A belated congratulations go out to Evan at Notes from the (Legal) Underground and his lovely wife Andrea for the new addition to their family, Samuel Lamere Schaeffer. A brand new copy of The Happiest Baby on the Block is on its way from Amazon. A book that saved my wife and I countless hours of sleep with our daughter Grace.
![The [non]billable hour](http://www.nonbillablehour.com/images/headway/header-uploads/xNonbillable,P20Hour,P20442.png.pagespeed.ic.sJ1SiCvIT_.png)
Monthly Archives: May 2004
The Weekly Five (Week 4)
The new edition of the Weekly Five is up in my sidebar. Some creativity-related links this time to keep my brainstorming weekend going. Have fun.
Comment from Former Legalmatch Salesperson?
This comment showed up today as a response to my original LegalMatch post, Why I’ll Never Use Legalmatch. I express no opinion on the comment’s validity, but food for thought if true:
Unfortunately, I was one of the salespeople at Legalmatch. For a very short time. (There are hundreds of us, and most of us were lied to as much or more than the attorneys.) Most attorneys did not have great success with the service, although they hid that from the sales people. The reason? People shop for free advice or post their cases for fun. They rarely hire an attorney. Yet, there is enough volume of these non-cases being posted to keep justifying the demand for “more attorneys” – i.e., more “allocations.” With high volume/high pressure sales tactics, extreme turnover of commission-only salespeople, and the real difficulty many attorneys have in getting clients, Legalmatch keeps getting people to sign up and hand over thousands of dollars. (Non-refundable once you’ve used the system – read the contract. And just try to get your money back from them if you’re unhappy.) Not a big surprise to me that Shubov was indicted.
Can Lawyers Innovate?
Quick, in the last decade, what has been the most significant positive change in the way lawyers do business? How about over the last twenty years?
Seriously, apart from technology making us available 24-7, I can’t think of one way the legal business model has changed in a positive way for lawyers, their staff, or clients. Do lawyers work fewer hours? Are working conditions better now than in 1995? Or 1985? Is the average second year law firm associate encouraging everyone they know to become a lawyer? How about the clients? Are they happier with their attorney now than fifteen years ago? Have legal services become cheaper? More widely available? As a profession, are lawyers more respected now than a dedade ago?
How can an industry populated with as many intelligent and clever people not implement positive change? Profitability has risen, but is that a positive change when so many lawyers hate what they do and how long they have to spend doing it?
Lawyers can innovate. Look at how amazingly brilliant and imaginative lawyers who do estate planning, M&A work, intellectual property, and criminal defense can be on a daily basis. Why don’t those same lawyers apply their vast talents and creativity towards changing the fundamental way we lawyers practice? Is it because time spent on the practice — as opposed to time spent on clients — does not have an immediate, tangible financial return?
Since I’ve started my new firm, I’ve fallen victim to the same pressures that keeps all of us from innovating. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the time I need to serve my clients and get my new firm off the ground that I’ve failed to move forward on the innovation front. I know I need to get back on track and thinking about my firm’s future, so here is my weekend agenda for renewing my creativity and recommitting myself to making my practice better:
Friday:
Buy a magazine I’ve never read before (courtesy of Eric Heels).
Use the Sentence Completion exercise from The Nub to answer the following questions:
If I were a client I’d want my lawyer to…
My business would be more fun if only I could …
My office would run more smoothly if we …Cook something for dinner I’ve never made before.
Write down twenty five ideas.
Saturday:
Get up early, and spend the first hour brainstorming with my KnowBrainer cards.
Take a walk with my daughter.
Go pick strawberies.
Write down my ideal scenes.
Take a nap.
Finish The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler
Sunday:
Help my dad barbeque. My father has a commercial smoker and he bbq’s for the entire neighborhood at least twice a year. We’ll be smoking ribs, chickens, and hams for nearly 30 people. We’ll start around 5:00 a.m., because the hams take nearly 11 hours to cook. Mmmm good. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t innovate on an empty stomach.
Monday:
Install MindJet’s MindManager on my Tablet PC and learn how to use it.
Write down twenty-five more ideas.
