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Law Practice Matters

Insight on Small Firm Law Practice Management & Legal Technology

Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Miscellaneous

Each year my friend and colleague, Reid Trautz, publishes a Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. I always find something new, interesting and amusing in Reid’s collections, and this year was no different.

Reid, being a bit of a gadget guy, has a few gift ideas for the tech-oriented lawyer: Apple TV continues to permeate our living rooms. For the lawyer already heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, such as myself, an Apple TV is a great way to rent movies and watch Netflix.

The Leap was entirely new to me – it’s a motion detector you plug into your computer that allows you to use hand and finger movements in place of a mouse. And from the annals of First World Problems, whenever I video conference on Skype I constantly have to untangle my headphones cord before I can take the call. Reid spotted BackBeat Go’s wireless ear buds which may just solve that problem for me this year.

I also have a couple of items I’d add to Reid’s list.

If there is one tech item I’d recommend this year it would be a Sonos music player. I’ve been using Sonos players at home for the past year and it they have been terrific. They sound great and can play the same song throughout the house, play independently or be paired in a very large room to provide sound to please the pickiest audiophile.

In terms of musical content, not only can Sonos stream my iTunes library, it also streams from Amazon’s Cloud Player, Spotify, Pandora and much more. Most of the time I use the built in TuneIn internet radio to stream my new favorite station, 94/7 Portland. I use our Sonos players every day and I love being able to control them from my iPad and iPhone.

Lawyers can’t gift by tech alone, though.

The top of my non-tech list this year is a new briefcase. The one in particular I have my eye on is the Alfred Work Bag from Property Of… Fine Bags & Goods. It’s not cheap at €269.00 but it’s a great looking bag that can go from work to weekend.

If you’ve got a lawyer on your gift list this year, take a look at Reid’s guide and you are sure to find something to please and delight.

Rocket Matter Adds Slick Email Integration

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Practice Management Software

The evolution of cloud-based legal technology software – practice management software in particular – continues.

One of the common frustrations faced by a lot of lawyers as they embrace practice management software is how to integrate matter-related emails into their digital case files. Email gets trapped within the silo of Gmail, Outlook or some other email program until the lawyer finds a way to bridge between that email program and her practice management software. Let’s call this the “email silo” problem.

This problem has been, in general, handled more easily by local practice management software than it has by their cloud-based brethren. Part of the reason for that is the solution often incorporates an additional software component into the mix – typically a document management software like Worldox. Through the well planned use of practice management, document management and email software – each offering strong interoperability – a lawyer could receive an email in Outlook, save it  and its attachment separately in Worldox and connect those documents to the related matter in, say, Practice Master.

Cloud-based software has generally offered less interoperability than local software. This relative lack of interoperability
is improving rapidly, but still has a way to go. I wrote about this topic in Linking the Clouds for Law Practice Magazine a little time back.

This has made it harder for cloud-based practice management software to solve the email silo problem in the same way.  Different software solutions have made various attempts at solving the problem (with varying amounts of success), but the solution offered recently by Rocket Matter is more tightly integrated – particularly for a firm using Google Apps.

Rather than forwarding or importing emails into the practice management software itself where it will be stored with the rest of the matter database, Rocket Matter introduced a sort of sync feature. Once the sync is set up between the lawyer’s email program and Rocket Matter, emails are viewable in Rocket Matter but actually still live in the email program.

Evan Koblentz, in an article for Law Technology News on the same subject, noted that another cloud-based practice management software, HoudiniESQ, has offered this feature since 2009.

You can view a short video about Rocket Matter’s email integration here.

My favorite features of this approach are first, that there is no forwarding required. Once you sync your email account and associate label/folder names with matters, the emails automatically populate in Rocket Matter. Second, since the emails appear in Rocket Matter via this label/folder association with the given matter, multiple users can associate their individual mail folders with the matter. This way the matter will show related emails from users across the firm.

