People don’t read, they skim. If you want your clients to understand you, make it easy for them and write like people read. Have you noticed that the way you read websites, emails, text messages — even magazine and news articles — has changed over time? A growing body of research suggests the internet is changing how people pay attention to writing. The most anxious accounts describe a burning platform: The internet is degrading our ability to pay attention for long periods and so also process extended chains of causal reasoning. I prefer more pragmatic accounts: People just are reading differently, and the challenge for writers is how to adapt to these new conditions. Clearly, the pragmatic approach is important for lawyers hoping to be understood by clients. People Don’t Read, People Skim How you’re reading this article is a good example of how most people read most of the time. You first noticed the title, right? Then read a little bit of the beginning, possibly skimming over the content until a word or phrase caught your attention, reading a few sentences, then skipping to the next bold heading, and starting to skim again. Sound familiar? My favorite book about pragmatic writing is technically a book about web design. Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me Think,” describes the No. 1 fact of life on the web as, “We don’t read pages. We scan them.” Scanning happens for three reasons: People on the web are on a mission. Goal-oriented behavior (where to eat tonight, how to file a form online) keeps people moving constantly toward their objective.People know they don’t need to read everything. Goal-oriented web use means that most of the information on any page is unrelated to our interest or task. (Ironically, this is the first thing

The first step in nurturing virtual relationships? Don’t assume everyone is OK. Work relationships are important. Maintaining them can be challenging — especially now in our remote work world. Here are five ways to show you value the people who make your practice possible: your employees. 1. Show Empathy It’s no surprise that remaining engaged with your firm may be a challenge as you experience a remote work environment for the first time. Your employees need to know that you understand what they are going through. A 2021 survey by Businessolver found that only 1 in 4 employees think empathy in their organizations is sufficient. Yet 84% of CEOs believe empathy drives better business outcomes. Showing your employees you care may be difficult in the best of circumstances, and it’s made even more challenging when we factor in remote work. So, the first thing to keep in mind for nurturing virtual relationships is: Don’t assume everyone is OK. Employees who are struggling may be hesitant to reach out for fear of being seen as needy, dependent or unable to do the work they were hired to do. To overcome this challenge, emotionally intelligent leaders make the extra effort to solicit feedback and maintain strong relationships. You can show empathy through active listening, recognizing emotions, and showing curiosity and concern. Expressing empathy doesn’t necessarily mean solving problems, though sometimes as the boss, you are able to do so. Showing empathy means your employees know that you are listening, and you care. 2. Understand the Role and the Resources Needed In an office, the lawyers don’t necessarily understand how everything happens; they rest easy knowing that their team does understand and implement. But when the office is spread out remotely, lawyers must make sure they understand the roles and resources needed to

As part of the duty to provide competent representation, lawyers are required to stay abreast of current legal technology. It should go without saying that lawyers must be able to use legacy technologies as well. For some younger members of the bar, the preferred medium is texting, so much so that they are unable to use platforms that predate the mobile phone. I recently confronted this phenomenon while trying to organize a continuing legal education program. The two other panelists were, shall we say, younger than I. I set up a conference call to discuss content and divide responsibilities; I emailed the call-in protocol to the other panelists. At the appointed hour, I was the only one on the call. Text — Not Email? I contacted the sponsor and explained what happened. Panelist #2 had previously engaged with me via email, but I had had no response from Panelist #3. The sponsor got back to me saying Panelist #2 would be in touch and that I should text Panelist #3. Text? Feeling somewhat put upon, I used the number the sponsor provided to text Panelist #3, who I noticed from her LinkedIn page had recently joined a highly respected law firm. I also left a voicemail in the voice mailbox for her extension at the firm. Both times, I directed Panelist #3 to consult her email queue for instructions for logging in to the second attempt at a planning meeting. I wondered: Have email and voicemail gone by the wayside? Has texting become the primary method of business communication? For a certain age group, the answer appears to be yes. Our Zoom Culture At the scheduled time, I called into the conference call system for attempt number two. Again, I was alone. Since I had had email communication with Panelist

The pace of litigation is dizzying. The path of every single lawsuit is filled with multiple inflection points, moments where attorneys have to make decisions about how the future is likely to unfold. In the past, attorneys navigated these twists and turns by relying on intuition, experience and anecdotal evidence. But things are starting to change. Judicial analytics remains one of the last frontiers of Big Data, a field poised to fundamentally transform the way attorneys practice the law by quantifying the unquantifiable to unimaginable ends. Starting From Scratch AI-powered judicial analytics emerged from the frustrations of day-to-day life as an attorney. Every attorney knows that the details of a past case can provide invaluable insights into how they should position similar cases in the future. The problem, however, was that these insights were impossible to access, especially for attorneys at the state trial court level. There was no effective way to perform practical legal research on state trial court records. The data was dispersed across thousands of separate courthouses throughout the country, with each county in each state authoring its own protocols for collecting, cataloging, and publishing court documents. The result? State trial court was too scattered, too clunky and too inconsistent to prove useful. Composed of dockets, petitions and rulings, state trial court data was designed for human (rather than mechanical) consumption. To be integrated into a series of interrelated data sets, this information needed to be cleaned, wrangled into standardized formats that a computer could read. This has been a difficult and expensive process. Consider, for a moment, names. The names of judges, attorneys and law firms are subject to change, a fact that makes it hard — if not impossible — to track legal entities across any given data set. Fortunately, much of this tedious work