June 2005

I’ve always been a smiling lawyer.  During the later round of my first year moot court competition (where I made it, out of 80 students, to the finals!), one of the judges told me that he appreciated my smile when I started my argument and since then, I’ve always smiled in court, to juries and…

All of us solo and small firm lawyers have experience with those “dog” cases that drive us crazy and often lose us money in the process.  This article, Spotting the Losers, James McElhaney (ABA Journal June 2005) offers some ways to clear the duds off your desk – or pass off cases that may…

Have you ever sat down and calculated how much it costs per hour to run your law office?  I haven’t (though I know what my overhead and expenses are from my tax returns, just haven’t reduced them to an hourly rate).  Yet it seems that most of us ought to know that number off the…

Via Matt Homann comes this very cool marketing tip:  set yourself up in you local coffee store for a designated hour where anyone can sit down and ask a question about your area of expertise.  And, as an added bonus, coffee for anyone in the store is on you for that hour.  (That is if…

When I put up this post about the ethics of collecting a profit on fees paid to contract attorneys, I didn’t include my own thoughts because my views are mixed.

From an ethical perspective, I’m fairly certain there’s no problem with the practice, so long as overall rates are reasonable.  In fact, the entire large…

Sometimes I just know that I’ve been practicing solo too long.  One reason?  I’ve completely forgotten how to converse in “partner-ese,” that obscure language used between partners and associates where associates must read between lines, jump through hoops and do everything else short of just asking direct and time saving questions.

Consider these encounters described…

Fellow small firm lawyer and former solo, David Leffler takes readers on a trip in the Solo Time Machine (GPSolo Magazine – June 2005), revisiting key moments in the history of the Internet.  David recalls 1995 – the first year that he put an email address on his stationary (I put email on my business…

Pat Yevics, who heads the Maryland State Bar Asssociation’s Law Office Management Assistance (LOMA) Program recently launched the LOMA blog, putting her in good company with law practice specialists Reid Trautz (DC) and Jim Calloway (OK).  The bars’ law practice management offices are one of the best developments that I’ve seen to assist solo and…