One possible problem for a lawyer who uses Outlook:  if you eventually want to clean out your closed client matter emails from Outlook, they will also (presumably) be removed from Rocket Matter. The lawyer is left with the same old email silo problem of having to export the emails and store them apart from the rest of the client file.

Where the Rocket Matter approach to email may really shine is for Google Apps users. Google Apps email (and its predecessor Gmail) have from the beginning taken the approach of giving users lots of space and encouraging them to save every email. Since you can easily locate an email via a Google search of your mail archive, it makes a compelling case for never deleting an email again. While gigabytes of old emails might eventually turn your Outlook and Exchange Server into sludge, Google Apps users can save emails forever with no similar degrade in function.

All in all, this is a fresh look at an old problem and Rocket Matter deserves credit for advancing the ball for cloud-based practice management software.

 

It’s Time to Sell Your iPhone

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Mobile

Sell my iPhone? What?!

You can pry it from my cold dead hands, to paraphrase Moses Charlton Heston.

Apple has announced a special event for September 12, 2012, widely believed to be an announcement of the new iPhone 5 (or just plain new iPhone, as they seem more likely to call it). Most Apple events result in a flurry excitement from Mac geeks like myself, but this one has particular oomph because the new iPhone is rumored to be the last product that Moses Steve Jobs personally worked on.

So, why does all this hoopla mean it you should sell your iPhone?

It turns out that iPhones, due to some vagary of market economics, and in stark contrast to most electronic gadgets, hold their value over time astoundingly well. That value peaks right before a new version is introduced, particularly a new version that changes the physical hardware, as the new iPhone is rumored to do.

A well-timed sale can put some cash in your pocket to defray the up front costs of the new phone. I just sold mine on Craigslist. I posted the ad at 9pm on Monday night and handed over the phone to the buyer at 10am the following morning. I got $280 back on a phone I used for two years and that cost me $399 in hardware up front. I’m sure I could have sold it for more if I was not impatient in dealing with spammers and pinheads.

If selling on Craigslist is not your thing, there are other ways to easily sell your old iPhone as well:

Amazon Electronics Trade In will allow you to sell your iPhone to Amazon, which will then turn around and sell it to a third party. It’s easy and the trade in allotment offered are generous. The only hitch is you will be paid in an Amazon gift card instead of cold, hard duckets.

Gazelle offers another easy avenue to sell your old hardware. The trade in allotment is a lot less generous than Amazon, though, it is in cash. For point of comparison, for a phone like mine in “flawless” condition, Amazon offered $310 and Gazelle offered $167. It’s cash instead of a gift card, but I would still have taken the Amazon deal instead.

Your wireless provider may also be interested in purchasing your hardware. Verizon offered me $165 for my old iPhone.

Going with one of these friction-free routes will net you less dough, but will spare you some hassle.

A few tips if you do decide to sell this iPhone or the next:

  1. The physical and working condition of the phone is paramount. Keep your hardware shiny and scratch-free and it will be worth more when you get rid of it.
  2. Keep the box. Used phones, like the children’s toys collected by the 40 Year Old Virgin, are worth more when you have the original packaging in good order.
  3. Wipe your data off your phone and reset all the factory settings before you sell it.
  4. Buy yourself a cheap phone to use in the interim while you are between iPhones. I’m presently rocking one of these sweet flip phones, while I wait for the new iPhones to come in. I bought it on Amazon for about $45, so factor that cost into your plan. Also factor in that toting one of these things around in 2012 will make you an object of mockery and feels depressingly like carrying a Jitterbug.

Happy sales.

The One Page Business Plan for Lawyers – Part 2

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Start Up

In my last post, I wrote about the notion of lawyers using a simplified, one page business plan when starting law firms.

In this post, I’d like to share some of the good examples of one page business plans from around the web and discuss how they might work for lawyers starting law firms.

It’s probably evident that in using a one page business plan, editing is king. That is to say, what you decide to leave out is as important as what the plan authors have included. As a result, there are a quite few one page plans out there and each takes a different approach.

