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Fall of the 'ancien regime'? - Alternative billing |
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 The enemy has been named. Alternative billing methods are making the so-far resilient time-billing champions very uncomfortable. Just how serious is the inconvenient attack on the old order, Michael Bradley asks. (The link is currently offline - we will try to contact the hosting publication to get it back up - The New Lawyer)
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The way lawyers do business is changing - is it time for them to plan ahead? |
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 Clients say that law firms are not doing enough to respond to the economic downturn. Law firms, meanwhile, say that clients are too focused on costs. These are two of the main findings of a recent study, commissioned by LexisNexis, on the state of the American legal industry.
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Common mistakes made in lawyer advertisements |
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 "Free Consultation!" "Need an Attorney?" "We Care For You!" Do you have these types of statements in your lawyer advertisements? If so, you are not the only attorney to make this common lawyer marketing mistake. Too often, lawyers waste money on ineffective ads.
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 Email has become one of the undisputed champions of corporate communication. Most competitive companies incorporate email signatures in their emails for legal, operational or creative purposes. The question lies in whether or not these emails are being utilised to their full potential.
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 Tip 4-Track Time Concurrently
Dustin Cole, president of Attorneys Master Class, says: "Attorneys fail to bill from 10 to 25 percent of their legitimate billable hours due to bad recording habits, overwhelm and disorganization, and poor team management."1
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Tip 2-Put Away the Firefighter's Helmet
Too many attorneys begin the day reading through their email in?box. No doubt, reputations depend on near instantaneous client service. But let's face it, if the only value you're providing for your client is rapid response, you'll eventually be replaced by someone in Mumbai, Shenzhen, or some other time zone who can respond even faster.
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Mining Time by 10ths: How to Increase Productivity and Bill More Time |
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No matter how many hours you work, it's the ones that are billed to clients that serve as the productivity measure in law firms. In addition to the attendant financial rewards, more billed time generally means better performance for the individual lawyer. The goal, then, is to bill more time. There are three ways to increase the billables attributed to you: (1) improved legal skills, (2) increased leverage of others, and (3) better use and capture of the hours you're working. The first and second come with experience. The third will immediately produce results in hours gained, one 10th at a time. |
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"Does the future belong to virtual law firms?" That question was posed by an American Lawyer article earlier this week that focused on Virtual Law Partners, a growing firm nominally based in Silicon Valley but in fact operating, well, wherever its lawyers are. Virtual firms - two others, FSB Legal Counsel and Rimon Law Group, are also cited - consist of partners who operate independently, charging rates well below what they would require were they (still) at large firms and profiting by the huge savings in overhead and other costs.
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Do Lawyers Really Need Practice Management Software? |
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Some solos, particularly tech-savvy ones, say no, but I'm not so sure. I think those who believe practice management software is a waste of money miss some of the most important reasons for using these programs in your practice. Maybe you think you don't need it, but here are a few things that may be worth considering.
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Social Media Guide for Paralegals |
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 "For paralegals seeking jobs in today's economy," he said, "it is essential to have a strong and ever expanding network of personal contacts utilizing online social media. Certain "well seasoned" paralegals I've met still exhibit the ostrich "head in the sand" view that social networking is only for a younger generation than their own, and is something that they neither understand nor even want to learn more about.
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 You've probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don't clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money... Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that's out of business.
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A Time of Recession and Repair for Law Firms |
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 Early financial data suggests a grim 2009. It's the perfect time for firms to fix their business model -- if they have the courage. First the bad news: Profits per equity partner were down 3 percent; this figure would have been a bit worse if the three Am Law 200 firms that failed last year were included. "Bad news?" you ask. "That's much better than we'd expected. I guess law firms have once again shown they're bulletproof."
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How well does your firm sell itself? |
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 There's an old song, originally made famous back in the 1930s by Ella Fitzgerald, which goes: ‘It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it - that's what gets results.' As with many other classic lyrics, these words have a timeless quality: in this case they have a particular relevance to the way in which law firms implement successful sales strategies.
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How to Meet Your Billable Hours Requirements |
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 Law firms give their professional employees quotas of "billable hours" they must achieve per year, ranging from 1700 (at the very low end) to 2100 or more. Young professionals often find it difficult to meet billing requirements.
