There is a common aphorism that often gets applied to life that goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. And it’s true in many cases. In good times, many businesses can see great returns, and the economy and emotional spirit of both large and small groups or populations of people can be elevated. But these past few years have been different. We are coming out of a really trying time, but something we have heard reiterated time and time again is that through challenging times, a firm's branding and marketing efforts become critical.

More importantly, when the going gets tough, the need to heavily rely on data to gain insights and direction becomes even more important as well. To be able to gauge trends and monitor consumer patterns is how firms will thrive through the chaos. For example, law firms that were marketing in 2020 saw a big drop in revenue in Q2, similar to firms who did not market, but, their leads and overall numbers were higher than they were in 2019 prior to the pandemic. And then into Q3 and Q4, they remained ahead of their previous years' numbers. The idea here is that although there were fewer people searching for legal services during the height of the pandemic, the jobs won went to firms that were consistently marketing.

Visibility and Searchability

The way people are finding law firms, especially via their websites, is significantly more fragmented than it has been. This fragmentation is primarily the result of the omnichannel environment we live in today. On any given day, you have people surfing Facebook, Google, local newspaper listings, online newsletters, podcasts, radio, the list goes on and on. The bottom line here is your potential clients are finding your firm in a lot of different ways.

Create and Highlight Content

Traffic from social media almost doubled in that second quarter during the pinnacle of quarantine, and surprisingly enough, it stayed almost 4% higher throughout the rest of the year than it did in 2019. We are seeing more traffic come from people on social media than ever before. And not only are these people spending more time on social media, but they are also actually taking the next step and going to law firm websites. The strategy here indicates that you need to be in more places online and the easiest way to achieve this is by producing content. Some of you may have read that and felt a wave of panic but don’t worry! When you begin thinking about this content, think about the content your firm would be best at producing; the areas of expertise your attorneys, firm administrators, paralegals and the like possess and capitalize on that! And utilize your ability to repurpose that same content in other areas as well. For example, if you have a blog, consider using that material and making it a video.

Another thing to think about in terms of your content is highlighting and marketing all the technological advancements you have at your firm. If you utilize practice management software, publicize your ability to take online payments, publicize your client portal, automation capabilities, easy intake process, etc. All of those things are advancements that potential clients will look at and cross-compare against other firms, so use it to your advantage! Being able to highlight your customer experience improvements will only serve to benefit you.

Utilize the Internet

Search engine optimization is not going anywhere, in fact, it is driving more and more traffic to law firms. If you think about all the effort you put into gaining referral partners, whether it’s getting on the phone with potential businesses, sending thank you gifts, those couple rounds of golf, all the things you do to establish those relationships. Now think about how much time you're putting in the largest referral partner you have, which is Google? The benefit of Google is that most users are searching for something already. They are looking for an answer or help so not only will they be more reliable, but they will be more willing to work with you to get their problem solved.

Let’s walk through a hypothetical example. Take an estate planning firm, typically, they do a lot of in-person events to drive potential new clients and they really emphasize the need and highly encourage clients to come in for consultations. Well, in almost the blink of an eye, the world shifted to operating online. And now, the first consultation is a Zoom meeting, and those in-person events have transformed or disappeared entirely. So what happens now? In this case, the firm would need to change their website to support online intake and then direct the potential new client to a calendar scheduling tool to seamlessly book the meeting. With this shift, you can now market the efficiencies of this new online process and emphasize the benefits of putting time back in your client's day by reducing commutes and streamlining the intake process.

Ultimately, all the things you are doing to help your law firm be more efficient and effective are also the way your clients want to work. So remind them of the pain of doing things the “old” way and market your services as ones that meet their new needs.

The Intake Process

Now that we have gone through some marketing strategies, let’s think about the ways that you can connect and hopefully get those new clients to contact and hire you. The next challenge that many firms face is how to manage the intake process. How do you manage the volume of calls and digital messages coming in? The issue that arises here is that there is a finite number of hours in the day, but clients don’t care about that, they want a response as soon as possible. And the sad reality is, people are impatient, if they don’t hear back on their time frame, they will find another firm who will.

The pandemic has obviously caused a lot of disruptions. But what has that meant for attorneys and firms? What solutions have been implemented to improve the client intake experience and ensure that responses are efficient and uniform?

System Dependency

Overall, the best way to maintain an elevated client experience is to be system-dependent and not owner or operator-dependent. Think about the lack of availability you may have on a day-to-day basis, between your personal and professional life, handling operations, HR, administrative tasks, everything that you have on your to-do list leaves very little time to handle those inbound inquiries that come to you. You still want to be responsive to both your existing and current clients, but also to your potential new clients and referrals. It is really critical that you set up systems that can be responsive for you, and bring in the technology and the talent that is on your front line. What we saw last year was a lot of people quickly added new technologies that acted like a bandaid or patch. And now what we’re seeing today is as people begin to recover, they notice the holes that they patched and they want to make it look better. They want to make it look great because after all, it is the reputation of their firm that is at stake.

Easy Automation

Making it easy for PNCs to select an available time for a consult without disrupting your day-to-day is the easiest first step to enhance your client experience with minimal effort. Not only will this calendaring automation speed up that first initial contact with the client, but it frees up your staff and it is easy to manage with minimal training in the case that you do need your receptionist or team to step in and intervene. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that everyone faced disruption this past year. So while you’re working hard throughout the day, your clients are too. Sometimes, it isn’t until 10 PM at night when a PNC will come home and have the brain space to think about those divorce papers, mergers, settlements, etc. So giving people the silent comfort of choosing availability on their time is priceless. And we are not saying that you have to answer your cell phone and email at all times of the day, but you do have to be responsive.

The next piece of this intake process revolves around legal workflow automation. The reason why legal workflow automation exists is that law firms needed to find a way to reduce the administrative tasks their attorneys take on and give them more time to focus on creating billable hours. Let's walk through some examples... when a PNC gets created, you can use a workflow to automatically alert your team that work needs to be done. You can automatically schedule a conflict check, confirm that the PNC's data is entered correctly, and verify that your attorneys can take on the workload. Not only is this eliminating inefficiencies, but it is increasing team communication, and enhancing your client services. You can also eliminate the monotonous task of creating letters of engagement or other documents with document merge. This allows you to automatically generate a document based on fields within Centerbase instead of manually typing each document and filling in the respective detail. You can create the initial template and set which information fields you want to be pulled to populate the document.

Legal workflow automation is meant to help create efficiencies and reduce human error. If you're not adopting these technologies or working with software that enables your firm, you're doing yourself and your clients a disservice. If you’re curious to learn more about this, check out this video.

The ways we are consuming and interacting with each other as consumers and businesses have changed a lot in response to the disruption of the pandemic.

Communication Expectations

A lot of what has changed in the last two years has been expectations. Today, clients are fully expecting that you guide and steer the process. So you must ask yourself, how do you make sure that you’re delivering on what the client needs? How are you producing content and answers on all the channels that you operate and are publicly available online? Every platform your brand is listed on needs to uphold the same level of responsiveness. And it’s not just about the speed, it’s about the quality of content. One of the main reasons clients won’t move forward with a firm is because they don’t get the answers they’re expecting. Easily combat this by proactively anticipating the commonly asked questions. Time is thin right now, and if you think about the importance of lead screening and qualification, not everyone is going to be a good fit for your firm. So it is one thing to get out in front and be responsive but you also don’t want to be taking consultations with just anyone on the internet who finds your firm and books your time.

The 2 Keys to Success

So after all of this, what are some of the most successful law firms doing when it comes to their intake process? Well, two things come to mind… the first is when you’re system dependent, you have to be constantly checking and monitoring those systems. That is simply a good habit that is just a matter of professional responsibility. It may not say it very specifically in the bar rules, but triple-check that when someone calls your firm the phone is answered and to your liking. Make sure that when someone sends an email and you have generated automated responses that the email is being triggered how you want it to, that it is being received, and that it also reflects the brand and voice of your firm. There are a lot of systems that are only being set up once and then forgotten and never checked again. Because of this, a lot of business is lost because no one has been assigned to that voice mailbox or that email account. If you don’t check them, that is a blindspot that is aiding a loss on investment for all your marketing efforts and all the other energy you’re putting into promoting and advertising your firm.

The second thing that successful firms are doing is following up with those individuals who reach out. This step can often distinguish the haves and have nots. What happens is the more you follow up (to a certain limit), the higher the payoff. Six points of contact are about the threshold here. Statistically, if you’re following up only once, we know that about 50% or slightly less of your inbound calls are being answered. There is so much distraction and noise these days that if you’re not following up multiple times, your message won’t be heard. It’s as simple as that. Depending on the practice area that you operate in, that will also really set the cadence. So when you ask, “How often should I follow up?” You have to take note of who your clientele is. If you are in personal injury, high-end estate, or intellectual property, you should be following up a lot sooner. Don’t give up and throw in the towel until the person has told you they have made the decision one way or another. That type of chase is incredibly beneficial to the bottom line.

