Managing a Law Firm

A client dinner is a beautiful thing. There’s food and wine and balloons and maybe a small token of appreciation. Somebody makes a speech that mentions “paradigm shift” 31 times and everyone falls asleep. Sometime between the main course and the ...

The idea of a “tribe” is powerful. Who would not feel connected in a group of people tied together by common values, traditions or goals? Tribes have two distinct yet equally important roles to play in your law practice — particularly if you are ...

Recently Attorney at Work caught up with three innovative lawyers — all speakers at this spring’s Lawyernomics conference, hosted by Avvo — for their thoughts on what it means to run a law practice like a business, the biggest bet they’ve placed ...

Dealing with each email message in order in your inbox can lead to context switching — a major drag on productivity. The time spent doing triage can instead be used to handle business email. To minimize email triage time, build these five email ...

When lawyers are surveyed about what keeps them awake at night, the top issue is almost always a feeling that their offices or cases are out of control. It’s not just a fear. In my experience, for far too many lawyers, it’s a true state of ...

Hiring lateral partners and groups is a key component for success in today’s competitive law firm market. And while large firms get all the headlines for key coups, smaller firms have both more to gain and lose in recruiting talent. Winning in ...

Are you contemplating streamlining, centralizing or outsourcing some or all of your law firm's back-office functions? It's an idea worth exploring. Improving basic processes and using the right technology can help you and your staff minimize ...

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the attitudes people bring to work every day and how a positive or negative attitude affects how others perform their jobs — including how they serve their clients. The interesting thing is that ...

Lawyers may practice in different areas of the law and serve a wide range of clients, but most seem to share a common aversion: They hate doing timesheets. Despite this near universal resentment toward tracking time, most lawyers eventually ...

Lawyers hate math. At least most do. It’s why they became lawyers. Which means working with data isn’t appealing to most lawyers, either. But law practices are businesses, and these days, successful businesses leverage data to thrive. Here are ...