If you love musicals and the web then this video is for you.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Sunday Funny – A CollegeHumor Musical

It’s Saturday and on this day of each week I publish links to some of the things I’ve come across over the past week that might (I repeat “might”) be of interest to you. These are things that stimulated me in some way related my practice. I’m publishing these links without much comment so you’ll have to click on them if they look interesting to you.

“Lets Call the Whole Thing Off” by Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic is an examination of her own divorce and the larger context.

What if Nordstrom provided family law services? It’s happening in the U.K. Can we be far behind? Adapt or die. Tescos law by Andrew Wooley.

Boo to Billable Hours, normally $16 on Amazon, is now a free ebook at John Derrick’s site.

Photo credit – Joel Bedford.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Interesting Stuff – July 4, 2009 Edition

It’s the third of July and most US offices are closed to celebrate Independence Day (even though the actual holiday is tomorrow). Are you taking the day off? I hope so. You should be taking advantage of every opportunity for rest and relaxation. It’s crucial to your mental health. This is a tough job and if you don’t take the time to enjoy your life you’ll quickly tire of the work.

While you’re out of the office, today, I hope you’ll take a minute to assess your vacation situation. Do you have a vacation planned? If not, why not?

My suggestion is that you take a major vacation (you’ve got to leave town) of one to two weeks at least twice a year – more if you can work it out. The key to making that happen is to schedule the trip well in advance. Always schedule your next trip immediately upon returning from your last trip. Make it a habit.

If you don’t have a trip scheduled now then get online and book something. Worst case – book it for six months from now. That will give you plenty of time to get caught up and it’s easier to commit to something so far out.

Don’t insist on being spontaneous. Plan in advance. Most of the “spontaneous” lawyers I know don’t take vacations. They claim to love quick trips at the last minute, but the fact is that they rarely find the time.

My favorite vacation of all time was a month on Grand Cayman quite a few years ago. Why was it great? The island breeze? The Rum Punch? Nope, it was great because I was there for four weeks. I went diving every other day, I spent time with my family and, most importantly, I was able to totally disconnect from the office. It takes me days and days to  stop thinking about work. That trip was fantastic.

Go ahead, now, and open another browser window and start researching your trip. Book it by the end of the day. Send me an email and let me know where you’re going. I can’t wait to hear.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Are You Taking the Day Off?

She called. She left a voicemail. She NEEDS to talk to you.

When are you going to call back? When I talk to lawyers I get the sense that they’re planning to call back within a day or two. It might be today, it might be tomorrow.

She’s sitting at home waiting for the return call. She may even call your office to let someone know that she’s running out to pick the kids up at school and can now be reached on the cell phone. She really expects a call – soon. She’s certain she’s as important to you as you are to her. She’s sure she made the right decision in hiring you and knows you’re someone she can trust.

She believes you’ll call her back within a few minutes, maybe a few hours. She gets calls back quickly from her friends, her pediatrician’s office, even the cable company. She can’t fathom that it could take you days to return her call.

Call her back. If you can’t call her then have someone else call her. We do more damage to the image of lawyers by our failure to promptly return calls than by anything else we do. Bar association image programs do nothing to help our image with someone that was in a crisis and couldn’t get her attorney on the phone. Call her back.

You can improve the situation – but you can’t entirely manage it – by better setting expectations. Explain your plan for returning calls at the initial consultation, explain it in your client handbook and have your voicemail system or receptionist explain it again. If your plan is to call back in two days then just say it. “We call back in two days. Take it or leave it. If you have an emergency or a crisis – it’s still two days.” By setting expectations in advance you head off some, not all, of the client upsets. You may also, if you tell people your policy, reduce your caseload so you can call back faster.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

When are You Going to Call Her Back?

Client meltdowns are miserable. It’s painful to deal with the upset and get a client back on track. Trust is damaged and it’s hard to restore. Meltdowns stink.

Once it’s over and the relationship is patched up it’s worth taking a few minutes to reflect on the situation. Sometimes, not always, we can learn from the meltdown and take action to prevent future problems.

