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.

In order to keep being strategic and focused, you need to keep your skill set current and sharp.  Take time to not only stay current on your area of the law but also in the skills necessary for the effective running of your practice.

“Life is a series of interruptions interrupted by interruptions” is a quote that we had always attributed to John Lennon, but that may be apocryphal.

Anyone who has ever worked in a law office knows that interruptions are the bane of a lawyer’s existence. We can’t tell you how to get rid of them, but we can offer some suggestions to help you control them and reduce their impact on your work.

To control interruptions, make sure that you and your secretary both take your previously scheduled work sessions as seriously as you would a client interview. If …

This is the essence of management - acting quickly and appropriately once you have sufficient data on hand to indicate an improvement in how you operate. Appropriately following up based on the information that you receive from your organization - transforming it to a learning organization - will lead you ...over time...to the goals that you have set for you and your firm.

Furthermore, by increasing your daily interactions with your staff, you will be reinforcing the message that their motivation and performance is uppermost in your mind.

A Thank You File helps you remember what you have done for people when the winds of life threaten to blow out our own light - and help rekindle that spark within us.