Complete my firm’s guarantee and give it to my seven year old neighbor to see if he understands it.
Relax, have fun, and get psyched for Tuesday morning.
If you have ways you innovate, let me know and I’ll post some more ideas on Tuesday.
Great Stuff from The Nub
The guys over at The Nub picked up my post the other day about Value Billing, and added their thoughts:
One can take the question further and ask: How much have we helped our clients succeed? And get the client to determine this. Then build in some sort of payment that is dependent on how much the solution helps the client achieve success. For example, I’ve been paid the final 25% of my fee upon hitting performance targets. Other times I’ve received an extra % upon my client’s satisfaction.
The Nub also has a pointer to a great excerpt from the John C. Maxwell book Today Matters.
Trapped by Overwhelming Demands?
In this HBS Working Knowledge article titled The Trap of Overwhelming Demands, authors Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghosha take on a problem most lawyers face. Does this sound like you?
[Y]ou deem some aspects of your work important, but you can never find time for them. Or you might feel under constant pressure. The most dangerous of all is believing that you are indispensable
If so, read the article, an excerpt of the authors’ book, A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time.
Entrepreneurism for Teens
The Small Business Administration’s Office of Business and Community Initiatives (part of the Office of Entrepreneurial Development) has a great site for teens titled The Teen Entrepreneur Guide to Owning a Small Business. There is some great information for all entrepreneurs there.
Law Firm Naming (Again)
Wordlab has a great post on law firm naming. From the article:
As today’s law firms grow or downsize, merge and emerge, keeping the letterhead, website, and collateral marketing materials current with the legal partnership name can be a regular challenge. And maintaining consistent brand awareness in a firm’s marketplace can be frustrated by a naming strategy that is focussed on the partnership roster, and not on the firm’s brand from the customer’s point of view.Business-minded lawyers name their law firms with their customers in mind–not to assuage the partners–and thereby protect their investments in the business. Better to have a partnership interest in a law firm with a strong brand than to have one’s own name listed with many other partners on a “shingle” few customers can remember. The classic parody of traditional law firm naming is Jerry Seinfeld trying desperately to remember the name of the firm where the beautiful lawyer, Vanessa, works; repeating the mantra “Simon, Bennett, Robbins, Oppenheim & Taft” over and over.
Wordlab is a free naming thinktank that’s worth a look. Some really fun things there, including my favorite, the Band Name Generator. Thanks to Abnu for the heads up.
Are you doing too much busy work?
Duct Tape Marketing is one of my daily reads. In this post, author John Jantsch argues that marketing is your highest payoff activity. John writes:
I don’t know about you but most small business owners are do-it-yourself types and get sucked into doing the littlest silly work faster than you can say “Oh look, the copier is jammed again.” If you want to achieve any of your goals and finally start making what you are worth then you’ve got to stop doing $5/hr work. Period.
John suggests that you calculate what your time is actually worth per hour (your Personal Average Yield, or PAY) and delegate everything that doesn’t contribute to your business’ growth. John continues:
So I ask you. Is fiddling with the copier, chatting with the mailman, running to the office supply store, making deliveries, or returning meaningless email paying you $72/hr? For that matter, doesn’t mowing your own grass, washing your own car, cleaning your own windows take you away from marketing your business? I know, now I’m asking you to give up most of the fun things you like to do everyday but hey, if you can get the neighbor kid to mow your grass for anything less than $100/hr, therefore giving you 3 hours to write a killer sales letter – it’s probably a stealFigure out your PAY number, paint it on the wall in your office, and then go about setting up your business in a way that allows you to focus on the only things that can really pay that kind of money: marketing, innovation, and customer service. – cause everything else is just a cost.
Cool Tech Tools
It has been a blogging day today, and I’m trying to post a bunch of stuff I’ve saved up over the last few weeks. Here is a cool web-based utility called “Mail to the Future” that allows you to e-mail yourself a reminder anytime in the future. Works great and, best of all, it is free!
Another cool, free tool is AnyBirthday.com. Type in a first and last name and zip code (if you know it) of someone who’s birthday you want to know and you’ll likely get the answer here. To save you the trouble, mine is August 7.
