If Donald Trump managed your law office

August 5, 2015 by
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If Donald Trump managed your law office, you’d be in for one hell of a ride. On the first day he arrived, he’d call a meeting and lay out the plan to take you into the big (or bigger) leagues.

Before he arrived, he would have had his people study you. They would know your operation better than you do, and they would have recommendations. Lots of them. They will have briefed The Donald and he will be ready to sell the plan to you and your staff.

And that plan would be breathtaking.

Everything that you have always taken for granted would be back on the table. Every document, every procedure, every employee would be examined, and that includes you. Some of your staff will be given raises. Some will be fired. New people will be brought on board.

Waste will be eliminated. Opportunities will be exploited. Everything will run smoother, faster, and more profitably.

I imagine The Donald will tell you (repeatedly) why a business person and not a lawyer should run things. He’d point out that lawyers aren’t good at taking risks, they don’t appreciate marketing, and they are often better with paper than people.

Yes, he’d ruffle feathers and leave you breathless trying to keep up, but as a result of implementing his plan, new clients would come in, bills would go out, and your bank account would grow.

The lesson? Hire a business person to manage your law firm. Or change your thinking, crack the books, and become one yourself. Embrace the notion that your firm is a business and needs to be run like one. Change the way you think about things, and change the things you do.

Because Mr. Trump is a little busy right now and probably won’t show up at your office any time soon.

Here’s a good place to start

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Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Productivity

If you’re not growing, you’re dying

August 3, 2015 by
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James Clear had an interesting post about something called The Repeated Bout Effect. In simple terms, it means, “the more you repeat a behavior, the less it impacts you because you become accustomed to it.”

He quotes Marshall Goldsmith, author of “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” who says, “Doing the same thing over and over again, even if it worked for a long time, will eventually lead to a plateau.”

Clear uses examples from weight training, but the principle applies to other aspects of life, including marketing and managing your practice. If you continue doing the same things you’ve always done, or you do them the same way you’ve always done them, you limit or retard your growth.

And if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

Clear suggests deliberately practicing new skills that you can master quickly, i.e., “in one to three practice sessions”. This will stimulate growth and help you reach new levels of achievement.

Identify skills that could prove helpful to you in marketing and managing your practice. Once a week or so, choose a skill to focus on for the next few days.

For ideas, read blogs and articles and books on those subjects. Talk to your colleagues and business contacts and see what they do to build or manage their business or practice.

Regularly add new skills to your bag of tricks and encourage your staff to do the same.

But don’t stop there.

I think it’s also wise to periodically examine your current skills and activities and seek ways to improve them.

Over the next few days, take note of everything you do–small tasks and big tasks, highly skilled tasks and rudimentary or routine tasks. Include everything: writing, speaking, presenting, signing up new clients, meeting with employees, interviewing job applicants, dictating a motion, prepping for trial, reviewing a new client intake, touch typing, and everything else.

Then, look at each task and ask yourself, “How can I do this better?”

Can you change the order of the steps? Add in an extra step? Use a different tool?

Can you do it faster, perhaps by leaving out a step or two?

Can you get better results by practicing the underlying skills or delegating some of the tasks (or the entire task) to someone else?

Acquiring new skills, combined with an ongoing effort to improve your current skills, is a powerful recipe for growth. And if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

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Filed Under: Personal development, Productivity Tagged With:

Calling all note-taking junkies–come and get your fix

July 29, 2015 by
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Who knew?

I had no idea how many different note-taking methods there were. Different methods for different styles and a variety of situations, from classroom to courtroom and everyone in between. And then I read a blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Note-Taking, which I heartily recommend to you.

Even if you’re not a note-taking fanboy or girl, or looking for something different from what you currently use to record notes or ideas, you’re bound to find something you can use.

The post presents a wide variety of note-taking methods, including the traditional outline/list method we first learned in grade school, visual methods like mind maps and charts, the Cornell method, and more. The author first demonstrates a paper version of each method, and suggests how it might be adapted for digital.

I think we all develop our own methods of taking notes. I know I did, first in law school, and then in depos and court. For the latter, I would write down what a witness said, what I thought about what they said, and notes to myself about what to ask in cross or what to look into when I got back to the office. I used abbreviations and visual marks to identify notes to zero in on when I later reviewed them.

