Make Tomorrow E-Mail Free
How about implementing "No E-Mail Fridays" at your office? Check out this ABC News article to learn why it may be a good idea.
Talk Really Isn't Cheap
Lisa Hanneberg writes about the high cost of communication. Required reading (if you've got the time) before you send out that next e-mail to 50 people or schedule that next two-hour meeting. If you haven't got time for the whole post, just think about this:
If your department budget was charged $100 for every minute you spentcommunicating, would you choose your words more wisely? It is likelythat the costs are that high or higher.
Join Me March 8th for a Teleseminar
I'd like you to join me for a teleseminar on March 8th, titled: Think Real BIG -- Ten Creative Strategies for Building an Innovative Law Practice. It is part of the online-only Career & Practice Development Conference.
I will share ten unique and easy-to-implement strategies to help you create an innovative, service-centered law practice that you'll love as much as your clients do.
The teleseminar takes place from 1:00 - 2:00 pm EST and the cost is $59.00. You can register here.
Lawyers Appreciate ...
Last week Gerry Riskin asked me to write a post that begins with the words “Lawyers Appreciate” (the idea was originally conceived here). Here’s mine:
Lawyers Appreciate Gifts. Here are three things I’d like to (belatedly) give all my lawyer friends for the holidays:
1. A family who loves them.
2. A community who respects them.
3. Great clients who pay them.
And if I didn’t spend all my budget on those three things, I’d add four more:
4. One hour each day to dream about how they’d make their business better.
5. The courage to try the things they’ve thought up.
6. The wisdom to ignore those who say those things can’t be done.
7. Friends like Gerry to cheer them on.
17 Lawyer Tips: A Mini Manifesto
After writing 15 Client Tips: A Mini Manifesto, I figured that turnabout is fair play. Here are 17 for Lawyers:
1. Whenever your clients don’t understand what you are doing for them, they think about what you are doing to them.
2. Many of your clients remain your clients because it is a pain in the ass to find another laywer – not because they love you.
3. Every time your clients get your bill, they think about how beautiful your office is and about the nice car you drive. And they wonder if you are worth it.
4. If your office is a dump and you drive a wreck, they wonder about that too.
5. If your client doesn’t pay you, fire them. Don’t ignore them.
6. At least once a year, tell a client, “It’s on the house.”
7. Taking a client to play golf doesn’t show how good a lawyer you are. It shows how good a golfer you are.
8. Quit being a pompous, demanding jerk around the office. If you can’t keep good staff, you don’t deserve good clients.
9. Your clients will always know their business better than you do. They may even know the law better than you. Make sure to seek their advice before giving yours.
10. A lawyer charging extra for stamps and copies is like a car wash charging extra for water. Stop it now.
11. Your clients have wants. Your clients have needs. They often don’t know the difference.
12. Whenever you interrupt a client meeting to take an “important” call, your client thinks about hiring another lawyer.
13. Imagine a world where your clients knew each month how much their bill from you will be so they could plan for it. They do.
14. If you hate being a lawyer, be something else. You are smart. You’ll figure it out.
15. A bill is not communication. At least not the good kind.
16. When is the last time you called a client just to thank them for being your client? That’s what I thought.
17. People don’t tell lawyer jokes just because they are funny. They tell lawyer jokes because they think they are true. Spend your career proving them wrong.
LexThinking Again 2.0
Dennis, JoAnna and I are working on a few new LexThink! events. The one that’s almost ready for prime time is described here in Dennis’ post. Check it out.
Right Way Writing
Dumb Little Man has compiled a list of 50 Writing Tools from Poynter Online. If you write at all, it is worth your time to check out some of the Poynter articles. An amazing resource!
Get Your Lawyers to Use Technology
Here’s an interesting tip to spur firm-wide adoption of new technology: Cut Off Non-Adopter’s E-Mail.
Make Someone Else's 'Employee of the Month' Yours
Gerry Riskin and Michelle Golden have been talking about the importance of having a great receptionist. Having had two amazing secretary/receptionists (Janelle and Sandy, thank you!) in my last two jobs, I second (third?) this sentiment.
Now, how do you find that perfect receptionist? Here are some tips on recruiting great retail employees, from a blog I’ve just moved from “probation” to my regular reads called Just Looking, that may give you some ideas:
Find the Employee of the Month wall in the retailer. Normally this is back near the offices in a hallway that is accessible by the public. Write down the names of the last 6 people who won, and then go find them in the store. Walk up and congratulate them on winning and ask why they got the award. You might have a great conversation that could end with "Here is my card, if your interested in examining other opportunities give me a call"
Look at stores that are not in your industry. Too often, sales managers will only recruit from of retailers like themselves. I found great luck recruiting in retailers outside of my industry. Blockbuster Video was a great place to recruit entry level sales and customer service reps. Anyone who walked out from around the counter to ask me if they could help me find something, got my attention and my card.
