Casemaker Mobile Apps Now Available

If you’ve been enjoying Casemaker, the free legal research service which is a benefit of Alabama State Bar membership, you’ll be glad to know that apps for your mobile devices are now available.

Alabama State Bar members have been able to access Casemaker through their mobile browsers for a while, but Casemaker recently introduced native apps that make doing legal research on your iPad, iPhone or Android smartphone a snap.

To start your mobile legal research immediately, follow these easy instructions:

• Sign in to Casemaker through the bar’s website.
• Once in Casemaker, click on the red link for “Available mobile application” near the top left of the Casemaker home page.
• Complete the form to receive a reference code.
• On your smartphone or iPhone/iPad go to Google Play or the App Store, respectively, and download the Casemaker app by searching for Casemaker or Casemakerlegal.
• The first time you run the application, it will ask for the reference code.  Enter the code that you got when you registered while on the Casemaker site. (If you later add the app to additional devices, you can access this reference code again any time by clicking on the “Available mobile app” link while you’re in Casemaker on your computer.)
• If you have any problems, contact Casemaker support at 877-659-0801.

For Casemaker research assistance M-F, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central call toll-free (877) 659 -0801 or check out the schedule of Casemaker training webinars . You can also call the Alabama State Bar for login assistance at (334) 517-2242.

Download the free app today. You’ll be glad you did.

Why Would You Want to Rent Microsoft Office?

I recently did a presentation on technology trends in legal practice management, and one of the new products now coming over the horizon that I gave a mention to was Microsoft Office 365. No one in the audience of about 25 solo and small firm family law practitioners had even heard of it. Then, yesterday, Ben Schorr’s SmallLaw column in TechnoLawyer (subscription required) summed up the features and advantages of moving to this new product. His piece is great, as always, and worth a read, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to summarize the information in it for ASB members who don’t subscribe to TechnoLawyer.

The first thing you need to know is that Microsoft Office 365 is software for download on your own computers that you rent rather than buy. While one-payment licenses for locally installed software will likely continue to be available for the foreseeable future (however long that may be), more and more software companies are moving to deliver use of their products over the internet and, thus, are moving to a “rent” rather than “own” acquisition model. This offers many advantages to the software developers, the most obvious being a continuous revenue stream rather than a one-time sale. And for obvious financial reasons even companies that continue to deliver downloadable software would like to move to this rent rather than own model. So it’s not surprising that Microsoft has come up with a plan to turn its current purchasers into renters. Have they put together a package that’s sweet enough to entice lawyers to make this transition?

According to Ben, here’s what Office 365 offers:

• Microsoft Office 2013 which including Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• Microsoft Exchange Server (necessary for email management and sharing and syncing of data among multiple users)
• Microsoft SharePoint (collaboration and workflow program)
• SkyDrive Pro (allows cloud-based collaboration and workflow within and outside the firm – such as client portals – along with cloud-based storage
• Lync (communications software for secure instant messaging, phone service, video conferencing and screen sharing – such as web meetings)

These parts can be combined in many different ways to provide only the services that you or your firm need.

Obviously, there will be some advantages and disadvantages for lawyers who are migrating to Office 365 from one-time purchased software.

Advantages:

• No up-front investment and low monthly cost (at least to begin with and as long as there are competitive options)
• Each Microsoft Office 365 per-user license allows software installation on up to 5 computers that the user regularly uses
• Both PC and Mac versions are available in each per-user license
• Regular upgrades are available at no extra cost – but with reason you can control the upgrade schedule (unlike forced upgrades in cloud-based products)
• Your package can easily be modified and scaled up or down as the number of people in your firm grows or shrinks
• All of your stuff can be housed in Microsoft’s cloud and will be automatically backed up if it is

Disadvantages

• While renting rather than owning may be an advantage in budgeting, your software will never be paid for
• The default “save” option for Microsoft Word 2013 is to save to SkyDrive, requiring more clicks to save documents to your local machine or network
• You won’t be able to hold off upgrades forever (as a lawyer I met recently who is still using Microsoft Office 98 seems to be doing)

We’ve been in more or less a stable holding pattern regarding law office document creation and storage since the late 1980s when most law offices moved away from the electric typewriter or proprietary word processing stations and to WordPerfect and storing documents on individual user PCs and then servers. As lawyers now move from purchased to rented software and from local to cloud-based storage for this and other workflow functions, I think we’re likely to see more options and competition in this market as time goes on.