The events of 2020 and their impact on our lives will not be soon forgotten. Like other businesses, the legal industry is seeing changes to its landscape as we move forward in 2021. In general, law firms weather downturns in the economy better than most, but there is nonetheless a change in the areas where attorneys will be most needed. With some forethought, attorneys and firms can proactively prepare for the changes ahead. By combining this preparation with an intentional focus on client service, you will find success.

 

Practice Area Growth

While attorneys will always be needed, we have seen some areas of practice on the rise while others have suffered over the past year. Practice areas that have seen the most significant growth include:

 

1. Family Law. Many families have suffered a breakdown through the COVID crisis. Contributing factors include isolation and financial stress.

 

2. Mergers & Acquisitions. Through the financial challenges businesses have faced during the crisis, there has been an uptick in companies considering changes that they would not have considered in the past.

 

3. Banking. Through the PPP loan opportunities and later PPP investigations, banking practices have seen a significant increase.

 

4. Employment Law. As many individuals have lost their jobs due to the financial challenges businesses have experienced, there has been an increase in employment-related wrongful termination claims.

 

5. Bankruptcy. The unfortunate end result of the health crisis has been bankruptcy for many businesses and individuals.

 

6. Insurance. There has been an increase in insurance practices as a result of bad faith claims and insurance fraud committed in an attempt to make up for lost income, as well as disability claims as a result of COVID-related illnesses.

 

 

Practice Area Decline

Practices who focus on foreclosures have suffered the most during the COVID crisis. By using what they know about banking and finance, attorneys and firms that practiced in the foreclosure business previously can pivot in a natural transition to banking and bankruptcy practices.

 

You Have Decided to Change or Add Practice Areas. Now What?

If your firm has decided it needs to move into another practice area, you may be wondering where to start. There are many things to consider.

 

Know Your Why 

What are you trying to accomplish by adding a new practice area to your firm? Do you have a strategic plan in place defining your one-, three-, and ten-year goals? There are many questions you may want to consider:

 

1. Why are you adding a new practice area?
2. Does the practice area fit into your strategic plan?
3. Do you have attorneys in place who are already experienced in the practice area?
4. How will adding the practice area impact your firm and its culture?
5. What will the timeline be for getting the new area up and running?
6. What is the projected cost for implementation and training?

 

Understand the Needs of the Practice Area and the Subcategories that Fall Under It

Most practice areas have a wide range of legal matters that fall under them. Consider family law, for example. There are divorce, custody, child and spousal support, settlement negotiations, litigation, premarital agreements, protective orders, and others. Some areas, such as employment and personal injury practices, typically require you to choose whether you want to be a plaintiff practice or a defense practice. You need to define the scope of matters you intend to cover once you have chosen a practice area so that your internal and external clients will understand what you do.

In addition to giving all interested parties a clear understanding of what you do, having a specific definition of the scope of your practice will help you in multiple areas. It will allow you to:

 

• Identify existing clients who may be potential clients for the new practice area;
• Know what potential clients to accept and which ones to refer elsewhere;
• Tailor your marketing to the appropriate audience;
• Structure your internal systems efficiently;
• Clearly define what protocols need to be added to existing procedures;
• Determine how cases or matters will be staffed;
• Identify needed training and plan for change management;
• Determine how you can use technology to your advantage.

 

Identify Clients In Your New Practice Area

It is important to have systems in place for internal communication so that your partners can share information for existing clients who may be served in your new practice area. It is surprising how many firms have corporate clients who are unaware that the firm offers services that the client is currently getting from another firm. In addition, knowing the scope of services you intend to offer in this new practice will allow you to train all internal stakeholders on the types of matters you will and will not accept.

 

Tailor Your Marketing to the Appropriate Audience

When you know who your desired clients are, you know how you need to structure your marketing plan. A plaintiff’s personal injury firm is going to be marketing to an entirely different audience than a personal injury defense firm, and their marketing strategy will be very different.

 

Structure Your Internal Systems

Begin by identifying the similarities your new practice area has with an existing area, where procedures can follow the same protocol. Once those items have been identified, look for other processes that will take place in this new area that will be similar across all or most of the matters and create procedures, processes, and forms for those tasks. Part of this process should include identifying how each task will be staffed. By carefully identifying your legal services in each practice area and setting up procedures and protocols for each task with team members assigned appropriately, you will develop an efficient and well-oiled machine.

 

Identify Training Needs 

Once the processes have been identified, you will need to determine where your current staff is lacking in knowledge, skills, and abilities so that you can either train existing attorneys and staff or add new hires. Bear in mind that change is scary and difficult for people, and managing change effectively will help make it easier for everyone.

 

Determine How You Can Use Technology To Your Advantage

You have identified processes and procedures that need to take place with your new practice area. Do you have the technology in place to make those systems work efficiently?

Technology offers us many opportunities to provide exemplary service to our clients. Using good practice management and time & billing software means that you can:

 

• Keep a clear and accurate record of the progress of each case;
• Effectively collaborate with the other attorneys and staff in your firm;
• Keep an effective tickler system of reminders with due dates and dates to reach out to each client so that nothing falls through the cracks;
• Provide clear, accurate, and timely billing to your clients each month.

 

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained 

They say the greater the risk, the greater the reward. Whether you want to add an additional area of practice to your firm or change your practice entirely, with some careful planning you can have a successful transition, and your team will learn a lot of valuable lessons along the way.

 

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Many people are resistant to change. Oftentimes, that resistance comes down to two factors: the fear of loss or the fear of having to adopt new processes. Whatever the reason may be, change is often the inhibitor preventing innovation and improvement.

With this in mind, ask yourself this, if change is necessary for the advancement of society and businesses alike, how can you help your firm embrace the change that will help improve your business?

There are three types of change that impact our firms.

1. People-related changes can be a change in the duties of an individual or position, promotions, new hires, terminations.
2. Process-related changes include changing procedures, protocols, workflows.
3. Tool changes that involve changing technology and or equipment.

Regardless of the type of change, people fear they are losing something. To address those fears and have as smooth a transition as possible, there are steps you can take to encourage your firm members that you are taking the matter seriously and working to ensure the change is made for the good of all. Let's take a look.

Identifying the Need for Change

Firms who have a clear strategic plan and clear vision of where they are going will find it easiest to identify where change is needed. By identifying where you want your firm to be in ten or five or three years, you can assess external and internal environments and determine what challenges are going to interfere with your goals and what changes you need to make to overcome those challenges. 

For firms who do not have a clear strategic plan and vision (don’t feel bad if this is you, as this is the majority!), the need for change is often ignored until there is a financial loss that is impacting the firm in a negative way. By ignoring the need for change, a firm will eventually lose its competitiveness in today’s market, impacting its bottom line, and then there will be a scramble to make the necessary changes to overcome the challenge. This reactive instead of proactive approach creates a firm environment that can be unsettling for its members, and the more you can work toward becoming a firm that is proactive, the better off you will be. 

Enlist the Buy-In and Support of Leadership

Without the buy-in and support of leadership, any attempt at change will be a challenge. Firm employees are intelligent people, and if they are reporting to a partner who is not on board with a change, they will see it, and they will follow suit. You will not get the entire firm steering your ship in the same direction if your leadership is not all turning the wheel in the same direction.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

When considering a change in your firm, it is important to communicate early and often. Do not assume that leadership discussions stay within the upper ranks. There will always be a partner who trusts their long-time staffer with management information, and before you know it the rumor mill is buzzing. With the exception of people changes that are inappropriate to share, it is important to communicate with your firm members. Today’s technology allows for such communication in a face-to-face environment even if you are not all in the same location. One communication with everyone at the same time is ideal so that everyone receives the same message. 

What if, after communication among firm members or while still on the leadership level of communication, you discover the issue is not yet ripe for change, but you know it is important to your firm’s long-term vision? Do not despair. Over time, you can gently move communication in a direction that it becomes ripe for change. 

Involve All Stakeholders in the Process

We already know that humans do not like change. How can we help them overcome their fears? Part of the communication process involves including all stakeholders in the process. Consider a technology change, for example. Who are your end users? How will they use the product? Do you know all the ways in which they use your current system and what their needs or wishes are for a future product?

When it comes to technology, there are many reasons for change, but the most important reason is to meet the expectations of our clients. Clients today want efficiency, transparency, service delivery, and technological savvy from their law firms. While this is what your external stakeholders want, your internal stakeholders may be harder to convince. Where do you start?

1. Communicate the reason for the needed change.
2. Query your end users on their needs.
3. Create an implementation team that includes stakeholders from every level of your firm.
4. Help the team to make data-driven decisions.
5. Manage resistance. Hold subtle conversations, listen, and promote discussion. Ask “how do we make this work?”

Identify Benchmarks for Evaluation ROI

Follow-through is important. If your firm has a habit of implementing changes but not following through on them – saying we are going to do things one way, then finding it doesn’t work and going back to the old ways that don’t work – eventually you will not be taken seriously. If firm members see you taking change seriously for the greater good and evaluating what went right and what went wrong, they will be on board with you. 

