There are two essential steps to any effective productivity system: (1) collecting everything you have to do; and (2) making sure you do it.

The first requires good, easy-to-use tools. If it takes work to collect tasks, you won’t do it. Tim Ferriss, author of the four-hour workweek, recently talked about how he does it.

Here are the tools he uses:

1. Evernote
2. Gmail
3. Google Calendar (Gcal)
4. Anxiety
5. Jott

Visit his article to see how he uses them to never forget anything again.

How to Never Forget Anything Again | Tim Ferriss (via Zen Habits)

With the stock market gyrating and the economy sinking, many lawyers are already starting to see clients fall behind on paying their bills.  Here are a few ideas for managing fee collection through troubling times:

Comfort clients

First of all, and to put the strategies below in context, make contact with your clients, particularly the ones who have typically paid their fees. Everyone’s nervous about the economy; you are one of their trusted professionals. Call them. See how they’re doing. Find out if there is anything you can do for them. Give them your ear. Don’t bill them for the call.

Send statements

Now is not the time to let invoices sit around unsent.  Yes, your clients maybe hurting financially, but they need to know what the status of their bill with you is. A big surprise later certainly won’t help.  If the clients have many bills, you need to make sure you’re figured into the mix. If clients don’t see a bill from you, they may think they don’t owe you anything or that your bill can wait a couple of months.

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I am getting ready to launch Comp Wonk, a blog about Minnesota workers’ compensation, on November 1. A friend of mine who represents injured workers will be writing the blog, and I am looking forward to getting it up and running.

If you have questions about work comp, check out Comp Wonk starting November 1st.

Like you, I get many solicitations to join bar associations and sections and attend CLE seminars. County bar, state bar, ABA – one could easily make a full-time job out of bar activities. Now I’ve learned that there is a bar association that exists almost entirely in cyberspace: the Second Life Bar Association.

Second Life, as more thoroughly described in a California Lawyer article, is a virtual world (some would call it a game) in which you create an “avatar” for yourself with a unique name and looks you design and venture forth to chat with others, play games, create and sell virtual products, and heavens knows what else.  Members are under no obligation to look or act like their real life selves; escapism and role playing seem to be a big draw for Second Life. Some people, on the other hand, just want to be themselves.

Which brings us to the lawyers, a handful of whom have decided it would be cool to form a bar association in the virtual world. (more…)

Jay Foonberg reported that, as of 2006, only 22% of blue-collar Americans and 11% of middle-class Americans use the phone book to find a lawyer. And that was two years ago.

If you don’t market online, that means you are ignoring 80-90% of your potential future clients.

And not just the younger ones. According to the AARP, 52% of americans 62-71 are online, using search engines (59%), staying in touch (59%, presumably with social networking sites as well as email and IM).

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One difficulty in representing clients who are “under water” on their mortgages is how the lawyer should get paid for his or her time negotiating a better deal for the client.

The client is heavily in debt, but if the lawyer shines, the client could save tens of thousands of dollars. In a listserve post this week, Professor Andrew Perlman asked: What if the lawyer was paid by taking a percentage of the money that the client saved through renegotiating the mortgage?

This kind of arrangement is used in other areas of the law and is commonly referred to as a “reverse contingent fee.” The ABA issued an opinion over 15 years ago, Formal Opinion 93-373, stating that there was no ethical prohibition against charging a client a fee based on a percentage of the money the client would save if the lawyer was successful.

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This has nothing to do with law practice, firm technology, or ethics, except peripherally, but it is pretty cool, nonetheless.

The Smithsonian recently posted a series of photographs from the Scopes monkey trial—the first major evolution case, which involved Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan (shown below) on opposite sides of the courtroom.

Now go and add Inherit the Wind to your Netflix queue.

Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs | Flickr (via BoingBoing)

I have been using Ubuntu Linux exclusively for nearly a year now, with one abortive attempt to return to Windows. For me, the transition has been smooth. But to date, I have not exposed anyone new to Ubuntu.

But recently, I hired a law clerk to help me with a few projects, so I bought a new desktop computer for her. I went with a Dell computer with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, and when my law clerk showed up on day one, I just showed her how to log in, where to find my client folders on the network, and not much else.

After a week using Ubuntu, she has not come to me with any problems or asked me how to do anything. I am sure it helps that most of my practice management software is online, but she had no issues getting up to speed with OpenOffice.org, the Evince PDF viewer, or anything else.

She says it feels like a mix of Windows and OSX, which is pretty much what I think about the default Ubuntu interface.

So for those who might want to try Ubuntu, give it a shot. It is easy to get oriented, and it just works. Plus, you can download a LiveCD and try Ubuntu without installing it or affecting your hard drive.

By now, everyone knows Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked a few weeks back. How? The clever interloper found her email address and used the forgotten password links plus a few well-known facts about Palin to reset her password. Piece of cake. Almost as easy as opening your physical mailbox to read your mail, in fact.

So take a lesson from Sarah Palin and change all your security questions to something less obvious. Instead of putting down your mother’s actual maiden name, use a different response you will remember. Something nobody will guess. Like the license plate number of your first car. Make a mental note of your response, and then use that same code for every security question.

(image: Huffington Post)

I have not decided just how I want to use Dropbox yet, but I will tell you what: this is one slick program. Dropbox is a very simple, easy-to-use program you install on all your computers, and it automatically syncs your files with a set of files in the cloud whenever you make changes, on whatever computer you have Dropbox install on.

Watch the video. Dropbox is really cool. I do not think it is ready, yet, to use for sensitive client documents, but I can think of a lot of other documents I want to have with me no matter what computer I am using.