Pick My Own Judge? Really?

If you have questions about private judges and how this new system to help expedite the resolution of certain types of cases will work, this short article by Judy Keegan of the Alabama Center for Dispute Resolution is worth a quick read:s

YOU PICK THE JUDGE: THE NEW ALABAMA PRIVATE JUDGES ROSTER

Earlier this year, Alabama became one of several states to implement private judging.  This means if you have a domestic relations, tort, contract, or combination tort/contract case, there is a procedure for you to select a judge, and within a short time have the case heard. Ala. Code §12-17-350 et seq. (1975, as amended).  Private judging is designed to quickly resolve issues, and to provide a judge with expertise in the subject area of the case.

The website www.alabamaprivatejudges.org was constructed for your use, and contains an on-line roster that provides names, expertise and information about judges that meet statutory requirements.  Those requirements include:

1.  have been, but are not actively serving as a judge of a district or circuit court and have served in the capacity of judge for at least six consecutive years;
2. are admitted to the practice of law in Alabama;
3. are an active member in good standing of the Alabama State Bar Association; and
4. are a resident of Alabama.

The case must be one over which the court in which the former judge served would have had subject matter and monetary jurisdiction.

Once parties have agreed that hiring a private judge will be helpful, and have selected a judge from the roster, then all parties to the action must file a written petition with the circuit clerk of the court in which the action is pending requesting a private judge and naming the selected judge.  The petition must be accompanied by a form signed by the private judge consenting to the appointment.  This petition may be filed contemporaneously with the filing of the action, or at any time after the action has been filed, but before the beginning of trial.  The filing fee is $100.

The clerk of the court will forward the petition to the presiding judge of the circuit of the pending case who will enter an order granting the petition and appointing the private judge.

A trial by private judge is conducted without a jury.  The judge has the same powers as the judge of a circuit court, and has judicial immunity.   All proceedings are of record, are filed with the clerk of the circuit court, and are made available to the public.  The Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure apply.  An appeal from an action or judgment of a private judge is taken in the same manner as any appeal from the circuit court of the county where the case if filed.  The private judge has access to all pleadings and docket entries as would any judge.

A private judge may hear your case at any time or place in Alabama, and will provide the clerk with date, time and place of hearing at least three days before the proceeding.  Compensation for a private judge is by contract with the parties, and will include costs of any personnel, facilities, or materials.

Are We There Yet? Is Email Really Still Different?

Attorney at Work is a great blog with lots of useful tips and ideas to improve a law practice.  I highly recommend that you check it out.  But a recent post by Ruth Carter titled Five Law Firm Website Turnoffs started a discussion among my fellow PMAs around the country about ethics and best practices for lawyer websites.  Some of us weren’t sure we could agree with part of her advice.

One of Ms. Carter’s website turnoffs is the failure to provide lawyers’ email addresses on a firm’s website.  In the past many of us have advised that, in order to protect themselves from receiving email with unsolicited confidential information which might create a perceived attorney-client relationship or conflict of interest, lawyers’ websites should not post email addresses.  Instead, we had counseled, they should use a contact form that requires potential clients to read and confirm their understanding of a disclaimer stating that sending confidential information will not create an attorney-client relationship and will not prevent the firm from representing an opposing party or using the unsolicited information.  Requiring a “click through” acknowledgement is, after all, the only way that you can establish that the potential client saw and read such a disclaimer before sending the information.

Is this overkill?  After all, you’d be hard pressed to find a lawyer anywhere who posts a sign in front of his or her office saying, “Sending unsolicited mail to this office through the U. S. Postal Service or making unsolicited telephone calls to me will not create an attorney-client relationship and will not prevent me from representing an opposing party or using the information against you in the future.”

Do we really need a different standard for email and snail mail or phone calls?  Logic would seem to say not, but the bottom line is that, briefly inconvenient though it may be, using a click-through disclaimer acknowledgement on your website can save you a world of potential ethical trouble, not to mention help deter spammers.  There are plenty of other ways your colleagues can get your email address if needed, such as looking you up in the bar’s online directory.

Eventually, ethics advisory bodies will likely come to view email as being just like any other form of communication, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.   For the time being, I’ll continue to recommend click-through disclaimers, before revealing a lawyer’s email address on his or her website, as a best practice.

Never Miss Another Deadline

I love this time of year because my new calendar arrives and I get to start filling its clean pages up with appointments and activities for the next year.

