process; the partner was a hero and I was thrilled. I have worked in law firm marketing my entire professional career so, when presenting a novel idea, I am never surprised when lawyers say, “But law firms are different.” ... READ MORE

Almost all law office denizens spend time creating and managing files. A lot of files. A lot of time. Whether Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Adobe PDFs or whatever, we create 'em, then spend time in Microsoft Windows Explorer copying them, renaming them, moving them, sending them and so on. (Sorry Mac people, but we’ll have to rely on a Mac aficionado in the comments to translate to Mac-speak.)

TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante researched and wrote the recently published TL Research Buyer's Guide to Legal Billing Software, interviewing top consultants and executives at the major companies in that space. For this Friday Five, Neil puts what he learned into perspective for practicing lawyers. So, what do you need to know before spending on your firm's billing system?  I haven't billed my time since the late 1990s. Back then, I entered billable hours into the long-forgotten Mac version of Amicus Attorney. I think I was the only lawyer among more than 300 in the firm who used software for time entry. Each week, I printed a report and handed it to my assistant, who then entered it into the firm's accounting system. She loved not having to decipher handwriting like all the other assistants in the firm. While billing habits have (hopefully) improved since then, many law firms still leave money on the proverbial table because they don’t take advantage of the latest technologies. Here are the top five trends in time-billing software I discovered while researching the Buyer's Guide to Legal Billing Software ... READ THE FULL ARTICLE

In this edition of "Ask the Experts," Legal Marketing Association members Paul Bonner, Stewart Hirsch and Stacy Smith take on the question, "I always have a hard time talking about my fees with potential clients. Do you have any tips?" ... Click to Read Their Answers

Let's start with a bold statement: It would be better to have no website at all than to have a poorly designed one with bad content and missing information.