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advice you can use — short and to the point — every Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday

technology  practice  research

All Our Tips

Keep Turnover Low

We have all heard that staff turnover is expensive.  We have all heard that reducing staff turnover is good for the firm and good for morale and positive firm culture.  Problem is, there is little in the way of specifics on exactly *how* to do all this.  Accordingly, this is a “Leadership Moments” guest post from Beth Flynn at the Ohio State University Leadership Center that is precisely aimed at the ways that you can keep the staff turnover rate at your firm low:

• Provide opportunities for associates to grow and learn.
• Maintain associate ownership in the company.
• Create a warm, caring, and nurturing environment.
• Empower associates to take responsibility for their own work.
• Involve associates in the direction of the company’s growth and management.
• Expect top performance.
• Let associates know when they perform well and when the need to perform better.
• Attempt to reduce the stress level by promoting a healthy lifestyle.
• Seek out customers and clients who share the same belief system.
• Be an open-book company. Share company financial information (except specific individual salaries).
• Share the vision of the company.
• Treat associates with respect and compassion when personal tragedies impinge on work responsibilities.
• Pay associates the best salary possible based on the financial performance of the company.
• Take great care in hiring, always taking attitude and character into account.

From:  Heath, R. (2009) Celebrating failure: the power of taking risks, making mistakes and thinking big . Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press.  Celebrating Failure is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. Click here to borrow this resource or any other resource.   Then click on the Spectrum http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu

 

Make Your Own Office Consolidation

Ah proclamations. I am sure it isn’t just Alberta where a coming into force section of an act can look like this:

Coming into force
98(1) Sections 77, 78, 79 and 85(a) and (b) come into force on January 1, 2011.
(2) Sections 31, 34, 35, 39, 41, 43 and 49 apply with respect to the next election that is held at least 6 months after the coming into force of this section, and subsequent elections.
(3) Sections 21, 54, 76, 83, 84, 86(b), 87, 88 and 94(b) come into force on the day that a writ is issued under section 40 of the Election Act for the next general election after this section comes into force.
(4) Sections 45, 56(f), 57(a), 58(a) and (b), 62, 63, 89, 90 and 97 come into force on Proclamation.

If you have trouble reading an act that has some sections that will come into force (and you aren’t in Ontario when e-Laws does a great job of this, or looking at Federal legislation, where the DOJ does as well) why not make your own act with ‘pending amendments’ included.

1. Take a Word version of the act before the amendments.
2. Grab a Word or pdf version of the assented or bill form legislation.
3. Insert the amendments before or below the sections that change.

I prefer inserting the amendments in text boxes because they can be shaded – just like the Justice Canada Laws and Ontario e-Laws websites show pending amendments.

Today’s Tip: if you can’t find something the way you need it, build it yourself.

 

Turn Luddites Into Gurus With Lynda.com

Lynda.com is one of the best online technology training sites you will find. For just $25 a month, you have access to more than 1,100 online courses on just about every program you would ever want to use. Stop, rewind and replay videos as many times as you want. This is an ideal way to brush up on basic or advanced skills, or to provide help to an eager staff member who just wants to learn more. What a bargain!

 

Are You Drowning in Closed Files?

It seems relatively easy to set up a filing system and add files to it. But what do you do when you absolutely run out of room to store any more files? Which ones do you get rid of? When do you dispose of them, and how do you go about doing it? And what ethical obligations do you have with respect to file storage and disposition?

What seems, at first glance, like a simple clerical task can spiral into an ethics nightmare if you’re not careful. Every lawyer needs to understand the professional obligations related to file maintenance, production, storage and destruction, and to have a good system in place to make sure that those obligations are properly met at every stage of the process.

The first thing to do is carefully review your jurisdiction’s rules of professional conduct to determine exactly what your obligations are regarding storing, stripping and disposing of client files.

Then, develop a written system that described how files are opened, how long they are kept, where they are to be found once closed and what records you will make to memorialize the fact that a file has been destroyed.

Whenever you turn over a file to a client, be sure to get a receipt that indicates what was in the file, and add that receipt to your administrative files, to only be destroyed when there is no longer any possibility that it might be needed (consider keeping a scanned copy of the contents of the file for your own protection – as you may not be able to get that file back should the need arise..).