I use both Outlook and Google Calendar, respectively, to keep my work and home lives on track, and I feed both into the calendar of my iPad to make sure my home and work worlds don’t collide, but I still prefer to reach for my paper calendar when it’s time to schedule an event or plan a trip.

For the digital generation, this probably doesn’t make much sense. After all, I have to spend time keeping the paper and digital calendars synced but, for those of us who came of age using paper and books, there is just something about flipping those pages that gives me a better sense of the spacing of events and how soon or distant something that I’m trying to schedule really is. And since I’ve been using the same Week-At-A-Glance calendar for 30 years, they are like a series of diaries that help me to remember people and events in the way that bits and bytes just don’t.

Regardless of the type of calendar you prefer, here are some tips to improve your calendaring processes:

• In addition to calendaring important events such as hearings, filing deadlines and statutes of limitation, always set up “appointments” with the file to perform the work necessary to meet these deadlines.
• Remember to calendar not just what you are supposed to do, but what others are supposed to do. If you request something, always note the due date for the response. In addition, always incorporate a deadline into any request you make.
• If you still use a paper calendar, don’t calendar in pencil. But if you feel that you must, cross out necessary changes rather than erase them. If appointments or other items on your digital calendar must be changed, amend the original entry to note the change and then create a new entry to reflect the new circumstances.
• Create a process for calendaring. If correspondence or an event triggers the need to put something on the calendar, always follow the same series of steps in creating the entry. For example, make the entry, schedule the time to do the work, and set up two separate reminders. The calendaring task is not complete until all of the steps are done. Create a checklist and follow it, if necessary.
• Never allow a paper file to go back into the filing system without a calendar entry for the next time it is to be pulled. Never perform work on a digital file without setting up a tickler for the next date on which you should review that matter – regardless of how many other ticklers you think may be outstanding for the matter. When every file always has a “next action date” assigned before it is refilled, you eliminate the need to periodically review all files.

Careful attention to your calendaring process can help you keep a lid on chaos and stress, and never miss an important date or deadline again.

CLE – Take Your Office Paperless and More!

If you are struggling to develop the skills and procedures needed to implement the recent order mandating e-filing, or if you just want to improve your existing technology skills, this program is for you.

On Tuesday, December 18th, the Alabama State Bar will present Legal Technology Show and Tell: Skills to Make E-Practice Painless, with nationally recognized legal technology speaker Steven J. Best,Esq. of Atlanta.

The program, which has been approved for 3 hours of MCLE credit, will cover Going Paperless, Adobe Acrobat X for Lawyers and Creative Outlook 2010 Management for Lawyers: Email and More.  It will take place at Alabama State Bar Headquarters, 415 Dexter Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama, and will be limited to the first 60 registrants.  Get the registration form, or view the program schedule.  For more information call the Practice Management Assistance Program at (334) 517-2242.

Steven J. Best is an attorney as well as a certified law office software consultant and the managing partner of the Atlanta office of Affinity Consulting Group. With an educational background in law, accounting and economics, Steve consults with law firms throughout the United States on law office software as well as sophisticated practice management issues. He is a frequent speaker on technology issues for lawyers.

Steve is a graduate of Rutgers University (B.A.) and Emory University School of Law (J.D.).  He is a member of the Florida and Georgia Bars and is also a certified consultant/trainer, maintaining certifications in Amicus Attorney, Credenza, HotDocs, PCLaw, Time Matters and Worldox.

This program is sponsored by the Alabama State Bar’s Practice Management Assistance Program, Lawyer Assistance Program, Volunteer Lawyers Program and Lawyer Referral Service.

Boost Your Firm’s Profitability

The July/August Law Firm Profitability issue of Law Practice is available on the LPM Section’s website, and you don’t have to be a section member to take a look. With The New Normal: Restoring Profitability by Arthur C. Greene as the cover feature and articles like 15 Proven Profitability Techniques and Increase Profits by Decreasing Costs, this one is a “must read.”

You can also find my Simple Steps column on improving profitability by firing some clients there or, if you’re too lazy to click through, just read it here.

READY, AIM… FIRE!

“The client from hell is on line three.”

The receptionist didn’t actually use those words as she announced the caller—but I knew she was thinking them because I was, too. My heart sank as I reached out to tap the blinking button that would connect me, tender ear to screaming voice, with one of several clients I just dreaded dealing with.

