South Carolina Trial Law Blog

I’m willing to give away a few secrets. Here is how to ace a job interview with me:

• Read this Blog Post – One of the first questions I ask is “What do you know about me?” It amazes me the number of people of people that don’t even take the time and effort to type my name in Google and see what pops up. I have a reasonable internet presence and to not even look at my website or weblog, before coming to the interview is slack. I don’t expect someone to know everything about me, but to not even look at the website and the areas of practice shows a profound lack of interest, that I find unattractive in a job candidate.
• Read the Practice Management Section of the Blog – I’ve been writing for 2 1/2 years and have very specific ideas about how I want a law practice to run. My ideas are well thought out, but run counter to a lot of lawyers out there. But you can really get an idea for what I want by reading the practice management section of the blog.
• Be a Real Person – I’m not a high falutin’ person. Just because I have a J.D. doesn’t make me snobby. While I’ll be nice and cordial, I don’t want a hoity-toity employee. Be nice and be yourself.
• Be Used to Dealing with People – I have a Plaintiff’s practice and we deal with the public. We have a lot of workers comp cases and construction workers and other blue collar people. I find a lot of defense paralegals aren’t used to dealing with the public. Very few people really have the knowledge and skills to accurately judge how good of lawyers we are, but 100% know whether we’re nice to them.
• Be Technically Adept – You don’t have to be a power user, but knowing how to do a Google search and find information on the internet is useful. Knowing the difference between a .pdf and a .jpg is helpful. Knowing how to get information on the internets is helpful.

In the scheme of things, the only make or break question is someone that doesn’t even take the time before the interview to type my name into a search engine to see what pops up. So giving this tip on my blog isn’t really that much of a tip-off anyways. And in case you’re wondering, if someone has just moved and doesn’t have their computer unpacked or cable service set up, I will cut them some slack for that.

I got this idea from Cheryl Leone in Raleigh. At the beginning of April, we started leaving the office at 1:00 p.m. on Fridays.

We cut the lunch hour from an hour to half an hour and came in half an hour early each day of the week. Then we work through lunch on Friday and leave at 1:00 p.m.

This give the employees time to schedule doctor’s appointments, get their hair cut, make appointments, run errands or just start the weekend early.

The nice thing about it is that they have a set time off each week to take care of things if they need to. Plus, it’s nice to have Friday afternoons off in the summertime at the beach.

I am very interested in SmartAdvocate. It’s a new case management system that’s coming out on the market.

It’s specifically geared towards, plaintiff’s personal injury work.

It is an off-shoot of the in-house program that Parker & Waichman has been using.

I heard about this system a few years ago and it looks great.

A few of the features that I like, when a case is set up, it sets up an extra-net or ‘mini-website’ for each client and case that allows them to see the accident reports, medical records or other information as it comes in.

No matter how good the case is, if you have a ‘bad client’, it’s still a bad case. What is a bad client?

• Unreasonable Expectations
• Won’t Follow Reasonable Medical Advice
• Won’t Follow Reasonable Legal Advice
• Abusive
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I was talking with a friend recently about case selection. He said he was taught to take the following cases:

• Limited Damages with Very Clear Liability
• Tough Liability with Significant Damages

That’s a good rule of thumb. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to gear up for trial, and you typically want significant damages to be cost effective, but if there’s very clear liability, you can do that with lesser damages. Also, if your clients has several hundred thousand in doctor’s bills, then it doesn’t hurt to look harder for liability, or fight liability issues on contested cases. But I’ll add another caveat:

• If the Client is a Bad Client, Regardless of Anything Else, It’s a Bad Case

If there’s clear liability and significant damages, but your client is a problem client or bad client, then it’s a bad case. If they’re a bad client, they will find a way to sabotage their case.

I go to a lot of seminars and conferences on how to be a better trial lawyer. There are always better ways to build your case, but they almost never focus on practice management on how to you can build your case faster.

I’ve been talking to Cheryl Leone and she has emphasized this point. Cheryl says “If you have a case that’s worth $25,000 and you get the client $25,000 a year from now, or you get them $25,000 in a few weeks, which do you think makes for a happier client?”

That makes a lot of sense and I’ve never heard anyone say it before. The same amount of money sooner, makes for a happier client. Happy clients make for a better practice and a better life for the lawyer.

So the question becomes, what can you do to have the cases move quicker and resolve quicker? I’m not talking about slamming cases out the door, but what can you do to put cases together efficiently and quickly? Here’s a short list to get started:

• Only take cases that you have a familiarity with and can handle well
• Make certain you get the information you need to prepare the case at the beginning
• Only work with clients that are willing to help their own case
• Standardize documents – correspondence, pleadings, discovery
• Create checklists that your staff can follow on the handling of the case
• Order the medical records as treatment is completed
• Maintain contact with the client, so that you know about changes in the case as it happens.

I think that running a trial practice efficiently is critical.

Tom Kane of the Legal Marketing Blog points to an article My 2007 Holiday Gift: Advice from Top Marketing Consultants by Stacy Clark. The bulletpoints of the advice is below. Click on the link for the full article.