Stephen Nipper tipped me off to a program called Adobe Reader Speed-Up that does what the title suggests: it helps Acrobat Reader open PDF documents much more quickly.
Quote of the Week
Saw this quote on Evelyn Rodriguez’s Crossroads Dispatches:
“A Native American Elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: ‘Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.’ When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, ‘The one I feed the most.” — Original Source Unknown
Ron Baker is in the House
I have written about Ron Baker before, the author of several books on value pricing. This morning, Ron left the following (edited) response to some of the give-and-take in the comments to a recent post. To get a flavor of the debate, and to whom Ron is responding, read all the comments. Here are some choice excerpts:
Hourly billing is not the cheapest way for a client to buy legal services, since the lawyer always has an incentive to bill more hours. There is no correlation between inputs and activities, and output and results. To think otherwise is to fall prey to Karl Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. Many large companies now insist on fixed prices up front, and when “scope creep” occurs change orders are used. Houlry billing is not here to stay, it’s only being kept in place by the apathy of the professions.How do actuaries price earthquake or flood insurance? The answer, of course, is they are pricing risk, so are lawyers. Clients don’t buy time, and to think they do is the problem with the professions. Do you care how long it took Porsche to build your car? Do you fly on an airline that charges you $4 per minute? They operate under uncertainty and risk, too, but so what? Who better to scope the project than the lawyer. If you think you are being paid for your time, you have put an automatic ceiling over your earnings. Do you think Tiger Woods has this attitude? You are being paid for your Intellectual Capital, not your time. Time is useless, and you certainly can’t leverage it. It’s the results you create customers are buying. All living beings, and all businesses, are subject to the constraints of time, so what?
Value Pricing doesn’t mean price gouging, it means charging a price agreed upon up-front, BEFORE you do the work, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER BUSINESS ON THIS PLANET. To deny this, and claim professional’s aren’t subject to the laws of economics, boggles my mind. How many things do you purchase as a consumer that you don’t know the price up front? Why do you think clients of lawyers are any different? Humans tend to avoid risk and uncertainty, and yet when you price by the hour that’s all they get.
I think highly of Ron’s theories and his books. He has kindly agreed to answer a Q & A here at the [non]billable hour. If you have questions, submit them to me and I’ll edit them and get them to Ron.
Value Billing by Architects
I found this great position paper (PDF) on the web from an architurcture firm Van Mell Associates titled “Why We Don’t Bill by the Hour.” Some excerpts:
To value each hour of work equally and to price and manage each hour is as corrosive a policy as any creative group of professionals could devise. To pretend that each hour is worth the same as every other is ridiculous. A brilliant insight can come in a flash, and save a client from disaster or find him millions. Other hours are dull or wasted and lead nowhere. It’s clear that billing by the hour is unfair to everyone.Of course, professionals, like everyone, must track their time and their staff’s time. But tracking each hour draws the professional’s eyes away from the client’s needs and toward the professional’s own reward. Whether measured by the hour or minute, the client completely depends on the advisor’s honesty to price and record their work effort fairly. Of course, professionals, like everyone, must track their time and their staff’s time. But tracking each hour draws the professional’s eyes away from the client’s needs and toward the professional’s own reward. Whether measured by the hour or minute, the client completely depends on the advisor’s honesty to price and record their work effort fairly.
Of course, we still need a way to manage our time, both for efficiency and for estimating the work needed in a new assignment. Our solution: a Good Day’s Work. This unit avoids false precision and is based on our honest judgment of worth using even increments of 10%. If we honestly feel we put in 10% of the day working hard on a client’s problem, that’s what we record. If we honestly felt we worked hard, but only for a few minutes, we don’t record it. If we see we’ve helped the client enormously, frankly, we round up.
This is the best articulation of the benefits of value billing by a company I’ve yet seen on the web. Read the whole PDF to learn more about the Good Day’s Work and the innovative ways this Company treats its relationship with its clients.
The Weekly Five (Week 3)
I’ve changed my Weekly Five again in the right column on the weblog. Take a look.
LegalMatch Founder in Trouble?
