Law Practice Management

I was looking through the categories I set up last year when I first launched this blog and I noticed the “Increasing Efficiency” category. And then I noticed that I hadn’t spent a lot of time posting on that subject.

So, with that in mind, I want to take the next few posts and share some of my lifehacks that have helped me stay efficient, productive and the ninja you need to be to be successful at this.

With that in mind, my first recommendation is to view a great Google Talk by Merlin Mann of 43Folders called “Inbox Zero.” Inbox Zero is a set of special posts looking at the skills, tools and attitude needed to empty your email inbox - and then keep it that way. Those are Merlin’s words, not mine. It builds on the concepts of Getting Things Done (which is a subject fit for its own series of posts), most importantly the concept of “processing” - this is whole-heartedly recommended.

If you’ve got the time, here’s the video

There has been a lot of talk on the blogosphere about hiring assistants, spending money on office space, etc.  It can be found mostly here, here, andhere, and in the comments to those posts. 

I may have to turn in my card to the Cool-Kid’s Club, but I disagree with most of the sentiments there about hiring staff.  Well, I should really start from a place of agreement, which is that needless frills are a waste of money, except if that’s what your clients care about.  While it is perfectly possible to practice law without thick, creamy letterhead, or without persian rugs, or without wearing Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and cufflinks, some clients expect it, and if you’re going after those clients, realize you won’t land them without it.  Doesn’t mean that you might not land one or two, but if you’re not meeting your client’s demands, you’re going to have to spend effort convincing them that they want something else (you).

One of the statements that started this discussion was that an attorney wanted to make enough money to hire a staff member.  I agree that the concept is wrong, but I believe that it’s wrong because he or she has the order mixed up.  He should be saying that he wants to hire a staff member to make more money.

Not to patronize, but it is an economic business waste to have the $250/hr person perfoming the $50/hour task.  Here’s the trickier part - most people will say that it isn’t wise to bring in a person to do the $50/hour task unless you can occupy that person with sufficient full-time work to justify the cost.  That’s patently wrong. 

Unless you are satisfied capping your earnings (at either a reasonable number for working less hours or at a higher number for working crazy hours), you will never increase your success doing it all yourself, or waiting for there to be enough work to justify hiring a person full time.  On the other hand, if you have an eye for keeping the total hours you work reasonable, and at the same time, increasing your earnings, you must, MUST, bring on additional people for one reason, and only one reason - to free you to bring in more business.  And you must bring on these people before you have enough full-time work for them to stay occupied.  If it turns out that you don’t have enough work for them, go get it.  Take the time that they’re working on stuff that the firm has to do and spend the time developing business. 

I think that a 33%/33%/33% approach to your work time is a good guide.  The manager of a law firm should spend about a 1/3 of his or her time practicing law and performing client work, 1/3 of the time attending to the administration of the law firm, and 1/3 of the time actively developing business. 

I’m not saying be foolish about it - let’s not go and hire 3 attorneys and 4 paralegals when you’re not busy enough to fill your own day.  But if you can’t meet the 33% rule I set out above (particularly the part about spending 1/3 of your time on business development) because you are swamped with work either on the administrative or the practicing law side - fix that situation with the approprite personnel.

Because I don’t care if you fight traffic tickets or set up IPOs, you need to spend time actively developing business and/or attending to your existing institutional clients. 

I don’t have an ending for this post; I could probably go on for a few more paragraphs.  I’ll leave it alone for now. 

As you might have noticed, I was away for a while. When I was around, I’d often check my “stats” on Typepad to see where my viewers were coming from, which often revealed search terms in Google or Yahoo that led people to this blog.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people searching for solo or small law firm salary information. I’m not sure why that leads them to this site (I haven’t posted a lot on that subject), but it prompted me to talk a little about it. I’m not sure what answer people are looking for. If someone writing a blog tells you that you can expect to make $45k your first year, does that mean you don’t go for it? If that same blogger tells you you can expect to make $100k, does that mean that you do?

My attitude, and I think that most entrepreneurs share this, was always that I can make as much money as I want to in law. I may not be able to completely control the timing of when I made that money, but I never thought that there were any artificial ceilings, floors and most importantly, starting expectations on that number.

So, for the benefit of the people who arrive here looking for salary information for solo or small law firms, here’s what I’ll tell you. When you open your doors that first month, you can expect to make $0. Even if you’re bringing along a huge client or many little clients, you will not get paid for that work in advance, you have to earn it - so, in Month One, expect zero dollars. After that, the sky’s the limit.

Take the advice of the people blogging on this subject. Keep your overhead low. Maximize your profit margin on your hourly or flat-fee (or if you’re daring, blended hourly/flat-fee) rate.

Define who you are. There are many lawyers in your community (I’m willing to put money on that); you are in competition with a large percentage of them. And you always will be. Define who you are, make sure that person is someone you’d want to hire to help you with your legal matter - sell the hell out of yourself. Get people to buy you.

The money will come - and if you’ve done any of this the right way - enough will come to make you happy with your decision.

Logging into this account after a few months of inactivity, I was surprised to learn that I actually remember my username and password. Incredible.

