All Our Tips
Commit to Change
In talking to hundreds of law firms, I am struck by a common theme.
Many of these firms have tried to implement change, only to be faced by staff (i.e. lawyers in most, but not all, cases) who refuse to go along with the change and still do things the old way.
What may be right for them (after all, the resisters don’t have to learn anything new and can continue to work as they always did) is almost always against the interests of the firm. The firm ends up maintaining dual systems (and doubling the costs) in order to continue to appease (yes appease) the change resisters.
There are many signs of change resistance that can be seen when talking to staff. What is common is that costs, of course, are higher and the bottom-line is adversely affected since the firm is trying to straddle two systems.
Take document management for example. When people avoid saving emails into the DM system and instead keep them in their Outlook folders, then the file in the DM system is incomplete. People have to spend time searching in both systems to find something (if they can even find emails in someone else’s Outlook folders). The firm ends up having to spend money for storage and backup to store these emails twice. If people store emails in Outlook, no one wants to delete emails from their Outlook folders, which only bloats the size of these systems. Working remotely may be affected since no one is quite sure that they are seeing the entire file. This promotes distrust in the DM system which further works against it. Furthermore, people may be using systems inappropriately (such as using the Inbox as your ‘to-do’ list rather than using a proper task management system).
There are other signs. People charged with bringing about change leave – you have a revolving door – as they feel totally frustrated in trying to work in an organization that resists change. Staff know that there is a lack of commitment among management to see the tough decisions through and that in itself sends its own message to staff.
There is an entrenchment and reinforcement of the fact that the organization is a serial rejecter of new ideas – and so staff feel comfortable resisting the next change that is promoted inside the firm.
What can be done? The management and the staff have to commit to change or frankly, forget it. This means taking some tough decisions and seeing them through and not letting certain people derail the process. It means building consensus, seeking carrot and stick rationales for adopting and committing to the change and having top management stand their ground.
The good news is that having taken a positive step towards adopting change, seeing it through and promoting the positive results that were achieved, you can set the stage for the next change – and move the organization from a change-resistent one to a change-adaptive one.
Search Multiple Sources
Today’s Tip comes from Melanie Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel, Manitoba Court of Appeal. Melanie shared a story about looking for citing cases:
I wanted to know if the Supreme Court of Canada had ever cited its decision in F.H. v McDougall, 2008 SCC 53. So I headed over to Quicklaw, pulled up the QuickCite record and filtered it by “Supreme Court of Canada”. There was one result from 2011.
Just to be thorough, I thought I would check Westlaw to see if there was anything more recent. This is not an easy task, as you likely know. I found the KeyCite record all right (though it only contained 574 results, rather than the 1400+ on QL), but didn’t find any easy way to just display the SCC results. You can use the locate feature to filter by jurisdiction (though it wasn’t clear to me which jurisdiction I should choose to capture SCC results) or by document type (‘highest courts’ still left 86 results, as it included all appellate courts). In the end, I reviewed all 574 results only to find that no SCC cases were listed (not even the one I found in QL).
So I got frustrated and thought I would try my luck with CanLII. They showed a similar number of cases in the reflex record, but again it was a struggle to get the results to filter by court. You can select individual databases from the reflex record page, but if you’re using Internet Explorer you also need to include some text in one of the search boxes (like the case citation in the full text search box) in order to get the search to work. Finally it did – and returned the one result I had already found in QL.
So I guess the upshot is that it can be tricky to easily filter judicial consideration of cases by jurisdiction or court. I worry about folks relying solely on Westlaw as it would appear that the KeyCite records, even for Supreme Court of Canada consideration of their own cases, are not particularly up-to-date. It was especially disconcerting because McDougall was listed in the Authorities link for the case that mentioned it (2012 SCC 3). I guess the work-around would be to run a full-text search of the case name or citation in an SCC judgments database, but those types of searches make me nervous about missing something.
Like Melanie, I feel strongly that searching for judicial consideration should be done with more than one tool. Thanks for sharing this tip!
Lawyers Should (Almost) Never Use BCC
Email is a primary means of communication for most lawyers. It is a fantastic tool. You can easily and almost instantly communicate across the globe with your client and other people involved in a legal matter. You can send different types of attachments. And if you have a smartphone, you can send and reply to emails from just about anywhere on the face of the planet (assuming you have wireless or internet access).
But email can be dangerous – and one of the most dangerous features is blind carbon copy or BCC. I will assume everyone knows what BCC is and how it works.
Now, there is no doubt, there can be very legitimate reasons for sending a message using BCC. From time to time you will want to inform someone that a particular message was sent, but not include them in the main email conversation or to let people getting the message know that someone else got it as well. This is the very essence of what BCC is and does. However, a problem arises when the person getting the BCC message sends a reply-all message not realizing they got the original email on a BCC-basis. Oops! Cover blown! Everyone now knows someone else got the message. In the very least this is probably embarrassing to the sender, it probably means there will be an unhappy client and it could lead to a malpractice claim.