By knowing what you hope to accomplish at the beginning of your project, you can easily identify benchmarks of improvement that the change is meant to accomplish. Once the change has been made, are these benchmarks being met? Things don’t always work out as we had hoped, and that is okay. It is also okay for your firm members to see that you are not afraid to try and fail – it will encourage everyone to be a change agent looking for ways to improve for the greater good without fear of failure. 

Some examples for positive changes you might see from a change in technology, for example:

• Attorneys now able to enter their own time efficiently and easily;
• Improved and more efficient billing process;
• Ability to easily save all documents and emails to a client file;
• Ability to track activity in a client file;
• Ability to track deadlines in a client file;
• Ability to log into a client file regardless of where you are located.

By identifying similar benchmarks for what you hope your change will accomplish, you can easily pinpoint what worked and what didn’t. By allowing your firm members to participate in these processes, the changes necessary for the growth of your firm will have a much better chance at being successful.

The Takeaway

Change can be hard, but without it, your firm will lack the progress and development needed to stay relevant in a very competitive industry.

With the continuing change in the landscape for law firms, it is increasingly important for firms to understand where their most profitable areas of practice lie. Gone are the days of multi-generational client loyalty. As a result, firms must hone their skills and identify the areas that are most beneficial in adding to the bottom line. Regardless of how altruistic your firm’s core values are, without a profitable business, you will be unable to support your clients or your employees.

There are multiple metrics a firm can monitor to ensure financial success. Having good billing protocols is a good place to start. Once those procedures are functioning well, you can accurately identify which areas of practice are most beneficial to your firm. Knowing where you should be focusing your assets (time) allows you to strategically make decisions on what cases to accept and what cases should be declined or referred out.

Identify Your Practice Areas

Begin this process by identifying the practice areas in which your firm most often practices, and ensure they are entered into your billing system. Using a billing system that allows you to identify practice areas and run reports quickly and efficiently is an important piece of this process. The identification of practice area should be a part of your client intake protocol to ensure that cases are properly identified at the outset.

Identify Departments

Depending on firm size, there are different ways to go about the identification of departments. If your firm typically has specific attorneys and staff working in each practice area, it is intuitive to define your departments by practice area. You may have a real estate department, a civil litigation department, a criminal litigation department, and a corporate department, for example.

If most of your attorneys are working across multiple areas of practice, you may want to define your departments by supervising attorney rather than by practice area. This will allow you to determine whether profitability is impacted by practice area or by managing attorney, for example.

Start Monitoring Your Metrics

Once you have identified the practice areas you want to track and how you would like to divide your billable timekeepers (attorneys and paralegals) into departments, you can start monitoring the revenue you are seeing from each practice area and department. By putting your clients into buckets of practice areas, you can:

1. Identify the average Client Acquisition Costs (CAC) for each practice area;
2. Identify the average Client Lifetime Value (LTV) for each practice area;
3. Determine the net revenue for each practice area;
4. Determine the overall profitability for each department.

Client Acquisition Costs (CAC)

The cost to acquire a client may be different depending on the practice area. Your physical injury cases may come to you through television advertising, which is going to have a different cost than your probate clients, who may come to you through word of mouth. By identifying your client acquisition costs by practice area, you can get a more accurate evaluation of the true profitability of each case type.

Client Lifetime Value (LTV)

Likewise, the lifetime value of a matter is going to be different by practice area. As is the case with acquisition costs, by identifying your average lifetime value by practice area, you can drill down even further on profitability by case type.

Net Revenue By Practice Area

Once you have calculated the average acquisition cost and lifetime value for your cases by practice area, you can determine an overall average net revenue for each area. This does not take into account the costs of your timekeepers or firm overhead – this is strictly net revenue after taking into account the cost to acquire the matter. For example:

Net Revenue By Department

Once you have calculated the net revenue by practice area, you can break things down even further to determine your revenue by department. In this calculation, you add in the direct costs of your timekeepers in each department.

To begin, you need to have calculated the hourly cost for each of your timekeepers. By knowing what it costs for each of your timekeepers to work one hour, you can calculate their costs in each practice area by running a report showing total hours billed by practice area or department. In the example below, the firm’s departments are identified by practice area:

Using What You Have Learned

Now that you know what it costs your firm to conduct business by practice area and department, how can you use this information?

1. Narrow your focus. Knowing where your firm is most successful financially, you can use this information to focus more on the areas that help to meet your financial goals.
2. Better identify your firm’s mission and vision. Using this information can help to bring clarity to what you are doing. Having clarity will help everyone in your firm to perform better!
3. Learn to say no. Once you have decided on the areas on which you will focus, learn the difficult task of saying no. Taking work that does not benefit your firm will only create a financial loss and take focus of your valuable assets (your attorneys) away from the work they should be doing. That doesn’t mean you can’t take on loss leaders if you think they will bring value in other ways, but you can be more intentional about those decisions.
4. Identify who should be performing what tasks and delegate accordingly. If there are areas of practice that you do not want to give up but you see that the current timekeepers performing the work do not allow you to be profitable in those areas, how can you change that? Are there younger associate attorneys who can handle the tasks currently being performed by senior associates or partners? Are associates performing tasks that could be performed by paralegals? Have you considered the option of using of counsel or part-time attorneys for some areas? The options are endless once you have the knowledge to make informed decisions.

By identifying these important metrics for your law firm, your firm can become more profitable, and your attorneys will be more fulfilled and effective with an improved clarity of focus.

What does it mean to have an international deposition? This simply means that the witness will be in a foreign country. However, in this new virtual reality we're in, there are new challenges and components that we didn't have to deal with before. Between juggling the complexities of international depositions, paired with the logistical and tactical struggles of video conferencing, you will have a lot on your plate.

As you begin navigating this process, there are some basic steps you should be taking that will hopefully make your depositions run as smoothly as possible. Let's check them out.

Steps to Conduct an International Deposition

Step 1

Leading up to an international deposition, it is recommended that 4-6 weeks prior to the deposition date, you determine whether the witness is even willing to be deposed and immediately begin coordinating with the opposing counsel. 

Cooperative Opposing Counsel 

If you have a good working relationship with the opposing counsel, the first thing you should be trying to check off your list is a mutual stipulation with the opposing counsel so that the depositions can move forward. You should be stipulating that:

1. The deposition will move forward remotely
2. The witness can be sworn in by a court reporter as long as both parties stipulate on the record and the court reporter agrees

This is extremely important because court reporters only operate in the country and or state where they are certified and registered, even domestically.

Uncooperative Opposing Counsel 

What happens if opposing counsel is not cooperative? There are a number of options that we will touch on at a high-level:

1. The Consulate Office may have to administer the oath for the witness. This means that the US Consulate and whatever country the witness may be in has granted status to administer the oath as it was taking place on US soil.  
2. The other option is to hire a local notary. This will always be contingent on the country’s laws and rules.
3. There are a few other judicial remedies where the judge by motion or otherwise decides to order that the deposition moves forward. This completely depends on the country where the witness will be.

Step 2

Now that you have talked to opposing counsel, hopefully, they are cooperative, the next step is to decide what country the deposition is going to take place in. There are a few red flags we want to draw your attention to with this.

The UK and Hong Kong are the most common locations for international depositions, but if you hear countries like Germany and Japan, those are extremely difficult to operate through and if you hear countries like Brazil or Russia, they do not allow US depositions to take place. A lot of the European countries that are in the EU are underneath the Hague Convention and generally follow the same rules. Please do your due diligence here because these rules do apply differently to citizens of those countries, versus non-citizens.

Remember that Covid considerations do apply to all depositions and meetings. Check out Our World in Data for up-to-date information on which countries are open, which countries will allow your team, opposing counsel, and or the court reporter to travel.

Step 3

Now that you have your country, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel regarding all the logistics surrounding the deposition, you must then determine where specifically the deposition will take place.

Much like a remote deposition here in the US, you have to decide the following:

• Do you want the witness physcially with the court reporter?
• Are you going to do this in a hotel, conference room, at the witnesses home?
• Does it have to be at the Consulate Office for the purpose of swearing in the witness?

If the deposition must take place at the Consulate, it is recommended to start making those arrangements at least 6 weeks out. 

With remote depositions, even domestically, regardless of where the witness will be during that deposition, you must test the equipment they will be using on the day of the deposition. And to go one step further, you need to make sure they have a working and reliable internet connection. 

Whatever video conferencing platform you choose to use, your team needs to ensure that it has the capability to incorporate international phone numbers. This is important because if the internet connection is poor, and the bandwidth cannot sustain the meeting, the witness must have an option to call in and have video only. 

Any video remote depositions do require a certain internet bandwidth speed, so again, please conduct your tech tests and be prepared.

Step 4

At this point, you’ve spoken to opposing counsel, you know the country, you’ve pinpointed an exact location of where your witness will be, you have all your equipment tested, next, you need to know what deposition services will be required. 

