 All too often we follow the pattern of what others have done when designing our own website. One needs to think about what your prospective client will want from your website. I very much doubt that they will be interested in the number of awards you have accumulated over the years; they will be more interested in finding out your hourly rate.
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 A few weeks ago Shamaa Sheik published an article in Law24.com which spoke about the importance of online directory listings to market your law firm. We thought that a practical extension to that article would be to see which online directory listings are available for the South African attorneys, what sort of followings they have and what the listing would cost.
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 There are many directories on the market geared at helping organisations generate business leads. And whilst directories can really help to promote your business, listing your law firm on the right directory is the most important decision you will ever make when setting up your new practice. Recently the legal industry's reliance on digital solutions has reached a tipping point, and worldwide there is a growing demand for sophisticated online research and marketing tools.
Read more...
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 I was asked the other day what a law firm should look for when choosing a legal accounting system. The answer wasn't what I expected, although it was surprisingly logical when I thought about it. In South Africa, most legal accounting systems have been around for many years - so they are not only full-featured, they have also proven themselves over the test of time.
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Secretary Salary Survey Reminder |
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 Our salary survey started off with a huge bang, but has slowed down considerably in the last couple of days. Remember that it is vital that we get a good number of people clicking the survey, the higher the number of votes the more accurate the results will be and the better for all. Please ask your colleagues to take part in the survey, maybe they don’t get a copy of Tech4Law. Click here to take you to the survey.
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Over half of consumers expect good law firms to offer legal services online |
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 A majority of consumers expect good law firms to offer their services online in the next couple of years, a survey of over 2,000 people has shown. The online poll, carried out by YouGov* on behalf of Epoq Legal also revealed that nearly half (47%) of consumers would be more likely to choose a law firm that offered the convenience of online access to legal services and documents over one that had no online service capability.
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Win business by answering the phone correctly |
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 Phone answering skills are critical for businesses. The telephone is still most business's primary point of contact with customers. And the way you answer your company's phone will form your customer's first impression of your business. These phone answering tips will ensure that callers know they're dealing with a winning business.
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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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In our previous issue we gathered information from attorneys and worked out the average salaries for the country. We thought that a natural progression of the salary review would be to determine the average hourly rate per area of practice for every region in South Africa.
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 We have come to the end of our salary review. The statistic that stood out for me was the fact that there are extremes to this salary survey, the majority are below the R10 000 bracket and the second most popular bracket are people who earn in excess if R80 000. I was surprised to see such feedback from the senior partners.
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 Currently we have 280 responses to the survey, which is a long way off the 690 responses we got in the secretary/paralegal survey we did last month. Our current stats tell us that 25% of practicing conveyancers earn less than R10 000 per month - rather an alarming fact.
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 The secretary/paralegal salary survey that was conducted in the last few weeks worked very well and we were able to establish quite a bit of interesting and important information from the results. We would like to extend the survey to the attorneys/partners of the firms of South Africa. As before the survey is completely anonymous and no private information is gathered on the short survey. There are 4 simple questions which mean 4 mouse clicks and should not take more than 4 seconds to complete. Nobody like to a "nosy parker" which this survey may be seen as being, but it really is not, the information once gathered will be a useful tool when next wondering what the right salary for a position in your firm will be. Click here for the attorney salary survey.
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A Foolproof 5-Step System to Attract Perfect Clients |
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 Are you attracting the type of clients you want? - I'm surprised at how many lawyers and non-lawyers answer "no" because it's really not that hard to do. It seems that not a week goes by when I'm not asked how I've been successful in attracting the clients I love to work with - entrepreneurs.
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How To Have a Firm Meeting |
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 Lee Rosen shares, "I'm gearing up for our next firm-wide quarterly meeting. It's coming up next week and I've been talking with our managing attorney as we finalize the agenda. It occurred to me that it might be useful to you for me to share our agenda and the thinking behind it." See how they approach their law firm meetings by clicking the "Readmore" button.
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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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