Although the pandemic has affected the legal industry in a multitude of ways, there’s no question that the surge in demand for estate and end-of-life planning legal services stems from the realization that no one is invincible in the face of COVID-19. Estate Planning Pointers Amid a public health crisis, everyone is vulnerable — not just the elderly. Even young people need to get their affairs organized and document their wishes if they were to experience long-term disability, incapacity or death — and so do their lawyers. Updating Your Estate Planning Documents There’s no time like the present for lawyers to practice what they preach. Reviewing and updating your own estate planning documents to reflect your current personal and family situation gives you the peace of mind that you and your loved ones are protected. Further, impending federal tax law changes may merit strategic adjustments. I recently spoke with Peggy Sheahan Knee, principal of the Knee Law Firm and LexisNexis Practical Guidance contributing author, who said the pandemic was a game-changer for her law practice. “I was absolutely shocked at how many people reached out to us about not having documents like health-care proxies, advanced directives and durable power of attorney,” she said. “In the past, I found people were generally resistant to the idea.” Not anymore — clients are more than ready to talk through scenarios and pull together the paperwork. Many of the calls she receives are from worried parents of minor children who previously had no estate planning documentation. With the realization that no one is safe in the COVID-19 era, planning for the worst while hoping for the best is the responsible thing to do. Should Your Firm Handle Your Will? Choosing a Service Provider According to Knee, it’s critical to have a will in place.

Facing a busier than ever week ahead? Use these steps to figure out how to prioritize when you are overwhelmed. Here’s my week: I have three transactions closing on Friday and I need to work on them all right now. One is not more important than the other. I have two articles due today by the end of business, both of which require my immediate attention. I am changing jobs and must figure out my medical insurance. Of course, I need to call during business hours to do that, and I have to accomplish this by Thursday or I won’t have coverage. Also: There are two contracts that needed to be reviewed last week that I still haven’t looked at, one client who needs revisions to his estate planning documents so he can sign on Friday before he travels out of the country, and another client who is very ill and needs legal advice regarding her will. Plus, my daughter has back-to-school activities, needs to be driven to her extracurricular programs — and we adopted a puppy! How the heck am I supposed to prioritize when everything is important and needs to be handled at the same time? Help! Five Steps for Figuring Out How to Prioritize It All Here’s what I do when I am faced with times such as this, when there is too much to do and no easy way to prioritize. 1. The first step is to breathe. When we take deep breaths, it calms our bodies and minds so that we can think more clearly and make better decisions. Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the “rest and digest” system that allows us to remain calm in the midst of the chaos of our busy lives. Once we are calm, we can

For law firms, streamlined, effective legal billing software is incredibly important. Enter modern legal billing software. It ensures that your firm’s legal billing processes are efficient and accurate by reducing the steps needed to invoice clients and accept online payments. Read on to learn about the most common billing problems law firms face, and how to help your law firm overcome them. Hurdle 1: Missed Billable Time Best Practice 1: Capture Time Automatically Using legal billing software, lawyers in your firm can track their billable time from any internet-enabled device using multiple timers, making it easy for them to enter billable time no matter where they happen to be. Another legal billing software timesaver is the ability to take advantage of default billing activity descriptions when entering billable time. After all, the easier it is for your attorneys to create a time entry, the more likely they are to do it. Hurdle 2: Growing Time Investment Best Practice 2: Batch Bill + Automate Time Reconciliation A single centralized billing software solution solves this problem. With all of the billing data collected and stored in one online location, it’s a simple process to create invoices from the billable time entered into the system, send multiple invoices at once, and accept online payments from clients within that same software. No more duplicate data entry or reconciliation across software tools; robust legal billing software does all of that for you! Hurdle 3: Payment Inaccessibility Best Practice 3: Eliminate Common Roadblocks to Client Payment The simplest way to make it easy for clients to pay is to provide multiple online payment options for your firm’s clients. Not only will your firm get paid faster, but your clients will also have more choices when it comes to paying their legal bills. In other words, it’s

When Janelle came to us, she was running her busy litigation practice off an 18-page to-do list she kept on a yellow pad on her desk. I’m sure you can picture that list. Frayed edges. Tasks jotted down in the margins while she talked on the phone. Assignments written on little flags sticking out of the sides. Things crossed off in red and other things highlighted with a rainbow of colors. Every time Janelle looked at that list, her stress levels went through the roof. Sure, most of her tasks were there, but she had to flip through multiple pages to remember what she’d assigned to whom and then go through her emails for the latest information. Tasks and to-dos related to a single matter were scattered across the pages. Dates were meaningless. And she’d completely forgotten what the highlight colors meant. Janelle was coping but she wasn’t managing, much less managing effectively. She was constantly chasing people for updates because she was worried about missing something, and she wasn’t sure if her team had the bandwidth to take on new work. Without clear insight into how work moves through your firm, you’re running your practice in the dark. You can’t see who’s working on what (and neither can anyone else).You don’t know where matters stand at any given time.You don’t know if you’ve got the capacity to take on more work.You can’t answer clients’ questions quickly when they call or email you for a status update. The result: You take on work when you don’t have the capacity for it, everyone ends up working crazy hours, and your best employees burn out.You commit to deadlines you can’t meet, driving your stress levels through the roof, working too hard, and sacrificing personal events that are important to you.You don’t spot

Why is it that so many lawyer presentations suffer from “hanging fragmentitis”? Here’s how to stop yourself from constantly editing, restarting and revising out loud. When we speak, why do we so often fail to finish our sentences? Linguists must know the answer to this question, but I am at a loss. All I’m sure of is this: Lawyers find it difficult — often impossible — to finish sentences. They have some kind of built-in resistance to committing to a period. Commas, ellipses and random question marks — yes. Periods — no. Here’s what I mean. A lawyer stands up to make a presentation to colleagues, an opening statement or a motion to a judge. She states her topic or theme, often (but far from always) in a single sentence. And then, she’s off to “The Land of the Never-Ending Sentence.” There isn’t a period to be heard for minutes on end: “Mrs. X has been afraid for her life since the night her husband stabbed her with a kitchen knife.” (This is the complete sentence.) “Mr. X had threatened her on numerous occasions, and the police had been … uh … called to their residence more than once and in 2009 alone officers were called by … uh … by either a neighbor or the caretaker of the condos or even by Mr. X himself … uh … on one occasion, and so she has been scared and worried, especially for the … um … effect of the potential violence on her two young daughters, who she sent away to live with her … um … sister.” And so on and on … and on. Eventually, the story emerges from the thicket of verbal litter. Participles dangle, prepositional phrases attach themselves, as if by their own accord, to the

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