All Our Tips
Helpful Tips for Collecting LinkedIn Contacts
Collecting a network of contacts is the very essence of LI. Here are some tips for building a good collection of LI contacts.
Do consider the quality, not the quantity, of your LI contacts: We all want to be popular but ultimately, the quality of your contacts is more important than the quantity. While a high number of LI contacts may look impressive at first, potential clients will dig deeper and judge you by the details in your profile and the quality of the people in your network.
Do make it easy for people to connect with you: LI allows you to limit invitations to connect to people in a contact list or people that already know your email address (Settings > Email Preferences). Don’t make it hard for people to connect with you. Configure LI so that anyone can send you an invitation to connect.
Don’t accept LI connection requests from people you don’t like or respect: Politely say “no thanks” or just ignore the invite. This can be awkward, especially when people are pesky and keep extending invites to you. Protect your reputation by making sure you like and respect the people you connect with.
Do be careful about conflicts of interest: If you are a litigator, be careful about connecting with the judges, experts or opposing counsel that might be involved with matters you are handling. While you may know them well, and even be good friends with them, consider how having them listed as a LI contact might look to your client or the party on the other side of a matter. Ethics opinions say it is not proper for lawyers to become friends with someone to dig up information about them for use in a litigation matter.
Do send personalized contact requests: Generic connection requests are cold and impersonal. Few things (except a box of chocolates) will make a stronger first impression than a personalized invitation to connect. This is especially helpful if the invitee may not be sure of or recall their connection to you.
Do use the People You May Know feature: Look for this box in the top right of your LI homepage. Click “See more” to see a list of people LI thinks you might know. It generates this list by using keywords and by looking at the contacts of your contacts. It does a good job of finding people that you will know.
Do right-click to open a new tab when extending LI connection invites: I know I will hear from at least a few of you that this is the best tip in this column. After you extend an invite to a new contact, LI gives you a list of other people you may know (it is the “People You May Know” list). What I find really annoying is that clicking on “Connect” to add a new contact causes the list of suggested contacts to disappear or reset to the top. If you right-click on “Connect” and select “Open” in new tab, the invite will appear on a new tab and you still have the list of suggested contacts to work from.
Do mine the contacts lists of people you know: Once you connect with someone in LI, you can see their list of contacts. As many of us work and socialize with the same smallish group of people, looking at the friends of your friends will help you find other people you know. The “Invite accepted” email is a great reminder to do this.
Do use lists of other groups of people you know: I have had great success adding contacts by reviewing lists of names from some of the organizations I participate in (e.g. members of my bar association). This works well, as many LI users do not list the different groups they belong to or the activities they participate in.
Do use the Search feature to find other contacts: Enter the names of companies, law associations or other entities where you know people to add people to your contacts list.
Do remember to invite people you are connecting with in other social media channels to LI: While you will not want to add everyone you connect with in other social media tools, this will get you a few extra contacts.
Do cross-market your LI presence: Let people know you are on LI by adding the LI logo or your LI URL to your business cards, email signature, firm website (make it a link), promotional materials, article bylines, PowerPoints and anywhere else it will be visible to existing or potential clients.
For even more LinkedIn tips, see my Essential Do’s and Don’ts for LinkedIn Users article which appeared in the November/December issue of ABA LPM section’s Law Practice magazine.
Interruptions Are Just a State of Mind
“Life is a series of interruptions interrupted by interruptions” is a quote that we had always attributed to John Lennon, but that may be apocryphal.
Anyone who has ever worked in a law office knows that interruptions are the bane of a lawyer’s existence. We can’t tell you how to get rid of them, but we can offer some suggestions to help you control them and reduce their impact on your work.
To control interruptions, make sure that you and your secretary both take your previously scheduled work sessions as seriously as you would a client interview. If you wouldn’t take a call while in with a client, don’t take the call while in with the client’s file. If you have difficulty saying “no” to interruptions, your staff won’t hesitate to interrupt you. The other side of this coin is that you need to work with your staff to make sure they know what the important matters and deadlines are, when you really don’t want to be disturbed no matter what, and how to handle particular things that you suspect may arise while your are unavailable.
Also, remember that interruptions are a state of mind. They only divert you from what you are doing to the extent that you let them. If you must allow an interruption, before you turn your attention, look at where you are in your work and make a mental or, if necessary, physical note of the next thing you are going to do. Most of the time getting back into the flow of what you were doing takes longer than the actual interruption, and that’s something you have complete control over.
