In what condition are your accounts receivable?

While your total accounts receivable number from your accounting system tells you the total amount of money owed by your firm’s clients, your accounts receivable report should be aged 30, 60 and 90+ days to give you greater information of the state of your receivables.

The 2008 Juris Law Firm Economic Survey from LexisNexis (the last date for which we have such a survey – they are no longer being published – a great loss as these surveys were very detailed and informative) shows that ‘days fees outstanding’ for accounts receivable in 2008 …

Today’s Tip: Go to the source

What I mean by go to the source is this:
If you have exhausted the traditional places to look for something (case law databases – both free and commercial; journal article sources; local libraries that you may borrow from; a general web search) and have not located a specific item that you need, go to the source.

Who authored the work?

• Phone the arbitrator
• Call the judge’s assistant
• Email the news reporter

People are amazingly helpful and willing to share what they have or what they know if you ask, infrequently and politely of …

Social media tools allow people to look at your profile information. By tweaking privacy settings, you can limit what people see by type of information (e.g., contact info, friends list, education, etc.) and degree of connection (e.g., friends or direct connections only, friends and friends of friends, everyone, etc.).

LinkedIn offers an interesting twist: you can see how many people have looked at your profile, and in some cases, you can even see their names.

As a LinkedIn user you should appreciate other LinkedIn users can see that you have looked at their profile. In many cases it may not …

Understanding your hourly cost structure has enormous implications for examining the financial status of your firm and for determining your top-profitability lawyers (as opposed to top revenue generators… which may or may not be the same!).

Today’s tip is for the watcher. Quite often a court proceeding of interest will be reported in the media as the case is heard. Decisions, especially in civil cases, usually come down at some future time. There are a couple of ways to virtually ‘watch’ for decisions of interest.

• Try a Google News alert – if the case was media worthy when it was being hear, there may be a media report of the decision which a Google alert will send to your email inbox.
• Create a CanLII RSS feed for a search of the decision – even if a

…

Crackberry.com has posted a useful tip that solves a problem that many BlackBerry users have had: how to dial all those phone numbers with words in them?? (e.g. 1-888-ROGERS1). The keypad letters don’t seem to correspond with the old rotary number/letter system.

There were always workarounds, from looking elsewhere on a webpage for the actual number to looking at an older phone and writing down the numbers yourself. But it seems all this time there was an easier way: just hold down the ‘alt’ key while dialing the letters (but not the numbers), and the BlackBerry will substitute the proper …

Part of coming to grips with the financial management side of your practice is learning to read the numbers. One of the more important ones to understand is the concept of "Effective Hourly Rate".

My colleague Jennifer Merchant, Library Assistant for Field Law in the Calgary office gets credit for this tip. It is really more the beginning of a memo of research results, rather than a tip, but I thought you might find it useful. Jennifer was looking for some background information on a private company. Here is the beginning of her result:

You asked for background information on [insert private company name here]. I used the following resources in my search:

• Google (general)
• Google News
• Canadian Business and Current Affairs Complete (business/news database)
• Canadian Newsstand (news database)
• Canadian Periodicals (news database)

…

Keeping up with the changes to Facebook Privacy settings is a never-ending task. The large number of settings makes it very confusing. The LifeHacker blog comes to the rescue with The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy.

This comprehensive guide runs through the basic privacy settings that determine what you share, next it looks at deeper settings you’ll want to tweak, and it finishes with a few third-party tools that will help keep your Facebook information private.

LifeHacker says they will update this page when there are changes in the future. Bookmark this page, make it a …

Decide to block out your time and put aside one block of time to accomplish important but not urgent tasks to avoid them never bubbling up on your To Do list - and actually get them done.