The difficulty I sometimes run into with after-action analysis is a tendency to believe that the problem discussed during the meltdown was really the problem. For instance, we recently misaddressed a letter and accidentally sent it the spouse’s address rather than to our client. The spouse informed our client and explained that her “lawyers were idiots.” This didn’t help our relationship with the client and the meltdown ensued.

The attorney managing the case was upset with the administrative assistant that had labeled the envelope. Blame was assigned. The attorney, exhausted by the upsetting client encounter, lashed out at the admin. The admin’s supervisor got involved. The attorney’s supervisor got involved. It started off ugly and ended uglier.

It’s unfortunate that the envelope was sent to the wrong address. But the problem likely started long before we mailed the envelope.

When a client melts down, when they reach the point of no return, it’s not usually, exclusively, about the thing that put them over the edge. The problem began much earlier when the temperature started to rise, long before it reached the boiling point. It’s likely that other mistakes were made – maybe a delay in returning a call – or a misspelling in a document – or an off-color joke – and those mistakes raised the temperature in the first place. The final straw – the misaddressed envelope – can’t really be blamed for the entire problem. And that administrative assitant can’t be assigned full responsiblity for the problem.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Stopping the Meldown Before it Starts

This is going to blow your mind (at least it blew my mind). We need a new employee in our Charlotte office. We ran an ad last week on careerbuilder. I’ve provided the full text of the ad below. We had 476 applicants within five days and more are coming in every hour.

Here’s the ad (I’ve highlighted the important part in red):

Full Time Administrative Assistant/Paralegal

Rosen Law Firm seeks Full Time Administrative Assistant in our Charlotte, North Carolina office.

Our firm strives to employ professional, ambitious people with high energy who embrace new challenges. This job demands the ability to handle responsibility with little supervision. This position will be filled quickly. We are ready to bring the right candidate on board immediately!

Responsibilities:

* Answers phones, greets & seats clients
* Scan documents and handle document management within client database
* Manage office supplies
* Make courthouse runs
* Draft court documents
* Taking payments and bank deposits
* Serve as back up point of contact for potential client calls and other administrative duties as assigned.

Requirements

* Bachelor’s degree
* Excellent communication, organizational and interpersonal skills
* Detail oriented with strong phone presence
* Proficient in Microsoft Office applications, basic understanding of Office Operations
* Experience with QuickBooks
* Must have a willingness to interact with our clients on a daily basis
* 80% of this job will be Administrative work and 20% will be legal assistant related duties
* Desire to innovate and an enthusiasm for change
* Ability to build strong and sustainable relationships and an aptitude for dealing with people at all levels of the organization
* A strong history of personal and professional growth
* A positive, big-picture, long-term perspective
* A history of exercising initiative and taking responsibility
* Work schedule expectations: 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through Friday and additional, hours as needed. At least one Tuesday night per month, you would be required to stay late.

Benefits:

* Competitive salary
* Company paid health, life, dental and vision, insurance
* 401(k) match
* Three weeks paid leave with additional time each year
* Annual salary review and evaluation.

To apply: PLEASE FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS:

Please email your (1) resume, (2) cover letter and (3) salary requirements to the address listed, in this posting. Please attach a (4) link to a video posted on YouTube.com (or any other video hosting site) in which you answer the question — “Why would you be good at this job?” Please provide an (5) email address and (6) your availability during the next two weeks for an interview. Any application submitted without these six elements will not be considered. ABSOLUTELY NO PHONE CALLS.

Of the 476 applicants we had 7 that fulfilled all 6 of the requirements. One of the 7 didn’t have a Bachelor’s degree. She was eliminated (probably a mistake we ought to fix). Less than 1.5% of the applicants followed the instructions. How is that possible?

Maybe some potential applicants are bothered by the video requirement. We can assume those people didn’t apply. I am aware of the exposure we create by requiring a video, but we decided it was worth the risk.

I can only assume that the vast majority of the applicants failed to read the entire ad or that they are incapable of following the instructions.

I’m tempted to go back through the resumes and find some other candidates that look good on paper. There are plenty of them. But I now know that they don’t follow instructions well. Following instructions is an important part of the job we seek to fill. Wouldn’t it be insane for me to consider the other 400+ people after they failed to comply with our request?

This experience is really depressing. I just can’t believe it.