Let’s catch up on what’s been going on with me. Most importantly, I recently hired another attorney to help with our work. This was needed for two reasons - first, the workload for my firm has stayed the same, but the hours of two of our attorneys has reduced for various reasons. Second, I’ve been overburden with many routine matters in the office, which means that I haven’t been able to attend to as many of the necessary business development tasks as I should.

Now that we’ve had this extra help for a couple of weeks, my schedule has calmed enough to get back to blogging (both practice development and substantive law blogs). Good to see you again, friends.

I held off from commenting negatively on other bloggers for about a year.  I think that’s a good streak.  And now it has to come to a grinding, screeching halt.

Every morning, I check my RSS aggregator (is that the right term) to look at the postings of the day/night.  I’ve got them divided into different categories and one of the oldest is my Law Practice Management grouping.  Lo and behold, this morning I come across this post from Larry Bodine’s blog.

Now maybe I’ve just been predisposed to disliking Larry ever since that asinine, ridiculous Mac-bashing article he wrote or maybe his smug response about driving traffic to his site by that article cemented what a fool I thought he was.  Actually, I’m pretty sure that was it.  So, now we come to a post where he brags about how he helped a law firm put up a website in 60 days.  Now, I don’t know anything about this law firm and I have nothing against it or its attorneys.  I’m not even bothering to link to them because of the negative tone of my post here.  In all honesty, good luck to them. 

That said, I’m really amused he’s bragging about this.  His first point is that this firm overcame the committee-structure that bogs down most law firms not using Bodine’s services.  Well, that firm has 3 attorneys.  3 (it wasn’t a typo).  What a firm of 3 people would be doing with a website committee is beyond me.  Let’s not go crazy over the efficiency of deciding on design and content for the website. 

Second, 60 days???  For an 8-page static website?  Oh jeez, that seems kinda slow to me.  My firm put up something similar in about two weeks.  Now, we’re not winning any awards for our website - it’s just a billboard for anyone searching for us on the Internet or checking us out based on our business cards, but I’ll put my website up against this one any day, and mine didn’t take 60 days to get up and running. 

Bodine is off my roll and reading list.  I’d rather not get worked up about a blow-hard anymore.   

Okay, enough of the negativity, let me end this with a few helpful suggestions to right my karma.  Law Firm, if you’re listening, let me give you a couple of free pieces of advice that seemed to be missing from your paid consultant’s repertoire. 

First, you should put an electronic contact form on your website under your Contact Us page.  It’s frustrating for consumers to navigate to the Contact page only to find phone numbers and a snail mail address. I would recommend that you NOT include your email address on that Contact Page (unless you want tons of spam), and any decent web hosting company should be able to provide you with a form submission code that allows people to enter their inquiries and provide you with their contact information.  In the alternative, you could create a "throw-away" mailbox for submissions (form0001mail at medinamartinez com is mine) and as it gets overrun with spam, erase it and make form0002mail, etc.

Second, and related to the first point, delete the email address contacts from the attorney page.  You’re inviting bots to grab that email address and start sending you spam.  What most people don’t understand is that email addresses that are taken from websites are presumed to be active and are almost never deleted from a spammer’s database.  This is unlike a spam effort that takes a generic domain name (like hotmail.com) and starts assigning it random usernames in an effort to get a bite (vmedina1, vmedina2, etc.)

Finally, a well-known trick of keeping your website high on a search engine’s results page is to update the site often.  One method for doing this is to link your page to your blog, or to blog directly to your website.  Either way, I suggest you find a way to change the content on the site every so often and do so in a way that is linked to your practice area.  A blog is best, and I’ve coded my website to automatically update the site when I put up a new blog post in any of my weblogs, but even just directly changing the content is helpful.

Okay, I’m feeling better.  I’m reading over this post and it’s more helpful suggestions than vitriol.  All is back right with the world.  Maybe I should start a side business consulting for law firms on websites.  The market seems to  be there.

Heh - I honestly started laughing as I read Gary Krakow’s second attempt to install Vista, recounted here at msnbc.com

Here’s an actual quote,

When I got my hands on a copy of Vista Ultimate, I wiped the X60’s hard drive clean and did a complete install. The new Ultimate edition comes on a DVD and allowed me to do a total wipe of the hard drive again before doing a clean, full install of Vista. The entire episode took nearly two hours.

Once the install sequence completed, my ThinkPad rebooted normally. Windows Vista started up without even a hint of an error message. Unlike my experience with Vista Beta 2, the final release of Vista Ultimate actually seemed to work — until I tried playing a music file.

It was then that I realized there were a number of features not working on the X60. There was no audio output, limited video resolution choices and the Wi-Fi connection was not running as quickly as I would have liked. I wondered whether it was a problem with the computer’s drivers again.

Are you serious?  So, you folks who are the income producers for your firm - the ones where productivity suffers when you can’t work - tell me again how you can afford to spend two hours with this headache when you could be working…?

And for those of you windows users that still believe the argument that Macs are more expensive, we just leveled the playing field on that.  2 hours X $250.00/hour, means that the Macs better be more than $500 expensive over the PC machines - and then you better never had any more down time because the pendulum swings even further in our favor.

