For today's Friday Five, we have five good reasons to add a little light to your life and celebrate next week's Winter Solstice—the shortest day of the year and its longest night. That's right, in 2012, the earliest winter since 1896 arrives with the solstice at 6:12 a.m. EST next Friday, December 21—a mere seven days away. If celebrating this solar event isn't already a part of your holiday tradition, you may want to make it so. Why? Lots of reasons ...

Have you been thinking about writing a book? It can be a fantastic marketing tool that sets you apart from the pack—and you can leverage it to get media attention for your area of expertise. In the past, you had to pitch ideas to publishers, of course, but today you can self-publish an ebook and release it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. And, self-publishing a successful first book can be a great way to get the attention of a publisher for subsequent tomes.

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." So goes the infamous Rule 13 from the original Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." Great idea. How do I do that? These six "signs," culled over 25 years of teaching lawyers how to improve their writing, will lead you directly to words and phrases that add no meaning.

Seized by sweaty anxiety at the mere thought of speaking with a reporter? Perhaps a bit of professional advice will help set you up to master the interview. In today's launch of our regular new feature "Ask the Experts," three media-savvy members of the Legal Marketing Association take on the question, "Is there a good way to avoid talking to a reporter—without looking like an ass?" You're going to use this expert advice ... READ MORE

In my first two posts (“How We Get Things Done” and “Boost Your Productivity: The Five Phases of GTD”), I talked about how to gain more time in your day and become more productive by leveraging a time management methodology called Getting Things Done, or GTD, by David Allen. In today’s post, I have five very […]

Once you unwrap your new iPad, master the most critical tap-and-swipe moves, and buy a few apps and iBooks, you're pretty much set. It really is that easy. So easy that you may find you neglect any further exploration of iPad features in favor of, say, reading the entire Jack Reacher series. You'd be highly entertained, but you'd also miss out on all the ways to use an iPad in your law practice. "The iPad," says Brett Burney of Macs in Law, "allows you to view and edit documents, check email, surf the web, read books, annotate PDFs, take notes, dictate letters and much, much more."

The first thing to know about note-taking on any mobile device is that it’s not perfect. Another thing to know: If, like me, you’re accustomed to writing in microscopic chicken scratch for post-session translation, you probably won't like note-taking on an Android device … at least at first. However, if you’ve decided (or, more likely, your secretary or co-workers keep complaining) that you need to “modernize” your paper output, you will find satisfaction in moving to a more robust digital note-taking system. ...

We’ve all heard the adage: “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” In reality, of course, it’s both. You can’t be a successful lawyer, or any professional, without knowing both the who and the what. But the message behind the well-worn maxim does have merit. You do need smart, trustworthy and, yes, well-connected people you can draw on to help you get your foot in the door-of-opportunity, solve a problem, close a deal—and for countless other reasons. And that gets us to the third pillar of advice that Scott Westfahl, director of professional development at Goodwin Procter, says all young attorneys at his firm receive: Build your network. “This piece of professional advice is the one I’m most passionate about because it’s the most quickly ignored,” Westfahl says. (In two posts last month, we presented Westfahl’s other career tips: Build your legal and technical skills and develop your professional skills.)

Lawyers have been talking about and wrestling with “alternative billing methods” or “alternative fee agreements” for a decade or more. Recently, however, the conversation has shifted to “value billing.” Well, that’s a concept we can get behind. Once we understand what we all mean by value, of course. Enter Antigone Peyton. She’s laying it all […]

It’s been almost three months since I wrote part one in my series about how I’m using Evernote in my law practice. Sure, I’ve been busy, but several other things happened in the interim, some of which have caused me to rethink this series. The first thing that happened is that my email inbox was flooded with suggestions […]