I’ll be interviewing most of the people that followed the instructions later today. I hope to find an excellent candidate. I’ll let you know.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Good People Are Hard to Find (Even in a Recession)

More and more attorneys are opening new practices. It’s tough to deal with financing a new firm and it requires careful thought regarding personal and business finances. How much money do you need to open a new practice? Where will you get the money? How long will it take for the money to start to flow?

Erik Mazzone and I provide the answers in this podcast.

I worked in a firm for three years before opening my own practice in 1990. It’s been awhile since I did it and some things have changed. But, lots of things remain the same. Erik advises new practices on a daily basis and is living on the frontline with many of these practices by providing advice as they go along.

We provide some specific action steps that are essential to the success of a new practice.

During the show we make reference to a couple of sites. The links to these sites are provided below -

QuickBooks Online
Google Voice

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Starting a Law Practice on a Shoestring

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Sunday Funny – Still Got Your Dignity

Each week, on Saturday, I’m publishing links to some of the things I’ve come across over the past week that might (I repeat “might”) be of interest to you. These are things that stimulated me in some way related my practice. I’m publishing these links without much comment so you’ll have to click on them if they look interesting to you.

Twitter Client Development Success Stories – Kevin O’Keefe has gathered these stories and it’s worth checking out if you still question the value of Twitter as a business development tool.

Priming the pump of efficiency – Seth Godin writes about the cost of updating systems. This inspired me to get moving on trashing our old client database system and moving toward something new.

What if the Apple Store billed by the hour? – Well done by post by Jay Shepherd.

How Facebook is Gunning for Google (And Killing SEO) – written by attorney Mike Wasylik about the huge impact Facebook is having on traffic to other websites.

Photo by Jose Luis Mieza

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Interesting Stuff – June 27, 2009 Edition

Many family law practitioners have started a blog. And stopped. Of the family law blogs I follow, most have gone dormant. Many of the others add a post only a few times per month. I think you’ve largely voted with your feet by deciding not to start a blog or abandoning it after you got it going. Blogging is time consuming and tough to do with the daily pressures of running a practice.

Blogging does several things for you. It helps your search engine positioning. It gets you media attention. It keeps you – top of mind – with your internet savvy peers around the world. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are a host of other benefits as well.

The problem, as I see it, with blogging in family law, is that a blog is usually about ongoing changes and developments. Unfortunately, most family law developments, like new case law or statutes, aren’t of great interest to our prospective clients. Potential clients are largely looking for answers to their questions about their urgent concerns. They seek a treatise rather than a news update.

Should you be blogging? Yes. But only if you’ve got the time to make a long-term commitment and you’ve already done some other things first. Most of us haven’t done these “other” things. So, for the most part, we should be working on other, higher value, marketing activities.

Before blogging, I would suggest that you’ve checked these three items off your list -

(1) Have systems in place that allow you to serve each client in such a manner that they commit to referring their friends and family to you should the need arise,

(2) Have a strong network of ten referral sources (per attorney) sending you six paid consultations (not merely referrals) per year,

(3) Have a high-quality website that features great information about divorce in your state.

Once you have those three prerequisites in place then go ahead and blog. Be sure to send me a note and I’ll add your link to our North Carolina Divorce site.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Should You Be Blogging?

Workplace affairs are standard operating procedure in the divorce lawyer’s office, right? I mean, we deal with clients sleeping with their coworkers, superiors and subordinates all day long. It’s pretty unusual to get through a day without dealing with at least one person that is involved in a workplace relationship turned romantic.

But what about your office? Is it somehow immune from the office romance? What about you? Is that something that would “never” happen?

Is it remotely possible? Maybe you’ve been spending time with a paralegal working on a complicated case. The trial date approaches. It’s going to take four days to try the case. It’s in a distant county. A hotel stay will be required.

You’ve worked hard together. You’ve traded stories about your families. You’re suddenly closer than you thought. It snuck up on you.

Are you just like so many of your clients? Have you learned the lessons of your clients’ failed marriages?

Don’t assume it can’t happen to you. And if it does, be prepared for a couple of lawsuits. One from your spouse. Another from the employee. Maybe one from the spouse of the employee, depending on your state law.