Here are my three favorites for lawyers.

MyShingle Back of the Napkin Law Firm Plan – Start Here

This plan from Carolyn Elefant is a nice, graphical approach tailored to lawyers and focusing on mission, passion, practice area segmentation, targeted marketing and goals. It features a blend of big picture topics and down to earth business exigencies to capture excitement but move the planning process forward.

This plan makes a great first step early in your planning process.

The $100 Startup One Page Business Plan – Your Next Step

Chris Guillebeau’s excellent book on starting a micro-business has a lot of potential wisdom for the lawyer starting a practice and his one page plan is also terrific. It focuses mainly on marketing and sales, including: price setting, generating referrals, targeting ideal clients, income projections and potential obstacles to success.

Once you have committed to starting a firm and know you practice area and firm mission, this plan will help you walk through the marketing issues in a bit more depth.

Gazelles One Page Strategic Plan – 1 Year In

Gazelles is a training and coaching company and they offer a free one page strategic plan. It is two-sided and probably would be printed on 11×17 paper, so it kind of stretches the definition of one page. It is, however, comprehensive and draws heavily on information from Verne Harnish’s worthwhile, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, as well as the ideas of management uber-guru, Jim Collins.

You could think of this as more of 201 level class in business plans, as compared to the other examples. I recommend this in my work occasionally to folks who are starting up firms and already have well-formed ideas about the nuts and bolts.

Otherwise, this is a great plan for getting you refocused after you have your first year of practice under your belt.

Using the Plans for a Law Firm

In law practice management circles, we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on what makes law firms different from other businesses – we have different ethical, regulatory and market challenges from Joe’s Copy Shop and Tire Rotation, to be sure. At root level though, the private practice of law involves selling a service to a willing customer (hopefully) for a profit. In other words, the DNA of a law firm is not terribly dissimilar to any other service business. Don’t let the non-legal verbiage distract you from the underlying ideas.

These plans are designed to minimize the resistance a lot of lawyers feel to creating business plans. They are short, concise and will get you focused on the big picture.

Whether you are contemplating starting your firm or are a bunch of years into practice and feeling stuck in a rut, give these great plans (and the associated books) a look and see if you they help you chart your course.

The One Page Business Plan for Lawyers – Part 1

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Start Up

In the course of my job, I meet with a lot of lawyers who are starting law practices. Often as solo practitioners, sometimes in pairs, and once in a while as groups peeling off from larger firms.

When we talk about what the new firm will do, what market it will serve, how it will differ from the prior firm, our conversation often steers to business plans. I ascribe to the notion that the chief benefit of business plan (especially for a business as strategically straightforward as a small law firm) is in the thinking and articulating the answers to the questions most commonly included in business plans.

As a predictor of the challenges and successes a new firm is likely to actually encounter, most business plans probably fall a bit short of the mark. But in forcing the attorney to consider challenges, opportunities, defining market segments, etc, they still are a valuable tool.

How Long?

When I encounter lawyers who have business plans ready by the time we meet, they (the plans, not the lawyers) tend to be very detailed. These lawyers often have a background in business, maybe an MBA, and this isn’t their first business plan rodeo.

These detailed plans can be great. But they can also be totally overwhelming to a lot of lawyers starting law practices and lugging to do lists that cover page after page of yellow legal pads. When rent is due and you need malpractice insurance and you have to file with the Secretary of State and 25 of your clients want to follow you to the new firm, a business plan sometimes seems like a time-consuming luxury that a start up law firm can’t afford.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Skipping a business plan altogether is a missed opportunity for the start up law practice. Once things get really rolling, the opportunities to look at the big picture of your law firm and its place in the market will come around less and less frequently.

Lawyers starting new law firms can get most of the value of doing a long, exhaustive MBA-approved business plan from spending an hour or two on a short form, bare bones business plan. These plans – and one page business plans are readily available all over the web – cause the start up lawyer to run through the most critical big picture questions without getting bogged down in details that are not mission critical on day 1.

