Maine Law Practice Management

‘Work in Progress’ (often abbreviate d to WIP) is a representation of work outstanding for law firm clients .  While most lawyers just let it ride, and take it for granted that the work just keeps coming in, and keeps getting done – WIP has some predictive powers that law firms are largely ignoring .     Your WIP gives you an idea of what your pipeline value is, in aggregate .  In other words, you should be able to pinpoint how much money you’ll make, if you finish everything that’s currently on your plate .  Better yet, many modern softwares (including law practice management softwares ) will calculate that number for you automatically, so you don’t have to jump through any mathematical hoops.     Now, you can get fancier than that, to boot .  Because, if you know how long it generally takes you to close cases, and the frequency of payments for those cases, you can generally pinpoint ( pretty precisely ) when you’ll get paid, and how muc...

Email is good for email; but, when law firms start to try to expand the uses of email into broader technology functions – that’s where they run into trouble.     Like when attorneys try to convert their productivity software into case management software .  (In case you haven’t tried it, that doesn’t work because productivity software is decidedly not a relational database.)     Emailing sensitive documents can be a problem, too .  When you email something, it passes through a number of different servers before it reaches its final destination .  Some of those servers are likely to be unencrypted, which means that, to ensure document security , you’ll need to encrypt the file itself, or your email system .  That’s a whole other step, and maybe an entirely ne w software to buy .  It’s also largely avoidable.     With modern document repositories (like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive) and law practice management softwar...

Routine is so . . . ‘routine’?     The notion of slipping into a routine has lots of negative connotations: it’s boring, it’s stultifying, it lacks creativity .  Oftentimes, routine and ‘rut’ are used interchangeably.     A routine is something to climb out of, not to get into.     But, if you run a business, especially a law firm . . . a good routine may be all you need.     Stagnation is a problem with law firms; but, that’s largely because they stick to a systemless model, that ends up being the antithesis of routine .  And, honestly: most lawyers don’t want to set up systems, because they’re worried about being bored .  They like the challenge , the intellectual stimulation , of untangling thorny legal issues .  Putting systems into place seems so  . . . ‘routine?’     But, this isn’t an either/or proposition.     You can still work on the cases that you love; and, setting up systems act...