I’m sure you have more than a few of these clients: the ones who call multiple times a day, demand to see you without an appointment, berate you or your staff members (often without cause) and simply cannot accept any advice you offer unless it gets them exactly what, how and when they want it. They sap your time, energy and spirit, making it difficult for you to get a good result for them and making it difficult for you to provide quality legal services to your other clients.

Or, maybe you don’t have a handful of “clients from hell” but you feel as if you have a whole flock of clients who are, not to put too fine a point on it, marginal. These are the ones who are always unhappy, who generate low fees for the amount of work involved, or who bring in types of work outside your expertise or that you just don’t really enjoy. In their own way, they can make you and your staff feel that practicing law is a miserable way to spend an otherwise perfectly good day.

A Radical Solution

So what’s a lawyer—who has to make a living, after all—to do?

Perhaps it’s just one more sign that the economic situation in our country seems to be getting a little better, but I have a radical proposal: Fire some clients. You’ll be happier, your staff will be happier, and your bottom line might even get happier, too. It may be hard to believe that you can raise revenue by getting rid of clients, but just as having a closet full of shoes doesn’t help if none of them match your outfit, being too busy working for the wrong clients can really hold a firm back, both financially and in terms of quality of life.

I’m not suggesting that you start cutting clients willy-nilly, or even fire the most irritating ones right off the bat. Instead, consider grading each client on a variety of factors, determine which clients produce the majority of your income and then eliminate the ones in the bottom tier who produce major stress but little income.

How does one go about figuring out which clients are really at the bottom of the barrel and should be fired?

Rate your clients. In their book How Good Attorneys Become Great Rainmakers, Mark Powers and Shawn McNalis describe what they call the client scorecard. This is a tool that helps lawyers determine which fish to keep and which to throw back for someone else to catch.

Clients are rated on five categories:

1. Level of cooperation
2. How enjoyable their type of work is
3. How profitable their work is
4. Their relative ability to pay legal fees
5. Whether they were referred to you by a good source whom you need to keep happy

Powers and McNalis suggest rating clients as A through D, based on where they fall within a matrix of these traits, but you could also assign a numerical value to each trait. For example, clients at the top of any category receive 4 points, while difficult clients, those whose work is outside your area of expertise or who cannot pay you, receive only 1 point for each trait. A final score of 20 would indicate a great client, a score of at least 15 would represent a reasonably good client, and a score of 10 or less would point out a marginal or poor client. The idea is to bring some information and logic to your subjective feelings about working with each client, and to help you to be able to divide your clients into three or four categories based on profitability and how desirable they are to work with.

Fire some clients. By this I don’t mean that you should print up a mass of pink slips and start handing them out to clients. As satisfying as that might be, attorneys are constrained by the rules of professional conduct from simply abandoning unpleasant, uncooperative or unprofitable clients. Instead, begin by reviewing the file of each client who falls into the bottom third of your rankings and decide whether you can ethically terminate the engagement.

If termination is possible, prepare the file and call the client for an office visit to deliver the news, making sure to provide all information necessary to warn the client about impending deadlines and the need to find other counsel, and to position the client to be able to do so. If you can’t ethically terminate the relationship, work out a strategy to handle the matter as quickly as possible, and if appropriate, set a reminder in your conflict of interest system to carefully screen any future matter before agreeing to work for this client again. Establish a goal of working through all marginal matters within a reasonable stated period of time, and check your progress periodically to make sure you are staying on track.

Envision a better client and practice. Take the information you’ve gathered to develop a picture of your perfect practice and your perfect client for each type of matter you’d ideally like to handle. Which types of matters do you find most enjoyable and which of those provides the best compensation for the effort involved? Are there legal needs within your community that are not being met? If so, are you qualified, or could you become qualified, to handle them? How could you adopt technology to help streamline the delivery of legal services, whether it’s client communications, document generation, evidence review or trial prep? Determine factors such as age, gender, education and income level for your perfect client. Where are these people found, and how could you best reach them, ethically, with information about your practice and the legal services you provide? This information will become the basis of the marketing plan you create to help make your perfect practice a reality.

Renew your client development efforts. As you begin to work your way out of your marginal and undesirable clients, apply the same standards you’ve developed for current clients to all potential clients. The new matter intake and review process is critical to helping you move your practice forward. You want to make sure that you don’t simply replace one set of problematic clients with another.

Use the time and energy freed up by getting rid of the clients who took your time but didn’t really add to your practice satisfaction or bottom line to implement client development efforts aimed at great clients and matters.

And before you know it, you won’t dread the client who’s holding on line three.