I do something similar when I’m listening to a presentation or in a business meeting.

I’m going to study this blog post to see how I can use some of these methods for recording tasks and projects and for taking notes on books and blogs.

If you want to talk nerdy to me, check it out and let me know what you think.

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Filed Under: Communication, Productivity, Writing Tagged With:

Getting the right things done

July 28, 2015 by
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Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a rule he lives by that helps him be more productive and successful. The rule: “Do Less. More.” It means doing fewer things overall, and getting the right things done. “Success often comes from doing a few things extraordinarily well and noticeably better than the competition,” he says.

Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle, says, “Everyone can achieve something significant. The key is not effort, but finding the right thing to achieve. You are hugely more productive at some things than at others, but dilute the effectiveness of this by doing too many things where your comparative skill is nowhere near as good.”

Koch also says, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

So, what do you do better than most? What should you focus on? I asked this question in an earlier post:

Look at your practice and tell me what you see.

  • Practice areas: Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of one? Are you good at many things or outstanding at one or two?
  • Clients: Do you target anyone who needs what you do or a very specifically defined “ideal client” who can hire you more often, pay higher fees, and refer others like themselves who can do the same?
  • Services: Do you offer low fee/low margin services because they contribute something to overhead or do you keep your overhead low and maximize profits?
  • Fees: Do you trade your time for dollars or do you get paid commensurate with the value you deliver?
  • Marketing: Do you do too many things that produce no results, or modest results, or one or two things that bring in the bulk of your new business?
  • Time: Do you do too much yourself, or do you delegate as much as possible and do “only that which only you can do”?
  • Work: Do you do everything from scratch or do you save time, reduce errors, and increase speed by using forms, checklists, and templates?

Leverage is the key to the 80/20 principle. It is the key to getting more done with less effort and to earning more without working more.

Take some time to examine your practice, and yourself. Make a short list of the things you do better than most and focus on them. Eliminate or delegate the rest.

Do Less. More.

This will help with getting the right things done

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Filed Under: Law office management, Leverage, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Productivity, success Tagged With: , , ,

Are you busy? That’s a shame.

June 18, 2015 by
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Being busy isn’t necessarily something to brag about. It’s not a virtue. In fact, it may well be a failing if you’re busy doing things that aren’t important.

It’s better to be productive than busy.

Being productive means you’re producing. Creating value for yourself and others. It means you’re not simply in motion, you’ve got to something to show for your efforts.

What do you want to produce? What results do you want to achieve?

Not someday, now. You can have dreams and long term goals but life is lived in the present, so what do you want to do today?

What are your priorities?

You should be able to cite a few things that you are focused on, and only a few. Because if there are more than a few, it can’t be called “focus”. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

“If you have 3 priorities, you have priorities. If you have 25 priorities, you have a mess,” one writer said.

You may have heard it said that you can do anything you want in life, you just can’t do everything; there isn’t enough time. Fill your day producing things that are important to you, your family, and your clients. If you do that, you will have a productive and happy life, even if you’re not that busy.

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Filed Under: Inspiration, Personal development, Productivity, success

Are you investing in yourself?

June 15, 2015 by
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Among other things, The 80/20 Principle, one of my favorite books on the subject, tells us to “pursue those few things where you are amazingly better than others and that you enjoy most.” Do them to the exclusion of other things you’re not as good at.

Another author puts it this way: “Do very few things, but be awesome at them.”

To do this, you must work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Figure out what you do best and find ways to do it even better.

I do a lot of writing. It’s one of my strengths. I invest in getting better at it by reading books and blogs about writing, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and making sure I work at it every day.

I also invest in tools that help me write better and faster. I’ve mentioned Scrivener before and told you that I now do all my long-form writing in it.

I got a new chair recently that helps me sit longer. It helps me get more writing done because I don’t need to take as many breaks.

Yesterday, I went out and looked at mechanical keyboards. (They’re in the “gaming” section.) I’ve been reading about these for awhile and I’m about ready to order one. I’m told they help you type faster and with fewer typos. They also last longer than the rubber membrane keyboards found on most laptops and computer desktops. I like the tactile feel of these keyboards, and the clicky sound they make. (You can get ones that don’t make that sound, if you prefer.)

