Managing a Law Firm

Recently, New York became the first state to require that law students perform 50 hours of pro bono work before they can be admitted to the bar. Plenty of bloggers have already chimed in on whether this is a good or bad idea. There’s little that ...

Wouldn't it be nice to make a clean sweep and set up your practice from scratch—applying all your hard-earned wisdom? Great ideas for setting up a new law practice was the focus of the Chicago Bar Association's Law Practice Start Up Boot Camp ...

If you read my post on "How Hourly Billing Kills Law Firms," maybe you’ve been inspired to figure out how to price certain legal services based on their value to a client, not the number of hours you spent. Now all you have to do is figure out ...

Here’s something I don’t understand: clients who are late for meetings. They set up the meeting based on their availability, and even confirm it the day before—yet sometimes I find myself sitting in a conference room waiting for them after the ...

In his book The Checklist Manifesto, surgeon Atul Gawande asserts that checklists are a “cognitive net,” a mechanism that can help prevent experienced people from making errors due to flawed memory and attention, and ensure that teams ...

Okay, we know the business of practicing law is in transition. (Some say "crisis"). It is evolving into ... something. But what? That's the question the College of Law Practice Management wrestles with each year at its Futures Conference. Some ...

We know it sounds like an oxymoron, but a “Red-Tape Reduction Committee” might actually be the thing your practice needs. Today, Vivian Manning describes how forming just such a committee is helping her newly merged firm dispense ...

Procrastination is a beast we all battle. Some days it feels like you'd rather do anything else but get work done. But you can't get away with that all the time. And sometimes the work just has to get completed posthaste, no matter what. So for ...

By now we can probably all agree that the cloud is not a mysterious and scary thing. We've bought into the idea that "anytime, anywhere" access to files and other stuff is, indeed, a pretty cool thing—and key to running a smart practice. After ...

Lawyers have been talking about and wrestling with “alternative billing methods” or "alternative fee agreements" for a decade or more. Recently, however, the conversation has shifted to “value billing.” Well, that’s a concept we can get ...