Managing a Law Firm

It may be among the toughest conversations you ever have to initiate. But when you think a colleague is in trouble—experiencing difficulties with drugs and alcohol or spiraling into a seemingly intractable depression, for example—it is worse, ...

At solo and small firm conferences around the country, lawyers gather to polish their skills, learn about new technology—and pick up a marketing tip or two. At the Illinois State Bar Association's Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference last week, ...

Would you work for you? Why or why not? It’s a great question to ask yourself—often—if you are “da boss” or supervise other people. It provides a quick self-audit and points to things you’d be wise to keep doing—or to ...

There are about 23 different business processes in most law firms. They range from new client intake to check requests to conflicts checks. When there's a problem with one of them—maybe it takes too long or there are too many errors—believe it ...

I'm always surprised when I meet someone who doesn't use Evernote. It's cross-platform (works on Mac, Windoze, iOS and Droid), painlessly syncs just about any kind of data you put into it—emails, images, PDFs, webpages, plain text—integrates ...

As a solo practitioner with a demanding work and family schedule, I’m always on the go. Between client meetings and depositions, I’m often attending parent-teacher conferences and baseball games and shuttling the kids to school, music and dance ...

When was the last time you bought an entire album of music from a single artist? Most of us create playlists with tracks purchased on Apple iTunes from multiple artists and albums. We create exactly what we want to jive with our moods and ...

Your long-tenured secretary arrives at work one morning and forgets to turn on the lights to her workstation, misfiles a court pleading and fails to confirm a client meeting. You want to believe it's just temporary but you fear it's something ...

Let me guess—you don't have time to think about your reputation in your community, much less devote extra hours to volunteer activities. After all, you're already doing a lot for your community by doing what you do best—providing reliable legal ...

Why do so many law firms protect their jerks — and what can you do when you've had enough of bad behavior?