Where are the money pits in your practice?  One of the biggest is called: “Unbilled Disbursements”  These disbursements represent expenditures on behalf of clients that you expect will be recovered in due course.  Of course, therein lie the assumptions: that you will be able to bill for them and you will be able to recover them in time.  But there is a quote of Ayn Rand that is appropriate here:

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Yes you need to expend funds on files you …

I posted at Slaw about my need for pop culture references for legal research training for law students. When I tweeted about my post Sarah Glassmeyer responded with the wiki I’ve got a hit. Wow!

A wiki describing video clips, songs and print illustrations from pop culture that can be used in class to demonstrate research techniques or legal concepts

What? Why? What?
Three excellent questions, to paraphrase Buffy. When preparing for class, we’ve all occasionally found ourselves wanting to throw in a little something which illustrates that lecture’s core concept — a brief example that will stick in

Through the course of the day, you will find many smaller tasks coming to your attention. They can come from many sources – perhaps you all of a sudden remembered something you wanted or needed to do, and more often than not, someone else will ask you to do something.
You can’t suddenly drop what you are doing every time one of these tasks comes up – you would never get anything done. But you need to make sure you capture a reminder of these tasks so you can complete them.
Here is a simple way you can do this: …

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said:  “Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”

There is an old adage that time equals money.  But unbilled time doesn’t equal money until it is billed and collected.  Accordingly, our cash flow report #4  in this series of posts is: Work In Progress:  Is your WIP increasing or decreasing?

What does your WIP report say about time that you have banked?  Is it trending larger or smaller or staying about the same?   If your WIP …

I was reading the proclamation for beginning the 1st Session of the 28th Legislature recently, which made my mind turn to run-on sentences. The Proclamation reads in part:

WHEREAS it is deemed expedient for certain causes and considerations to convene the Legislative Assembly of Our Province of Alberta for the First Session of the Twenty eighth Legislature, WE DO WILL that you and each of you, and all others in this behalf interested, on Wednesday, the 23rd day of May 2012, at the hour of 1:30 in the afternoon, at Our City of Edmonton, personally be and appear, for the

Some of us will have fond memories of grabbing a traditional book dictionary to look up the definition of a word. In grade school we had a smaller dictionary with big print and the occasional picture. Somewhere in most of our homes you will be able to find a big dictionary with lots of pages of very small print and no pictures.
In all likelihood, our personal dictionaries are all gathering dust. Why? There is no longer a need to go and grab a dictionary of the shelf to look up the definition of a word. Simply go to Google …

Edward Gibbon once said: “I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.”

In our prior posts we have looked at income projections from a couple of different perspectives.  This third post in our Cash Flow series starts to look at expenses in a bit more detail.

You can have billings (and fee collections) that exceed your wildest dreams, but if your expenses exceed your fee collections, you will be in financial trouble.

Accordingly, our tip this week is as follows:

#3 – Compare your Actual versus …

One extremely useful type of source for legal research is an annotated act. An annotated act looks at a piece of legislation and consolidates the interpretation of that section by section and sometimes they include expert commentary.

Annotated acts are not available for every piece of legislation, but when they are available, it is a great place to start. Most annotated acts are only available in print – some exceptions being the Canada Business Corporations Act and the Criminal Code. Check your local bar association, courthouse or law society library for annotated acts.

Sorry to all the students who have …

This is the second in a series of ten tips dealing with cash flow reports and cash flow management.

Gregory Nunn once said: “Never underestimate the value of cold cash.”

While our first cash flow management tip looked at comparing your actual billings as measured against your projected monthly billings, this week we are taking things one step further in terms of looking at how well you are doing in terms of collecting your billings as measured against your projected cash needs.

Accordingly, our second cash flow report that you should be generating from your accounting system is:

#2 – …

Today’s Tip: Monitor UN documents with RSS

Since I last looked, the United Nations Documents site has a new look and feel. For what the site is trying to deliver, it feels very browsable.
One new (to me) feature is the ability to have an e-Subscription.

At the UN’s e-Subscription page you are now able to select what documents you want to receive by email or RSS feed. Available documents include the UN Journal, as well as documents from the General Assembly, Security Council, Human Rights Council, Economic and Social Council and others.

Watch for those little RSS symbols.…