* Give so you can receive (Sally Schmidt)
* Visit Clients (yours truly)
* Fix up your web site (Deborah McMurray)
* Don’t waste marketing dollars (Andy Havens)
* Focus on your own market (Susan Saltonstall Duncan)
* Spend 200 hours on marketing (Larry Bodine)
* Have a plan (John Remsen)
* Happy Birthday, client (Elizabeth Lampert)
* Meet face to face (Sylvia Coulter)
* Keep what works secret (Micah Buchdahl)

I think these are all great ideas, but I don’t agree with Micah Buchdahl’s suggestion of keeping what works secret. I think the best marketing is something that fits you (or the firm) very well and can’t be copied easily.

Also, marketing by it’s very nature means that you are going out and  putting your information in front of the public (or targeted segment). So it can’t really be a secret.

I’m a big believer in the idea of giving things of value away as a means of marketing. I’ve given out over 3,000 of the PowerPoint compilation disks that everyone helped put together.

Of course, you don’t have to give away everything and every piece of information you possess, but I think that good marketing is hard for others to duplicate.

It’s the time of year to take stock.  Looking back at the year we’re finishing and the year ahead. One of my goals is to get cases prepared and moving as quick as possible. Cases don’t do any good sitting in the filing cabinet. So here are the goals:

• Demand Packages are prepared and sent out within 30 days of the client finishing treatment.
• If we need a questionnaire, future costs projection, vocational report or other expert report, the demand package is sent out within 60 days of the client finishing treatment.
• Within 30 days of the demand package being sent out, the case is settled or suit is filed.
• When we file suit, we bring a motion to put the case on the trial roster within 6 months.
• Discovery is answered within 15 days of receiving it.
• We never ask for more time or a continuance.
• We don’t grant the defense’s requests to delay the case from going to trial.
• Every client is called every 30 days (at a minimum). Every client is called by a lawyer every 60 days (at a minimum).

What we want to do is maximize the number of client touches, but minimize the number of times we touch the file. What are we going to do to make this happen?

• Do better intakes, getting copies of the client’s driver’s licenses and the answers to nearly every question that would be asked during discovery.
• Identify what the problem areas are on most cases and come up with appropriate solutions for the most common problems.
• For problems that can’t be determined with a flow chart, have a system set up to identify what the facts are so that I can make a determination quickly regarding what we need to do on the case.
• Order incident reports and emergency room records at the beginning of the case.
• Do a review of the parties at the beginning of the case, to include getting the driving records of both parties (if appropriate), doing a google search on all of the parties, doing an insurance company search for prior suits, doing a myspace and facebook search.
• Keeping contact with the client and ordering records as the client finishes with treatment.
• Standardizing the way that medical binders are kept (in .pdf format), updated and reviewed.
• Standardizing the way that medical treatment is summarized and identifying any problems (pre-existing injuries, non-related treatment) up front.
• Standardizing pleadings, discovery and motions, so that they can be generated and modified easily.
• Scanning of documents and good use of .pdf’s to control the case.
• Identify the appropriate experts early in the process.
• Work on standardizing model questions, cross exams, openings and closings.
• Document generation to quickly generate the appropriate documents.
• Work on customizing the case management system to provide the information that is needed to get out high quality work.
• Determine the processes involved in putting a case together and clearly defining in detail exactly how that case will be put together.
• Refining the processes in putting the case together, staying in contact with the client and keeping the client informed.
• Once the process is defined, convert building a case to task based system, instead of a case based system. That allows cases to be put together by people friendly secretaries instead of paralegals and allows for easier training and more consistency of work product, allowing paralegals to do the work that they are most suited for.

It looks like we have our work cut out for us. It should be an interesting and exciting new year. I’ll keep everyone posted on how we do converting.

After that great guest post on using an open source PBX system, I thought I would share what we’ve been working on. We’ve been working on taking the entire office electronic. It’s time to take the office digital. What does that mean?

• Documents Will be Digital – Everything coming in or going out of the office will be scanned. There’s a number of options we could have gone with. I chose to put a scanner on everyone’s desk. The easier it is to use, the more likely it is to get used. My first choice was a Fujitsu Scan Snap, but that didn’t have a TWAIN or ISIS compliant driver to scan from within case management or document management programs. We decided to go with the Xerox Documate 250. All incoming mail will be scanned, all outgoing mail will be scanned. The entire file will be available on the computer as a pdf.
• PDF’s Will be How We Like Them – Everyone gets a full version of Adobe Acrobat to combine pfs, rearrange pages, or set up chapters, bookmarks and hyperlinks. Picture writing a demand package that talks about medical treatment that has a link to the appropriate page of the medical records.
• Faxes Will be Digital – We are installing a fax server so that anyone can send or receive a fax directly from their desk. I was looking at eFax.com, but you have to use their number and can’t take the number with you if/when you leave. We’ll be setting up a separate fax server.
• Bookkeeping will be Digital – I’m embarassed to admit this, but I’m still writing checks manually and entering the information on a 2002 version of QuickBooks for the accountant. We’ll now be writing the checks on the computer, downloading the monthly statements from the bank to automatically reconcile. We’ll also link the case management program and client expenses, operating account and trust account to automatically generate cost sheets, disbursement statements and preliminary disbursements for the trust account.
• VPN Router to Allow Access to the Network – A Virtual Private Network (VPN). What’s that? It allows access to your local network even when you are not local. It’s similar to GoToMyPC or PCAnywhere and allows you to log on to your network from anywhere. When you’re out of town, you can log in and get your messages. You can work from your home office, your paralegal can work from home when their child is sick. Or….if everything is digital, then an employee can work without being in the office to work on the file.