In the next post, I’ll gather some links to one page business plans from around the web that may serve as useful jumping off points and talk about applying these forms specifically to starting a law firm.

Should Lawyers Use Encrypted Email?

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Digital Security, Ethics

A few days ago, a lawyer friend of mine asked if I meet a lot of lawyers who use encrypted email. I told him I hadn’t – that apart from the lawyers whose clients (banks, mostly) required the use of encrypted email, I hadn’t come across many other lawyers using it.

Undeniably, and maybe unfortunately for our collective productivity, email has become the communication backbone of many lawyers’ practices. Email is everywhere, chirping and beeping for our attention. No matter how tantalizingly close we get to Inbox Zero at night, few of us wake up without an Unread Email count bursting from our phones and computers.

Despite its ubiquity, though, email as a technology does not command much of our attention. I talk to lawyers every day who wonder if an iPhone or iPad is secure enough, or if using Dropbox will cause them problems for client confidentiality. But most of these same lawyers happily peck away at emails without ever considering how secure it is.

A Google search on “is email secure?” reveals a torrent of articles over the years on the topic, most of which conclude that email is not a terribly secure technology.

Given the general consensus that email is not particularly secure combined with lawyers’ penchant for avoiding or reducing risk, especially technological risk, it’s a bit surprising that there is not wider adoption of secure alternatives to email among the practicing bar. Using encrypted email is not an ethical requirement in North Carolina, and I don’t know of any jurisdictions where it has been required.

That said, with the continued clash of ethical self-regulation and technology, it won’t surprise me when some unsuspecting lawyer somewhere has a client communication intercepted and becomes the ethics test case for encrypted email. All lawyers are required to maintain the confidentiality of their clients’ information. If you, in the course of your practice, also have occasion to email trade secrets like, say, the recipe for Coca Cola, it’s probably a good idea to have some passing familiarity with encrypted email.

I’ve lately been experimenting with Enlocked, an email encryption software (still in beta) that has mobile apps for iPhone and Android as well as plug-ins for Outlook, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and more. Enlocked is simple and free and in my early testing has been easy to use. If you’d like to read a primer with a bit more depth on how to encrypt email, here is a recent article from PC Magazine.

There may not yet be a need for a lawyer to encrypt every single email, but now is a good time to understand and experiment with encrypted email (or other secure communication) if for no other reason than to have another tool in your toolbox.

 

Avoiding Lost USB Drives

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Digital Security

File this under “you get what you pay for.”

Imagine you are walking out of your office to your car or down the street to grab lunch. You turn the corner and there at your feet – so small that you almost missed it – lays a little USB drive. You bend down and pick it up and note that it is a 64 GB drive. Wow – those aren’t cheap, you think to yourself.

When you return to your office, being the good samaritan that you are, you plug your new found drive into your computer’s USB port to see if there is any identifying information on it. You figure, if there is identifying informaiton, you can return it to its rightful owner and if there isn’t, well, then you’ve got yourself a nice new 64 GB drive. Worst case scenario, it’s broken – right?

Wrong, actually.

The worst case scenario is quite a bit worse than that.

According to the digital security blog Naked Security by the firm Sophos, fully 66% of of the lost USB drives were infected with some kind of malware. None of the malware appeared to infect OSX (Apple’s operating system) machines, though several of the drives seemed to have been owned by Mac users – making them malware carriers who show no signs of disease but capable of passing it on to Windows using friends.

So, what’s the takeaway here? There are a few best practices that can be gleaned from this study:

1) if you find an unidentified USB drive in public, you are better off tossing it in the garbage than plugging it into your computer;

2) if you use a Mac, the odds are still good that you can rely on herd immunity to keep you safe from malware;

3) if you use a Windows computer, make sure you are using an up to date suite of anti-malware, anti-virus and anti-spyware;

4) at the rate at which USB drives apparently are lost, you are probably best advised to use an encrypted drive, one that hangs on your key chain, or one that costs so much that it is too dear to misplace.