To start, you need a court reporter, as mentioned previously, are you going to stipulate with opposing counsel that the court reporter be the one to swear in the witness remotely? 

Will you have a videographer? Now, there is a common misperception with this element. Most online conferencing platforms have the ability to record meetings. But if that recording is taken on your own, it is not certified. Not to mention opposing counsel may not approve or allow it. So if you’d like the deposition recorded, you do need a certified videographer who can do the video recording remotely. This is a highly encouraged practice for international depositions and locally-based ones as well.

Do you need an interpreter? If so, what language(s) do they need to be able to speak, do they have all the necessary and properly tested equipment?

Next, you need to think about your exhibits. What exhibit platform are you going to use? Are you going to show your exhibits by sharing your screen? Some conferencing platforms will let you share you exhibits by chat, so is that something you would consider using? Additionally, how, when, and to who will you submit your exhibits to? Take time to get all these answers organized.

Following these considerations, the next step for your team is to prepare and send your deposition notice with all the assets and people you’re requesting for the deposition. It’s best practice to always indicate that this will be remote and by video conference. You also may want to take this opportunity to identify any other unique aspects of the deposition.

Step 5

It is important to send out your notice to the agency you are going to use to arrange your court reporter, as soon as possible. If there is an issue in terms of stipulations, you may need, for example, a notary in that country and that process takes time to coordinate. Any logistics internationally presume will take at least a week longer than in the states.

Step 6

It’s deposition time! Make sure you have the time correctly marked in your calendar, and everyone is on the same page in terms of time zones. 

When it begins, it will flow like a normal domestic deposition, just keep in mind any other additional considerations or international rules that you have to follow. 

The Takeaway

Whether you’re working with an agency that specializes in international depositions or not, be prepared and do your homework. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to schedule and coordinate everything so that you have time to make adjustments if need be. 

Today’s reality looks something like this: we wake up slightly later because the longest commute we now face is walking from our bathrooms to the kitchen.  Dogs barking in the background, kids running in the background, and a home office set-up that would make Office Depot proud. 

Working from home is our reality and although we have quickly adapted to this change, some industries face hurdles that far outweigh others. 

Unfortunately, the legal industry is not exempt from the hardships that work from home has caused. Sure we have telephones and Slack and other means of communication, but by removing the element of face-to-face interactions, we have also removed a certain element of humanity. Your clients are stressed more often than not and now that we are forced apart, how do we bridge that connectivity gap? How do we create an environment of togetherness and empathy even if we are miles away from each other? 

This dilemma carries into the courtroom as well. And arguably, it is harder to get away with the virtual nature of the work you conduct because a courtroom relies on this element of connectivity. But if you exchange your courtroom nuances with that of a screen, what do you get? Will the results be the same as they would if you were there in person? The goal is for that answer to be yes. And we are here to help. 

So let’s talk about one dilemma that many attorneys face and that is “how do we manage exhibits in a virtual courtroom?” 

Going to court looks different and because of this, the processes and procedures we may have followed at one point now have changed.

In this virtual world, there are some steps you should follow when moving an exhibit in. Take a look:

1. Know Your Court’s Requirements

Each court and each judge has different requirements when it comes to how, when, and to whom you need to submit your exhibits.

Most still require you to submit your exhibits to the clerk, but you can guarantee that they will be required to be sent in a virtual format by a specific deadline prior to your hearing or trial. 

Some require a courtesy copy of those exhibits to be sent to the judge through the JA. So you want to make sure you know and understand where the exhibits need to go and in what format they need to be in. Do they need to be in a PDF format, do photos need to be JPEGs? You have to make sure you are understanding the requirements.

Some require the exhibits to be submitted through an online portal. Ultimately, you want to make sure that the first thing you know and understand is “how,” to submit exhibits, what format those exhibits are expected to be submitted in, and to whom those exhibits need to be submitted to. 

This should go without saying, but do not miss your deadline. If this happens, that could result in a delay of your hearing or trial.

Once you have this covered, guess what? The rest of it is almost the same! 

2. Moving an Exhibit In

If you know how to move an exhibit in court, you know how to move an exhibit in on Zoom. That doesn’t change. The medium does not change the process for moving in an exhibit. Your exhibit still has to be relevant, related, and right. 

Your exhibit needs to be relevant, meaning it proves or disproves a fact of consequence.

They have to be reliable, meaning they are either not hearsay, or there is an applicable hearsay exception.

And they have to be right, meaning as in not prejudicial.

Once those three things exist, you’re going to go through the same “do,” “how,” “what” process. 

Do you recognize it? How do you recognize it? What is it?

And then the remainder of the predicate depends on what type of exhibit you are moving in. However, in this virtual world, there are some things you do have to do differently.

3. Verbal Communication Differences

You no longer have to say “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense exhibit A for identification purposes.” Why? Because you’re not actually making that movement in the courtroom where you’d need the court reporter to document it. 

What you do need to say is “I’m putting up on the screen, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes,” so that your court reporter still can take down the exhibit and make sure that it is a part of your record. 

When you are doing the logistics of moving the exhibit in, you also do not have to ask to approach the witness. This sounds fundamental, but you will be surprised. Because you have been doing it for so long in a certain manner over and over again, the first time you have to do it in this virtual setting can feel very weird. You’re going to want to say, “I’m showing opposing council, what has been pre-marked as defense Exhibit A for identification purposes. Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” You don’t have to do any of that. But you do still want to make it clear for your record, what you’re doing and what exhibit you're handling. You can ask the witness to go to what’s been marked as Exhibit A, and they can now pull it up in whatever format it is that they have it in. 

4. Formatting

When it comes to formatting for your witness, your judge, or even the opposing council, we suggest using a PDF document that you can bookmark. And you bookmark it in the order you want to proceed in. In an ideal world, your exhibit list matches the order you intend to introduce your exhibits in trial.  

No one lives in that type of ideal world. It almost always gets reordered once you do your trial notebook, and you start doing your questions. 

So what you want to do is make sure your final PDF is bookmarked in the order you want to introduce the exhibits in. Doing this will make it easier for your client who is going to be your witness. It also makes it easier for the judge to follow because when it is a bookmarked PDF, the judge can just click on the bookmark and it automatically takes them to that exhibit. It is also recommended to put the exhibit letter, or a virtual exhibit sticker on the appropriate PDF pages themselves to keep them organized. Some ways you can do this include inserting a footer or by using the bate stamps feature that is in PDF.

Your organization is what becomes key in this virtual setting. And as we mentioned before, moving the exhibit in and the trial skills associated have not changed, the process has. Your clerk, your witnesses, and the judge all need to know what you’re talking about, so this organization is paramount.

5. Using the Exhibit

When you are getting ready to use the exhibit, you’re going to have to share your screen. Prior to doing so, you have to ask the judge’s permission to do that. In some cases, the judge will explicitly say that the council has permission to share their screen when necessary. 

When getting ready to share your screen, your exhibits should still satisfy the “Billboard Test.” There are a number of ways to be able to use exhibits and do presentations in this virtual setting. Powerpoint is going to be the most common default presentation application for most attorneys. If you choose to operate from PowerPoint, you do not want a million words on each slide. You want to satisfy the Billboard Test. What is the Billboard Test you may ask? When you’re driving down the street and you see a billboard, it has all the information you need, in large print with no clutter. You can understand who the billboard is about, what the contact information is and you’re able to digest that information in the 2.5 seconds you have to look at that billboard. 

You want to apply this same test to your exhibits and your presentations. If you’re using your PowerPoint for your opening, or closing statements, or any other kind of demonstrative situation, make sure it is clear. Make sure they can read it, and don’t put any overwhelming amount of information on it. Er on the side of having more slides with fewer words than condensing the quantity and packing everything you have to say on three slides. If the people on the other side of the presentation cannot quickly read or understand what is on the screen, you’re going to lose them. 

Because we are in a virtual environment, you must be able to convey the information that you need to convey in a clear and concise manner. When dealing with an actual exhibit, and in this hypothetical case let’s go with medical records. When you are using these documents, unless you need the entire document, it is suggested to do a call-out. This call-out would work similarly to the way you normally would do a call-out if you were standing at trial in person.

Using this call-out draws the attention to wherever it is you need it to be. You still have to use the entire document in order to get it authenticated and introduced, but when you get ready to actually use the actual exhibit, use the pertinent parts! This will work to cut down clutter, and the person not being able to see or understand where it is you’re coming from.

6. Tangible Exhibits

When it comes to physical and tangible exhibits, you need to submit all physical items to the clerk in order to get it entered. Have a photograph of it, so you can use it and talk about it and everyone can see what you’re talking about. If for whatever reason, the court lets you keep this physical exhibit (they really shouldn’t because if you’re entering this piece as evidence, it needs to go into the court’s virtual file), you should still have photos taken of the item to share electronically throughout the Zoom presentation.  

