Managing a Law Firm

We know it sounds like an oxymoron, but a “Red-Tape Reduction Committee” might actually be the thing your practice needs. Today, Vivian Manning describes how forming just such a committee is helping her newly merged firm dispense ...

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 ...

By now we can probably all agree that the cloud is not a mysterious and scary thing. We've bought into the idea that "anytime, anywhere" access to files and other stuff is, indeed, a pretty cool thing—and key to running a smart practice. After ...

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 ...

It may be among the toughest conversations you ever have to initiate. But when you think a colleague is in trouble—experiencing difficulties with drugs and alcohol or spiraling into a seemingly intractable depression, for example—it is worse, ...

At solo and small firm conferences around the country, lawyers gather to polish their skills, learn about new technology—and pick up a marketing tip or two. At the Illinois State Bar Association's Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference last week, ...

Would you work for you? Why or why not? It’s a great question to ask yourself—often—if you are “da boss” or supervise other people. It provides a quick self-audit and points to things you’d be wise to keep doing—or to ...

There are about 23 different business processes in most law firms. They range from new client intake to check requests to conflicts checks. When there's a problem with one of them—maybe it takes too long or there are too many errors—believe it ...

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 ...

As a solo practitioner with a demanding work and family schedule, I’m always on the go. Between client meetings and depositions, I’m often attending parent-teacher conferences and baseball games and shuttling the kids to school, music and dance ...