Visualize, for a moment, the embarrassment of having one, two or all three of your trials in the county where you practice. Imagine your colleagues watching as the case is heard by a judge you’ve known for years. Or, more likely, a judge is brought in from another county due to your relationship with the local bench. You know how that goes. The judge goes home after the trial and all the lawyers in that county are dying to hear how it went. You’ll be the talk of the judge’s hometown as well.

Maybe you’ll get really lucky and your case will hit the local papers. Ironic situations are especially appealing to the media. They say “no press is bad press.” Congratulations on your new found celebrity.

Oh, and your assets will be divided if your marriage goes down the tubes. You’ll be on the hook for some support. You’ll be seeing less of your kids. And of course, you’ll lose the paralegal and have to find a new staff member and, as we all know, the relationship with the paralegal won’t work out.

I mention the fallout simply to remind you of what you have to lose. We’ve seen it all before. We wonder how people make such bad decisions when it happens to them. Sometimes taking a minute to feel the pain, now, rather that after we make a mistake, can drive us to avoid the mistake.

Don’t let it happen to you.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Are You Sleeping With Your Secretary?

Many years ago we engaged in a process for determining the core values held by our firm. We went round and round and settled on five brief statements that capture who we are and what we stand for. We didn’t look for aspirational values. We pushed ourselves to figure out what we were already all about. We looked at the way we behaved with one another and examined the things our actions indicated that we cared about.

The most important question we asked one another was “would we fire someone for failing to live this value?” Answering that question was the key to clarifying our thoughts.

We’ve lived with the core values we committed to writing for many years. Those of us that have been with the firm for a long time have an easy time remembering the values and what they mean.

But we want to keep them alive. We want newcomers to understand the values.

Once per quarter, at our regular firm-wide meeting, we present three awards to individuals that have demonstrated, by their behavior, one of the five core values. The awards are presented by one employee to another and the recipients are selected by the employees rather than by the firm’s management team. Everyone is eligible and the awards tend to go to lawyers and other team members in fairly equal numbers. Our various teams meet a few weeks before the quarterly meeting and agree on who will be given the awards. They also figure out a gift for the recipient that will really fit each winner.

The process of taking nominations, discussing the nominees, selecting a winner and deciding on a gift help keep the core values alive in the minds of everyone in firm. The award presentations further reinforce the values. The entire process, repeated every quarter, goes a long way toward keeping us in alignment with our values.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Reminding Us of Our Values

I read a post on a family law list serve yesterday asking about “no-shows” or missed appointments. The attorney was wondering why people make an appointment for an initial consultation and then fail to show up. Is it because the consult fee is more than they can afford and they’re embarrassed to say so? Is it because it might be a week before the meeting and they find someone else that’s available immediately? Is it just an inevitable thing that’s going to happen sometimes no matter what you do?

I think the attorney asking the question was on the right track, generally, with the possible causes. Some “no-shows” are the result of the three causes mentioned above. There is, however, in my opinion, a more prevalent cause.

I think the larger cause of “no-shows” is a lack of connection between the prospective client and the firm. For some reason they didn’t feel as if the firm understood them and was willing to help them. They didn’t get a sense that the firm was there for them, heard their story and was poised to solve their problem.

For many years we’ve assigned one person, at a time, to handle all of our initial consultation calls.  These calls are pretty much the only duty assigned to this position. We usually have a  young woman who keeps the job for between one and three years. By the end of her tenure she is usually pretty burned out on listening to upset people.

We’ve tracked conversion rates and cancellation rates for these employees for more than a decade and have analyzed the data carefully. We’ve found that these employees perform very well at the beginning. They are most successful at about three months into the position and then they fade a bit. They generally hold steady until about three months before they leave the position.

We’ve theorized that “burn out” is the biggest factor in the decrease in conversions and increase in cancellations. When they burn out they are less able to be empathetic on the phone. They don’t listen as well as they did when they were new and enthusiastic. They aren’t as willing to let callers drone on and on. They are more likely to cut to the chase, schedule the appointment and get off the phone.

The caller picks up on the employee’s attitude. They feel like they talked to a scheduler rather than to a person committed to helping them solve their problem. They’re more likely to decide not to come for their appointment and to feel like calling to cancel is unnecessary.