I thought I was done talking about LegalMatch (see here, here, and here, and here) but several readers e-mailed me with news that LegalMatch’s Founder and CEO, Dmitry Shubov was indicted. Here is the story from the AP:
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — The founder of an Internet-based service that matches lawyers with clients was indicted for allegedly hacking into the voicemail system of an Irvine competitor and deleting messages.Dmitri Shubov, 31, of San Francisco was charged with three counts of unlawful access to store communications and one count of making false statements, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Stolper said Wednesday. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Shubov is the founder of LegalMatch.com, which matches lawyers with potential clients, Stolper said, and one of his competitors is Casepost.com. Shubov allegedly telephoned the company, used an access code to hear messages and then deleted them, Stolper said.
He also allegedly lied to FBI agents about the activity during an interview earlier this year, Stolper said.
At least he won’t have any problems finding a good lawyer.
Specialist v. Generalist
Jennifer Rice, at What’s Your Brand Mantra, has an interesting post on specialization:
Trying to be all things to all people is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to attracting and keeping customers. Choosing a target market is tough. It means eliminating entire groups of people from your messages. But without focus, you risk a bland, diluted message that means nothing to anyone.
She has lots more great thoughts, so go to the full post to read them.
50 Coolest Song Parts
This has nothing to do with the law, marketing, my daughter, or whatever else I write about on this blog, but I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes reading RetroCrush’s “The 50 Coolest Song Parts.” He’s counting down and has twenty yet to go. Really fun.
Building Client Loyalty
I found this article on the MarketingProfs.com website (if you aren’t subscribing to the e-mail updates, you really should) titled, “12 Laws of Customer Loyalty” by Jill Griffin. Her 12 tips:
Build staff loyalty
Practice the 80/20 rule
Know your loyalty stages and ensure that your customers are moving through them
Serve first, sell second
Aggressively seek out customer complaints
Stay responsive
Know your customer’s definition of value
Win back lost customers
Use multiple channels to serve the same customers well
Give your frontline the skills to perform
Collaborate with your channel partners
Store your data in a centralized database
My favorite gem from the article:
Today’s customers are smarter, better informed and more intolerant of “being sold” than ever before. They expect doing business with you to be as hassle-free and gratifying for them as possible. When they experience good service elsewhere, they bring a if-they-can-do-it-why-can’t–you attitude to their next transaction with you. They believe that you earn their business with service that is pleasant, productive and personalized; and if you don’t deliver, they’ll leave.
As service providers, lawyers are not just competing against other lawyers, but airlines, dry cleaners, restaurants, and even internet retailers. When clients have gotten a high level of service from someone else, we need to match (or even exceed) that level of service, or we fail. That is one of the reasons I’ve been writing this blog. I want to look to see what others in business are doing to improve the customer experience and bring those lessons to my firm and lawyers in general.
I joined LinkedIn a few months ago, but didn’t do much with it. I just started sending out my invitations today, and have already gotten several responses back. If you belong to LinkedIn, drop me an invitation.
The Weekly Five (Week 2)
This weeks version of The Weekly Five is up in my sidebar on the site. Don’t wait too long because these links disappear and will be replaced next Friday.
Tablet PC
My new Tablet PC (a Toshiba Portege M205) arrives today and I am giddy with anticipation. I hope to run it though it’s paces and have a full report next week. The best part: after buying it on E-Bay, the seller tells me there is a rebate. Sweet!
Update: I’m salivating even more after reading this article.
Quote of the Week
From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life. — Arthur Ashe
Ask your clients to point out your faults.
In this post from his Duct Tape Marketing Blog, John Jantsch recommends that we should ask people to point out our mistakes and then reward them for doing it. According to Jantsch:
When you make this a policy and communicate it to the world you accomplish several things.1) You get better or at least things get fixed. (Watch how fast your staff shapes up when they realize their every move in on notice.)
2) You admit you are human. Now more than ever people are looking for ways to connect with companies they do business with. Inviting them to participate in your customer service process is great way to connect.
3) You send the message that you care. You want to provide an absolutely perfect experience even if it means getting help from your clients to do it.