Having the entire file in a digital format creates a lot of benefits. I’ve got a great staff and we’re ready to take this to the next level.

I’ve been reading The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks. Why would a lawyer be reading an essay on software engineering? Because it’s all about project management. Some of it is computer specific, but the vast bulk of the book is how to get a large group of talented people all going in the same direction.

I’ve noticed that even with smart, sharp, dedicated people it’s still difficult getting everyone on the same page. Frederick Brooks was in charge of building IBM’s System 36 and was behind on a project, so he threw more people at the project to knock it out. He found out that adding people to a late project just made the project even later. Ouch.

So he began studying the project. Looking at what worked and what didn’t work. There’s a lot of good stuff in this book and I’ll bring you a few nuggets at a time. First off?

How does a project get one year behind? One day at a time.

It’s hard to argue with that. The implication is that you have to constantly review your cases, looking at what needs to be done and making certain it gets done.

I have a number of cases with thorny issues that if I’m running and too busy, I’ll do a review and say “I need to do something about that”. Make the time, take the time to keep the cases moving, because the only way a case can get a year behind is one day at a time.

I’m working on a project that requires people to be able to work remotely. That means everything has to be digital and scanned into the computer. Most of the information already is scanned, but what do we do about the things that aren’t digital?

I just found out about Remote Control Mail from Mark Zamora of A GeorgiaLawyer. What does it do? You have your mail sent to a P.O. Box in any of 20 diifferent cities and then they will send you an e-mail that looks like this:  

Remote Control Mail will then give you the choice of recycling, shredding, scanning and then shredding, forwarding the hard copy to your office, or storing the hard copy at your office. They’re used to handling high volume for coprorate consumers and fees are very low.

You can handle your e-mail and regular mail at the same time and with the same ease, forwarding documents or replying to them quickly and easily.

We’re going to use it initially for our medical records. Neat stuff.

Last weekend, I re-read The Goal. I’ve previously written about the relation of statistical variances and dependent events. Other posts on this topic are here .  The mathematical principle is that delays accumulate rather than average out. In re-reading this, I came to another understanding on why cases get stuck:

• There is a FINITE ability to speed things up – If you hire a lifecare planner, vocational expert, economist, engineer…. the soonest they can give you their report and evaluation is immediately. That’s not a realistic goal, but the fastest that it can possibly happen.
• There is an INFINITE ability to slow things down – Information can sit on someone’s desk, inbox or to do list for a long time.

It’s our job to keep the cases moving, and not only hire the right experts and staff, but make certain that they keep things going.

I talk to a lot of people that want to start their own practice, but don’t know how to get started. The main problem some people have is not with logisitics of getting office space, a computer and a desk, but in getting the gumption to get started in the first place.

Sheryl Sisk Schelin of the Inspired Solo Blog describes some of the rood blocks that keep people from going solo:

When I contemplated going solo, there was always a “yes, but …” at the end of every thought:

Yes, but - I don’t have enough experience.

Yes, but - I don’t have enough money saved.

Yes, but - I don’t want to practice law like everyone else does with all the billable hours and nonsense.

Yes, but - what can I do? I’ve been practicing municipal/county law for so long.

Sheryl describes an Inspired Solo as someone who likes the practice of law, is happy, likes their clients and treats people right. I’m paraphrasing, you can click on the link for her full description.

Sheryl also writes

• SC Bankruptcy & Consumer Law Blog; and
• SC Employment Law Blog

We’re starting to see more and more South Carolina legal blogs. That’s a good thing that more lawyers are willing to share their information.

I have about 138 blogs in my newsreader. Some of my favorite are blogs written by CEOs. These are people that have risen to the top, been successful,  and they’re willing to offer their opinions for free. Here are some of my favorites:

• Mark Cuban – Blog Maverick – Mark is the flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks and also HDTVNet cable station. He’s a self-made billionaire (as if there’s any other kind). He shares his thoughts on owning an NBA team, being successful in business and also what he thinks on the merging of the old media (newspapers and cable) with the new media (the internet). We’re at a crossroads now and he knows far more about this than me, so I’m interested in his thoughts. Here are some good posts to get started: Success and Motivation: You only Have to Be Right Once;  this post lists a lot of his thoughts on business and collects a number of his posts together. Motivation, Redux;
• Michael Hyatt – From Where I Sit – Michael is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing and writes about running a business, dealing with employees, bosses and getting things done in a modern office. Nearly all of his posts are great. Some of the categories on his blog are Goal Setting, Leadership, Planning and Productivity. Almost all of his posts are helpful in some way to me. Here are a few recent samples What to Do When Technology Fails; Four Characteristics of Inspirational Leaders; How to Get Your Boss Off Your Back and 20 Things I Learned from My Boss (Even the Bad ones). Michael had a previous blog Working Smart that he no longer updates that is also chock full of good language.
• Paul Levy – Running a Hospital – Paul is the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is very passionate about delivering better health care to people, his doctors and the results that his hospital gets. He’s done things such as posting how the hospital is doing on infection rates (which hospitals normally do not publicize) and call for letting patients know how well hospitals actually handle treatment. Most studies are done and published two years later, when they are basically worthless for determining which facility to use. Paul realizes even with the best doctors, you have to see what results the patients are getting and make changes appropriately. Here are some sample posts: Changing Abbreviations; What Works – Triggers; and how doctors react to malpractice suits.  Paul has also posted his salary on his blog and asked people if they think he makes to much.
• Bob Parsons – Hot Points – Bob is the founder and owner of GoDaddy, he also was the owner of Parsons Technology. He has an interesting approach to business as his company builds all of his own software and technology. While Bob blogs mainly about what GoDaddy is doing, he does share some good thoughts. Here are some samples: The Secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil. It’s Simple. Putting it to work in your business; “Robert, they can’t eat you!” My Rules for Success in Business and Life in General. I also learned about domain kiting from Bob. This is where spammer will register a domain name, see if it makes money and if it doesn’t cancel it within a grace period. Apparently this happens with 92% of the domains registered (32 million of 35 million registered in one month) and is a huge problem. ,
• Tom Peters – Tom Peters is a management guru that has written In Search of Excellence: Lessons from Americas Best Run Companies; The Pursuit of Wow!; Re-Imagine and a bunch of others. His blog is a treasure trove of business advice, business ranting and stuff that’s good to know. Tom has a consultancy and some of his talented employees contribute to the blog. Tom gives presentations and posts his PowerPoint slides, has interviews with ‘Cool Friends’ that have written books and gives his opinions on things. He doesn’t like MBA’s, he thinks that business should inspire and lead, not be managed. He’s upset not with doctors, but the state of health care in this country and doesn’t like big mergers because they never work.

What CEO blogs do you read? Am I missing any that are worthwhile and helpful to you? Whenever talented people offer their hard fought knowledge, I’m going to take it.

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on technology and the lawyer for the Mass. Bar’s Lawyer’s in Transition seminar. It was a very interesting program, designed for people that had been out of the workplace and were looking to get back on the ‘lawyer track’.

Most of the people had been out of the legal field for 2–5 years, some a bit longer. The most common reasons for being out of the work filed were raising children, elder health care or personal health problems. It seemed like half of the people were thinking of going the sole practitioner route.

Being a sole practitioner myself I was very interested in the presentations and learned some new thins.

However, there was something very shocking to me. Every speaker. And I do mean every speaker emphasized networking. They emphasized networking to find a job and talked about how to define your ‘network’, how to tap into your network and how to expand your network.

Personally, I think of the same issues as people I know, talking to people I know and getting to know more people, but I’m a simple person.

Anyways, lots of good advice on networking. In the half day I was at the seminar, I heard 7 presenters (there were a number of panels) push the issue of networking. Networking, networking, networking.

So there’s a networking reception after the seminar with food and drinks to get to know people. What happens? Only 25% of the seminar participants even went!

The first rule of networking? You have to show up.  Judge Edward M. Ginsburg and I were discussing that on a break. His comment was “You just have to get out there and you never know what happens. Oftentimes the thing you really expect to happen never does, but some random event changes your life.” Yep. I totally agree.

I’ve been talking to a few people about what kind of cases they want to handle, what kind of work they want to do for a living and what kind of life they want to live.

I think this is a constant reevaluation. Even if you find something that you are really good at, are successful and profitable, it won’t last forever. You only have a limited window where it will be a real good opportunity and then you have to find other opportunities.

I worked my way through law school writing a computer system for an asbestos plaintiff firm. That was good for awhile, but has dwindled down. The large mass torts and ‘warehousing’ of cases was very profitable for a period of time, but that time period has passed. I have a friend that did very well with stucco cases for a period, but now those have dwindled down.

What’s the moral to this story? Even if you get a lot of cases that are profitable and that you’re good at, it won’t last forever.

So what kind of cases do you want? More complex high dollar cases? Medium size cases that don’t bring in as much  money, but are easier to work up? Lots and lots of little cases that are very easy to standardize and you can hand off to an associate? Cases that you feel you’re making a difference in your clients life? Cases where you feel that you’re making a difference in upholding (or changing) the system?

Once you identify the kind of cases you want, where do those cases come from? Who are the clients? Who do the clients go to for advice? Where are the gathering spots for the referrals? Who are the connectors in the industry? And by connector,  I mean who out there knows everyone and can give you referrals.

