Lawyer Productivity

The day that first computer appeared on a lawyer's desk, it brought a promise of simplicity. Technology would organize, systematize and calendarize the daily chaos, leaving our human time and minds free to address the really critical stuff. Ha! ...

Wouldn't it be nice to make a clean sweep and set up your practice from scratch—applying all your hard-earned wisdom? Great ideas for setting up a new law practice was the focus of the Chicago Bar Association's Law Practice Start Up Boot Camp ...

In his book The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande asserts that checklists are a “cognitive net,” a mechanism that can help prevent experienced people from making errors due to flawed memory and attention, and ensure that teams ...

Procrastination is a beast we all battle. Some days it feels like you'd rather do anything else but get work done. But you can't get away with that all the time. And sometimes the work just has to get completed posthaste, no matter what. So for ...

I'm always surprised when I meet someone who doesn't use Evernote. It's cross-platform (works on Mac, Windoze, iOS and Droid), painlessly syncs just about any kind of data you put into it—emails, images, PDFs, webpages, plain text—integrates ...

We've been hearing some mumbling among our iPad-owning colleagues lately. Something about the keyboard? Given that most iPad owners are passionately in love with the device, this grumbling is surprising. Is it an actual flaw? Or is it that we ...

In "Attorney at Large: A Field Guide for the Mobile Lawyer," 15 inveterate business travelers answered our questions about working on the move—and gave up some of their hard-earned travel and productivity secrets. While each has their own ideas ...

The deal is done. The case is tried. It's over—now you can go home and rest. Tomorrow, you'll clean up this mess. Repeat. Soon, though, colleagues begin to comment about the federal disaster area your office has become. Next, you only take ...

Creating legal documents can be something like playing with Legos. How so, you might ask? Well, typically lawyers assemble new and individualized documents—contracts, briefs, opinions—by plugging together existing sentences and paragraphs from a ...

Let’s face it—redacting documents has never been a lot of fun. In terms of something to look forward to, it probably falls just above getting a root canal. But with new technology, there are ways to make it easier, if not more enjoyable. Using ...