Always Be Recruiting. Don't ever stop, because you never know when you might run across someone that would be a great member of your team. I can remember two instances of this happening. One was when I was out to dinner with some friends. The waitress was amazing and during our chatter I found out she was looking for a part time job. I ended up hiring her for for the holiday season and we both were very satisfied with her 4 month stay. The other instance was when I answered the phone and a telemarketer began his pitch on the other end. It was one of those telemarketers that didn't give up at the first no, but kept the tone very light hearted. He came in and interviewed for a full time position.
Recruit for the right traits not just sales skills. There is no way you will ever be able to evaluate a potential recruits selling skills effectively but you can get a good feel for their passion and enthusiasm. My goal when recruiting is to find someone who is outgoing, passionate and enthusiastic about what they are selling. I can't teach passion but I can teach someone with passion how to channel it into selling better.
Set a Recruiting Goal when you go out. If you head out to go recruiting without a goal, all you will get is 2 to 4 hours of walking around. Set a goal of coming back with 4 to 5 names to call and at least 2 business card drops. A business card drop is when you introduce yourself and give them your card with a suggestion they call you. The list of names are of people who you will call later that day and invite them to come in for an interview.
Keep a People Pool. Don't toss out information from old interviews. Make a file and keep it around for later job opportunities. You never know when a position will open that might be perfect for someone you didn't consider before.
Network with other Sales Managers. Find sales manager in other stores that do not compete with you directly. They might be interviewing a candidate that needs more hours or income then they can afford, that might be perfect for your job. A lunch, once a month with a few of these other sales managers could help you locate the people you need. Who knows, maybe they might have a current employee who is looking for a change that is the perfect recruit.
Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me ...
Michael McDonough has an article in the Design Observer titled The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School that made me think he was actually writing about Law School. Here are a few:
1. Talent is one-third of the success equation. Talent is important in any profession, but it is no guarantee of success. Hard work and luck are equally important. Hard work means self-discipline and sacrifice. Luck means, among other things, access to power, whether it is social contacts or money or timing. In fact, if you are not very talented, you can still succeed by emphasizing the other two. If you think I am wrong, just look around.
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work. Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance. Overconfidence is as bad as no confidence. Be humble in approaching problems. Realize and accept your ignorance, then work diligently to educate yourself out of it. Ask questions. Power – the power to create things and impose them on the world – is a privilege. Do not abuse it, do not underestimate its difficulty, or it will come around and bite you on the ass. The great Karmic wheel, however slowly, turns.
10. The rest of the world counts. If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was “If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.” Not a single person from that school that I know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it. Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time.
I’d love to get a list of those things you wish they’d taught in school, but never did. Leave a comment, e-mail me, or trackback to this post and I’ll compile them all for a future post.
The Myth of the "Short" Meeting
In practice, I always preferred a face-to-face meeting with my clients to a telephone conversation or an exchange of correspondence. I believed in-person conversations were much more effective and better for both client and lawyer — and still do. However, it is important to keep in mind the true costs (to the lawyer and client) of that “short” meeting. From 37signals:
If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it’s probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.
Remember how valuable your clients’ time is. Though you may not think their time is worth as much as yours, at the end of the meeting, neither of you will get that time back.
technorati tags: meetings, productivity, client+service
Computer Programs I Want: ToDo-per Scooper
Saw this about scheduling productivity “dashes” on 43 Folders, and had this thought:
Say you’ve got 10 (30, 200?) items on your To-Do list, and you are so overwhelmed, you don’t know where to start. What you need is a Random Task Generator, (alternative title “ToDo-per Scooper”). Here’s how it would work:
1. It would take the list of your to-do’s, either inputed directly or scoured (scooped?) from your Outlook tasks list, along with the estimated amount of time you think each task will take.
2. It would automatically add 50% more time to your estimate (to account for innacurate and overly-optimistic estimating).
3. Whenever you set aside a certain amount of time on your calendar for non-specific task completion, it would fill in that time with a randomly-selected To-Do (or To-Do’s) that fit the time you set aside.
4. The randomness could be changed to give more weight to more important tasks — kind of like adding more balls for the bad teams in the NBA lottery.
BONUS: If this feature were incorporated into an enterprise-wide calendaring and task-management program (legal software vendors, are you listening?), the business could set aside an hour each day when everyone could get access to a fresh set of to-do’s to complete in that hour. I think it could make the whole enterprise more productive.