This takes thought. The high dollar cases with clear liability, serious damages and unlimited insurance/collectability are few and far between.

There’s a lot of legal work out there and the clients are going to hire someone. It might as well be you.

While working on Friday, I accidentally deleted my entire Inbox. I meant to delete an entire directory of spam, but I made a mistake.

I probably had about 750 e-mails in my inbox of things I needed to sort, return messages to, put in various folders (civil procedure, damages, evidence, experts, tort reform…). That’s far too many too keep up with. And the number kept growing…….and growing……and growing.

Now it’s gone. And I’m okay with that. While I try to weed through them in random moments of the day, like when I’m waiting on hold, it had really gotten out of hand. And really, if I was waiting to respond to an e-mail from last July, it’s probably just easier to say “I didn’t do it” as opposed to thinking I would get to it soon.

I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I get to start fresh. In reality I could call my tech guy and have him pull the e-mails from Thursday night’s backup, but I’m not going to do that.

I wrote about an experiment we tried at our office concerning moving cases at the Trial Lawyer Resource Center. An excerpt:

We have a magical law firm where we have as many cases as we want and there is an unlimited supply of cases where the people have finished medical treatment. This big bowl of peanut M & M’s is our supply of cases. Each M & M is a case. We can help as many people as we can get out the door.

I have a six sided dice here. Each person is going to roll the dice and they ‘move’ or produce as many cases as they roll. 5–6 is a good week. 1–2 is a bad week. 3–4 is an average week. Now we all know all of the possible reasons for having a non-productive week, some of them are within are control and some are not.

Our goal here is not to be judgmental about good reasons or bad reasons, or productive vs. non-productive time. That’s what the dice is for. A high number is a good week and a low number is a bad week.

Each roll of the dice is a ‘week’. We’ll run through 10 weeks, which is going through the whole team in sequence ten times. Halfway between one and six is 3.5 (I know your first thought is 3, but that’s halfway between 0–6). My expectation for my staff at the end of ten weeks is that we will have moved 35 cases.

Every turn, I want my staff member to roll the dice and then take that many ‘cases’ from the cup to the left. The first person in the chain has an unlimited supply of cases. Each person down the lline from there can only take as many cases as they roll, or as is actually in the cup. Okay, let’s go.

Check out the whole post at Why It's So Hard to Move Cases.

I was at the Kentucky Academy of Trial Attorney's program on Technology: Learn How It Can Help You Be A Better Trial Lawyer. I gave a presentation on weblogs and what they mean for trial lawyers. Why you should write one, why you should read them and why they are changing the face of the internet.

I also listened to other great presentations at the program. I especially enjoyed Mike Burman from Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Mike gave a presentation on case management, a subject near and dear to my heart. Mike is using Needles and has it integrated with ecopy, a scanning networked copy machine. It looked like a slick operation.

In addition to what you can do with good case management, Mike talked about WHY you would want case management. Answer? It gives you more time to talk to your client. It allows you more time to think about the case. It allows you to be more organized and deal with problems before they occur.

Sounds good to me. I always say, it is important for the lawyer to manage his cases, or the cases manage him. Thanks for the input Mike.

There. I said it. And I mean it. But it's probably not what you think.

At the WILG Convention in San Antonio, there was a vendor selling outsourced legal services. The company was from Bangalore, India. That was the first time I've personally seen a company from out of the country selling their services. It's rather ironic, that they were selling their services at a Convention of lawyers that are dedicated to protecting injured workers and their rights.

So do I want to have my demand packages written in India? I don't think so. So what do I mean when I say I want to outsource?

I'm in the process of setting my goals for 2007. But to do that, I need to know overall where I'm going. Here are two quotes I like a lot. From Alice in Wonderland when Alice reaches a fork in the road:

Alice: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
Cheshire Cat: "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

Alice: "I don't much care"
Cheshire Cat: "Then it doesn't matter which way you go".

And a Dr. Seuss Quote:

You have brains is your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
-Dr. Seuss (Oh, the Places You'll Go!)

So what do I want to do? How do I keep on track? I'm writing down the following goals.

• What Kind of Life Do I Want? - When I'm 82 and look back over my life, what would make me say "That was a good life. It was worth living and I'm glad I did it." If I have a long life, full career and good family, what does that look like? What is my definition of that? The more I think about this and clearer I am on this aspect, the more things fall in place and happen, almost automatically.

One exercise that's recommended is to write your obituary. Not as a morbid exercise, but to say at the end of your life, what do you want people saying about you? What do you want as accomplishments? What kind of life do you want to live?

• What Is Your Ideal Law Firm? - As an exercise in thought, what is your Ideal Law Firm? If you could wave a magic wand and your wildest dreams come true and anything you want could happen, what kind of law firm would you want?

You get up in the morning, drive to work and open the door. There in front of you is your Ideal Law Firm. What does it look like? I'm mapping out the practice areas, the kind of cases, the number of cases, the difference between a good client and a bad client, how to differentiate those, how I'm going to get the cases, the operations, the systems I need in place, the type of employees that I want, the traits I'm looking for in an employee and the work that I will do.