Takeaways

Although our world has changed slightly, life still moves forward, even if not in a way we imagined. 

When it comes to your exhibits, make sure they are clearly marked and organized and are being presented in a clear and concise manner. Remember, you should be handling them the same way you would handle them in physical court, you’re merely adjusting how you submit and introduce them.

Everyone handles their email inbox differently. Some people have to clear every unread message out at the end of each day, while others let their unread email notifications pile up until there’s no going back. But one thing is for certain, our inboxes today are significantly more overwhelming than they were even just a few years ago.

Before we jump into email management and everything therein, we are going to take a moment to talk about a psychological philosophy called Flow. Essentially, Flow is a state of mind in which a person becomes fully immersed in an activity. While this is a mental state, it is deeply influenced by psychological, environmental, creative, and social responses.

Your chances of reaching this Flow state are greater when you can first focus on single tasks, as opposed to jumping back and forth between activities. Additionally, having clear goals and immediate feedback play into your ability to reach Flow. 

Now you may be asking why we are bringing this up now when we’re supposed to be talking about emails. And we will tell you… Emails are huge disrupters to our Flow state because each email we receive acts as a distraction from our current task. Not only are we interrupted to either respond or read the email, but we are given yet one more thing to focus on. Emails are inevitable. They are a great means to communicate, but if unmanaged, they can quickly spin out of control. 

Now that you have a brief background on Flow, everything we discuss moving forward is to help you achieve this level of clarity and productivity through your inbox. 

To kick this off, let’s look at some numbers. Did you know that the average office worker receives around 121 emails every workday? Roughly 2.5 hours a day are spent on email, which adds up to about 30% of your workweek! That is insane… Nowhere in your job description does it say you have to spend 30% of your time on email, but this is where we are today.

Three things are significantly impacted by our time spent on email: our mood, our focus, and our to-do list. These three things are both negatively and positively impacted by not only the quantity of virtual mail we receive in a day but the quality as well. 

The Science Behind Attention

For the past few decades, a lot of studies and work have gone into the science of attention. And because our inbox holds so much of our attention during the day, there are many parallels that can be drawn between our inbox and our phycological response to how we interact with that inbox. Part of why so much our of time is devoted to checking and looking at our email can be attributed to what science calls the Fixed reward vs. the Variable reward system. 

Hear us out, this is interesting…

In 1948, a behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner studied what he coined “schedules of reinforcement.” At the time, what Skinner was studying was the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). During this study, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times — say 20 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. So for example, if the rat pressed the level 5 times he would get a reward, and sometimes it would take pressing the lever 150 times to get the reward. 

Obviously, the predominant difference between the two schedules of reinforcement was this aspect of predictability. Prior to the conclusion of the study, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, what Skinner found was that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats that were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a considerable time longer.

So, what do food pellets have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like trying to get the pellet rewards. Most of it is junk and the equivalent of pulling the lever and getting nothing in return, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news, some watercooler talk, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or maybe just an important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. See where we are going?

We are feeling science-y today, so along the lines of this psychological response also comes what is called completion bias. By spending a third of our time on email, it feels like we are being productive, after all, it is our “work-inbox.” Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case. We convince ourselves that we are being productive by checking this work-inbox but really we aren’t producing anything at all, instead, we are being reactive- responding to the needs of whatever the senders are requesting of you. As a result, we spend a tremendous amount of time on short-term priorities that get in the way of completing the bigger tasks on our lists. All of this has resulted in one thing: multitasking. As professionals, we have gotten good at multitasking, which if you think about it, is somewhat of an oxymoron because no one is truly good at multitasking. 

Research shows that when we are deeply engrossed in an activity, even minor distractions, like an email, can have a profound effect. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes! And that’s after only one interruption… you get where are going with this. 

The Three Email Rules

1. Email is like Tetris

No matter how good you are at playing Tetris, blocks will continue to come, and they will speed up over time. No one has ever won a game of Tetris, and email is the same way, no matter how good you are at clearing the messages, they will not only continue to come, but they will also increase in frequency year after year.  

The Solution: You have to change your mindset. You have to use the right tools to be able to consistently keep your emails at a manageable level and you have to set limits and boundaries around when you choose to interact and not interact with your inbox.

2. Email is not the default priority

For way too many of us, email has become this default, number 1 priority. You wake up and check your inbox. You get to the office and check your inbox. And the problem with this is that your email acts as a to-do list that other people add to. So what happens is other people’s priorities become your own. 

The Solution: Scan your inbox for important and or otherwise urgent emails, then close your inbox. You can do this first thing in the morning, or really any time you want, but the key is to scan and then get out. Next, block a 30-60 minute appointment slot every day for “email time.” This is time you designate to spend in your inbox because you say so, not because someone else is requesting something from you. Now depending on the number of emails you receive every day, that time can fluctuate, but the point is that you are setting the time, it shouldn’t be dictated by anyone else. When you get sucked into your inbox, take a minute and ask yourself, is this the best use of your time? Most of the time, it isn’t, so give yourself that moment to decide for yourself. 

3. Not all emails are created equal

Each email commands the same real estate in your inbox, whether it is from the CEO or spam. There are really three types of emails, the unimportant noise, the important and urgent emails, and the important but not urgent emails. 

The Solution: Delete and archive all the noise in bulk, handle the important and urgent emails in the moment, and then defer the important but non-urgent emails to your designated email time. 

Reaching Inbox Zero 

Inbox zero is a method for continually getting to zero emails in your inbox every day. How you can do this is by categorizing your emails into five action buckets. 

• Delete/archive
• Defer
• Delegate
• Respond
• Do

All the noise: newsletters, updates, weekly emails, should be deleted in bulk. You should be giving very minimal time to these emails. The quick fix emails, emails that can be taken care of in 2 minutes or less, can fall into the three middle categories of deferring, delegate, and responding.  

When you defer, that simply means moving it out of your inbox into a separate folder. You can create a folder, whether you call it a deferred folder or your snoozed folder, the idea is to just move emails out of your main inbox. Delegating an email(s) simply means you’re forwarding it to someone else on your team who is more suited to answer the specific question or request, and to respond, is well, you respond.

The last bucket, “Do,” are the emails that require more of your time and attention. They are emails that need work or are related to various projects you have on your plate. These are the emails that should be remaining in your inbox that should be worked on throughout your day until a resolution is met. You can prioritize them further by flagging or starring them to ensure they don’t get overlooked.

Email Hacks

Bold Key Phrases

If your email is on the longer side, highlight keywords or sentences in bold. This will make your reader’s job easier and you’ll be a more efficient communicator. It is important here to not bold too much and don’t use all caps because people associate that with yelling.

Don’t Get Hacked

You deal with more sensitive information than most professional people do. Because of this, the legal industry is hit with a lot of security breaches that leave lasting impacts on not only your clients but your firm. 

If you’re using the same password for multiple online services, if one of those services gets hacked, that means there’s a good chance that all of them have been compromised. The solution to this is to use individual passwords that are not associated with anything in your day-to-day life. And we know that can be tough to keep up with, so utilize services like 1Password to help you create and then store all your passwords for each of your accounts. 

Don’t Fill Out The Recipient’s Address Right Away

Mistakes happen! Wrong email addresses can be attached, misspelled names or titles, etc. Give yourself a chance to proof-read the email prior to hitting that send button. Every email interface typically works from the top-down. You fill out the recipient, then the subject, message, and any related attachments. Instead of working this way, try the reverse. Add your attachments first, then write your message, fill in your subject line, and then once all of this is complete add your recipient(s). Doing this will help mitigate some of those human errors that we are all prone to make!

Choose Your Subject Wisely

Putting a call to action in your subject line will not only get your email read faster, but there is a greater chance the recipient will interact with it. Additionally, the more specific your subject line is, the easier it will be to search for it later on. 

Don’t Unsubscribe from Suspicious Emails

Often times, it becomes a reflex to unsubscribe from emails that are either spam or considered irrelevant and otherwise unnecessary for you to be receiving. What happens if you unsubscribe from senders with compromised integrity, is you’ve exposed yourself as 1. Being human, and 2. A human who cares about their inbox. This is a spammer’s best-case scenario. Instead, either move these to a designated spam folder or bulk delete them.

Avoid Open-Ended Questions

Email is a great medium for close-ended questions, not open-ended ones. Emails ending with, “Thoughts?” Is a strong signal that that email should either be a phone conversation or even an in-person one. Knowing what is appropriate to send via email and what is not will save you time during your day and will keep those email distractions to a minimum. Conversely, email is great for unambiguous communication, where decisive answers or choices can be made.

Matter-Centric Emails

If you’re working with a practice management software, some platforms will let you save emails directly to matters from Microsoft Outlook, or let you find emails based on any email property including subject, sent/received date, or email content. With the ability to connect your email correspondence directly to the appropriate matter, you are keeping all your communications matter centric. Having all your communication related to particular matters in one place helps keep your team efficient, in sync, and organized. 