This idea isn’t new among lawyers. Evan Schaefer at Notes from the (Legal) Underground has been offering a proofreading reward of $20 for each typographical error, $10 for each grammatical error, and $5 for each clever demonstration of how he can omit needless words.
Personally, I’m nervous about asking my clients to point out my mistakes, but perhaps that is why the idea is so intriguing.
Sometimes, its the little things.
Sam Decker has been writing his weblog, Decker Marketing: Marketing, eBusiness, Management, & Life — from a Startup & Dell Marketing Guy since September 2003. I happend across it last week and have been consistently impressed with what Sam has to say. In a recent post, Sam talks about his friend’s new restaurant and its amazing bathroom hand dryer. Sam’s point:
I told my friends and wife to go wash their hands. And now I’m telling you about this. I’ll tell others. Why? I’ve never seen this before, and thought it was cool. Mike spent a few extra dollars for this dryer…but it should quickly pay off.I think little things in the customer experience can make a big difference in driving customer choice and word of mouth.
It’s why I go to Mexican restuarants with great chips and salsa, despite the food. Or the tipping point for me to choose one sandwhich shop over another because they serve soft ice. Or the chinese buffet, just because they have free ice cream.
Think about the little things you can do in your business to stand out, be remembered, and perhaps lead to word of mouth
.
What little things can you do to make your law firm stand out? I’m compiling a list of things we’re going to try. I’d like to know your ideas too.
So, what do you do?
Don the Idea Guy’s Brain Blog posts a link to a site called 15SecondPitch.com. From the site:
“So, what do you do?” It’s one of the first questions people ask. Your 15SecondPitch lets you answer with confidence and get them interested in learning more. Enhance all your relationships, business and personal, by marketing yourself more effectively.
The site also helps you craft an elevator speech with the help of a “Pitch Wizard.” You can put the result on a business card purchased from the site — which I think is a great idea. I’ve been working on my pitch for quite some time. As a general practitioner who also mediates, it has always been very hard for me to answer that very question, “So, what do you do?” But here is my best effort so far:
My name is Mathew Homann and I am an attorney and mediator. As an attorney, I help individuals, businesses, and organizations cope with day-to-day legal issues and plan for the future. As a mediator, I help those same kinds of people resolve their personal and business conflicts in a peaceful and cost-effective way. My firm, the Silver Lake Group, constantly strives to improve the way we work with our customers and we guarantee they will be happy with our service.
I’m still not 100% happy with it, but if you don’t start somewhere, you’ll never get anywhere.
Redesigning the Customer Experience
Rob over at Business Pundit points to a Business Week article on IDEO, a famous design firm. The article focuses on IDEO’s work in redesigning the customer experience for Kaiser Permanente, the largest health maintenance organization in the U.S.
After just seven weeks with IDEO, Kaiser realized its long-range growth plan didn’t require building lots of expensive new facilities. What it needed was to overhaul the patient experience. Kaiser learned from IDEO that seeking medical care is much like shopping — it is a social experience shared with others. So it needed to offer more comfortable waiting rooms and a lobby with clear instructions on where to go; larger exam rooms, with space for three or more people and curtains for privacy, to make patients comfortable; and special corridors for medical staffers to meet and increase their efficiency. “IDEO showed us that we are designing human experiences, not buildings,” says Adam D. Nemer, medical operations services manager at Kaiser. “Its recommendations do not require big capital expenditures.”
This article got me thinking about how IDEO would redesign the customer experience for most law firms. Seeing a lawyer is also a social experience often shared with others (spouse, parent, business partner) and, like medical care, often starts due to some unpleasent situation. Read the full article, it is a fascinating take on the IDEO process.
Great Client Questionaire
A great profile of Harvey Mackay, the well-known author of multiple business best-sellers, on About.com. The story contains a link to the Mackay 66, a tool Mackay uses in his businesses for gathering information about customers. The instructions:
It’s critical to have information about your customer. Armed with the right knowledge, we can outsell, outmanage, outmotivate and outnegotiate our competitors. Knowing your customer means knowing what your customer really wants. Maybe it’s your product, but maybe there is something else, too: recognition, respect, reliability, service, friendship, help – things all of us care more about as human beings that we care about malls or envelopes. Once you attach your personality to the proposition, people start reacting to the personality, and stop reacting to the proposition.Use this questionnaire to develop a profile of each customer. Some of your resources for the information might include secretaries, receptionists, suppliers, newspapers, assistants, trade publications, and the customer themselves. Look, listen, and learn all you can about the customer, both personally and professionally. You’ll find topics for opening conversations, which can open doors for you and your company.