Anyone want to build this application with me? Or is it already out there?
technorati tags: productivity, procrastination, lifehacks, software, web2.0
Be Ready to Leave Your Best Message
Here’s a great tip to keep in mind next time you call a client:
Prepare for every telephone call expecting to get voicemail. This will help you focus your message and prevent rambling. You should treat your voicemail message as a short presentation, thinking it through ahead of time, not during the recording…
From this 1999 Report, via 43 Folders.
Know What You Don't Know
Ben Folds, from the song “Bastard” on Songs for Silverman:
“Why you got to act like you know when you don’t know?”
How many of us are afraid to admit to a client that we, “just don’t know” the answer? Ben Folds would suggest:
“It’s OK if you don’t know everything.”
It really is. Next time you don’t know, say you don’t know. Your clients may appreciate your candor.
Lessons for Ford, and for Lawyers
In The Truth About Cars, Robert Farago offers up his prescription for an ailing Ford:
You want bold moves? Kill Jaguar. Kill Mercury. Sell Volvo. Sell Mazda. Sell Land Rover. Cut half the remaining models and plow money into the ones that survive. Re-invigorate your rear-wheel drive, box-frame car with new sheetmetal, a bad-ass motor and a killer cabin. Build a world-beating Lincoln luxury sedan. Make the Ford Focus the world’s best small car. Get the Explorer’s mileage into the mid-20’s. Develop a more powerful engine than the Hemi and stick it into everything-- including a new minivan. Set SVT loose on the entire model line-up. OWN quality interiors. Don't badge engineer ANYTHING.
Lose the glass fishbowl; redesign Ford showrooms to look like a modern retail outlet. Trim the dealer network and sell cars on the web. Undercut everyone’s price with every vehicle. Interact with every single customer on a regular basis via internet. Institute no-haggle pricing. Make financing cheaper. Drop 80% of your print budget and dominate the web. Do it all, and do it all at once-- regardless of cost. Then sell value for money. Ford: the best car money can buy.
Imagine a big law firm (or any law firm) making similar moves. What would that advice be, and what would the resulting law firm look like?
Deposition Tips
It has been over 18 months since I’ve taken a deposition, so I’ll pass this one on for what it is worth: Take Great Notes from LifeHacker. Some great tips for general notetaking, and a few that would work well for depositions. For instance:
[U]se a simple system of symbols to make off 4 different information types in the column space left in the margin.
- [ ] A square checkbox denotes a to do item
- ( ) A circle indicates a task to be assigned to someone else
- * An asterisk is an important fact
- ? A question mark goes next to items to research or ask about
After the meeting, a quick vertical scan of the margin area makes it easy to add tasks to your to do list and calendar, send out requests to others, and further research questions. (This method is the brainchild of Michael Hyatt, someone who clearly has mastered the art of attending meetings.)
Time Alone for the Zone
Jason Fried has some great advice on how to get into the zone:
Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy. It’s like rem sleep – you don’t just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.
One tip to help you create some alone time is… Set up a rule at work: Make half the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first or the last half of the day the alone time period. Just make sure this period is contiguous in order to avoid productivity-killing interruptions.
How much more work would your business get done if you set aside “zone” time.
Is it all the same thing?
Will lawyers ever realize that it is all the same thing:
We don’t spend 2 hours every day on marketing, we spend all day on marketing. We don’t spend 1 hour every day figuring out the best way to communicate what our products do, we spend all day figuring out the best way to communicate what our products do. We don’t spend 3 hours on interface design, we spend all day on interface design.
When the edges are blurred, and one thing is many things, you can achieve so much more with less time, effort, and people.
Good work for clients is marketing. Sending a fair bill is client service. Returning telephone calls and e-mails is relationship building. It is all the same thing. Go read the original post and the comments. Great Stuff!
Only Make Smart Mistakes
Steve Pavlina sets out 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed. They are a worthwhile read (go to the post for his explanation of each), even if you’ve been self-employed for a long time. I know I still make a few of these stupid mistakes. How about you?
1. Selling to the wrong people.
2. Spending too much money.
3. Spending too little money.
4. Putting on a fake front.
5. Assuming a signed contract will be honored.
6. Going against your intuition.
7. Being too formal.
8. Sacrificing your personality quirks.
9. Failing to focus on value creation.
10. Failing to optimize.
Does More Time Equal More Money?
Here’s How to Have a 36 Hour Day. Now, for you lawyers out there, leave in the comments section your suggestions on How to Bill a 36 Hour Day.