Email Smarter

Sometimes it is easy to forget that emails constitute billable time. If you are working, responding, and communicating with your clients, you should be getting paid for that. Technology is advanced enough today to allow you to automatically create a billing entry every time you send an email to your client or create billing entries from your inbox as you’re reviewing emails. Not every software allows you to do this, but the technology is available and with reason- it will help you make and collect the money you deserve! 

The Takeaway

Email Zen to Optimize Our Flow State

Phase 1: The Declutter Phase

Creating folders that are labeled for old mail and dragging everything into those folders on a regular basis. Train unwanted emails to go into that folder and if you have time, delete those old emails and make sure relevant emails correspond to the matters they relate to. Delegate emails when necessary and don’t get distracted with the longer, more project-based requests.

Phase 2: The Organization Phase

This is where you figure out how much time you’re going to give yourself and set limits and boundaries on how much time you are willing and able to spend going through your inbox. Avoid mindlessly checking your email when you’re not in a dedicated place to respond or think about next steps. The best way to fall behind with your inbox is to start checking your email while you’re in line at a grocery store, get distracted by the cashier, and then completely forget about that email entirely. So stop doing that! Set numeric goals of how many emails you want left in your inbox at the end of the day. Inbox zero may not always be possible for everyone, so set goals to keep you on track and accountable. 

Phase 3: Email Zen and Flow Phase

You now have a clear set of rules to follow, you don’t leave your email open, you don’t get distracted with emails outside of your designated email time, and you’re able to put more focused time back into your day for billable activities.

If your firm doesn’t have a proper intake process, you could be losing a lot of billable time working on administrative and organizational tasks. In, Business Development 101: Online Communication Strategies to Increase Your Billable Hours we discussed how properly utilizing the various communication forms (phone, email, text, and website) can make a huge impact on your productivity and future revenue generation. 

Today, we are going to dive deeper into the client intake process and learn how you can not only improve your process but retain better clients. 

To start, let’s do a little refresher on how potential new clients are handled.  

How To Handle PNCs

Potential clients can be handled by you and your in-house staff or through remote and virtual services like paralegals, bookkeepers, and receptionists. 

With software, you have access to resources like call routing and tracking, client intake automation, and calendaring management. All of these tools exist for you to reach as many people as possible with the least amount of leg work.

Responsiveness Through Form and Function

When you think about the form and function of the content and materials that you use to draw in PNCs, you need a combination of human and machine intelligence. 

For the human intelligence side, ask yourself these questions:

• What goes into your lead nurturing drips?
• What does the copy (the actual words on the page) look and sound like?
• What are your lead-qualifying questions and intake-form compositions?
• What is your caller greeting?
• What does your email content look like? (From appointment confirmation to lead conversion drips)
• How do you handle 'bad' leads?

How you handle these questions all contribute to your firm’s brand. Not to mention the answers also set the tone for the initial impression you give a PNC.

On the other hand, machine intelligence is necessary to take care of the monotonous, orgnizational tasks. Consider these questions:

• Where is your client intake form hosted/located?
• How are leads and clients recorded and tracked?
• What happens after intake?
• What happens if a lead doesn’t convert?

Where the human intelligence is used to capture emotion and connection, the machine intelligence is used to speed up your back end logistics and take away some of the manual labor involved in capturing new leads. 

Combined effectively, you will achieve fast, friendly, and accurate responses from PNCs which will lead to more qualified leads and a better experience for new clients. If you can keep them happy off the bat, you’re one step ahead of the game. Not to mention, if your current clients are satisfied, they are more likely to refer friends and family.

Lead Conversion Flow 

Now that you have a firmer grasp on contact methods, let’s take a look at lead sources. Referrals make up a large source of new clients for firms, but what about cold leads? Where are those people coming from? Let’s take a look:

• Reviews
• Local listings
• PPC
• Social media
• Content & Freebies (downloadable pdfs, advice, forms, calculators, etc)
• Technical SEO to increase the visibility of your firm in search results
• Link building with other businesses 

Now, once a lead has contacted you, spoken to whomever you have in charge of the response methods (whether the response is via a receptionist service, in-house, or directly from an attorney), you qualify that the lead is ready for a consultation, your next step should be scheduling a meeting to collect more information. 

This process looks different for firm-to-firm, but at its core, you need to be able to track data efficiently and access it whenever you need it from wherever you are. We have created a great downloadable checklist attached to this blog for you to use as a guide, however, here is a high-level framework outlining what you should be tracking (at a minimum):

1. Getting started: When a PNC first makes contact with your firm
2. Confirm the PNCs basic details
3. Screen the PNC and do a conflict check
4. Approval: Initial consultation granted or denied
5. Gather pre-consult information (if you didn’t have enough information prior to do to conduct a conflict check do so now)
6. Consult
7. Organize post-consult information 
8. Send a over a new client agreement
9. Gather necessary documents

Now if you decide this person is not a good potential client, are you making referrals systematically? Referring out clients who are not a good fit with your firm not only highlights your good will, but it also gives you an opportunity to inform people of what your firm does so that in the future they can call reconnect with you. Additionally, if you refer clients to other firms in your area, they will be more likely to reciprocate that business when a PNC who isn’t a great fit for them walks through their doors. Huge takeaway here - don’t underestimate the power of a good first impression.

How to Leave a Good First Impression

Step 1 - Professionally and intelligently manage calls

Set up your phone so you’re not using your personal cell phone number. A huge push back for texting clients is the lack of privacy. Although you would like to be available for your clients 24/7, you don’t necessarily want to give them access to your personal information.  

Some software offer services where they will provide you with your own private number. Through this you will have the ability to track text and call communications that will automatically be converted into billable events for you. 

Once you have a private work number set up and ready, make sure you establish a professional greeting and menu. If a PNC calls you and wants to leave a message, that voice recording is the first form of communication they will experience with you. Don’t set a bad tone with an unreputable sounding recording. 

Next, consider blocking spam calls. In today’s age where solicitors are around every virtual corner, it is important to protect your number as much as possible. You have no idea when or off what number PNCs will call you from, so if you have spam calls blowing up your phone in between client calls, this is a problem. 

Keep in mind that PNCs have no boundaries when it comes to respecting your time. So make sure your phone is routed during holidays, vacations, schedule adjustments, and any times throughout the day when you are not available. You will miss out on PNCs if you do not have an action plan to capture their calls or messages when you are unavailable. Also consider having a separate after hours voicemail. For these messages, ask for more specific information and give them a time frame for when you will get back to them. This will encourage a relationship versus a one-off missed call. But, if you promise a call back during a specific window you better keep your word. Nothing will lose you a new client faster than unreliability. 

Lastly, track performance! Where did the calls originate from? Did the source yield high quality leads? This information may not seem important in the immediate, but it is. Track this information so you know where your clients are coming from. Having this information will help you determine where to spend your advertising and marketing dollars. The best way to increase non referral based leads is to hone in on target demographic and geographic information. Additionally, know how many answered and missed calls you have. Monitor the number of rings it takes to pick up and keep note of the duration of your calls. It is also important that you have call recordings for performance monitoring. Track what goes well and things that don’t. Your first job is to be an attorney, but your second has to be a business person. 

Step 2 - Automate lead capture and qualification

The very first step here, and this is incredibly important, is to have your criteria identified. First think about who the potential clients are that you really want and maybe also the clients you have worked with in the past that you want to avoid. Additionally, who are the clients you missed? Who are the PNCs that you wished you had captured sooner or the people who may have not experienced your best foot forward. 

Use this thought process to identify the criteria and systematically put in place either a form or a list of questions which you can then use to screen PNCs. When you determine if the PNC will make a good fit, implement workflows for qualified leads and incorporate new-client call-back or appointment procedures. Think about what form these call-backs will take place in, do you prefer phone call or email, and will you have a template for what you say that will encourage these people to use the most detail in their response?

For initial meetings, determine the policy on consultations. How long will they be? Twenty minutes? An hour? Will you charge for them? What format would you like to host them in? All of these details should be ironed out prior to speaking with anyone. Obviously customer service is important so if you have to make a special accommodation for someone, make it happen! You have no idea who they could be connected to or who they know, so always lead with kindness and consideration. It is important to note here that everyone has a different comfort level, video is very intimate, but not everyone is comfortable with it. Also keep in mind that some video software requires the users to download the app (like Skype). That is not always convenient for people who are either not very tech savvy or who simply don’t want to download it. If you are to conduct in-person consults, consider the time you will lose in the commute and any potential traffic delays or last minute schedule conflicts that could occur.

We all know that attorneys charge for a finite number of billable hours each day, so ensure you’re utilizing your time by automating the monotonous outbound tasks. For example, if you have people completing a contact form on your website, you can automatically forward those to the appropriate team members so that the call-back communication happens immediately. Set up workflows to make data collection and tracking easier for you. 