So how do you avoid using BCC and still “BCC” someone on a message? Easy – just go into your Sent folder and forward the relevant message. From an etiquette point of view, nice to include add an “FYI” or add a short explanation for the person getting the message. Forwarding the sent message will keep the BCC person informed, and if they send a reply, will ensure it will only come back to you.
Thus, as a general rule, lawyers should avoid using BCC. However, there are always a few exceptions to general rules. You should use use BCC if you need to make sure people receiving the message don’t see the email addresses of others that received it. For example, when you send an email newsletter to firm clients. In this case, include a firm address in the To: field, and client names in the BCC field.
And I saw another good where BCC is a must last week. A lawyer had his AOL email account hacked (via typical phishing message tricked him into disclosing his login name and password). He used the email account for his practice and it was full of sensitive and confidential client information. With the help of AOL he was successful in recovering control of the account. However, he sent a message to everyone in his contact list telling them his account had been compromised. This was a good thing to do, but unfortunately, the names of all his clients were disclosed as he put their email addresses in the To: field. It would have been much better to use BCC which would have hidden all the clients’ names from each other.
There you have it: don’t use BCC, unless you need to keep the identity of people receiving the message confidential.
Know When to Say “When”
This phrase is usually associated with too much merrymaking – particularly cutting off the intake of intoxicating spirits – but it can have real application to your law practice. In essence, it means to think about what you’re doing and whether you should continue down that path or make some changes.
The beginning of a new year is a good time to take a hard look at your practice and your clients, and decide whether things are “in balance.” If things are running smoothly and you are making money and happy with what you are doing, then they probably are. But if things are out of balance it’s probably time to step back, assess your big picture, and determine what changes are needed to return you to a road that will take you to the destination you truly desire.
Often we start projects with genuine enthusiasm, only to find that circumstances change over time. The law may change in a way that makes a certain practice area less enjoyable, or less lucrative, but we remain stuck in our rut. It’s what we do, so we continue to do it.
This week we encourage you to review your practice’s mission statement, if you have one. Is it pointing you in a direction that you really want to go? If you don’t have a mission statement, it’s time you wrote one. Think about why you are practicing law, who you want to help through your practice, and what you want to accomplish for yourself, and what changes you must make to make it happen.
And so, on that note, I want to say a big thank you to Dave Bilinsky and Simon Foden for asking me to participate in slaw Tips. Since we began this project my duties here at the Alabama State Bar have changed and, as a result, I will now be turning my attention to new challenges. Thanks for the fun and the feedback!
Use Storify to Save and Send
One of the things that we are careful to do in the Field Law Libraries is to make sure that the output of research is the way that it is needed. There is no sense in providing a printed copy of something if the requester wants to send a tweet about it. Likewise, there is little use in sending someone a short URL if they need to attach something to a printed brief.
Today’s Research tip crosses into technology: Try using Storify to capture information where your research sources are from social medias or the web.
To see a sample of what you can create with storify, check out the sample I made for Commentary about R. v. Dunn.
Resolve to Go Paperless
This is a New Year…the time to resolve to (finally) go paperless.
What are some of the benefits that can be achieved by moving to a paperless document office?
Cut Your Storage Costs
Paper takes up space. Paper legal files take up lots of space. Space is expensive. Cut out the need to store paper and you have cut your costs. Especially if you are simply storing closed files for regulatory and insurance requirements.
Moving to creating, filing, searching and storing legal files in a digital form means cutting your costs to simply store all that information in paper form.
Save Costs on Retrieval
According to Sisco (http://www.gosisco.com/costofpullingpaper.shtm ), if it takes a well-trained employee 6 minutes to pull a file, and if this employee does this just 10 times per day, they have spent an hour of their time on document retrieval. If this employee costs $15 per hour, (including SS and benefits) you are spending $15 per day on document retrieval.
Multiply that by the 260 working days in a year and you arrive at an unrecognized cost of $3,900 per year. This is for just one employee pulling 10 files a day.
If finding a document electronically takes less than a minute, you can see the cost savings that you can achieve in just file retrieval tasks. For example, if your document management system stores each unique document number in each document as a footer, then just searching on that document number allows you to find a document very effectively and efficiently on the network.
Indexed Searching
If your document management system continually indexes all words found in a document (which may involve optical recognizing all scanned documents brought into the system) then you can search by keywords to find documents on the network. Full text search is not possible in paper files.
Metadata Searching
Document Management Systems record metadata when storing a document. That metadata – author, file number or name, type of document (pleading, letter, contract) etc is another way to find a document in a paperless system. You can also search by other criteria – such as all documents created in the last 7 days – or documents created by author – to find a document on the network.
Reduced Costs of Document Distribution
Once a document is in electronic form, it can be distributed to others quickly, easily and cheaply. Paper document distribution involves physical costs that increase with the number of recipients, the distances involved and the size of the documents. This is typically not the case with electronic documents.
Security over Documents
A paper document must be physically controlled to secure distribution. Not so with electronic documents. Most document management systems allow the user to select who can see, modify, delete and distribute electronic documents. You can also track or log who sees any particular document. Since you can control who can delete documents, you can prevent documents from being ‘lost’.