My Cousin Vinny and Resilience in Law Practice

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Management

After a CLE a few months ago, I sat in a bar sipping bourbon and listening to my friend, Jim Dedman, explain his plans for doing a blog series commemorating the 20th anniversary of one of the all time great lawyer movies, My Cousin Vinny.

Jim asked me if I would write something about the movie to take part in the anniversary. I love movies in general and lawyer movies in particular, so I readily agreed. It gave me an excuse to rewatch the movie, which I hadn’t seen in at least ten years.

I’m pleased to say, the movie holds up well after 20 years. As a native New Yorker, an Italian and a lawyer living in the south, I really like this movie on a lot of levels. Not the least of which, it should be noted, is Marisa Tomei’s star-making performance as Joe Pesci’s big-haired, beautiful, foul-mouthed automotive expert witness/fiancee.

Here’s a clip of Marisa in action, in case it’s been a while since you’ve seen the movie:

I could watch clips of Marisa Tomei all day, but this being a law practice management blog and all, I wanted to write about a different aspect of the movie: resilience. 

Resilience, as the psychologists use the term, refers to one’s ability to cope with stress and bounce back from setbacks.  Throughout the first three-quarters of My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci’s Vinny suffers setback after setback. Yet each night he works hard and each morning he comes back to the courthouse to do battle for another day. 

Vinny didn’t seem to know a lot of criminal procedure, but the man was a model of resilience.

We are each born with some measure of resilience. If your worldview tends to lean in the glass-half-empty direction, hope remains. A growing body of evidence indicates that we can learn resilience, or to “fall up” as Shawn Achor put it in an article on the Harvard Business Review website.

I’m working my way through Achor’s terrific book, The Happiness Advantage, and have been recommending it to anyone who will listen. If you’re not quite ready to start reading the book, but are a little curious about how you might learn resilience, you can check out Achor’s excellent (and short – 2o min) presentation, The Happy Secret to Better Work:

So, check out the video and the book, and and see if working to cultivate resilience in your life also produces benefits in your practice.

It worked for Vinny Gambini.

Are Passwords the Weak Link in Your Firm’s Security Chain?

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Technology

Law firms spend a lot of time, energy and money trying to create a secure environment, both physically and digitally, for their clients’ confidential information. Disciplinary bodies, such as the North Carolina State Bar, spend gobs of time sorting out the ethical implications of cloud computing and software-as-a-service for lawyers.

Then along comes an article like this.

PCMag.com ran a story – and a story on this theme pops up once a year or so – noting that the number one most used password employed by business users is “Password1″. I can’t imagine that law firm users are appreciably different when it comes to choosing passwords from other business users. In other words, while law firm IT folks and managing partners wring their hands about which level 5 data center is secure enough to serve as the digital fortress for the firm’s client information, it’s entirely possible that the average user in the firm is using a password so common and obvious that it is akin to leaving the front gate open and the drawbridge down.

I’ve written about passwords in general and LastPass (my favorite password manager) in particular at TechnoLawyer.

If you decide not to use a password manager but want to beef up your password procedures in your office, search around for articles like this one from the New York Times a few years ago that detail how to create strong passwords.

Saturday Stuff You May Have Missed

By Erik Mazzone on Posted in Uncategorized

While you were busy working this week, you may have missed some interesting legal technology stuff on the web. Here are some links to get you caught up:

Wolfram Alpha is a cool search engine – but did you know you could use it to create a password, create a QR code, or tell you how much college tuition is going to cost in a few years? Check out 10 Fun and Interesting Things to to with Wolfram Alpha from 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

There was an interesting article in Fast Company about Why In-Person Socializing is a Mandatory To Do Item. 

Brian Solis published a report called The State of the Blogosphere (hat tip: Kevin O’Keefe). Spoiler alert: blogging is a terrific way to increase your influence.