Step 3 - New Client Intake

Following lead capture, begin completing the client intake process. Before you begin, it would be prudent of you to ask them how they heard about you or your firm. This is valuable data! Don’t overlook it. (Your marketing team can thank us later)

Depending on your firm, your intake process may occur before or after booking your first appointment. And similarly to Step 2, identify the required questions you will ask and standardize this process across your firm. Aim for 5-10 questions and make it easy for these individuals to fill out the information. 

Some software today will allow you to customize your intake form and when a PNC fills it out and submits it, the information will automatically populate in your system. Not only is this process efficient, but it is professional and allows you to capture the specific information that is pertinent to your firm.

Step 4 - Streamline Appointments 

The most efficient and effective way to book appointments is by having a public-facing booking page directly on your website. The idea is to remove the amount of barriers between when a PNC first reaches out to you and when they become a client. Integrate this calendar with your own and make sure once a client submits a time that you are sending them the subsequent next-step information that they need. The sooner you can get this information to the client after they hit “schedule,” the more likely it is that they will not only be on time, but that they will come prepared. 

Utilize technology to also trigger workflows for your staff. Once a PNC requests a booking time, what does that mean for your staff? What needs to be done in preparation and who will be involved? 

As mentioned in Step 2, consider whether or not you’re going to charge a PNC for the consultation. The upsides to a paid consult include: reduced no shows and more guarantee that the person is a fit for your firm. However, some people see the cost and may raise an eyebrow. These are all things for your firm to consider, there is no right answer!

Step 5 - Bad Leads Out, Good Leads In

If you generate a list of PNCs who are not a great fit for you, but could be for another firm, utilize that to your advantage! However, some state Bar rules will not allow you to monetize referrals, so make sure you review the rules before getting started. 

Your firm should have an implemented process for “bad” leads. Think back to potential client qualification criteria and use that to identify unqualified leads to save your time. Make a list of all attorneys and firms you recommend by practice area and share that list with your staff or receptionist service including instructions for identifying the correct firm to recommend to the “bad” leads. This could be based on location, practice area or cost. Think of referring “bad” leads as a service. Systematically earn good will in the community and educate future potential clients and referral sources.

Step 6 - Record, Record, Record

As much as possible, integrate as many of your communications into your existing practice management software as possible. Every text and call should be logged with pre and post consult notes. Activity logs on new appointments need to be documented, and triggered workflows should be assigned as action steps for your staff as a PNC flows through your intake process. 

Use project and document management tools to integrate your emails and documents into your system seamlessly and automatically. With some software, you have the ability to build out document templates that can be automatically populated with new PNC information. This not only saves you time but reduces human error as well.

Having robust records of everyone you talk to will not only allow your firm to improve your intake strategy, but pinpoint what is working well for you so that you can continue capitalizing on it. 

So What’s Next?

Now that you have all this information, utilize the attached outline to start solidifying and building your intake process. Define what will be standardized across your firm and make it as easy as possible for PNCs to retain your firm!

In Calendaring Best Practices: Seems Simple, but Is It? we talked about calendaring best practices, and establishing a workflow. Today, we will connect some dots and focus on the dreaded missed deadline, bad habits, and improving inefficiencies. Calendaring is critical to your day-to-day operations so don’t take it lightly! If you don’t believe us, keep reading.

The Dreaded Missed Deadline

Did you know that lawyers have a 17% chance of being sued for malpractice every year? 

Addressing the #1 Cause of Malpractice Claims

According to the American Bar Association, nearly a quarter of all legal malpractice claims are based on lawyers procrastinating or failing to calendar.

• 6% of legal malpractice claims are based on the lawyer’s failure to file documents.
• 7% are based on the lawyer’s failure to calendar.
• 9% are based on the lawyer’s procrastination.
• 8% are based on the lawyer’s failure to react to the calendar.

Crazy, right?! 

If you look at all of these statistics, you will see that they are predominantly related to bad habits and inefficiencies. Let’s take a look at some of the bad habits plaguing the attorneys who are getting hit malpractice suits.

Waiting to schedule deadlines
If you’re not tracking and recording these deadlines as soon as they come in, you could be leaving yourself at risk for malpractice. 

Missing centralized calendars
If someone at your firm loses their calendar, or cannot see deadlines the rest of the firm is trying to meet, the more likely a misstep will occur. A rule of thumb to successful calendaring is transparency and visibility.

Lack of research
If you’re practicing in a new jurisdiction, you need to know the local rules or any rule changes. Even if you’re a new attorney, brush up on the regulations and make sure your bases are covered.

Failure to plan
If you do not have a plan of attack as to how you’re going to meet your deadlines, you will be leaving room to not only procrastinate but to forget about what you have due entirely.

Deadline reassignment
If your staff changes or someone gets sick, those court deadlines won’t change. Your clients should not be on the receiving end of your firms' disorganization when life happens. Always be prepared, and have a backup plan in case your team faces a disruption.

Entering deadlines
It is very inefficient to enter deadlines on a calendar one-by-one. If you have a high volume practice and one person is in charge of entering deadlines, it may take them a few days to enter everything in accordingly. And at that point, you are now a few days into a 10-day timeline, or whatever the timeframe may be. 

Potential Attorney Missteps

There are many things that can go wrong in the span of one case. Many of these things are out of your control, but some are not. Let’s go through some of those examples:

• Notice of Removal of Federal Court - This is a prominent trap because if you don’t file that notice you can incur attorney’s fees and a whole host of other consequences. 
• The Certificate of Review (or Professionals in some jurisdictions) - The case can be dismissed without prejudice, and if the statute of limitations expired, you cannot refile.
• Inadequate or late fact disclosures - This is what it sounds like. You can lose the ability to use evidence at trial if the evidence you’re providing is either past due or insufficient.
• Hiring an expert - If you hire an expert too late they will either not be allowed on the stand or they will come severely unprepared. You should try your best to prepare to disclose your expert at least 60-90 days prior so that they have a sufficient amount of time to prepare to the best of their ability. 
• Missing Summary Judgement deadlines - This is really huge. If you miss a deadline, you may be subjected to writing-off a ton of time or worse, a prejudice against your client's case. It should also be noted that your firm's failure to respond to a motion for summary judgment within the time required by Rule 56 cannot be forgiven by reliance on excusable neglect.
• Notice of Appeal - If you miss this deadline then you miss it. Now you can file a motion to extend the deadline, but doing so also requires you to act in a specific window of time.  

All of these examples severely impact your client. It is worth taking the time to modify and ensure that your calendaring practices are not only accurate but are standardized across the firm. 

Ideal Calendaring Workflow

1. Calculate your deadlines as soon as they are evident and available
2. Have another member of the team verify that calculations are done correctly. This initially may seem redundant, but human errors happen.
3. Schedule deadlines and corresponding reminders at the appropriate intervals and assign those to a second set of eyes 

You may have read those three steps and sighed. That’s a lot of work! But it doesn’t have to be.

Instead of researching deadlines and inputting dates manually, there are ways to automate this process so that you are not only spending less time on it, but you are remaining more accurate and consistent as well.

Practice Management Software

There are a considerable amount of advantages that come with using a practice management software, let’s take a look:

• You have a centralized calendar that is backed up and will allow you to utilize multiple views along with a matter centric view. 
• You can sync this calendar with Outlook, Apple, and Google Calendar.
• Workflows and task management are built into this, so all of the tasks associated with meeting those deadlines can be configured into customizable matter templates that can get layered on depending on what the deadline is. 
• Organized matters and matter streams that will help you keep track of your last activity. You will have a better idea of when a document has been prepared when tasks have been completed, and you can subscribe to a specific matter feed to get alerts for all things pertaining to that matter. This is great for firms that are collaborative or for firms who have a heavy workload and need help juggling a multitude of tasks.

How to Keep Your Calendaring Head On Straight

Aside from having to meet court and document deadlines, you have regular tasks and everyday to-dos that you have to keep up with. Whether that includes client consultations, new client intakes, progress reports, managing your staff, and not to mention being able to go home and turn off your work brain for a little and enjoy your personal life. All it takes is a plan, and we encourage you to try to implement one of these calendar tips today. 

Take 5-10 minutes at the end of each day to plan out your next day. 

Make sure all your appointments are filled in, check your upcoming deadlines, and ensure you have blocks of time reserved to be able to work towards those deadlines and begin crossing things off your list of to-dos. Also, be thinking about the top 2-3 activities that you can accomplish for that day. You don’t need to write this down, but take mental note of what went well that day, what you're grateful and blessed to have, and what you appreciate. It may seem insignificant, but in this fast-paced, high-stressed industry, it is important to take a moment to acknowledge the good. 

Use 30 minutes on a Friday to plan out the following week.

In addition to looking at your calendar and mentally taking note of everything you have on your plate, try to solidify 3-4 concrete action items or tasks to complete for your work, your relationships, and your personal life. If you already know this, then bear with us for those who don’t. Your work productivity, happiness, and satisfaction with your life are influenced by your relationships and personal life outside of work. 