After that, I’ll probably look at external monitors. A bigger screen will allow me to look at two documents at one time, instead of having to switch back and forth. Maybe dual monitors is the thing.

For a long time now, I’ve been using the track pad on my laptop. I might start using a mouse again.

It’s all about getting that edge. Making a good thing even better.

How about you? What do you do best? How are you investing in yourself to get better?

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Filed Under: Productivity, success Tagged With: , , ,

How I beat the clock and became more productive

June 10, 2015 by
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I was a clock watcher in school. I watched the clock and waited for it to tell me I could go to recess or lunch or to another class I hated less. When it got close to the end of the school day, I watched the seconds tick by until the bell rang out and I was set free.

I was bored and frustrated that I had to be somewhere I didn’t want to be, doing things I didn’t want to do.

Maybe you can relate.

Today, I make my own schedule and do the work I want to do. But I am still haunted by that clock.

I’m working on a big project right now. Even though I enjoy the work, as I see the end of the day approaching, as my stomach tells me it’s getting close to dinner time, I mentally start winding down and find myself going into evening mode.

I’m not making as much progress on the project as I want to. I know I could do much more.

It’s the clock, damn it. I worshiped it in school and now it owns my soul. It knows that I don’t have a deadline for this project and it plays with my mind. Sometimes I can hear it laughing at me.

I listen to music, to drown out distractions and keep me from looking at the clock. But my inner clock seems to have synchronized with the external clock-god and as the end of the day approaches, I know it and I start losing steam.

The clock-god wants to control me, but I refuse to bow down to it’s evil ways. Thankfully, I’ve found a way to banish the clock-god from my life.

I found a new clock.

It’s just as tough and demanding on me, but I obey this new clock because it is benevolent and wants me to succeed.

The new clock-god has a name. It’s called a countdown timer.

I decide in advance how much work I want to do each day on the project. Right now, that’s four hours. Before, I probably worked no more than a couple of hours a day on it, and not every day, either.

I know that if I put in four hours a day, I will reach my goal.

I found a site with a simple countdown timer on it. When I start work, I set the timer for four hours and click the start button.

Now, it doesn’t matter if I get distracted. It doesn’t matter what my inner clock tells me. I’ve got four hours to do and I’m not going to call it a day until I’ve put in my time.

When I take a break, I pause the timer. When I get back to work, I start it again. I enjoy watching the timer count down and seeing how much time is left before I’ve hit my daily goal.

Sometimes, if it’s time for dinner and I haven’t put in the full four hours, I go back to work after dinner. Before the countdown timer, I usually didn’t do that. I’d tell myself I was tired and that I would pick things up tomorrow.

Not anymore. The day isn’t over until I’ve put in my time.

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Filed Under: Productivity, Time Management

Get more work done by doing it in batches

June 5, 2015 by
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I just saw a video by a very successful Internet marketer who says he works an average of four to eight hours per week. Mondays is work day. He writes his blog posts, records and edits his videos, and does everything else he needs to do for the week. Then he takes the rest of the week off.

This might not work for everyone, he acknowledges, but it works for him. It allows him to finish things more quickly because he gets into the flow of whatever he’s doing, and keeps at it until it’s done.

Could a lawyer do something like this? Probably not, at least to this extent. For one thing, most attorneys put in many more hours than this fellow. We couldn’t get everything done in a day. In addition, much of our work is dictated by other people’s schedules and agendas.

We could use the concept of “batching” our tasks, however, to get certain things done in less time.

For example, we could dedicate a day (or a half day) for all of our writing. We could write a week’s or a month’s worth of blog posts and articles in one stretch of time and have the rest of the week or month for other things.

I haven’t tried this. I typically write a new post each week day and I don’t know what I’m going to write about until I sit down to do it. But I like the idea of cranking out a week’s worth of work in a few contiguous hours. I might give this a try.

I found another Internet marketer who works a full week. He is prodigious, producing tens of thousands of words each week, and claims batching as a key to getting so much done.

How about you? Do you think you might get more done if you designate two afternoons a week for client meetings instead of spreading them throughout the week? Could you block out Tuesday mornings for file review and get most of your week’s dictation done in one or session?

Something to think about?

Now if I can just figure out how to get a year’s worth of work done in a week. . . let me get back to you on that.