I honestly didn’t finish reading the Krakow article - it became too much for me.  He could have loved Vista by the end, but I won’t know because faced with the prospect of futzing around for two hours to even turn my machine on and getting sound, I’d rather just use my Mac and keep billing. 

This morning I taught a class to aspiring entrepreneurs on legal basics.  I was supposed to give a canned Powerpoint presentation prepared by the local small business development center, but after I arrived I discovered that they sent me the wrong canned presentation (Legal I instead of Legal II), so I decided to treat the students to one of my presentations that I use on legal basics that I created on my own.  Pardon the wisp of ego here, but the presentation is truly quite good.

In any event, during the class I was struck by how passionate I was getting in talking about the law.  About the theory behind different constructs, the practical applications of various concepts, a few bits of free advice - I mean I was really working myself into a lather about it all and I realized how much I enjoy being a lawyer these days. 

I’ve avoided many of the "soul-searching" posts here, unless it’s to rail against the shortcomings of big firm practice habits, because I don’t believe in blogs as surrogate therapy, but I think it’s high time for one. 

I had about 45 minutes on my drive home to think hard about why the change, as the title says, "a bit of reflection."  Here’s what I’ve concluded:

While I was working for the big firm, I had a hard time conceiving myself as a lawyer, a hard time thinking about what I was doing as the "practice" of law.  I didn’t care much for the people for whom I was working (through no fault of who they were as people, but more as a function of the fact that I didn’t want to be them), which didn’t make me feel proud of myself.  Self esteem was low at that point, in part because the future was grim, but also because my confidence in myself had been eroded over time.  Years spent having my work torn apart (sometimes for legitimate reasons, more often because of stylistic difference - what I had written was perfectly serviceable…and substantively correct) had left me with the sense that I’d only be capable of practicing law with years more of this kind of "training." 

Fast forward to some experience being out there on my own and I had tested my chops against other lawyers…and found myself pretty good at what I do.  More importantly, I enjoy my work immensely.  There are very few drudgeries in my practice, or perhaps I’ve done well to mask them with a love for working with my clients.  Regardless, I can’t imagine doing anything else, being satisfied with my work and career in any other way.

I’ve found that that sentiment is quite rare among lawyers.  Whether they be from large firms or be sole practitioners, there are a lot of burnt-out, disgruntled and cynical lawyers practicing right now. 

On the one hand, I’m not in a great hurry to change that fact - I think it gives me an advantage as potential clients consider their options (wouldn’t you choose a lawyer passionate and happy about his work over one that is not?).  On the other hand, I hate to see it all so prevalent among my friends.  There are many lawyers on the blogosphere, many of whom I respect, who seem to be quite happy with their practice - but they seem to be people bucking the trend - whether they be GAL, Grant Griffiths or Jonathan Stein - all people working outside of convention.

I don’t have a cute ending for this, so I’ll stop here.  I’d love to hear what you have to say out there on this subject.  How are you feeling these days?

Inspired as I always seem to be by Grant Griffiths, I am announcing the launch of two new practice-area blogs.  I believe Grant, GAL (E.S.), and Jonathan Stein when they say that they’ve gotten new clients from their practice area blogs and I don’t like falling behind the pack.

That said, *cue trumpets* - please point your browser to, and add to your rss reader, two new, exciting, and informative blogs:

Jersey Estate Planning

and

Jersey Education Law

I’ll let you know the moment either of them brings in new clients.

Best - VJM

So much has been said about the penetrating power of blogs for solos and small firm lawyers. I’d be just “me-too”ing if I gave you a post on that, but I did want to address an interesting thought today. (Well, at least I think it’s interesting).

If you haven’t been paying attention to my URL, I run my blog through TypePad, an entry-level professional blogging program by Six Apart. (BTW, catch Mena Trott, Six Apart’s founder, with an excellent presentation at TED in 2006 - in fact, I’ll give you a whole post on the wonderful things at TED).

Anyway, Typepad allows you to view your “visitor stats” - which is basically a rundown of what time people navigated to your site and what site they came from. I’m always curious to see what websites people are coming from and how they got to my site. Sometimes the referring address is a blog reader, so that’s not so interesting (except to learn that I’m on someone’s regular reading list). Other times, the referring address is something completely unrelated to law, blogs, tech - unrelated to anything Victor Medina. And still other times, the references come from my law firm’s website - www.medinamartinez.com. Not interesting, but at least my card is getting around in some circles…

The most interesting information comes from the entries from a Google or Yahoo search. When I click on those, I get to see what search terms brought up this blog. I see way too many searches for “Victor Medina” to feel comfortable walking to my car at night. Then again, I see a fair amount of searches by people looking for information on financing a law firm, or looking for tech help. I wonder if they found anything helpful when they arrived.

Sometimes when I follow a link after a Google search, I’m decidedly unimpressed with where I end up. That’s not always the website’s author’s fault - many times I’ve inartfully described by search or Google had a brain fart. For the most part, though, I find something of value every where I go. I hope that people landing here are satisfied with what they see and take something worthwhile with them when they go.

No point tonight - just want to get that down on “paper”.