The season is finally here. (Whew.) The endless NFL negotiations are, well, negotiated. The rookies have pushed through their two-a-days and preseason games—and we are at the coin flip. Last night the Packers showed they still have the championship stuff (no surprise there). Just three-and-a-half excruciating months to go before we see if they can repeat […]

When I started my own commercial litigation boutique last year, I gave serious thought to abandoning the much-maligned billable hour. After all, we all know the criticisms: The billable hour rewards inefficiency, places the lawyer’s interests at odds with the client’s and unrealistically assumes that every hour of time is of the same value to the client. On the other hand, as a litigator focused on complex and often unpredictable cases, the alternatives are not particularly satisfying.

Many lawyers use personal accounts on social media platforms to market themselves and their practices. But who else are you unknowingly marketing when you use social media? The addition of social ads default settings within two of the major social media platforms underscores a point that is not unique to the Internet: If you don’t pay attention, people will take advantage of you. Here's what you can do.

You have been working on finding that job in your dream location. You've created a timeline and you are sticking to it. Using both public and personal contacts you have identified the positions you want, and now you are ready to apply. How in the world can you—from hundreds of miles away—become an attractive candidate to a hiring manager who has lots of people to choose from within a 25-mile range?

Oh, come on. It’s almost Labor Day weekend and nothing’s going anywhere today. So you can either put your feet up on your desk and blatantly loaf … or you can do what we’re doing. Put your head down, huddle up to the computer and pretend to be earnestly involved in paying work while actually […]

Finding a new job is hard enough when you are looking in your own backyard, but the difficulty level increases when you are job hunting from states away. It may be easier, of course, if you are heading back to a place you once lived or if you have local family ties—but what if you simply […]

You've spent hours working on that court filing or contract, getting everyone's feedback (electronically and otherwise) and polishing your prose. Before you attach that Microsoft Word file to an outgoing email to your client or co-counsel, though, you need to do a full security check. Here's a list to help ensure you've covered your bases and your document is clean.

So you passed the bar. CONGRATULATIONS! Now you are a real lawyer. After the pain and torment of law school and the nerve-jangling business of studying for the bar, you’d think this would be a good time to relax and regroup—and ease slowly into your new career. Yes, that would be nice. But it’s not recommended. Because once […]

I just hired a great new employee using LinkedIn Jobs. It turned out to be an incredibly easy and effective way to identify good candidates and fill the position with a minimum of effort. Deciding between candidates was the only tough part of the process! How did it work? Here are the basics of conducting a LinkedIn search […]

If you really want to know what’s going on with technology in law practice, you get yourself to the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). That’s just what InsideLegal’s Jobst Elster has been doing for 13 years now, so we knew he’d be the ideal guest blogger to report on ILTA 2011, which wrapped up […]