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Latest from Lawyerist

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These days, clients have different expectations about how their experience with attorneys should go. Clients are savvy, and you need to step up your game. To get their attention, and their business, you need to connect with clients on a personal level and establish trust beyond just being a lawyer. SimpleLaw’s new integration with the free HubSpot CRM helps you do just that.  Details  Managing contacts and clients is an important part of an efficient…
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Let’s delve into the details of visuals and how they can enhance your brand in some different ways. You Need More Than a Primary Logo Although your logo is the center of your branding efforts, it’s only the beginning. While you may have developed a primary logo for your business, it’s important to have more than one version of it to use in different scenarios—and to keep your brand from becoming boring. The logo you…
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Collecting attorney fees is difficult, which is why many lawyers insist on getting fees up front. But after turning away thousands of dollars in business, I started looking at the potential clients who were walking away. I realized the average fees were between $1,000 and $4,000, and were generally for lower-level court cases. Many of these potential clients had professional jobs, but either had credit cards with insufficient limits or did not use credit cards even…
In access to justice discussions it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the majority of those in possession of legal problems, remain in want of solutions. (My apologies to both Jane Austen and the Legal Service Corporation’s Justice Gap Report.) Also, ROBOTS!  Ergo, we should throw AI at A2J. There is considerably less consensus, however, on how (or why exactly) this should be done. But don’t worry! There’s an app/game for that, and it…
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Client testimonials have become a hot topic for lawyers as they embrace marketing and business development, build websites and participate in social media. Some social media platforms, like LinkedIn, have a built-in mechanism for client testimonials (which they call recommendations). Platforms built especially for lawyers, such as Avvo, also provide an opportunity for clients to comment on their experience with lawyers. But should lawyers ask for client testimonials? And what does an effective testimonial look…
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In a profession that places a premium on time, powerful workflow automation gives you a considerable edge in the business and practice of law. Software that can autonomously manage and perform your day-to-day administrative tasks will help maximize productivity by saving time and improve the performance of your administrative workflow. Ken Grady identifies automation as a key component of the legal service process: Lawyers’ jobs are composed of thousands of tasks. Some tasks are extremely complex,…
Never ever ever send a Word file as “correspondence.” A Word file — or a WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, or Pages file — is not a document. PDFs are documents. Word files are drafts. And sending a draft that includes your digital letterhead and signature to anyone is just plain stupid. Here’s why. I frequently receive “correspondence” attached to an email from an attorney involved in one of my cases. Nothing is unusual about that. While I think an email with a…
Buying a good document scanner is obviously critical for going paperless. So is a solid backup strategy. After that, you can pretty much just start scanning every document in your office. Your overall paperless workflow doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should follow some best practices. Designing Your Paperless Workflow But there is a bit more to going paperless than that. You need to think about your paperless workflow. In other words,…
Going paperless shouldn’t be about just scanning in the paper that comes into your office. To take full advantage of going paperless, establish a paperless workflow to increase your efficiency. The first two considerations are establishing a workflow for incoming paper and one for outgoing paper. The goal is to minimize the steps required to deal with the paper and optimize your ability to access your digital file later. Also, by creating pre-populated file and…
Once you have decided leaving BigLaw is right for you, there are still many practical and logistical questions you need to answer carefully before you can walk out the door. It can be daunting to figure out how much notice to give, anticipate what’s going to happen after you do, and notify clients you are leaving. But don’t give up. Those concerns are what any responsible, conscientious lawyer would seriously consider and deliberate before giving…