Disaster Recovery
Provided that you have a secure off-site location for storage of your electronic documents, you can achieve greater resiliency to disasters as compared to paper documents. It is also easier to store your closed files electronically rather than facing the costs of paying for paper documents to sit somewhere until you can safely destroy them.
Better Client Response Times
Having all your files and information available by mouse-click means that you can respond to client inquiries quickly, accurately and achieve a greater client – satisfaction score.
Knowledge Sharing
Having documents available on the network may translate to a greater amount of information or knowledge sharing within the firm, since documents can be found by others rather than being stuffed away in paper files that sit on a shelf somewhere.
Those are just a few of the tangible and intangible benefits of moving to a digital paperless practice. Resolve now to make it a goal to implement a paperless practice this year and start to achieve these benefits – now.
Find Your Groups
I confess to being a skim-a-holic. I find personal satisfaction in having a really good idea what people in the legal industry are talking, thinking, and writing about.
The problem is that there is a ton of new information. If 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube just from mobile devices, how do you determine what to pay attention to? If there are 500,000 new blog posts each day, which are the most meaningful to your work?
My method for narrowing the flood of information to the most succinct and ‘important to me’ trickle is to find groups. Groups in this case are a selection of people whose work (blog posts, Twitter stream, LinkedIn updates, Google+ shares, traditional publications, etc.) alerts me to what is most important.
Not sure where to start? After following Slaw, try browsing the LinkedIn Groups Directory or spending a few minutes browsing the Groups You May Like link from the LinkedIn Menu bar. The groups directory is searchable and the results list shows how active the group is.
In addition to following groups to keep up with your interests, you can also skim open LinkedIn Groups as a source of information about an industry that you are researching.
One New Year’s Resolution You Must Follow-Through On: I Will Make a Backup of My Data
No doubt you have all made – or at least thought about making – a few New Year’s resolutions. Hopefully one of them is to make a backup of your data. You do have a backup – don’t you???
Now I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I know at least a few of you don’t backup of your data, or perhaps you have an older backup. If you are one of these people, make plans to backup your data now! It is critical to remember that for love, time or money, you can’t easily or cheaply recreate lost data. And a crashed hard drive usually means that this important and precious data is gone forever. Regardless of whether it is client files or other critical law firm documents, or on the personal side, family pictures or information, you don’t want this happening to you.
If you are backup newbie, read 7 Backup Strategies for Your Data, Multimedia, and System Files for some perspective on the different types of data you have and how often different types of data should be backed up.
This Lifehacker article, How to Back Up Your Computer, has great instructions for using the built-in backup utilities Windows and Mac OS X. How to Backup Your Data from PCWorld mentions some of the most widely used online backup tools.
And don’t forget all the data you have on your smartphone! This How to Backup any Smartphone article from Gizmodo will help you with this important task.
Make plans to get your backup done or updated ASAP. Figure out what you want to backup and how you are going to do it. Give yourself a deadline and make an appointment in your calendar to get it done. It will make you breathe easier and sleep more soundly. Happy New Year!
Do a Budget!
Rupert Sanders once said: “We just did the best we could with quite a limited budget, to be honest, and had a lot of success.” Rupert may not have been talking about a law firm budget, but his point is that you may be surprised at your success when you take the time to set out the expenses (and income) framework within which you plan to operate in the year.
This is a new year. A time to make positive resolutions to take you to your future. Part of building the bridge to your future is to outline your expected income and expenses for the next 12 months by building a Budget and then tracking your actual income and expenses against that budget.
The budget incorporates at least the following:
- Forecast for future financial performance – income and expenses, grouped by categories. Expenses can be both fixed (ie rent, salaries, leases) and variable (file disbursements that rise with the volume of work). Income can be determined by month and allows you to see any mismatches between income and expenses month by month that will have to be covered one way or another.
- Month by month – 12 months is the typical period, broken down month by month.
- Fudge factor 20% – it is a rule that expenses will *always* be higher than expected and incomes lower…so build in a fudge factor to give yourself some wriggle room.
- An excel spreadsheet incorporating the typical expenses in a solo and small firm by categories can be found at:
- Twelve-Month Law Practice Cash Flow Budget Worksheet
So start the New Year on the right foot and build a budget for your practice. You may just be pleasantly surprised at your success by the time the year end draws neigh.
Currency
I usually talk about currency from the “the quality or state of being current” perspective. Today, I used the Bank of Canada Currency Converter to look at the exchange rate which leads me to today’s tip that deals with another definition of currency:
Look to the Bank of Canada site for money issues.
- The Currency Converter offers exchange rates, current and historical.
- The Inflation Calculator is an excellent tool to determine what the present day value of a monetary award from a past decision is equivalent to in today’s dollars
- Canadian interest rates are available using a 10 year lookup tool
For those of you who keep track of the prime business rate for the purposes of calculating interest under the Northwest Territories Judicature Act, s.56(2), the latest interest rate is 3%.
Happy New Year!