I suspect that “burn out” or “busyness” also impact attorneys handling these calls themselves. I suspect that careful tracking would show more n0-shows when an attorney really needs a vacation and when the attorney is on overload with other tasks. To avoid “no-shows” focus on building a connection with the prospective client before the appointment. You’ll still get some missed appointments. But there will be fewer of them.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Getting No-Shows to Show

The day starts, the day ends and, sometimes, nothing is accomplished between those two endpoints. How can this be? How does this happen?

How can we be so easily distracted by shiny objects?

Two experts on wasting time, me and Erik Mazzone, talk through some of life’s greatest distractions. We offer some suggestions for getting things back on track.

Are we alone in being easily distracted or do you suffer along with us?

During our “picks of the week” segment we discuss Dial2Do and Remember the Milk.

Give us a listen.

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Easily Distracted: Time Sucks

It was funny to me, plus he’s a lawyer, but you’ve likely already seen it…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Sunday Funny – President Kills a Fly

Each week, on Saturday, I’m publi

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Interesting Stuff – June 20, 2009 Edition

I used to forget Father’s Day. At the very last minute I’d remember.

Back in the day before e-cards, I’d rush out to the store, buy a Father’s Day card, write something on it and fax it to my dad at the office. He seemed to like it.

Now he’s gone. I was in a deposition one day and the receptionist interrupted me. My mother was on the phone. It was about ten in the morning. My mother told me he had died on a plane waiting to take off. He was headed for the state capital with a client for a meeting. They did C.P.R. and tried hard to revive him. No luck.

I left immediately for Miami and helped my mother deal with the funeral. There were a ton of people there. Lots of former clients ranging from two guys that had spent more than a decade on death row and were finally freed, to a group of Santeria Priests. I held it together until the end when one of our closest family friends hugged me and the emotion just poured out.

I think of my dad often. He was a good guy and a good lawyer.

I try to be practical here on this site. If you’ve forgotten Father’s Day then I’ve got an idea for you and it works at the last minute. Send an Animoto Father’s Day card. It’s a whole lot better than a faxed greeting card. You can do it online, at the last second, and email the gift. Even if you’ve already sent a gift, take a minute and check this out.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Father’s Day is Sunday

Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. And it’s proven to be the case with some frequency since the early ’70s. What does that have to do with family law?

Mistakes will be made. It’s inevitable. Failing to tell the client, quickly, invariably makes it worse.

It’s one thing when it’s you making the mistake – or engaging in the cover-up. It’s another when it’s one of your associates. Especially when the cover-up is not only directed at the client, it’s also directed at you. That seems MUCH worse, doesn’t it?

We deal with it by putting our clients on duty to keep an eye on things. We have our file scanner email all incoming and outgoing correspondence to the client immediately upon sending or receiving. Our lawyers see an incoming document at the same moment as the client. The emails are sent simultaneously.

This avoids the problem of the associate hesitating to deliver the bad news and burying the document. The document might be an adverse ruling, or a letter from opposing counsel pointing out a mistake, or a motion pointing out the failure to meet a deadline. The client wants and needs to know. Failing to tell the client quickly will, nearly always, result in the client being more upset than they would have otherwise been. If it starts to look like a cover-up the client will really explode.

One thing we learned, years ago, is to make it clear to the document scanner, that they are NEVER to agree to delay transmission of the document. Associates can be very persuasive and put a lot of pressure on the administrative assistant dealing with documents. Those staff members need to know that you have their back when they refuse to cooperate in the cover-up.

Associates want to do a good job. They are used to being successful. By creating a system that minimizes their options for cover-ups you help them deal with a bad situation quickly, and directly, and you avoid the temptation to take action that might be appealing in the short-term but disasterous in the long-run.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

The Cover-up is Worse than the Crime

Kathy Foer-Morse embezzled $300,000 from the law firm she worked for in New York in 2005. She did it again in Pennsylvania and used some of the money to pay restitution to the New York firm. Apparently this happens all the time. It’s especially common in small firms.

The most frequent perpetrators are paralegals, mostly women, who have been with the firm for several years. They are usually delegated a great deal of authority and provided with little oversight. They avoid leaving for vacation to keep their activities from being detected.