Never destroy a file except in accordance with your regular schedule, so that you can not be accused of doing so to try to cover up evidence of malpractice.

Lastly, store your closed files in boxes organized around their destruction dates (here we assume that you set the date for the destruction of the file at the time you close the file). This way it is easy to see which files are to be destroyed when.  Your closed file records should be able to indicate in which box a particular closed file is to be found should you need to find it.  This method of organizing closed files saves time – as there is no need to go thru all your closed file boxes and cull out the ones that are to be destroyed this year…and the next…and the next….

Take time today to put in place a system for regularly closing, storing and purging files and materials that you and your clients no longer need, and you’ll never want for storage space or an organized filing system.

 

Finding With the When

Thanks to David Paul of Paul & Co in Kamloops who wrote a great article for Canadian Lawyer recently called Useful Google tips and tricks for lawyers for today’s tip.

As Mr. Paul put it:

daterange provides documents that have been modified in the given interval. Unfortunately, Google requires that dates be entered in Julian format, e.g. charter scc daterange:2451193-2455757. Click here for a Julian date converter.

How is this useful for legal research? When you have a inexact facts that you need to verify. Perhaps you want to find information about a motor vehicle accident in Edmonton in January of 2009. Try this Google search:

accident edmonton daterange:2454832-2454862

The search will net you news stories, YouTube videos, and other interesting results.

CNET offers further details about date range searching with Google.

Can you think of other useful date range search scenarios?

 

How to Back Up Your Gmail

Google’s Gmail has made news a few times in the past couple of years by “losing” users email – often years worth. While these outages have primarily affected the free Gmail, even access to the paid Google Apps has occasionally been lost. For lawyers who are using the free Gmail as their primary email communication with clients, one must ask “how are you backing that up?”

With Gmail, there are a number of options. You can run Google Gears and maintain a local copy of Gmail. This is a pretty useful option, letting you choose which folders you want to maintain locally. Look in Gmail Settings under “offline” to set this up. Another option is to set up IMAP, which synchronizes your Gmail to a downloaded email client (like the free Thunderbird) to keep on your server or harddrive (which you do backup, don’t you?).

Don’t let your record of client communication live in the ether without a safety net.

Thanks to my good friend Catherine Reach at the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center for this tip.

 

Look at Your Compensation System

Look carefully at your compensation system. Are you rewarding those efforts that will ensure the long and short-term viability of the firm? What are you rewarding? A Lexis Managing Partner Forum Survey ranked the most and least important factors in partner compensation.

The results are as follows:

1. The top factor in partner compensation is working lawyer fees received (at 30%).
2. In second place is origination credit (at 29%).
3. Billable hours is in third spot (at 13%).

The bottom three factors (from the bottom up) are:

1. Recruiting, mentoring and training associates (1%),
2. Role in Firm governance (1%) and
3. Teamwork and firm citizenship (3%).

Interesting, the survey found that Cross-Selling services was not taken into account at all in terms of partner compensation. Now – in a tough economy, cross-selling services to existing clients is low-hanging fruit! Ask yourself why wouldn’t you reward lawyers for cross-selling!

It is oftentimes said that you get what you reward.  Look at your compensation system – are you rewarding the right activities?  Certainly no one would question rewarding billable hours and origination credits, but many firms have difficulties having their lawyers spend time on management tasks, on mentoring juniors and in participating in activities that will improve the productivity of the firm long term, such as building a good precedent database.

Take a hard look at your compensation system and see if it is aligned with your business goals – both short-term and long-term.  Ensure that your future is being secured every day by rewarding the types of activities that will ensure progress towards long-term goals – that are in the best interests of the firm as a whole.

 

Print Method for Finding a Leading Case

Today’s Tip is an expansion on my post to Slaw.ca yesterday. In Tip language, my post would have said “do not panic if a commercial legal research site is down, there are other ways to find decisions.”

