These Zoom tools improve your Zoomiverse by streamlining call scheduling, automating video enhancement, and transcribing meetings. When the pandemic closed offices and forced working from home, we were instantly turned into “Zoomers” without little to no instruction.  The technology let us connect and kept businesses afloat — but often while looking and sounding bad in less-than-productive meetings. Since Zoom is here to stay, let’s make the best of it By now, most have grasped logging on to Zoom and unmuting, but it’s amazing how many still haven’t optimized their setup or discovered the wonders of add-ons. Read on, and I’ll show you how to appear more professional with a few essential workspace tips, then introduce applications that will improve your Zoomiverse by streamlining call scheduling, automating video enhancement, and transcribing meetings, so your ideas are always preserved. 5 Steps to Get Ready for Your Close-up More than 18 months (and one thousand Zooms) later, it’s still shocking how many participants join calls from horrible windows. It’s not your fault — you’re no videographer — but you can look and sound like one with these five easy tips: Set your camera just above eye level. Looking down at the camera makes us look older and overweight. Raising the lens is like an instant diet and can be the difference between Jabba and Luke. Look at the camera, not your screen. It’s human nature to address someone’s face as you speak. But on Zoom, eye contact requires looking into the lens. A good trick is to position caller windows right below your camera, aligning you with both simultaneously.Balance your lighting. Ideally, you will be lit directly from the front to eliminate odd shadowy effects (but not so close as to cause facial glare). If your space features lighting from one side or

A framework for measuring the ROI of coaching. Your firm or practice group launched a business development coaching program for your lawyers. Congratulations! You are among many progressive firms that realize the value of coaching in helping attorneys develop their rainmaking skills. But do you know how you will measure the program’s success? When we ask firms this question, oftentimes we get a one-dimensional answer: “We’ll know it’s a success if program participants bring in new business.” But any lawyer who’s attempted it  knows the business development process is anything but linear. Depending on the type of client, the industry, or the matter type, bringing in business may take months — and sometimes years. And since most coaching programs last six months to a year, such tangible results as originating new clients can happen after the program is over. So how can firms determine whether the program is working and whether it’s worth the lawyers’ investment of time and the firm’s investment of money and resources? Measuring the ROI of Your Firm’s Coaching Program Measuring the ROI of coaching requires setting clear success metrics that take into account all the complexities and nuances of the legal business development process and the skills that underpin its success: clarity, consistency, and focus on relationships. If you are ready to set your own success metrics for your coaching program, here are the steps to follow: Step 1. Identify Key Organization Objectives and Key Segments The first step to setting clear success metrics for your business development coaching program is to identify the broad areas of improvement that will be the focus of the program (organizational objectives) and who the program will include (key segments). Here we are answering the question: “For whom and in what areas do we want to see a change

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

A large part of practicing law is persuading someone to believe, act or agree with your client’s position, whether in a courtroom or boardroom or at a negotiation or dinner table. We seek to persuade juries, judges, colleagues, friends, family or the media that we are right, and others are not. Following these six principles will help you be a more persuasive lawyer. The Art of Being a More Persuasive Lawyer There is an art and science to persuasion. Unfortunately, this art is not on the curriculum of many law schools. Several fundamental principles of persuasion are commonly suggested by psychologists and marketing experts. In the years I’ve spent researching how to persuade people and coaching lawyers to hone their skills, here are the six principles I’ve found most effective. 1. Acknowledge their efforts We are often trying to persuade someone who has a bias against our position because they don’t understand, are confused, or simply tried and failed in their life. Failure has a way of closing minds, digging in heels and causing rigidity in thinking. When you encourage people to rise above their failures, they look to you for guidance. As lawyers, we are not in the business of making people take responsibility for their lives — we are trying to persuade them. When you acknowledge the struggle of others and tell them you understand, they are much more open to your position. If you can demonstrate that you do not judge people for their struggles, they will be more likely to view you as a friend rather than a foe. 2. Calm their fears Everyone has fears and biases. It is human nature to recoil from threats and prefer safety. When you can comfort the fears and uncertainties of the people you are trying to persuade, not only