Embezzlement is getting worse since the downturn in the economy. But, this is nothing new. Employees have been stealing from their firms for a long while. One firm, in New Orleans, closed it’s doors as a result of embezzlement. Cutting staff, during a recession, makes matters worse since supervision is reduced.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) recently conducted a study and found that the median loss, in the 959 cases examined, was $175,000. The theft went undetected for two years in most cases. Most perpetrators were first-time offenders and had a clean record prior to getting caught. Most were caught as a a result of tips from employees or others. Most cases involved small businesses.

What can you do to be sure this doesn’t happen to you? Look for the fraud in the obvious place – the accounting staff. Use checks and balances – make sure more than one employee is involved. Divide deposit making from bill paying. Use cross-training and job rotation so that different employees are exposed to all of the data. Make employees take vacation.

Most importantly – use surprise internal audits. It’s got to be a surprise. Do it yourself if you’re all you’ve got. Don’t be so trusting. Dig in and examine everything.

ACFE pubished a full 68-page report if you’re looking for more information.

I think our practices sound exactly like the typical victims. I bet there are a bunch of you reading this and starting to worry. Sounds like we need to plan a surprise.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Is Someone Stealing from You?

We measure everything. What gets measured, gets done. Right? We track it all in trailing twelve month graphs.

But we don’t measure one thing and it’s probably the most important thing we should be tracking.

We don’t track the quantity and quality of gifts from clients to our lawyers.

When a client brings a gift to their lawyer, especially after paying a big fee for the representation, it really sends a message. This is a happy client. You’ve created a raving fan.

The gift in the photo is a golf bag along with a Carolina Panthers hat. They were mailed to one of the lawyers in our Charlotte office. This same lawyer has received bottles of scotch, a bible, Christmas ornaments, an engraved pen, shirts, coffee mugs, gift cards, a catered lunch, and chocolate covered strawberries.

Our best lawyers get gifts all the time. It makes me proud. It motivates them to keep delivering excellent service. And it drives the lawyers not getting gifts to try harder. Keep a list of your gifts. It’s a great measure of how well you are treating your clients.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Do You Measure What Matters?

Taking payments can be complicated, but it’s essential to the survival of your practice. You’ve got to make it easy for clients to pay the way they want to pay. Erik Mazzone and I discuss cash, checks, credit cards, fax and phone checks, wire transfers, and paypal as means of payment. Can your clients pay via the web? We tell you how it can be done.

Who takes the payments in your office? What if they aren’t available? Can someone else handle this essential task?

What are the ethical concerns? What about client agreements?

When you finish listening to this podcast you’ll know what you need to know to make sure you can take the money and get it in to your account.

During the show we discuss, among other things, Mint.com, PayPal and Jim Calloway’s book Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, Third Edition: Strategies that Work

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Show Me the Money

I can’t say that I know quite what to make of this video. But it’s funny and it’s related to what we do. It’s Sunday and it’s only four minutes of your life. Give it a shot.

On a side note, this was put together by a legal marketing firm. What a great attention getter. Are you willing to try something different in your marketing?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Sunday Funny – Midsize is the new Big

Each week, on Saturday, I’m publishing links to some of the things I’ve come across that might (I repeat “might”) be of interest to you. They will be things that stimulated me in some way related my practice. There won’t be much comment on any of the items but you might enjoy clicking on the links.

The launch of Building 43 by Robert Scoble and Rackspace. Scoble’s new site will provide very practical help to businesses seeking to use technolgy and social sites to increase their exposure and make more money.

The 10 Commandments of Social Media – Short and sweet top 10 list of the things you need to do if you want to grow your business via social media.

I am constantly being asked about whether young people should go to law school. I usually discourage it and then get asked what they should do instead. I’m going to start referring them to this Seth Godin post – Graduate school for unemployed college students.

Master the Fine Art of Networking to Win Clients and Increase Sales! – a free webinar courtesy of Glance featuring Diane Darling. It takes place on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 1 PM E.T.