Basically, a model business plan not for my current practice, but for my Ideal Law Firm.

• What Are My Goals for 2007? - At the beginning of the year, the papers and the media get carried away with the 'Year in Review'. I sat down and thought "Okay, it's January 1, 2007. Another year has passed. What would I like to see happen in 2007?" What would have to happen for me to look back on December 31, 2007 and say "Man. That was a good year. I had a good 2007 and I'm very pleased with the work that I did, the things I did. That was fantastic and I can't wait for 2008"?

• What Are My Monthly Goals? - Once I have my yearly goals set, then I can sit down and figure out where I have to be halfway through the year to make them happen, then a quarter way through the year and what I need to accomplish every month to make those goals happen. Once I have the monthly goals, I can break those down to weekly goals and communicate those to my staff.

• What Work Do I like Doing? - Of all the parts of being a lawyer, what do I like best? What do I really like to do? What do I dislike doing? What do I procrastinate on? What should I be doing more of, and what Should I be doing less of?

Or in shorter terms, I'm setting short term, medium range and long term goals. By putting them down in writing, I can see how well they are aligned and whether they actually match. Do I need to be doing something different today? Are my short, medium and long range goals at odds with themselves? Am I working towards where I want to be or working against it?

The clearer you are about where you want to go, the easier it is to get there. Brains in the head and feet in the shoes.

The age of technology allows us to be more and more connected to the office and our clients. But the question is how connected should we be?  The Greatest American Lawyer gives his answer:

The answer to this debate is simple, not easy, but simple. Ours is a service industry, and as connectedness becomes more and more the norm, those who we serve are going to demand the same from us. If you want your firm to succeed in the 21st century - the age of unparalleled communication - you need to make yourself available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For if you don't you will be left in the dust of the 9 to 5, watching as other attorney's offer full-time availability to their clients and reap the benefits.

For further thoughts regarding this subject, please check out this post titled: "Ball and Chain? Key to Freedom?" by Patrick J. Lamb. Patrick hits the issue right on the head: "Those who put clients in second place are going to find out that they don't have to worry about that problem any more."

I strongly disagree with this. Connectivity is great. On Friday afternoon, my wife who is about to have our second child was unexpectedly admitted to the hospital for testing. After the tests, but before the results were in she was reading a book and I logged in to the office network, checked e-mail, checked messages and answered a few questions. Before the age of technology, I would have had to leave either my wife or the office in the lurch. Wi-fi is a good thing.

I am the first to admit that I don’t have the most balanced life between work and family. I write articles, do research, read business books, do legal research, put together presentations and read and breakdown depositions in the evenings and weekends. I’m finding out with a small child (and soon to be children) that I can do that less and less.

I write about practice management and marketing a goodly amount and get a decent number of e-mails and questions about marketing and what is the best plan of action for their firm. There’s no right or wrong, but here’s a few things to take into consideration:

• What size market are you in? – I have a number of friends that are lawyers in Atlanta. The greater Atlanta area has 22,000 lawyers and a population of about 4 million. The entire state of South Carolina has about 11,500 lawyers and 3 million people. I live and work in Myrtle Beach.  Myrtle Beach has about 400 lawyers and a population of about 100,000. Different approaches are necessary for the different sizes.
• Are you in a high tech market? – In Myrtle Beach, we have a lot of construction workers and service industry workers (restaurant and hotel workers). We are a resort town with 1,500 restaurants. We’re a pretty low tech town. A lot of my workers comp clients don’t have a phone number throughout the entire engagement, much less an internet connection. You have to take a totally different approach in a high tech market such as Boston, Austin, Huntsville, San Jose or cities that are highly connected.
• Do the Yellow Pages Work?  – Based on the size of the market, different ways of reaching clients make more sense. I went heavy into the Yellow Pages in Myrtle Beach early on. At the moment, I have a full page ad for litigation, front and back of a divider tab between the white pages and yellow pages, a half page ad for workers comp and a handful of in column ads. That’s quite a bit, but in Myrtle Beach, it’s not too expensive. I also got in early enough on the full page ads to be in the number five spot of about 30 full page ads. Would it be worth it today to be in the 31st position? Probably not. I hate to think how much the same ad would cost in Manhattan, or any decent size city. In fact, even in Charleston, South Carolina, the Yellow Pages would probably cost 2–3 times the amount. Is it worth it to have just a little ad the size of a business card or a dollar bill? Hmmm……Probably not.
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What’s the difference? Do put your focus on controlling expenses, counting pennies from goingout the door while keeping dollars from coming in the door in the first place? Or do you focus on the ‘top dollar’? Working on getting more money to come in to the business? Tom Peters is a huge proponent on focusing on the top dollar. Putting your time and energy into generating more business and not counting the pennies. This is the same principle of penny wise and pound foolish. Tom is also fairly derogative of MBA programs. He feels that business needs more leaders and thinks that there should be higher aspirations than business ‘administration’. Why would any want to be an ‘administrator’? It beats me.

Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of reading, thinking and learning about what it takes to be successful. While I’m smart and do well on standardized tests. Being smart is not a requirement for being successful. The world is full of intelligent losers. The world is full of incredibly bright people who just can’t seem to put things together. There are also people of average intelligence who do very well. Here are the three basic things that I think it takes to be successful:

• Building a Good Team – What kind of team can you put together? Unless you are small and want to stay very small, you are going to have to rely on your employees. If you have golden employees, you’re a hero. If you have mediocre or less employees, you’re a goat. If you have the ability to put together, build and keep happy a good team, then your team will make you look good. In addition to employees, the better team you can put together for your cases (private investigators, future costs experts, doctors that care about their patients and will give honest opinions, but will take the time to really look at what is wrong, lifecare planners, case managers…) the better you will be able to work your case up and the easier your life will be.

• Paying Attention to What Works and What Doesn’t – Taking the time to look at your firm and see what is working well and what is not. The things that are working well, think about what you can do to do more of them. The things that are not working well, do what you can to fix the problem or eliminate it. Are soft tissue cases not being profitable? How many cases do you have? Is there anything you can do to handle them better and make them more profitable? Or do you have too many of them and they’re not profitable and taking up a lot of time and energy of your staff that could be better put on your other cases and you would be better off wrapping up your existing soft-tissue cases and not taking them in the future. Or….a combination of still taking soft tissue cases, but being very selective about the cases you take and making certain your staff knows your criteria. If you can identify what is not working, it’s not too hard to identify what the solution is. It is important to be able to identify and articulate what the problem is.

Also pay attention to what works and doesn’t work at trial. After a trial, talk to the jurors (following the appropriate rules of course) and find out what they liked and didn’t like. You’ll be amazed and surprised at what you hear. If there is a lawyer in your area that tends to get tremendous results, take him to lunch and ask him why he thinks his verdicts are so high.

I also like to pay attention to business and what works there. Technology and the internet were supposed to be the next big thing, but Wal-Mart came out of nowhere to be by far the largest company in America. And they did it in retail sales, a vanilla field that has been around forever. Target came out of nowhere to beat K-Mart at their own game. The continued excellence of McDonalds is a story worth studying. Disney reinvented itself after the passing of Walt Disney. These are all stories worth studying and learning from. As lawyers should we copy them? No. Can we learn from them and adapt lessons from them? Absolutely. We ignore the successes at our own peril.

Of course we ignore the failures at our own peril as well. We can learn quite a lot from the decline and/or demise of the American car industry, Osborne Computers, IBM giving up the software rights to MicroSoft (and there’s a re-invention success after that), Sears, K-Mart, the tnetire airline industry (except for JetBlue and SouthWest, two more success stories) and many more. What was their fatal flaw? Where did they go wrong?

Why didn’t they fix their problems? How do we as lawyers anticipate situations and not make the same mistakes?

As lawyers, we are trained to be analytical. We apply logic to the case we’re working on. As trial lawyers, we’re trained to be ruthless in using what works and doesn’t work. I’ve had demonstrative exhibits that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on and absolutlely loved. People didn’t like them and reacted much more strongly to a simple picture than I thought. Out goes the fancy (expensive) exhibit and in goes the picture. If I have an argument that I love, but the target audience doesn’t, the argument gets pitched. We’re trained to do this as lawyers, but more often than not, fail to do this in our practice. We need to use what works, and fix or stop doing what doesn’t work.

• Pay Attention to the Day to Day – How many cases are coming in? How many demand packages went out the door? How many cases do you have where something needs to be resolved? How quickly are your cases moving? While it’s important to think strategically, the ‘big thoughts’ of what’s working, what’s not and what you can do to be a better lawyer, run a better law firm or get more/better cases it’s just as important to not forget the daily work and determine what needs to be done and what’s getting done.

 There you have it. Build a good team, pay attention to what works (and what doesn’t) and pay attention to the day to day. That’s my recipe for success. What’s yours?

There is no cheaper advertising than your business card. You can get 1,000 business cards for $30–40. It kills me when I see business cards with perforated edges and blurry ink that a lawyer printed up on his own with an ink-jet printer. It drives me crazy when I get a lawyer’s business card that has something printed on the back because they got it printed for a discount. It drives me to distraction when I see a business card on cheap, flimsy card stock.

The business card is a descendant of the ‘calling card’ that announced who you were. Do you really want to tell the world you’re too cheap to have your cards professionally printed? If the card looks clean, sharp and professional, there is a good chance they will think that you and your firm are clean, sharp and professional. If you give them a cheap card, odds are people will think you are cheap.

There are a lot of things that the big firms do, that solos don’t have the money for. But $35 for a thousand cards? Please. By not getting clean, sharp, professional business cards, you are doing yourself and your firm a disservice.