Case Status software’s new SMS for Legal app helps law firms easily and securely text with clients as part of their case workflow. Case Status is a client connection platform for law firms. In other words, it’s a one-stop-shop for all client communications needs. Functionally, Case Status is a law firm-branded portal, designed to be mobile-first, through which law firm users can push — and law firm clients can access — up-to-date case information and notifications. Case Status integrates with lots of case management/law practice management software and with Zapier, making it a fairly extensible tool. In its fullest flowering, Case Status can replace email for client communications, in much the same way that Slack has replaced email for internal office communications. Textual Analysis Many law firms have taken an alternate path over the course of history, by trying to avoid client contact whenever possible. That has (not) worked to the tune of virulent complaints from dissatisfied clients. In fact, the No. 1 complaint against law firms is lack of communication. So, if your law firm can add software with a focus on communications with clients, well, said software should shoot up to No. 1 on your purchase list. SMS for Legal Introduces Texting to the Communications Platform My mom knows that if she wants to reach me and get a quick response, she should text me. And, for sure, one line of demarcation for considering the addition of a technology component to your law practice is whether elderly people get it and use it. Texting has become ubiquitous in that way. Starting out, texting was largely used as a personal communication method. Over the course of time, customers began to text businesses, and businesses had to be responsive. Of course, this has been a boon for businesses, too. Texting

A million scary things at work can send you diving under the covers — even before the remote work and hybrid goblins came to play. Here’s advice you can use to confront three of those workplace fears and send the demons packing. Once past the age of trick-or-treating, we like to think we’ve kissed our last bogeyman goodbye. After all, we now know that zombies are merely figments, and it’s only dust bunnies populating the space beneath the bed. Regrettably, a white-knuckle grip on adult reality often brings a more complex set of fears — and these bogeymen are worthy opponents, indeed! It takes more than a warm hug or a bag of fun-size treats to get past the monster fears we encounter every day. So what will help you wrestle these ghouls to the ground? Adult things: determination, a measure of common sense and some perspective. Let’s take a look at three workplace fears professionals commonly find terrifying — and some useful tips for mastering them. Workplace Fear 1: Calling Someone You Don’t Know You know it’s true. Even the most competent extrovert can experience a little telephone twinge. Even when you are the one in the so-called power position, just picking up the phone can feel like pulling your own teeth. Overcoming those telephone goblins can take determination. Here are some things to try. Determination: Just hold your breath and do it. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.Practice makes perfect. If you do most of your communicating via email, naturally you may feel awkward on the phone!Write down your key points beforehand. That way, you won’t get lost and forget them.Rehearse. Really. Memorize your “Hi, I’m …” lines. Then you won’t have to think about it.Change how you talk to yourself. With a little work and practice, your pre-call “Ack! I have

Repeat clients are the most accessible and cost-effective prospects to target.  We all have our favorite “things” we choose to purchase again and again. Whether it’s the brand of coffee you most enjoy or a specific type of running shoes that allows you to perform well, most of us are repeat buyers of certain products. As consumers, we understand we have a choice. But purchasing our favorite products gives us a sense of security and helps us be more efficient when we shop. In other words, we don’t have to stare at the variety of choices when we’re buying peanut butter. We simply need to find the Peter Pan creamy and put the jar in the cart. So, If You Were a Product, Would You Be Your Client’s Favorite? While referrals from colleagues, friends and family top the list of reasons clients choose a particular lawyer or firm, studies show that buyers are also influenced by several factors. These include: Positive reviews build trust. Client testimonials, case studies, and other recognition in outward-facing marketing materials have proven impactful for law firms and individual lawyers. A study in 2021 found that 70% of buyers read a review before making a purchase. Written individual attorney reviews combined with testimonial statements and case studies about the overall competencies can influence prospective buyers, lateral and associate candidates, and future staff hires. Keep the reviews and testimonials fresh, descriptive and compliant with ethics standards. Professionally produced video reviews are also compelling and relatable.Peer Recommendations. Are the attorneys in your firm aware of the firm’s overall capabilities, or is work inadvertently sent outside the firm due to lack of knowledge? If your lawyers don’t know their peer’s expertise and experience, you could be missing out on client opportunities. On the other hand, if peers trust each