Nothing makes me happier than getting my head around complicated issues and feeling mastery over my chaotic, 21st-century life. And nothing helps me organize my scattered, Internet-addled brain cells better than mind mapping. Put simply, mind maps are a form of fluid, visual note-taking arranged around a core idea. Essentially, they allow you to dump […]

Fred sat at the end of the table, sweating and looking at the six of us as we waited expectantly for his decision. He hemmed, he hawed. And he asked to go over the options yet one more time. “It’s easy, Fred. Settle or sue. We’ve been here over an hour, now make the call.”

Last week, we covered the first steps of using LinkedIn to land a new job: Complete your profile and populate your account by inviting people to connect with you. Step two focuses on targeting the places you want to work, and connecting to people who work there.

Successful practices identify specific client groups and focus business development efforts there. But, being lawyers, we tend to classify clients according to their legal needs rather than by criteria that are far more relevant to clients: location, income, marital status and especially age. Generational change is real, so you should think about adjusting your business development efforts demographically.

Another U.S. baby boomer turns 50 every 8.5 seconds. And if you run the math, it’s also the case that baby boomers are turning 60 at the rate of 1 every 7 seconds. Yes—you in the back there, hiding your issue of Rolling Stone behind the Wall Street Journal—that means you! What’s on folks’ minds in tipping […]

Given everything they have to do to keep their practices going and their clients well served, lawyers typically can't be expected to be full-on tech experts. Nonetheless, some of the basic rules that many fail to follow are amazing. Wow. Here is Sharon Nelson and John Simek's list of top gaffes they see lawyers make with technology.

While 90 million users may seem paltry relative to Facebook’s 500 million, LinkedIn offers a professional promise Facebook can’t touch: It can actually help you find and land a new position. In this two-part series, Wendy Werner gets you set up to do just that. First, the basics to ready your LinkedIn account.

Are you still using the default security setting on your wireless? Still using unsecured wireless settings at Starbucks, airports and hotel lobbies? If you answered, “What security setting?” then you'd better read this before you sit down with that Starbucks latte, open up your browser and click Connect again.

“It’s the silence that gets me most,” he said. We were sitting in his small office in a 1950’s building just off the main drag. His name was stenciled on the frosted glass door. He looked at the silent phone and absent-mindedly checked his e-mail, again. There were no calls and no e-mail, no mail (except a few bills) and no work. My friend suffers, like most solos, from a boom and bust workload. What could I possibly say to help him cope?

It’s Friday! Why not make today the day you finally do something about that vacation you keep putting off? Block out the time on your calendar, pull out the brochures and just make a decision. If taking a cruise has long been on your list but you’ve resisted, let lapsed lawyer and cruise industry expert Wendy London raise anchor on the concerns getting in your way. In this week's Friday Five, she debunks some of the biggest myths about cruising.