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Last Week’s Interesting Stuff – June 13, 2009 Edition

Your laptop is in your computer bag. It’s in the backseat of your car. On it’s hard drive is a file with names, addresses, phone numbers, social security and driver’s license numbers and other basic information gathered to handle cases and perform conflicts checks for your firm. Your database may have, as mine does, thousands of names in it.

A rock is used to break your window. The bag is grabbed and by the time you get back to the car the laptop is long gone.

Once you deal with the getting your car repaired and your computer replaced you may discover that your state requires that you report the security breach to the government. In my state, North Carolina, the Identity Theft Protection Act of 2005 requires a report in situations like the one described above. The statute requires the company to give notice to it’s customers and to submit a report to the Department of Justice.

The reporting form has one question that you want to be prepared to answer. They ask you if the “information breached or potentially breached was password protected or encrypted in some manner.” They further ask you to “describe the security measures protecting the information.” Your answers become part of the public record. The last thing you want is to have a public record that makes it clear that you’re slack about protecting your client’s private data.

How can you protect the data?

One thing you can do is password protect the computer. That’s a start.

You can also encrypt the data. Microsoft provides instuctions for the Windows operating system. Apple provides instructions for OS X. There are numerous commercial encryption products and TrueCrypt is a free open-source disk encryption product for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is a task for your I.T. support person unless you really enjoy playing with your computers.

None of this is rocket science and you owe your clients an effort to keep their private data private. We practice in an area where privacy is a major concern. Don’t look like a slacker in public.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Security Breaches and The Slacker

I hear this all the time – “I don’t have time to do marketing.” I went to a social networking seminar for lawyers recently and heard objection after objection about not being able to find the time to use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And these comments were from people that had taken time out of their day to come to a marketing seminar.

Why did they come to the seminar?

I get the same feedback from lawyers paying me for consulting work. They’ve come to me to build their practice and they sit here and explain why they don’t have time to build their practices. Why do they want to learn about marketing if they’re already so busy?

Here’s why – they aren’t making the money they want to make. They’re “busy” doing poorly compensated work. Their either not charging enough or they aren’t getting paid for the work their doing.

The solution? Stop doing work for which you aren’t getting paid. Free up that time and start using it for marketing. Use the marketing activities to generate work that pays a higher rate.

This is basic supply and demand. If you have more work than you need at a low price then raise the price. The volume of work will be reduced, but your revenues will remain unchanged. You’ve got to leave time, always, for working “on” the business rather than “in” the business. Marketing time needs to be a permanent part of your day, week, month – forever. If marketing time isn’t part of your schedule your business will stagnate. And you’ll be one of those lawyers that can’t find the time to do the marketing.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

No Time for Marketing?

Your client arrives at your office – he checks in with the reception desk – is offered a drink and is told you will be notified of his arrival. He is seated in the lobby, relaxes to the soft music, pages through a magazine and sips the drink. And waits. And waits. And waits.

Where are you?

Other people stroll through the lobby coming and going. And he waits.

He may be uncomfortable having others know he is waiting to see you about a divorce. Other people in the lobby may be trying to strike up a conversation and ask prying questions.

What are you doing? Where are you? Why are you allowing the client to be kept waiting?

Have you prioritized a phone call over a waiting client? Are you stuck in a hearing?

It really doesn’t matter why you’re late (to the client). You’re just late. And the client is feeling disrespected and unimportant. We all know the feeling. It’s happened to all of us.

Now, no matter how excellent your “legal work”, your client will struggle to feel good about you. Your client will struggle to recommend you to a friend. I hope you had a good reason to make the client wait.

At a minimum, get the client out of the lobby. Move him to a room. Make sure he’s comfortable. Make sure he has a phone and access to wifi. But he still won’t feel respected. He will know that you value your time more than his. He won’t likely be a good referral source for you down the road.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Is He Waiting in the Lobby?

I don’t want to talk about clients that owe you money. If they owe you money and you’ve already done the work then you’ve screwed it up. Sorry, but I really can’t help with that. Cut your losses, cut a deal and get it over. Face it – the client now has leverage and you don’t. You want to be paid and the last thing you want to do is pursue a fee through any sort of collection process. Don’t get into this situation. Don’t extend credit. If you’ve already done it, make the deal, get it done and don’t do it again.

