Max Amsterdam once said: “Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.”

The purpose of having a written agreement between all parties in the firm is that everyone then knows the terms of the arrangement between them: the expectations, the consequences and the means to implement those consequences. Failing to have such an agreement between lawyers is the equivalent of a shoemaker’s children running around barefoot.

Office-sharing agreements cover issues between solos sharing the same office suite. Common issues include management of the suite, lease payments, confidentiality, signage and sharing of …

You should assess whether you can accept the financial risks associated with taking the matter, just as clients will assess whether they can (and will) pay your fee. Spend time at the beginning of the relationship to learn if the client is able and willing to pay a reasonable fee for the legal work the client wants done.

When everyone in the firm is required to report monthly to all other partners, you instill a culture in the firm that is self-correcting. If someone fails to regularly meet their financial goals, you have a decision to make and a forum within which it can be made.

It is a huge financial mistake to not record in writing the very nature of the contractual relationship with each and every one of your clients.

By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.  ~Author Unknown

There is much talk today about lawyers moving to alternative billing. We happen to be in favour of trying to bring the practice of law back to its roots in terms of delivering value to clients (ie results-based billing) rather than just time spent on the file (input-based billing). But does that mean that you as a lawyer can give up tracking your time? To those who say yes, we respectfully disagree. While you may not bill by the hour, tracking your time does …

A lawyer's trust account often poses a lawyer’s greatest risk for ethics trouble. Yet it seems that one of the tasks lawyers quickly delegate is that of properly maintaining client trust accounts.

Although moving to a different accounting package may be a troublesome undertaking, remaining with one that doesn’t help you run your business will be more expensive and troublesome in the longer run.

Instead, we advocate using historical realization rates against billable time to get a better picture of how each lawyer - and the firm in general - is doing from a financial perspective.

Failing to develop a cash flow projection (your budget) as against anticipated expenses is one of the surest ways to get into financial trouble and as such, it tops our list as our #1 financial error.

Many lawyers deal daily with a subtle form of procrastination – working on “busywork” to avoid the important but intimidating jobs that they should be working on. This behavior creates a vicious cycle that causes stress which, often, leads to additional procrastination which, in turn, leads to more stress and, you guessed it, more procrastination.