Maine Law Practice Management

If you don’t use, or haven’t optimized for , web directories, you’re missing out on a fantastic way to build your online brand.  Online directories are great for building linkbacks to your website, a s well as for creating domain authority.  There are a number of free directories available to lawyers, but none has the immense reach and distribution of the Google Business P rofile.   If you haven’t yet claimed your Google B usiness P rofile, do it yesterday, since it’s an online billboard advertisement for your law firm, and facilitates things like Google Reviews.  It’s also free; and, you can’t beat that troika.       If you have a Google Business Profile , and you’re not doing much with it, there is not a better time to start, as law firms must now focus more on their online presence than ever before. This is a comprehensive guide for better understanding your profile .     This is about as easy a win as you can get.   ...

With more and more attorneys working from home, more and more attorneys are using multiple devices than ever before.  A common arrangement is to have a desktop at the office, and a laptop at home.   That setup, of course, becomes a significant challenge when you’re using premise-based software, because that software lives o nly on a specific device.   So, if you work on email i n a desktop application, and then open that same application on a laptop, you’re going to have some hoops to jump through before you ca n update for any changes you made.  This situation becomes more problematic when you are using your email to organize your files; th at is a true subfoldering nightmare.     Using cloud software instead wipes all of th at difficulty away.  Since cloud software is accessed by a web browser, rather than through a premise-based desktop program, that means that you can access the same software , with the same information, anywhere you have a se...

Law firms put themselves through some interesting gymnastics in order to reconcile trust accounting, well or poorly – mostly poorly.  There’s a couple of reasons for that: (1) Lawyers are pretty bad at math, finance.  That’ s definitely a thing.  (2) Also, law firms tend not to focus on utilizing technology throughout the trust account management process, and errors tend to occur when busy lawyers (or their staff) use analog methods to try to balance accounts, or review account balances.   IOLTA violations mostly occur due to user error (transposing digits, leaving out information, fudging an audit trail, misunderstanding the requirements of account reconciliation recordkeeping), not bad intent.  The vast, vast majority of lawyers don’t actually want to steal their client’s money.   Literally the best way to tighten up your trust account management is to adopt software fit for the purpose.  Trust account reconciliation can be made via accounting softw...

Law firms have traditionally hewn to an hourly billing model; and, in doing so, have been reticent to quote legal consumer s anything outside of an hourly rate.   Of course, tha t’s of little comfort for legal consumers, who already think that attorneys are expensive and greedy, to be told that they will be charged a high billable rate until . . . the case is done , whenever that is .   For consumers who are used to paying low monthly rates for high-value services (think Disney+ or Netflix ), paying lots of money per hour for a lawyer, with no discernable end point -- so, no notion of the total cost of engagement -- seems like a pretty risk y proposition.   It’s the rare consumer who will confidently enter such an open-ended arrangement these days.     That’s why legal consumers have two prominent questions they want answered from attorneys, which questions both get after the same answer .   They want to understand the legal process; and, they want to k...