Garry Wise:  On the weekend, I had the notion that it might be interesting if David and I devoted a post or two to answering some recurring  law practice management questions we typically encounter.

My co-author, Dave Bilinsky, of course, is SlawTips’ resident guru on law practice resources. As a practice advisor and lawyer for the Law Society of British Columbia, he brings (among other elements in his broad perspective) a regulator’s vantage point to all things practice management.  I come at these questions from a different place, as a practitioner and veteran of the legal trenches, having focused …

Sounds basic but many solo and small firms do not have one.  You need one to act as a reference for both management and employees alike.  It can be your shield against discrimination, harassment and other claims.  It can save time by having answers to common questions on routine employment matters and issues and employee concerns in such areas as vacation and sick-leave policies, unpaid leave, holidays, work hours and other such details.  It can also contain forms (evaluation forms), descriptions (jobs, tasks and expectations) and procedures (fire, disaster, privacy etc).

Most office manuals today also address emerging issues …

Moving beyond Cooperation

Collaboration has many benefits. There are a few pitfalls and difficulties to avoid.  But with solid leadership, a law firm can overcome the potential difficulties and achieve real results by adopting a collaborative model.

According to Morten T. Hansen, author of “Collaboration – How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results“, the goal of collaboration is not collaboration but greater results.  Greater results is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you are able to successfully adapt your firm to the new model.

(GJW:  With better result…

Collaboration: Breaking Each Task Down into its Many Parts

Picking up on last week’s post,  let us start with a basic assumption – there’s nothing ad hoc about how successful law practice groups collaborate.

It takes real planning and repetition to create an optimal, collaborative work-flow routine.

Now, by practice group, we don’t necessarily mean anything highfaluting.

In a solo practice, it may simply be a lawyer and a single assistant.  Or a single lawyer and outsourced collaborators. A larger group model, operating as a stand-alone boutique or as one corner within a larger firm structure, might involve a senior …

Collaboration: An introduction.

It’s a pleasure to commence my SlawTips collaboration with David Bilinsky by focussing on…

What else?

Collaboration: Law firm, style.

And by that I simply mean assessing how your practice group works together, and seeing whether adding some planning, systems and efficiencies might increase the sum of your group’s parts.

We’ll be looking at this in a bit of depth over the next few weeks.  For now, an introduction.

Allow me to pose some serious questions at the outset.

How does your law firm optimize its intra-firm collaborations? Does your practice group really work together? Do …

I would like to take this moment to introduce my new joint columnist, Garry J. Wise of Toronto.  As you gentle readers would know, my long-time collaborator and friend Laura A. Calloway recently resigned from this column due to growing work demands.

A bit about my friend and new collaborator:

Garry J. Wise was called to the Ontario Bar in 1986, and practices with Wise Law Office, a Toronto litigation firm that focuses on Employment Law, Family Law, Estates Litigation and Civil Litigation.

He is primary contributor to the award-winning Wise Law Blog, which features daily legal news updates and …

In my last post, I dealt with the issue of procrastination as being the first hurdle in terms of task management.  In this second part of the post, we are dealing with all the interruptions that happen to you once you have started on the path to accomplish a task.

Now that you finally have your job started, how do you manage the inevitable interruptions that are keeping you from finishing?  To do this, you must take control of your boundaries and space. People have long noticed the difficulty in dealing with interruptions:

“Life is a series of interruptions interrupted …

This is the first of two tips dealing with personal time management.

There are two big difficulties when it comes to time management and trying to fit in all the tasks that we have to do in our lives.

One is procrastination (trying to start a task) and the other is dealing with interruptions (trying to finish a task).

This post deals with procrastination.

In order to start dealing with procrastination, you need to come to an understanding when you are procrastinating on a task in order to start to take steps to correct it.

So: …

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 …

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.  …