Last week I was a speaker at the Solo and Small Law Office Conference that was put on by the Virginia Trial Lawyer’s Association. They had speakers from around the country and was (I believe) the best conference of this type in the country. I was very impressed with the speakers, but was more impressed with the participants. The lawyers were very engaged and actively listening and participating in the sessions. They were very involved in the discussions and how to better their practice.

Several weeks before that, I just got back from a practice management retreat that was fabulous. It was a private retreat and I’m still digesting all of the information that I received. Right now, I’m spending a lot of time focusing on the cases and moving them forward.

Why the focus on practice management? The better run your office is, the better lawyer you can be. The more smoothly your office runs, the more time you can spend being a lawyer.

While my overall focus is on being the best trial lawyer I can be, don’t be surprised if the posts are slanted towards practice management for a bit.

During the Fall Retreat for the Southern Trial Lawyers, we talked about the ATLA name change, the image and perception of trial lawyer’s and the future of the profession. It was a fascinating conversation, but one thing emerged. Two forces are changing the the world we live in. The changes are going to be dramatic.

Force one is the extended pressure the corporate world has exerted to deny compensation to people they have injured. This is commonly known as tort reform. The corporate world has alwyas wanted to limit their liability, but it has really picked up steam in the past few years. And don’t think that it’s over or that they will be happy with their successes. In South Carolina, after tort ‘reform’ was pushed through, the very next year they tried to gut the workers compensation system based on false information and lies. We survived this year without changes, but the fight isn’t over.

Force two is advertising. Typically when lawyers think of advertising, it’s the ‘schlock’ lawyers, the ‘One call that’s all’ or the ‘Got a wreck? Get a check’, or the ‘strong arm’ or ‘heavy hitter’ lawyers that they think of advertising. In Florida, there’s a firm that has spent more than $6.5 million in advertising. From what I hear, the advertising is classy and tasteful. The firm has 85 lawyers working for them and a high percentage of the lawyers are board certified. They go to trial and do a good job. This firm started in Tampa (I think) and has now spread to the entire state of Florida. They have now moved into the Atlanta market and doing heavy advertising there.

What does that mean for you? It means it’s only a matter of time before this firm (or someone else with the same business plan) moves into your town. I now know how a well run mom and pop shop felt when Wal-Mart moved into their town.

Our world is changing and it’s changing fast. What is the proper response to take? It depends on the size of your firm, the focus of your practice, how many years of practicing law you have left, the size of your market and your goals. There’s no easy answer. However, I can easily say the ‘golden years’ of plaintiff practie are over and it will take some careful navigation to avoid the rocky shoals ahead.

Michelle Golden of Legal Ease Blog asks: What's With All of the Legal Consultants?:

It’s only natural that more and more consultants would be cropping up as more and more people graduate from law school and competition gets stiffer and stiffer. Perhaps years ago you could just hang out a shingle and as long as you knew what you were doing in the legal arena, you’d get business. With less lawyers to compete against, it was easier for the community to find the lawyers, and more people knew who was who. That just isn’t the case now.

Law is a business, and there are plently of lawyers who need help with running a business, managing people, managing time, managing cases, bringing in business, and keeping clients happy. Clients are getting more demanding, and lawyers need to start focusing more on what the clients want and less on the lawyer’s skills.

I think it’s a brave new world and you don’t get ahead by doing the same thing everyone else does. I use the following consultants:

• Business Coaching – To maximize my strong suits and minimize my weak points. I have found that rhw rwm I build is just as important as my trial skills. I use a two person team of business coaches. One an attorney with 35 plus years experience, and the other is just a business guru.
• Trial Consultant – To stay up on the latest techniques and tips on trial work. With tort reform in the news and the changing demographic pool of the jury, the landscape is shifting for injury lawyers. In addition to using a trial consultant for any individual case, I schedule monthly meetings to stay up on the current ‘tech’.
• Marketing Consultant  – To help design a logo, stationary and other literature and to help get my message across.
• Blogging Consultant – To help stay current on all of the weblog tech.
• Website Consultant – To stay current on SEO topics.
• Case Management Consultant – To help on maximizing my case management software.

I try to find the most knowledgeable people in the country and use them. I think it helps to leverage their knowledge and shorten my learning curve. I also have a number of informal mentors that have provided a lot of guidance. After awhile, you build a team that’s large enough that you can’t do everything. Plus…I need all the help I can get.

In a recent discussion on scanning and going paperless, John Powers of Powers & Santola in Albany, had such terrific input that I had to share it. Take it away, John:

We’ve been paperless for nearly three years, using TrialWorks as our case management system.  The keys to going paperless are having a dependable HIGH SPEED scanner and a plan to make certain that everything gets scanned before it gets into the hands of a lawyer.

With 7 lawyers in the firm we are using the Canon 9080C scanner, which has color capability and scans at 90 pages per minute (180 pages per minute in duplex) in black and white and 50 pages per minute (100 ppm in duplex) in color.  We started with one scanner and subsequently added a second 9080C scanner to alleviate the frustration that occasionally arose when someone was “waiting for the scanner to be free”.  We also have three Canon 2080C portable scanners for use in court, at depositions or for gathering records outside of the office.

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