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No one likes to receive an invoice, especially an invoice from a lawyer. But you can make it less painful if you consider the process from the point of view of your clients. Your invoice can be a tool to demonstrate that you deliver on the promises you make. They can help you to build trust.
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Whether you are writing a brief, a blog post, or an e-mail, clarity is key. If what you write is easy to read and digest, it is more persuasive.
If you want to enhance the clarity of your writing, here are a few tips.
November has arrived; the holidays are fast approaching and 2011 will be here before you know it. Many like to start the New Year off fresh, with a look back at what worked and what didn’t work in 2010, and define the goals to be reached over the next year. November is a good time to do this assessment and planning before the holiday rush begins.
Waiting until the anticipated ‘quiet time’ at the end of the year often fails for the same reasons that client work slows down. Planning is unlikely to get done (or get done well) during that time. Holiday preparations, vacations, last minute end of year tasks and celebrations get in the way.
The very simple task of turning meeting or law school class notes into concise memo-style documents improves knowledge retention and access.
Sam wrote a great post a few weeks back about knowledge management. This semester I’ve been working in my school’s in-house legal clinic, which has a, er, rather archaic filing system that’s the antithesis of a paperless workflow. While there are electronic copies of a lot of things, the primary case file is paper, paper, and more paper.
Despite lawyers’ efforts to get the best possible results for their clients, sometimes clients are dissatisfied. Their disappointment is often accompanied by finger-pointing; surely someone must be to blame for the outcome of the case besides the client or the opposing party. When the lawyer ends up in the path of that finger, the most common complaint is that the lawyer rarely, if ever, talked to the client and that on the few occasions the lawyer did talk to the client, the lawyer never let the client know what bad events were about to unfold.
Following yesterday’s Lawyerist post criticizing current methods of class action notice by publication, which received some great coverage by Reuters, it got us wondering: is there even an appetite in the legal community for changes to the way class members are notified?
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Social media can be great for marketing and great at keeping you off-task. Email can save time for certain communications, but incessantly checking also prevents you from accomplishing anything.
If you find yourself distracted while trying to write, here are some great tips to help you focus on the task at hand.
In class actions, where individual members of a class are not easy to identify, notice to the class is often made by publication in a newspaper. This is, however, a prime example of the law lagging behind reality, where the print media are struggling to prop up their dwindling circulation figures.
But because only a tiny fraction of the American public actually subscribe to newspapers, notice by publication is virtually guaranteed to be ineffective. It is also insufficient due process.
Co-counsel arrangements can be a great way to expand your practice. Negotiating the best arrangement involves knowing the right questions to ask.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bzedan/107728952
Earlier this week I wrote a post on how to look smart by following instructions. Sadly, it was quickly brought to my attention the post was riddled with capitalization errors. That is a prime example of why everything you write needs to be checked and double-checked before submission.
Driving the point home was a recent opinion by a judge that noted counsel’s numerous spelling, citation, and grammatical mistakes in a brief that criticized a magistrate’s opinion.
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