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Virtual Law Firms Stay Afloat in Tough Times |
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 Whether they're contract attorneys, virtual law firms or freelance sole practitioners, the lawyers who've figured out how to provide less expensive service to corporations are the ones flourishing now. Here's a formula for success in a brutal economy: Figure out a way to save general counsel money on their outside legal spending. The attorneys who have done that are growing their revenue while others are not.
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Dealing with the dearly departed (ABA) |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 Lawyer turnover has been increasing for years-but it may be especially high in firms this year because of the need to reduce costs. In addition, lower levels of income may cause some partners to leave for greener pastures. Plus, many associates never intended to stay the course in the first place and, having received their postgraduate experience from you, are about to move on to the next stage of their careers just as they become profitable.
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Lawful Mining of Blogs on Social Networks |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 Web logs (blogs) simultaneously provide Internet users with social network prospects and employers a source of information suitable for employment assessment decisions but previously inaccessible. While social networks users may argue that posted content is private, courts have unequivocally ruled that the revelation of personal information in a public manner results in the diminution or elimination of reasonable privacy expectations. To avoid legal difficulties, employers are well advised to employ three particular policies when using information mined from blogs.
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The Rise of BigSolo: Large Firm Refugees Who Start Their Own Law Firms |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 With a long dark winter ahead, according to Punxatawny Phil, Spring may not come at all this year for many BigLaw lawyers. As fallout from the economic chill that is gutting the bread-and-butter corporate business of BigLaw, an increasing number of large firm lawyers are jumping ship, before it sinks. And what are many choosing to do? They're going solo.
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Billable rates now under siege due to recession |
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 When an East Coast law firm ignored a client's suggestion and announced a nearly double-digit percentage billable hour rate hike for this year, the customer shifted some of its business elsewhere.
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Many firms are profiting in this economy |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 Don't believe all the gloom and doom. Many firms are profiting in this economy. And that is certainly true today in most parts of our economy including the legal profession. Yet legendary investor Warren Buffett sees this downturn as providing opportunities. And, despite the dissolution of some firms and lawyer and staff layoffs in a number of others, many firms - particularly mid-size and smaller - are doing more than just surviving. Some are even doing well.
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High Tech without the Cheque |
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 Until recently, medium and large firms were the primary adopters of sophisticated practice management software, such as Time Matters produced by LexisNexis, and other "high" technology. This was due to the high cost of adopting cutting-edge technology, such as the need to have an in-house IT department.
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Set a Family and Friends Rate |
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 Once you pass the bar, relatives, friends, and acquaintances come out of the woodwork with legal problems. Many of these people expect free advice or representation because of your relationship with them.
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 In his latest book "The End of Lawyers?" legal IT guru Richard Susskind speaks of the inevitable movement from bespoke work to commoditisation. Susskind cites the 5 stages as Bespoke, Standardised, Systematised, Packaged, and Commoditised. Conveyancing is a typical example of a service on its way to being commoditised.
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Tip 5-Use a Safety Net for Capturing Time
Inputting time throughout the days is very challenging for a busy person supporting multiple clients amidst a non?stop barrage of interruptions. It is, indeed, much easier said than done. Our aforementioned new user survey found that attorneys, on average, spent over 2.5 hours each week reconciling their billable time. Yikes!
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Tip 3-Stop Multi-Tasking, Start Batching
Picture your standard morning at the office: you're checking a complicated formula in a spreadsheet. Ring! You turn away from the spreadsheet and take the phone call. When the call is over, you go back to the spreadsheet. Ding! MS Outlook just alerted you to a new email. You toggle over to your email, read it, and dash off a short response. Knock! Your partner ducks in for a quick question. You feel in control. You're multi?tasking, efficiently getting so much work done in so little time.
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Did you know that you could be under?estimating your billable hours by 30%.. 20%.. up to 50%? One hundred attorneys we surveyed in the summer of 2009 estimated they were only capturing and billing for 67% of their legitimate billable time, on average. This means that a firm with $1 million in gross billings could be losing as much as a half of a million dollars a year for work they performed but never billed the client for. The effective use and capture of your time is the single most important factor in making your law office more profitable. By following the tips in this paper, you'll be able to increase your billings significantly, without working one second more.
