According to Ruby Receptionists, January second is the busiest day of the year for its call center. That sounds about right for my litigation practice. I always felt like we got mobbed in early January with people who were finally ready to take care of their problems after the holidays (and perhaps some holiday-related problems). It was welcome after the holiday slow-down we always experienced between Thanksgiving and the new year.
What about your practice? What day does your phone ring the most?
The new Communities feature of Google+ is a great way to connect, and we’re giving it a try with our new SoloSmallTech community. (Those of you who have been around for long enough may recall that SoloSmallTech was Lawyerist’s original name.) We’ll be geeking out over, er, geek stuff. Join us!
Gyi has also started a Legal Marketing community, where I imagine you will be able to find everything from big-picture marketing ideas to inside-baseball discussions about the latest Google algorithm tweaks.
Here are the links: SoloSmallTech & Legal Marketing.
CPA/attorney and LAB member, Jeff Vandrew, on the difference between entity choice and tax status:
A single member LLC has a choice of the following tax statutes: disregarded entity (like a sole proprietorship), S-corporation, or C-corporation.
A multi-member LLC has a choice of the following tax statutes: partnership, S-corporation, or C-corporation.
A corporation has a choice of the following tax statutes: S-corporation or C-corporation.
Read (and respond to) Jeff’s comment in the LAB.
In the LAB, Nicole Black is (unsurprisingly) full of good information on ethics and the cloud:
Also, the ABA recently revised Model Rule 1.1 to require lawyers to not only to maintain a knowledge of law and a level of skill in the practice of law, but it also now requires lawyers to have (and maintain) proficient knowledge and skills related to legal technologies. So a vendor green light from a bar association wouldn’t be enough, in any event. You still have to have tech proficiency.
See, it’s just not okay to be a Luddite, anymore. You cannot be ethical if you don’t understand what you are doing with your data. You can’t just hire someone else to take care of your data, either. Not without understanding what it is they are doing. You cannot outsource ethics.
You can’t just avoid the cloud, either. Most cloud services are much more secure than your average solo or small firm with no IT department can manage. Staying out of the cloud is not magically more ethical than maintaining your own non-secure PC or file server.
Scott Greenfield on the importance of thinking — and the difficulty in getting paid for it.
Try an experiment. Bill ‘em for thinking.
Thinking. There’s no code for that.
Why would that be? Thinking is a good thing. I try to do it whenever I can, and most of the time, it turns out to serve my client’s interests quite well. If I was a defendant, I would want my lawyer to do some serious thinking. In fact, I would demand it. So why, I pondered, was it not an acceptable basis to bill, and an even less acceptable basis to pay.
Sure, you can bill for thinking, but as Scott points out, you have to hide it in other activity, like reviewing documents or talking things over with someone. It’s pretty hard to just sit and think, and bill for it.
This is actually a primary reason I prefer flat fees. I can do all the thinking I want, and get paid for it without explaining every moment of thinking I do (.4 Thinking while showering; .3 Eureka! moment wile listening to public radio).
Read “No Code For Thinking” on Simple Justice.
This sentence, from young “virtual lawyer” Rachel Rogers, gives me the willies.
There have been times when I’ve woken up in the morning and I have new clients. They’ve found me online somehow and I’ve never had any interaction with them, but now they’re my clients. It’s pretty sweet.
I’m trying to decide if there are any legal matters so trivial and about which I could be so competent that I would feel comfortable taking on clients without even meeting them beforehand to discuss their needs and my capabilities. Maybe a few, but there are still a lot of things that could go wrong, not all of which could be cured by a refund.
Read “Law grads going solo and loving it” on NBC News (HT Alison Monahan).
In general, I think Windows 8 is a step in the right direction. It makes sense to combine tablets and notebooks into a single class of computers that run a single operating system.1 Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a stumbling half-step. Much of it is poorly executed; many of the UI mistakes seem unprovoked, and should have been avoidable.
My most-common response to Windows 8, which I unwisely installed on both my Windows PCs, is something along the lines of “oh, dammit.” That’s because Windows 8 has two completely different UI paradigms coexisting. I mostly use the Desktop to get work done just like I have in Windows for years, but it regularly kicks me out into a Metro app that (a) takes forever, and (b) is a completely different user experience. Menus work differently, things slide sideways instead of vertically, fonts are changed, there is no taskbar. So I have to stop and remember how to work things on the new screen, and how to get back to the one I was using before. I think I was right to compare it to Windows Vista, which was an intermediate step to Windows 7, which still rocks. Windows 9 will probably be awesome, but in the meantime, Windows 8 is a mess.
Read “Nielsen on Windows 8” on ignore the code, and “Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users” on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
The inimitable Scott Greenfield, calling it like he sees it:
And if one wants to fix the problem of opaqueness in the legal profession, the solution isn’t deceit, puffery and omission of material facts, but accuracy and honesty.
The one thing that stands out above all others are lawyers who omit dates from their websites and blogs. This is wrong, and whenever I see “Harvard Law School” without a date, it tells me that this lawyer is concealing a simple, basic fact. Concealment is hardly transparency.
Read Without Dates, You Intentionally Deceive
Scott Greenfield’s response to Clay Shirky’s Law Via the Internet conference keynote:
The LII’s efforts to make law freely available isn’t at odds with Clay Shirky’s nonsense, but isn’t consistent with it either. Rather, Shirky takes the ball and runs sideways, toward a goal that doesn’t exist. People, meaning non-lawyers, want unfettered access to the law. That’s fine. They want not only access, but the ability to understand it and use it without need to pay for lawyers. That’s not so fine.
I think Scott may have gotten Shirky’s point backwards, perhaps due to my poor summary. Shirky’s point, I think, is that non-lawyers are — en masse — already trying to interpret and understand the law, largely without help from lawyers, and will continue to do so using whatever tools are available. Shirky thinks lawyers ought to pitch in and correct the of bad interpretations that Scott complains about in his post.
(Also, I’m not clear on why Shirky is a charlatan, but Scott is not the first to say so. It’s possible I’m just being dense, but its not obvious to me.)
Read The Future Of Law and The Fool’s Utopia, Rape Edition on Simple Justice.
![clio lvi2012 [A] charlatan told a worldwide crowd of serious academics that in the future, everybody will be a lawyer for 15 minutes.](http://cdn.lawyerist.com/lawyerist/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/clio-lvi2012.png "[A] charlatan told a worldwide crowd of serious academics that in the future, everybody will be a lawyer for 15 minutes.")
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What’s Your Busiest Day of the Year?
by Sam Glover on December 26, 2012 in Practice Management
According to Ruby Receptionists, January second is the busiest day of the year for its call center. That sounds about right for my litigation practice. I always felt like we got mobbed in early January with people who were finally ready to take care of their problems after the holidays (and perhaps some holiday-related problems). It was welcome after the holiday slow-down we always experienced between Thanksgiving and the new year.
What about your practice? What day does your phone ring the most?