My favorite is number 66: “Does your competitor have better answers to the above questions than you have?”
The Weekly Five
Each week, I come across some really cool sites that I don’t specifically write about. To share them with you, I’m starting “The Weekly Five” list in the right column of this weblog. I’ll throw five (or so) sites on the list each week that I’ve found, liked, and added to my Bloglines news aggregator. Enjoy.
How to design a memo.
Greg Storey’s Airbag has this post demonstrating how he would have redesigned the memo to George W. Bush about the Bin Laden threat. I don’t write about politics, but the redesigned memo is quite striking and makes me want to rethink my client correspondence design. Greg writes:
I seriously doubt the White House cares about such things (Condi if you are, lets talk) but it would seem to me that if USA Today made it easier for a nation to monitor the weather through good design, why not give design a crack at making it easier to stop terrorism?
What do Clients want.
Wayne at Cutting Through asks, “Now why can’t I get my Estate Agent and my Lawyer using RSS the next time I move house? I don’t then have to spend half my life on a phone finding out whether I have a house to move into in 6 days, 6 weeks, or 6 months?” Why indeed?
Gaming Strategy = Business Strategy?
Angie McKaig has a brilliant post titled On Game Theory and Entrepreneurship equating her computer game play strategies with her business methods:
I realized something about myself last night. I realized that I play games the same way I manage my business. … Truth is, I’ve always played games the same way; for the strategy. I just never realized it. And over the last twelve hours I’ve come to realize that I can understand the way I do business more clearly by looking at the way I play. I can also learn how to do business better by keeping in mind the way that I play.
Angie’s lessons (read her post for her explanations):
1. Short term sacrifices are sometimes made to pursue long term goals.2. Cooperation is preferable to hostile competition.
3. Build quietly and carry a big stick.
4. Amass only good resources.
5. Invest in your people.
6. Avoid conflict and keep successes tactical rather than bloody.
7. If I could win the game without decimating my opponent, I would.
8. In choosing between overtaking an opponent through brute force or your own skills, choose your own skills.
Angie muses, “Makes me wish I could play Master of Magic with my competitors. What a great way to quickly determine how my competitors do business. Is this why “good old boys” play golf?”
Word of Mouth for Lawyers
In this post, Creating Customer Evangelists author Ben McConnell comments on the recent Time Magazine Article on the new movie Troy. From the Time article:
Before a movie opens, studios can generate inauthentic signals by securing a star and advertising heavily, creating the impression of a phenomenon. This puts butts in seats on opening weekend and gets the competition out of the way. “You can orchestrate an opening,” says [economist Arthur] De Vany. “What you’re doing is briefly dominating supply. That’s not demand. The long-term demand necessary to sustain a blockbuster is still dependent on the authentic signal, word of mouth
Ben’s take:
In other words, you can advertise the hell out of a movie, or a product, and create artificial demand, but it’s still word of mouth that drives long-term, profitable success.
We lawyers already are at a disadvantage when it comes to this kind of customer evangelism. Our profession is so maligned that we must first convince our clients/customers/prospects that we are, “not like other lawyers.” Once you get past that barrier, however, good “buzz” or word of mouth will be your best measure of success.
Quote of the Week
When you’re through changing, you’re through. — Bruce Barton
Some Catching Up
So involved with the cool stuff we’re doing here that the blogging has been sporadic. That will change come Friday, but for now, here are a few interesting reads I’ve come across:
Dane at Business Opportunities Weblog picked up a great piece from Jeff Wuorio at the Microsoft Small Business Center on ways to diffuse angry customers.
Curt Rosengren at The Occupational Adventure has another thoughtful post titled, Your Money or Your Life – rethinking money.
