Maine Law Practice Management

Every year, when you apply for or renew your malpractice insurance, your provider asks whether you have a ‘dual calendar’ system -- like that’s good practice for running a law firm.     Only, it’s not.     The best practice of a ‘dual calendar’ system is a vestige from times past, when lawyers used paper calendars .  That second calendar was a hedge against missing a deadline, because the idea was that, if that item did not appear on one calendar, it would appear on the other .  Of course, managing two calendars, one as a ‘backup’ of sorts, could also lead to errors, if not diligently managed .  For example, if the time is recorded incorrectly on on e calendar, which one is right ?  It’s hard to know .  And, that potential for human error increases in a world where reliance on paper calendars is almost non-existent .  Trying to run a paper calendar in an electronic world does not make sense, even as a backup protocol.   And, the...

Mixed-use work and personal email accounts can quickly become ultra-confusing .  And yet, ma n y lawyers still utilize the setup, ostensibly (and, ironically) for ease-of-use/simplicity.   Modern law firms need to specialize in efficiency, more than any specific practice area .  To that end, your email should be mission-critical to your business .  That messages in your inbox should be from your clients, from referral sources and colleagues, maybe from organizations you belong to (those should be pushed to a subfolder, so you can them on your time ) and maybe from your staff (though, you should consider a separate communications tool, like Slack , for that) .   Anything else is static, including your personal emails, because it’s going to distract you from running your business.     That means that you need to push your personal email to another account .  The good news is that it’s not going to cost you anything, and will take less than 5...

As much as I advocate for the use of cloud software by law firms, sometimes there can develop an over reliance on such tools by lawyers.     Take, for example, cloud document storage.  If you’re a law firm, and you’ve recently moved to a paperless office , adding your document files to a cloud drive system ( like Google Drive , Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox ) may seem like the solution to all of your problems.  It’s certainly a huge step in the right direction; but, remember that a cloud drive does not a data backup make.     Storing your files online does not create a data backup .  If you think of a data backup as a redundancy = another place where your information is stored, solely using a cloud drive for document storage does not answer for that .  You still need to backup up your cloud drive data somewhere else.  And, this isn’t about Google or Microsoft or Amazon’s server architecture going down in flames -- if that happens, w...