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.  …

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.…

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.

As we head for the end of the year, your mind is probably already turning to things you’d like to change in the new year.  We think that aiming for an empty inbox each afternoon is one of the best resolutions you can make.

The holy grail of current email management is the empty inbox.  This is often referred to as Zero Inbox, RAFT (Refer, Act, File or Toss) or OHIO (Only Handle It Once).  The idea behind all these systems is that you deal with each item in your …

One thing that has changed is that today's legal rebel does recognize that the power of the Internet means that they no longer have to be alone. Courtesy of new collaborative tools, legal rebels can bring people together into virtual teams and practice in ways never before possible as a solo.

There are at least two aspects to legal technology.  The first and most obvious one is “What is the latest and greatest?”

While there is a certain group that gets very excited about legal technology, there are the managers and bean counters in firms who cringe when the ‘tech heads’ start talking; they only anticipate the costs and potential disruptions in workflow that could arise from introducing something new into the well-oiled and functioning office machine.  After all, change can be expensive and we are not talking about just the cost of the new stuff!

Accordingly, to satisfy both camps …