Maine Law Practice Management

There’s nothing like daylight savings time to get you to observe how dramatic a small shift in time becomes.  Push back one hour, and all of a sudden it’s instant winter.  People are like, ‘Wow, when did it get so dark out?’  And, hot chocolate sales start to rise.     Saving time as a business owner can have a similar effect on you.  But, instead of greeting the coming of winter, you’ll be saying things like, ‘Wow, I just got home, and it’s not even dark yet!’     For law firms, just like for any other business, change start s  small; and, it’s the same thing when it comes to better managing your productivity.  There are some immediate changes you can make to your law firm that will incur massive incremental value.  So, if you buy a second monitor for your desktop, laptop or tablet, you’re eliminating many of the several seconds you spend opening and closing windows every   day.   Over the course of months and years, that time adds up , and you can fi...

Nobody has ever liked waiting.  But, there has never been a point in recorded history where people have liked waiting less.  Cave people, I suppose, never had the benefit of the internet and smartphones.  But, I’m not even talking about the Neanderthals; heck, people are far less patient than they were even ten years ago, since things like Netflix have pumped urgency addition up on steroids.  No one wants to wait for anything anymore, because no one  has to  wait for anything anymore.  Except for hiring law firms.   Despite the fact that consumers are simultaneously less patient and have more choices than ever before, attorneys still make those consumers wait.  They call; you wait to call them back.  They want engagement; you give them online f o rms.  They text; you ignore their texts.  Converting leads starts at first contact; and, if you’re not the first contact back, you’ve already lost the game.  Everything you do in marketing your law firm is centered around getting...

You know what’s really scary?  Losing your law firm data.  Even so, many law firms don’t utilize effective data backups.   Every business needs to backup its electronic data; but, the imperative is even more important for law firms, which have ethical and fiduciary duties tied to their client relationships.  And, although it’s now 2018, many law firms subsist on remarkably thin data backup systems.  This is true even though law firm data loss is not an extremely rare or impossible occurrence.  Fires, floods, natural and manmade disasters  -- those all  still wipe out law firm data.  So, if you’re concentrating on securing your law firm data backup, there’s no time like the present to get a handle on it.   This is a three-step method to making sure your data is recoverable:     (1) S et up a physical data backup.  It doesn’t really matter what it is (some firms still use backup tapes) -- just have  something  in p...

Most lawyers have a general understanding of what encryption does.  (If you don’t,  let me introduce you to Wikipedia .)   Nevertheless, most attorneys don’t feel like they have a comprehensive plan for managing encryption in their law firms , when it comes to sending secure files to clients and colleagues .  That leaves a lot of law firms feeling a little insecure.  But, there’s a simple strategy for managing encryption in law firms, that’s entirely based on the volume of files you need to encrypt.     If you don’t send out a lot of documents that need to be encrypted , you can use the built-in tools in  Microsoft Word  or  Adobe Acrobat  to encrypt those documents.  Apply passwords, and then call the recipient with the password -- don’t email it along with the document.     If  you  do send out a lot of documents that need to be encrypted , use an email encryption system that will allow you to manuall...