Popular Articles from the CPM ICYMI Newsletter (November 2022 – January 2023)
Every week subscribers receive the ICYMI enewsletter from the NCBA Center for Practice Management. The newsletter highlights tips, tools, trends, and techniques to help your law practice. The following are a few popular links from the past issues of the newsletter.
Lessons for Legal from Microsoft Outage: Know Your Recourse Options 2/3/2023
Microsoft 365 went down last week for roughly 6 hours, taking Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook and other cloud services with it. This article from Law.com discusses the murky recourse of chasing compensation from an SLA, and how it is important to have a solid disaster recovery plan.
Five Ways to Make Clients Love Your Practice 1/27/2023
In an interview with Martindale Avvo, Atlanta solo Erin Gerstenzang discusses designing processes to maximize efficiency and improve client experiences. She suggests automating intake, scheduling communication, using technology effectively and putting clients in charge of scheduling.
Warnings From Southwest’s Meltdown—Old Software Creates Legal Risks 1/13/2023
Travel over the holidays is always tumultuous, but if you were flying on Southwest Airlines, you might have experienced a new level of stress and frustration. As details emerged it turns out that despite staff warnings, the former CEO focused money on the customer interface instead of internal systems. This decision to limp along on outdated technology cost more goodwill (and possibly $825 million) for Southwest than any user experience online could overcome.
Why Elon Musk and Other Tech Leaders Are Right to Ban Remote Work 1/6/2023
Many reasons expressed by the C-suite for the need for folks to go back into the office seem disingenuous when those making the decisions do not participate in some of the activities that would require the workforce to be in person – communication, culture, and teamwork. This article points out one real reason the workforce needs to go back to work – that most companies did not change underlying structures, norms, and tools to optimize for remote work.
Lawyer Who Missed Deadline After Spending 25 Minutes Trying to File ECF Document Gets No Mercy From 10th Circuit 12/23/2022
A missed deadline is a missed deadline. Despite the 10th Circuit agreeing that he “barely missed the deadline”, they ruled that while he had difficulties with the ECF filing system, the issues were not caused by any malfunction of the system and there was “no factual basis for any relief”. The court also noted that the ECF system help desk was available during business hours for help. Think again about waiting until the last minute to file, even if you can.
Zoom Alternatives: Vowel, Butter, Switchboard and More 12/9/2022
During the pandemic Zoom rose to the top for video conferencing. It is easy to use and feature rich. Now some new tools are available to try to topple Zoom with better collaboration tools and more meaningful interactions.
What’s In Your Firm Financial Statements? 12/2/2022
Annette Fadness, president of JurisBookeeping, Inc., writing for Attorney at Work, illustrates in detail how to improve your firm’s Profit and Loss statement. QuickBooks out of the box does not show two major firm expenses in detail – occupancy and personnel. Ms. Fadness explains what is missing, and how to fix it – including a free downloadable set of instructions on how to create sub-accounts in the QuickBooks chart of accounts.
Real Complaints About Lawyers — The Legal Profession Can Do Better 11/18/2022
Jennifer Anderson, a former California litigator, shares some experiences from friends who have contacted her about their lawyers. What are they complaining about? Leaving them out of decisions, sloppy work, not returning phone calls, or simply delegating all the work to the support team and never checking in with the client personally. The author suggests some minor adjustments that attorneys can make so that clients aren’t complaining to someone about them too.
Catching the Right Fish: Associate Job Posts 11/11/2022
Not attracting the right resumes for your job posting? It may be you. This post from the Oregon Professional Liability Fund suggests adding appeal to your job postings, describing the firm’s benefits based on location, benefits, and how candidates will be supported in their new role.
Background Removal Tool for Pictures in Office 11/4/2022
While you might not ever need to remove the background in a picture you insert into an Office file, you should probably be aware that you – and other people – can. These tools let you remove backgrounds, and also edit out any part of an image. No Photoshop required! How might you use this? Well, you can create a transparent signature stamp and insert your signature without having to print a document, sign it and scan it back in for one!