Need more clients? Get this

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Filed Under: Productivity, Time Management Tagged With:

How to find the time to grow your law practice

June 2, 2015 by
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On my walk yesterday, I listened to an interview with Michael Hyatt on The Smart Passive Income podcast (episode 163). One thing he talked about was how he hired his first outside assistant after he had resisted doing so for a long time.

He told a story about an entrepreneur he knows who had also resisted hiring help. A friend showed him the light.

First, his friend asked how much his time was worth. He estimated $250 an hour. Then the friend asked him to name a task he did in his business that he wasn’t particularly good at. “Updating my website,” he said. The friend asked, “If you did hire someone to update your website for you, would you pay them $250 an hour?”

The entrepreneur said no, of course not. “But that’s exactly what you’re paying now,” his friend said.

Hyatt said that when he realized that a virtual assistant  could free up his time to do the work that he does best, he decided to give it a try. He started slowly and hired someone for just five hours a week.

He quickly realized how much more high-value work this allowed him to do and increased it to ten hours a week. Because he was doing more of what he does best, his business really took off. He now has a stable of employees and virtual assistants who do the work that they do best, allowing him to focus on his strengths.

I thought about that and realized that all of us could find enough tasks in our week to keep a virtual assistant busy for five hours. If the assistant costs $10 an hour, that’s only $50 a week.

Who wouldn’t pay $50 to free up five hours?

What if that allowed you to bill an additional five hours a week? What if you used that time to bring in more clients?

If you want to grow your law practice, this is a place to start. Make a list of things you do that you’re not good at or don’t enjoy and find an assistant who can do them for you.

What will you do with all that extra time?

Learn more ways to leverage your time. Click here

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Law office management, Leverage, Productivity Tagged With: ,

Mr. Spock was only half right

May 28, 2015 by
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As a kid, I loved Star Trek. I watched the original series and thought that Mr. Spock’s unemotional, logical approach to problem solving was the way to go.

Examine the evidence. Calculate the probabilities. Make your decision.

I even took a class in logic in college. It was one of my favorites. My professor noticed my enthusiasm for the subject and wrote me a letter of recommendation to law school.

Anyway, I started my legal career with a penchant for logic. I calmly reasoned my way through problems to find the best solutions. I did my best to keep my emotions in check.

And it’s a good thing I did. Those first few years were awful. I didn’t know how to bring in clients and, oh yeah, I barely knew how to do the legal work. Every month was a struggle to survive and if I had let my emotions out of their box, I would surely have fallen apart. Logic got me through some tough times.

Later, when I had turned things around and had a thriving practice, logic only took me so far.

At one point, I had an important decision to make. I can’t recall the subject but I remember having a terrible time deciding what to do. I had a paralegal who saw my consternation and offered a suggestion. She told me that I was more intuitive than I realized and that I should trust my intuition to provide me with the right answer.

I listened to her. And then I listened to the voice inside me that told me what to do.

Whatever the issue was, my intuition provided the solution and the problem is long forgotten.

We should remember that Spock was half-human. Somewhere inside him was a reservoir of intuition and human emotion. We saw flashes of it when he made illogical decisions to save the life of Captain Kirk.

We all have great intuitive powers and we shouldn’t ignore them. There is a voice inside us that wants to guide us but most of us (men) don’t listen.

Feelings, who me? I’m a lawyer. I don’t let my feelings tell me what to do.

Maybe we should. Maybe we should listen to how we feel about things before we make decisions.

I do that now. When I think about choosing A or B, for example, I ask myself how I feel about those options. More often than not, I choose the option that feels better.

I also do that when charting my future. I look at the pantheon of options available to me–all of the projects I could work on, all of the tasks on my master list–and do the ones that I feel pulled toward.

I have one such project I’m working on right now. It’s something I feel good about and I can’t wait to get back to work on it. Isn’t that how our work should always be? Mostly doing things we enjoy?

Look at everything on your plate right now, and everything on your list of ideas. Which one calls to you? Which one feels good when you think about it?

That’s probably what you should do next.

Mr. Spock might not approve, but he’s at the Science station and you’re in the Captain’s chair.

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Filed Under: Career satisfaction, Goal Setting, Inspiration, Marketing Plan, Personal development, Productivity Tagged With:
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