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 In today's world of cost savings, you might be asking yourself, should I be spending critical income on training or can we do with out it?
In any company learning and development are key aspects of sustained organizational performance and not just tools for HR. Creating an effective learning strategy is never more crucial than in times of constrained finance, restructuring and redundancies.
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7 Simple Tips To Improving Your Law Firm Website |
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 Marketing your firm online is no longer cutting edge, it's required. People turn to the search engines for answers before the Yellow Pages, television, or radio. Heck, when someone is looking for a bankruptcy lawyer they will often go online before asking even their closest friends.
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Tech turbulence: 10 Questions to Just Ask your IT director |
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 During this economic downturn, here are 10 questions law firm managers should ask IT directors, in order to best exploit existing technology.
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Law Firm Cost Recovery Is Here to Stay |
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 Cost recovery has always been a controversial area of law firm billing. Law firms incur substantial administrative costs in servicing their clients, and yet clients are generally resistant, even hostile to the idea of these costs being billed back to them. Given the current economic crisis, law firms are having to justify their fees and costs more than ever before, so they need tools and data to help them demonstrate that their rates are fair and competitive.
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 There are a number of reasons law firms have for changing their accounting system. In some cases, it is justified, but in most cases it's not. And if firms who had changed accounting software were honest about it they would almost certainly admit that, with hindsight, they should rather have stuck with their old accounting system.
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Cuts, freezes and sabbaticals mooted |
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 Sweet & Maxwell asked 25 top-100 law firms what measures they have implemented to cut costs while avoiding staff redundancies. According to the results, only one firm has gone ahead with pay cuts, but 36% said they are considering them. A quarter (24%) of firms have put salary freezes in place, with 60% considering this as an option.
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10 Rules of legal technology |
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 For your consideration: Ten "Rules" of Legal Technology. Not many are new, and very few apply only to lawyers, but these are a few more nuggets I'm pulling out of previous posts.
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 Your clients fall into this category whether they want to or not. You are their “one stop shop” in giving advice before as well as after death!
Make sure that.....
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Famous Law Firm Last Words: I'll Never Do That |
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 A good article from Adriana Linares on how to take advantage of training opportunities, especially now when things are a little slower than normal. Do you know that a lot of vendors offer free training to their clients? So now is the prefect time to ensure that every_ person who uses the application gets trained and if needs be, re-trained. Phone your vendors and ask them about their training offers - what is there to lose? Also Adriana shows us how it benefits the individual as well, something we all tend to forget.
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The Fine Art of Overbilling |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 A tongue-in-cheek look at how to pad your bill, unless of course you don't mind getting arrested or disbarred.
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Is 'sexting' a crime, or just bad judgment by teens? |
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Business4Law - Tech4Law
 To parents, it's even more frightening than the huge monthly bills teens run up on their cell phones. To prosecutors, it's yet another way that technology has complicated their jobs.
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 So the recession is really starting to bite now, and we're starting to see law firms closing down and partners getting out of the profession. It's OK though: Most bank economists agree that we'll see an upturn in 2010 - so perhaps you can still outride the storm. But what if they are wrong? And even if we do see an "upturn", will that be enough to save your practice? And for those firms who haven't been saving for the proverbial "rainy day", how do you hang in there?
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Dealing with confidential metadata - Law Technology News |
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 What should you do when confronted with the disclosure of confidential metadata? Conversely, what should you do if you learn that confidential metadata has been disclosed? Browning Marean, a partner at DLA Piper, delves into recent e-discovery cases that may offer insight.
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When will the economy turn for the attorney? Survey by 14 307 lawyers. |
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Sadly, we'd probably be wasting our time if we tried to get South African lawyers to give us their opinions on the recession, since it has been our experience that local lawyers tend to shy away from any type of survey. So we have latched onto an article commissioned by the American Bar Association in January 2009. Given that our recession is pretty much worldwide, their opinions should generally hold true for the South African legal profession too.
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Business4Law