Jennifer Rice at What’s Your Brand Mantra comments here on a great post from Dispatches from the Frozen North about marketing and the customer experience.
Johnnie Moore has list from the ecustomerserviceworld newsletter about the difference between managing and coaching that I thought included good lessons for lawyers.
And finally, the best of the bunch. Scheherazade writes:
When you get invited to someone’s place for dinner, and you say, “What can I bring?” and they say, “Just yourself,” bring flowers. I feel like a champ every time I do this, and like a bit of a chump every time I don’t .”
The [non]billable hour in print.
I am constantly amazed at the power of weblogs and the blogging community. Though I am far overdue in posting thank-you’s for sites linking to this weblog, there were some interesting off-line developments last week:
First, thanks to Evan Schaeffer for including this weblog in his Illinois Bar Journal Article (reprinted on his firm website). Evan is a friend, and if you haven’t read his Notes from the (Legal) Underground or Illinois Trial Practice Weblog, go do that right now.
Second, I posted here about letting your secretary fire a client as a “gift” for Administrative Professional’s Day. The post got picked up in a lot of weblogs and generated a request from the editor of the Administrative Assistants Update newsletter to reprint the post in her publication.
The Silver Lake Group, Ltd.
Well, the Silver Lake Group, Ltd. is open for business. My partner is Jeffrey Mollet, a lawyer with expertise in agribusiness, real estate, and banking law (I’ll post his biography here in another post). Jeff shares my passion for innovation and we both recognize how important it is to get our new venture off on the right foot. To that end, I’m shutting down my legal practice for the next month to concentrate on everything we need to do to start fresh, and most importantly, start right.
To be sure, I’ll still be here for client calls and meetings, and the occasional motion or hearing, but I have no trials scheduled and will be taking on no urgent matters this month. On June 1, we will be meeting with every client and sharing with them our vision for our practice — and more importantly, learning from them how we can better serve their interests. Some things on my agenda for the next four weeks:
1. Complete our Satisfaction Guarantee.
2. Prepare our announcements and finish our marketing materials.
3. Settle on our slogan/tagline. Right now, “Innovative Lawyers – Guaranteed Service – Uncommon Value” is the one we like best.
4. Revise our Mission Statement and draft our Client Care Agreement.
5. Interview for our Client Concierge Position.
6. Talk to the Placement Offices at St. Louis University, Washington University, and Southern Illinois University Law Schools about a first or second year student for some research projects.
7. Work on the SilverLakeLaw.com website.
8. Finish our migration from Word (him) and WordPerfect (me) to OpenOffice.
9. Introduce Jeff to blogging. He’s going to be starting a Farm Law/Agribusiness Blog soon as a service to his existing clients. We will use weblogs as an alternative to newsletters for clients in specific industries.
10. Keep blogging (though a bit sporadically).
I’ve never had more to do and been more excited about doing it. Look for updates here and thanks for your support.
Law Day
For many years now, I’ve been in charge of the Highland (Illinois) Optimist Club’s Law Day Program. Every year, we organize a “mock trial” for all of the eighth graders in Highland (from both the public and Catholic schools) at the Madison County Courthouse in Edwardsville, Illinois. This year, there were over 300 students, assorted faculty, and staff who attended.
The purposes of the program are two-fold: first, we want to give a realistic view of how a trial might work; and second, we want to impress upon the students the negative impacts of drinking and driving. A random selection of eighth graders make up the jugy, high school students play the roles of the defendant and witness, but everyone else involved is the real deal — judge, prosecutor, criminal defense lawyer, police officer, court reporter, and bailiff. Nothing is scripted. The police reports and other evidence are as real as we can make them, including the tape from the breathalyzer. The trial takes about two hours and almost always results in a conviction of the “defendant.” After the trial, the students ask the officers, lawyers, and judge questions about the law and legal process. After we finish, the kids are taken back to Highland for an assembly on drinking and driving (this year, time did not permit the assembly).
I estimate that we have presented this program to over 3000 kids since I’ve been involved with the Optimist Club, and probably 1000 more before then. Our annual cost is zero (except for the bus transportation). If anyone wants to know more how to run a similar program for your community, please contact me.