Anyone who has ever talked to me about case law research has (been forced to) listen while I wax poetic (or pedantic) about my true belief that the best and fastest way to retrieve the most usable copy of a judicial decision is by using an electronic research source. We are blessed in Canada to have many roads to Rome with commercial and public electronic legal research sources.

What do you do when the whole internet is down and you need ‘the leading case’?

Remember the basics! Find some commentary in a textbook or the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest or Halsbury’s Laws of Canada – your local courthouse or university library likely has the print. Look at the footnotes to see case references. Use the print noting up tools – the Canadian Case Citations – again you may have to visit or phone your courthouse library for assistance from a print copy.

The internet going down is not unheard of: In March 2010 an earthquake damaged undersea internet cables, cables were cut in December 21, 2008 which affected 75 million people. Recent history tells us that political activities can affect the web. Though you won’t be able to read this post if the web is down, perhaps you will remember not to panic.

 

Google Maps Can Help Clients Find Your Office

How often do you find yourself giving new clients directions to your office? Google Maps offers a great tool for creating a map that will show clients the location of your office. Go to maps.google.com and type your office address into the search box. Click on the link icon (look for an icon with 3 chain links at the top right corner of your screen). This will open a pop-up that will give you a URL link you can use to access that same map. Send that link to a new client via email and they can see the map.

The pop-up also gives you the HTML code you can use to include the map on your website. Slick! Take it a step further by creating customized maps to show clients directions to other places that might be helpful for them (e.g., the local court house).

 

Produce a ‘Key Statistics Report’ Part 2

In our earlier post, we talked about what should be in a ‘Key Statistics Report’. This is the second post in that series. In this post we are looking at the cash-flow impacts that such a dashboard or key statistics report could reveal.

This part of your Key Statistics Report is the nerve-center of your cash-flow analysis. This report looks directly at the factors affecting cash flow, both in the short-term and in the slightly longer term. These components of the Dashboard Report are as follows:

Cash Flow Analysis:

• net cash at start of period
• cash additions (fees collected, disbursements collected, other income)
• cash withdrawals (office overheads, disbursements paid, other disbursements)
• net cash remaining at the end of the period
• Expected Cash Flow requirements for the upcoming period (compare to net cash remaining in the Cash Flow Analysis)

Line of Credit Analysis:

• opening Line of Credit balance
• amounts repaid
• amounts drawn down
• net balance of Line of Credit

WIP Analysis:

• net WIP at start of period (hours x standard rates)
• WIP added during the period
• WIP billed during the period
• net WIP at end of the period

Files / Clients Report

• Files opened/added during the period, by responsible lawyer and by originating lawyer
• Files billed during the period, by responsible lawyer and by originating lawyer
• Files collected during the period, by responsible lawyer and by originating lawyer

The first component is the cash-in/cash-out analysis (cash at the start of the period, plus any additions, less any withdrawals, resulting in the cash at the end of the period). The net-cash remaining is then compared to the expected cash needs for the upcoming period – answering the question: “Do we have enough cash on hand to keep us afloat in the short term?”

The Line of Credit Analysis looks at the buffer remaining in the firm’s Line of Credit: if the net cash remaining + remaining buffer in the Line of Credit is insufficient to meet the Expected Cash Flow Requirements in the upcoming period – the firm is desperately in trouble.

The WIP Analysis looks to see if he WIP is increasing, decreasing or remaining steady. Increasing WIP is a sign of upcoming cash shortages. Decreasing WIP indicates potential longer-term cash flow problems.

Lastly the Files/Clients Report looks at the matter from a much longer baseline – are you steadily opening new files? If not – again, cash flow may be adversely affected in the longer term. You need to keep files continually entering the hopper to keep the cash flow steady in the firm.

You also should be examining which lawyers are billing and collecting.  More importantly, which ones are not? Why not? These questions need to be answered…the results could indicate someone is simply in a slump or caught in a difficult file. They could also indicate that a lawyer is facing a much deeper crises…and this is the early-warning signal…and needs help.

You should receive the reports in a timely fashion and ensure that *you* look at them as soon as they arrive. Examine the deeper meanings and whether or not your firm may be facing a cash-flow crises. Much better to know about it now – when you can do something about it – than find out later when your back is against the wall…