What I’m talking about today is the situation where a client asks for a discount at the outset of the case when fees are initially discussed. It happens all the time. You quote a fee or you require a deposit to the trust account. The client has an argument for paying less – usually that their case will be really simple and easy. What do you do?

You can take one of two approaches. First, you can offer a discount if some element of the service is removed. If the client is willing to, for instance, forgo the pursuit of a contempt action as part of the custody modification then you can reduce the fee accordingly. Or if the client is willing to have the work done by a less experienced associate then you can reduce the fee. There are many possibilities. The key is to hold the line on the fee unless you negotiate a different service than was originally anticipated.

The other approach is to simply say “no.” Prospective clients, especially difficult prospective clients, like to test limits. The fee discussion is one such test. Be tough. Sometimes it gains you respect. If the client is overly difficult at this stage of the game you may be better off without this client.

Years ago, I had a fee discussion with a client in front of another lawyer in my firm. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the fee but, more importantly, the other lawyer and I had agreed that our additional purpose was for me to demonstrate how to discuss a fee. I did everything more forcefully, more dramatically, than usual because I knew he was watching me and I wanted to make a point. I explained the fee and practically yelled it at the client. The client asked for an adjustment. I said “no” and explained that I didn’t negotiate and that the fee was the fee. I told the client “there would be no quibbling, no dickering, no negotiating.” In fact, I behaved as if I was agitated that any discussion of my fee had even occurred and made it clear that I might not be willing to accept the case.

The client, by the end of the discussion, was begging me to take the case at the fee I quoted. I was surprised at the effect I had on the client. My mission was accomplished with respect to teaching the other lawyer. And the client was grateful that we were willing to do the work.

Hold the line on your fee. Don’t compromise unless the client decides to compromise the services they require.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

When Your Client Wants a Discount

Are you getting ready to cut your expenses by canceling your voluntary bar association membership? I think some lawyers are, but others won’t do it because their bar memberships have a terrific return on investment. In this podcast, Erik Mazzone and I discuss some ways to maximize your ROI and build your practice. It’s possible, even easy, to see a great return if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen. Some benefits of your membership might involve simply researching and signing up for things (think discounted legal research or office supplies). Others may require you to do some leg work (think networking opportunities). If you’re going to pay the dues then go ahead and reap the benefits.

My American Bar Association membership dues statement came in the mail last week. Between my Family Law Section and Law Practice Management section dues I owe $520. Is it worth it? It sure is. I can’t even count the clients that have come to me over the years as a result of my section activities. On top of the referrals, I’ve learned so much from attending CLEs and from talking to other members. On top of all that I went on no less than ten all expense paid trips to Hawaii, Santa Fe, Chicago, San Francisco and other great places because of my membership. Listen in and I’ll explain how it happened.

This weeks picks include Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty : The Only Networking Book You’ll Ever Need by Harvey Mackay.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Maximizing Your Bar Association Membership

I’m not really sure if I should call this a Sunday “Funny”. It’s funny if you have a really dark sense of humor. More than anything it’s a sad and difficult situation. I don’t imagine most of us will ever have to deal with quite this many kids.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Sunday Funny (kinda) – The Mother of All Child Support Cases

Each week, on Saturday, I’m publishing links to some of the things I’ve come across that might (I repeat “might”) be of interest to you. They will be things that stimulated me in some way related my practice. There won’t be much comment on any of the items but you might enjoy clicking on the links.

Married, With ADHD is the headline in the Washington Post for this story about a study finding that parents of ADHD kids are more likely to divorce. Difficult children stress out their parents. The study finding is very consistent with my observations in our practice.

Diane Rehm interviews Andrew Cherlin, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Public and Private Families”.  Really interesting discussion of divorce. I’d love to hear any marketing ideas you take away from listening to this just to see if you’re as cynical as I am. I’ve already initiated a project based on this interview.

Being Strategic: The Antidote to Fear is a new Manifesto on Change This. Author Erika Andersen provides wise counsel applicable to family law. We’re stressed by the recession, short-term, and impacted by competitive pressures and increasingly dissatisfied and alienated customers, long-term. What’s next for us?

Post from: Divorce Discourse - for family law professionals

Interesting Stuff from the Past Week