For relationships, this could be anything from calling your parents to check-in, or writing back to an old friend or old co-worker. Little things like this make a difference and they do matter. For your personal life, this could be as simple as scheduling yourself a lunch. Often times, attorneys and legal teams will get so busy they forget to eat. We aren’t scientists here, but glucose level and productivity go hand in hand. All these things may feel like a distraction at times, but your motivation and the type of work results you produce will correlate in some shape or form with how the rest of your life is going. So take a minute to incorporate those elements into your calendar because they are important.

Create a firm-wide process for scheduling and set boundaries for your time

Sometimes when people have access to a firm-wide calendar, there is a tendency to grab any time they want and book you for things without asking first. All this does is throw you off. If you spent Friday planning out your week and then you find that come Monday there are multiple chunks of your day booked out already without you knowing, you will have to completely adjust what you had planned to do. How do you fix this? You set verbal and transparent boundaries. For example, set specific days for allotted activities. Maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays are when you do your inbound consultations and client calls. So when someone calls your staff requesting your time, they will know to slot them in on either Tuesday or Thursday.

The Pomodoro technique 

The Pomodoro is a proven and popular time management technique. The premise here is that you work in blocks that typically last 25 minutes that are called Pomodoro sessions. You work for 25 minutes straight, focusing on your work with zero distractions then you follow that up with a 5 minute period of rest or a break. The result of this is productivity and higher management of distractions. Now after 4 Pomodoro sessions, you’re supposed to take a longer, 20-minute break to step away from your work, catch your breath and clear your mind. 

Delegate

Delegate where appropriate and have dedicated time to review with staff. If you’re using practice management software, you will have a way to manage projects at a glance and also get really granular insights into the work your team is doing. This will enhance your firm's productivity overall and the quality of service you are able to provide to your clients. 

If your scheduling regular dates to review your matters and you have specific staff assigned to those matters, pull up the calendar and go through everything that you expect needs to be done or completed by that person. The earlier and more often you do this, the easier it will be to catch mistakes and avoid missed deadlines. Additionally, give these staff members the opportunity to talk about their workload, and give them feedback on the quality of their work. Also, use this time to offer support and constructive feedback; if you don’t like how something is being handled, let them know, or if you are happy with something you should express that as well. 

Takeaways

Calendaring is important. If you walk away with only one thing, it should be that. You may not be able to implement everything we just talked about overnight, but if you can start today, you will only improve company morale, ensure that no task is being forgotten, and you will help foster a system of efficiency and excellence within your firm.

Technology is a driving force behind trends that significantly impacts the way your clients consume and interact with data. Ditching old habits can be hard, there is no argument there, but the benefits of adopting these new tech-driven changes will be the difference makers between profitable and unprofitable firms. 

Calendaring. It seems so simple and trivial, but there is nothing more critical to your day-to-day operations than an accurate and up-to-date calendar. It is really important to evaluate and understand what types of calendars each attorney is using. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we must be able to effectively utilize distributed workspaces; so if your calendar is a paper planner zipped up in your briefcase, staff working remotely will most certainly not be able to access it.

This blog will be broken up into two parts, part one today will focus on best practices, and establishing a workflow, and part two will focus on the dreaded missed deadline, bad habits and inefficiencies, and how to achieve calendar zen. 

Let’s jump in.

Calendaring Best Practices 

1. Office-wide calendar 

An office-wide master calendar is a really good rule of thumb. Having one place where all of your dates are listed across the firm, regardless of the attorney that’s working on it, is a really good thing to have. Having a redundant calendar is important. If you’re using Outlook 365, that needs to sync to your practice management system. Transparency and visibility cannot be sacrificed.  

2. Recurring matter review date

You should set one review date for every matter to ensure they are being kept on track. What does this mean? You don’t want to have 200 matters in your system and then realize in 6 months that you’ve only touched 40% of them. Having a recurring date to review your matters on a regular basis gives you time to see where each case is, to check in with your clients, and most importantly just keep everything organized and up-to-date. 

The longer your case stays in your office, the less profitable it becomes. Take in cases, wrap them up efficiently, get them out the door, and collect your payment. The tighter you can make this process, the more money you will make. 

3. Enter deadlines as soon as possible

Enter your deadlines as soon as you’re aware of them with spaced out reminder dates. As soon as you know that a deadline is apparent, whether you’ve been served with discovery from opposing counsel, or a trial date has been scheduled, you want to make sure you get those dates into your calendar so that you do not forget about them. Having a tiered system to enter dates is also a smart thing to implement. Setting a reminder date to notify you that a deadline is coming up, an urgent date to alert you that you must take action now, and lastly a warning date right before the actual due date. By creating this tiered level of reminders, you will be able to stay more organized, and file motions for extensions if need be. 

4. Staff accountability

Make sure all attorney and non-attorney staff are held accountable. Everyone should know what their role or responsibilities are when it comes to deadlines. Whether they are in charge of entering the activity, drafting paperwork corresponding to the event, editing, filing etc. Everyone should know what they are responsible for. If one person drops the ball and misses a deadline, there should be no reason why anyone else attached to that activity misses the deadline.

5. Be realistic 

Give yourself enough time to investigate and work towards a deadline. Some dates are pretty clear cut. But there are other rules that are slightly more ambiguous and may require more research. An example of this could be if you’re taking on a case in a new jurisdiction. Give yourself enough time to investigate and work towards those deadlines. 

6. Analyze Procrastination   

Failure to react to the calendar is another field the ABA takes into account when they look at reasons for malpractice. So even with the best technology and minimal human error, if you’re avoiding or dismissing deadlines, there may be a bigger problem. For example, if you’re practicing law in an area you are not 100% familiar with, or if you’re working for a client you don’t particularly like, you need to figure out if you can find ways to combat those issues directly because if you cannot meet the deadlines, you need to remove yourself from the case. 

What Goes Into A Good Master Calendar?

A good master calendar is crucial for firm-wide visibility, collaboration, and accountability. Many attorneys have the ability to manage their workload in their own way, this includes managing their own court calendar. However, every firm should still have a master calendar that is managed by a well-trained member of the team that can constantly keep it updated. If events are not updated, attorneys assisting on matters may be more prone to miss key dates or information. 

Firms should also consider different viewing formats or filters. Your calendar must be agile and flexible enough to provide you with filtering options. In most cases, there are many filtering options that you can utilize, but it is best practice to explore which filters work best for specific teams. If your firm has different geographical locations you can filter by a specific area, or if you only want to view some members of the team over others, you can filter by that criteria as well. 

A good master calendar should be backed up regularly, either offsite or in the cloud. Depending on what you’re doing, if you have an on-prem system you are going to want to have a backup copy of that calendar in another location that is not your physical office. This is for reasons like natural disasters, break-ins, server malfunctions, etc. There are so many things that could happen and you have to be prepared for them. Cloud-based backups are very easy to implement. If you’re already paying for cloud services, your cloud provider should be doing most backups for you automatically. 

Your master calendar should also flow to and from matter-centric calendars. If you’re using practice management software, you want anyone who has privileges to access a matter in your system to be able to see the relevant dates and information for that matter. Additionally, this calendar should be accessible from your mobile device. Attorneys are on the go more often than not, so it is crucial that this information is available wherever they are. Make sure you turn on push notifications and reminders so that when you are using your mobile device for calendering, you are alerted to what is due and when just like you would be on your computer. 

Workflow Processes and Holding Your Staff Accountable 

The roles and responsibilities for everyone involved with calendaring should be clear. Who enters the dates when activities are made clear? Is there someone who is going to be responsible for double-checking those calculations for deadlines? Have tasks been assigned according to the upcoming deadline so everyone knows what their responsibilities are in order to meet them? 

Your calendaring process should be standardized across the firm to ensure continuity if staff changes. If that staff change does occur, then will you be able to easily train them on your process? Or if someone is out of the office, or they’re sick, you don’t want to have to call them with an emergency because the people who are available are not trained on how to read and operate the calendar. 

Proper calendaring using case management should also funnel into easy billing. Why you may ask? It is part of productivity. You want to make sure that if you are putting in the work to make sure you are meeting those deadlines, then you also want to make sure that you’re billing for it too. Some practice management software today have the capability to allow you to bill on the go, or enter time from the programs you’re already working in. For example, you can record your time as you save documents in Word or when you send client emails from Outlook.

Nobody should be able to opt-out of using a calendar because you want to maintain that accurate centralized firm calendar that is used not only consistently but in a uniform and standardized way. The workflow for each matter should allow everyone to know what step needs to be taken and when. This will lead to a higher level of firm efficiency, a higher level of communication, and as a result, higher client satisfaction. 

What To Walk Away With

Calendaring seems simple, and in part it is. But it also can be the difference between a malpractice suit and a profitable law firm. It is important to learn and train your team on best practices because although calendaring seems like a no brainer, you’d be surprised about how many firms struggle to keep their schedules buttoned up and organized. 

To learn more about Centerbase's calendar, schedule a free no-obligation product demo!