Moreover, here is a time management tip: Take your to-do list, and make appointments with yourself in your calendar to do them. Then tell your staff to treat these ‘appointments’ as if you were in with a client – in other words, interruptible only for very good cause. That way you can work on your most important tasks and not allow the tyranny of the urgent to steal time away from the truly important. This way you start to control the interruptions rather than having them control you – and you don’t end up saying that other well-known quote: “Where did the time go…?”
Real Time Searching
Plenty of innovation is happening around real-time search. Simon Fodden told us about Google adding real-time search in August 2010, Connie Crosby has blogged about the importance of real time news and information, and I have shared a tip about Social Mention.
Today’s Tip: Check out Topsy.
Topsy is marketed as a social intelligence tool.
Our fast-indexing technology ingests massive amounts of authored content from the world’s largest social networks and our live-ranking software applies influence algorithms to social data, identifying the most important content seconds after it has been posted to the social web. We produce a variety of metrics calculated from census-based social data sets, enabling businesses to interpret social signal in ways that are meaningful to each business segment’s needs, with high degrees of precision and in realtime.
One nice thing about Topsy is the integration of Google+ and search. Test it out. You might find something that you otherwise wouldn’t.
50GB Free Cloud Storage for Life for iPhones and iPads From Box.net
Box.net recently announced that it is giving away 50 GB of free storage to anyone who uses a free Box Personal account on an iOS device. This promotion only runs for 50 days (Starting October 12).
To get your free space in the cloud, follow these steps:
- Visit the App Store and download the Box app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
- Log in to your account or register for a new one directly from the app.
- Start sharing and collaborating in the cloud.
And another bonus: Your account will have an increased file size upload limit of 100MB instead of the usual 25MB.
And note, your 50 GB of storage isn’t just limited to your mobile device – you can get at it anywhere you use your Box account, like on your laptop at home or your desktop at the office.
Now, it is true that “life” in this case means either your life or the company’s life, whichever is shorter. Box.net is a well established company, so your free storage may actually be around for a bit.
Always good to have a backup of the data and info on your iPhone or iPad. Remember to be careful to protect the confidentiality of sensitive client information if you are storing client data in the cloud.
A hat tip to my good friend and practice management advisor Jim Calloway for this tip.
Follow Up…for Results
“It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know” is a quote attributed to the motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins.
Over the last while, we have been discussing building in reporting systems and feedback loops into your practice. Now…what do you do with all this information that you have gathered? After all, Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Armed with your data from your feedback loops, you are in a position to now lead the dialogue with all stakeholders on how your plans should be adjusted and how the goals and/or strategies should be modified to better take you and your team towards your desired goals.
Aside from planning, effectively following up can make the difference between a firm that gets to its destination vs one that just gets by.
For example, all of us have accounts receivable at some level. Yet some firms have little or none in the way of A/R, but others have huge A/R balances. What is the difference?
The low A/R firms have learned from their past mistakes (leadership) and have put into place stricter client selection processes (Planning) as a result, they monitor the A/R balances, they effectively communicate the firm’s policies on payment of retainers and invoices and they are effective in dealing with a client who starts to have an A/R problem (follow-up) before it gets worse. It is not just enough to know what your A/R balances are, you need to take action to produce change once armed with this info.
Accordingly, it is vital that you take the information that you have learned from your reporting systems and take action …*NOW*… to change the way that you do things in order to get (better) results~!
This is the essence of management – acting quickly once you have sufficient data on hand to indicate an improvement in how you operate. Appropriately following up based on the information that you receive from your organization – transforming it to a learning organization – will lead you …over time…to the goals that you have set for you and your firm.
Look for Useful Things
Sometimes we learn so many ways to find information that we forget one or two.
Today’s Tip is to look for the Useful Things.
Here you’ll find a collection of resources hosted on or developed by Slaw, all designed to make your legal work on the internet just that little bit easier. Some of the resources have a page on Slaw all their own, while others are described and made available on this page. The table of contents immediately below will direct you to the proper place.
Please let us know via the Contact link in the main menu if something is amiss or doesn’t work the way it should. And let us know, too, if there are useful things you’d like to see here that we haven’t yet come up with.
Useful Things exist in many places, though the collection at Slaw.ca is particularly handy. Do you have any Useful Things to share?
Use Application Groups to Organize Apps on Your Ipad or Iphone
Most of us have many screens of apps on our iPads and iPhones. Sliding multiple screens of icons back and forth is really easy, but it can be a pain finding a particular app if you’ve downloaded tons of apps. For faster access to your apps, create application groups. They are collections of apps within a single icon.
