Lawyer Skills

If you want people to notice you online, it doesn't take a marketing genius to know it's all about the visuals — a photo, infographic or video will out-pull your wall of words every time. (A photo of you will help, too.) We're not advocating ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Let’s face it: Lawyers don’t think, talk or write like regular people. We’re trained not to. The systems we work in are bewildering. The language we speak is full of specialized terms. The documents we create are both written in our language and ...

Ethics rules require you to keep your client informed (see ABA Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4). The client’s guidelines may require interval and event reporting. But sometimes it feels like nobody on the other end is reading your client status ...

Here’s one for the books. You can bank on it. Clichés are overused phrases that everyone knows. Pundits of good communication advise shunning clichés as unoriginal and boring — which is why readers of these posts may be surprised to see me take ...

We all have habitual ways of relating to other people, and chances are your habits haven't changed much over the years. So ask yourself, does the way you communicate and behave foster positive relationships with clients, colleagues, family and ...

Billing. It’s not something we like to talk about, but it is something lawyers have to do regularly, so it deserves some attention. Making sure you capture all of your billable time and produce clear, coherent invoices for it helps ensure you ...