Creating an application or app group is dead easy. Touch and hold your finger on an app icon. After a few seconds, all the app icons on the screen should start shaking. Simply drag one app over top of another and an application group will get created with those two apps in it. To add more apps to a app group simply drag other app icons over and into it. Press the Home button when you’ve finished to stop the shaking.
The icons for application groups have mini icons on a dark background. They are easily distinguished from app icons as they have a silver border. If you look closely, you can actually see miniature versions (up to 9) of the actual icons in that group.
Tap on an app group icon to open it. Group like apps together and give your app groups names that will make it easy to figure out which group has the app you are looking for (e.g., social media, games, utilities, etc.). You can change an app group icon name by editing the text in the white area within an open app group.
You can create multiple app groups on the same screen. You can’t create an application group within another application group.
To remove an app from a group, open a group icon by tapping it as normal. Then press and hold an app icon within the group until all the icons start vibrating, then drag the icon onto the “see-through” desktop above.
Application groups are available as of IOS 4.2. You can also create application groups within iTunes using the device’s apps tab. Some people may find it is easier to move apps around and create groups on the computer. Any changes you make must be synched to get them onto your iPad or iPhone.
Thanks to my youngest son Christopher who showed me this tip last night.
How Am I Doing?
Bob Nelson once said: “An employee’s motivation is a direct result of the sum of interactions with his or her manager.”
Your employee evaluation process should begin before the employee ever performs the first task. During the hiring process take time to explain carefully to the potential new employee the firm’s criteria for evaluating performance, including the standards to which he or she will be expected to adhere and the goals toward which he or she is supposed to work.
Evaluations should be regular (whether you have time or not – and lawyers never do) and based on expectations discussed with the employee at the beginning of the review period. If goals or expectations need to be changed along the way, be sure to immediately discuss those changes with the employee. Everyone should be clear at all times about where the firm is trying to go and how it expects to get there.
Although it is common to have evaluations 60 to 90 days after hiring, don’t wait for a formal evaluation to address performance that isn’t up to par or that indicates progress is not being made toward reaching the expected level of proficiency.
A stitch in time saves nine, and carefully adhering to your employee review schedule will help produce employees who are both happy an truly helpful to the firm. Furthermore, by increasing your daily interactions with your staff, you will be reinforcing the message that their motivation and performance is uppermost in your mind.
Spam or Not
Wondering if that email in your inbox is a legitimate request for business? Here are some steps that I use to research if an email from a company is legitimate.
- Look at the original email – check the properties (usually a right click) of the From address to make sure that it matches what appears as a link – make sure the domain matches the company URL.
- Hover over any links in the email to see if the URL behind the link matches what is highlighted.
- If there is a phone number in the email, paste it in to Google or Bing or Yahoo as a search.
- Search for the company website using Google or another search engine. Look at the URL attached to the search results and check for inconsistencies with the email.
- Check LinkedIn for principles named in the email.
- For international companies, look for North American distribution of the product. If there is no Canadian distribution, it is less likely that there would be a claim in our jurisdiction.
- Check the Canadian Importers Database http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cid-dic.nsf/eng/home to see if a product is listed in the email and there is no apparent distributor in Canada. This database can be searched by product.
- Check the FBI eScams page http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/escams.htm or the RCMP reporting Economic Crime On-Line website https://www.recol.ca/partnerspage.aspx for more information about email phishing.
- Check Dan Pinnington’s Avoid a Claim Blog for news of recent scams directed specifically at lawyers and law firms.
- Follow your law society Client Identification and Verification guidelines.
Use the Space Bar to Advance in a Browser
You’re reading something on a website that’s longer than your browser window — perhaps a judgment, or the latest posts on Slaw. How do you scroll down the page? If you’ve got a scroll wheel on your mouse, you may be adept at rolling along with that, or you may have set the wheel to advance a screen at a time with a click. But you’d be surprised how many people I’ve seen who still fuss to get the cursor into the scroll bar at the right and to make sure it stays in the empty zone between the two arrows so a click there moves them ahead — or worse, who repeatedly stab at the down arrow, crawling along at one line at a time.
The simplest of all techniques for many is to use the space bar. Just tap it each time you want to jump ahead by exactly one window’s (i.e. screen’s) worth. There’s no dexterity or judgment required, leaving you free to focus on what you’re reading.
