Are You N.A.A.?
Mark Merenda gives some great advice on law firm taglines, and then shares this story:
It put me in mind of the — much shorter — tag line of a young attorney whom I met at a NAELA event at Hilton Head Island, S. C. in May, 2004. His business card read (with a change of names to protect the guilty): Joe Jones, attorney at law, N.A.A.
I asked what the N.A.A. designation stood for. He said, "Not An A**hole."
Choosing the wrong profession?
According to the article [here], many mechanics charge between 100 and 140 pounds ($174 -$244) an hour just in labor costs. Junior barristers charge 30 - 100 pounds ($52- $174) as their typical hourly fee; physicians charge from 44 to 63 ($77-$110) pounds per hour.
So, that's why you are suing me.
Management By Baseball breaks down a silly law suit by Major League Baseball against the owners of fantasy baseball leagues. What’s so interesting about the post is the explanation of the three common reasons big companies sue small ones. The third one doesn’t sound familiar, does it?
COMMON REASON #1 -- The attacking organization is on a decline it cannot stem with the creative energy & growth in its market & is just trying to squeeze a little more juice out of the old beetle before it folds.
COMMON REASON #2 -- The attacking organization is struggling to survive because even though it has creative energy, its markets are blocked & the chump change it stands to claim is more than it currently has.
COMMON REASON #3 -- The attacking organization just brought counsel in house or hired new outside counsel and the newcomer is trying to make an impression or the hiring executives want to show off their new toy.
Great Client Brainstorming Tip
I ran across this great tip on brainstorming a better career on the Achieve-It! blog:
Take a pad of paper and write down at the top your objective in question form. Then, simply list out 20 answers to your question.
For example, in this case, you would write “What should I be doing with my time and life?” Then stay seated for a half hour to an hour coming up with answers to that question. The key to this exercise is coming up with 20 answers - don’t quit until you have 20 answers.
Take this tip, and at your next client meeting take 30 minutes for you and your client to both complete the exercise, answering the question “What is a successful outcome of this case” or something similar. Trade answer sheets and discuss.
I wish I’d thought of this for my mediation practice. Imagine having each side do the exercise and then giving their answers to the mediator
ROI through the client's eyes
I’m completing my “Beyond ROI” presentation for ABA’s Techshow and have come up with a theme I like a lot. Let me know if you like it too:
The only “Return on Investment” that matters is the return your customers receive on their investment in you.
Promotion Progress
Don Dodge hits the nail on the head:
The web, and more specifically blogs, have made it simple and cheap to promote your product. And it can all happen in 24 hours...without ever leaving your computer screen. This is transformational. It has been happening gradually over the last 5 years so we haven't really noticed how dramatic the change has been. It is huge.
Be a Master
Hugh MacLeod on the billable hour:
The thing about consulting I hate is, you just get paid by the billable hour. So the minute you stop tapdancing, you're dead.
A Journeyman gets paid while he works. A Master gets paid while he sleeps.
links for 2006-02-16
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Regular E-mail reminders about anything you want.
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Pretty funny for anyone who works for crazy/demanding/insane clients.
21 Tips to Better Blogging
Here are 21 great tips for better blogging, from MakeYouGoHmm.com. They’re all great, but a few got a hearty AMEN! from me, including:
6. Start blogging about subjects that aren’t already being blogged to death, or write about them with a fresh perspective. Unless you are some kind of celebrity, the head of a major company, movie star, etc, just being you is likely not enough in today’s overcrowded blog space. If too much of your content is “me too” then readers will find it harder to stay interested and look elsewhere.
8. Don’t slap a bunch of flashy banners and buttons (no matter how small) all over the place. The clutter effect will happen if you keep jamming more and more stuff onto the pages, so be picky about what gets on the pages — and keep the content relative — and when something doesn’t seem as important or relevant either remove it completely or move elsewhere.
16. Don’t cripple the RSS feed. Some readers may actually prefer to read your posts in their favorite aggregator or portable device, so try not to punish them for their preferences.
20. Are you having fun? Readers are smart and can tell who is having fun from their writing over those who are laboring. Don’t labor, have fun. If trying to follow too many things on this list is peeing in your cornflakes, then stop following this list. It’s not the gospel, although I believe these tips will help those who are seeking some guidelines and direction.
While talking tips, if you haven’t already, check out Evan Schaeffer’s presentation from BlawgThink here.
Legal Writing Tips from Elmore Leonard
Well, not exactly tips on legal writing, but pretty solid advice from my favorite author. The best of the bunch?
Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
Imagine if Law Review writers followed the last tip. No more footnotes!
Technorati Tags: elmore+leonard, writing, law+review
Law Office of the Future for the Mobile Lawyer
Man, I’ve got to get me one of these. The only problem, not much of a waiting room.
Attorneys Aren't Knowledge Workers - Ron Baker
Attorneys Aren't Knowledge Workers by guest blogger Ron Baker
In light of my last post titled Your Employees are Volunteers, this one is sure to cause some cognitive dissonance. My VeraSage Institute colleague Dan Morris thinks I'm wrong about professional firms being filled with knowledge workers; he believes the majority of them are more akin to factory workers.
Now I know this is a heretical view, but Dan assembles a very powerful argument to support his assertion. He doesn't deny professionals have the potential to be knowledge workers. His argument is they are not largely because of the incentives and structures of the firms in which they operate, which function like sweatshops of yore.
Now this is a powerful argument, and it made me pause to reexamine my core assumptions about automatically asserting that just because someone is a credentialed professional they are automatically a knowledge worker.
There's no doubt they can contribute a certain amount of creativity and innovation to the jobs they perform and the customers they serve, but being a knowledge worker also requires that the leaders of your organization recognize and treat you like one.
Stephen Covey writes about exactly this in his latest book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness: "It's the leadership beliefs and style of the manager, not the nature of the job or economic era, that defines whether a person is a knowledge worker or not."
When you consider the metrics used by most firms to measure their team members, they all come from the Industrial Revolution's command-and-control hierarchies (realization, utilization, billable hours, etc). Yet as I discussed in my posts on The Firm of the Past and The Firm of the Future, the metrics we use to measure a knowledge worker's effectiveness are woefully inadequate.
Dan further supports his argument by stating that true knowledge workers:
- Don't have billable hour quotas.
- Spend at least 15% of their time innovating and creating better ways to add value to customers (this destroys efficiency under the old metrics!).
- Understand that judgments and discernment are far more important than measurements in assessing performance.
- Are focused on outputs, results and value, not inputs, efforts and costs.
- Don't fill out timesheets accounting for every 6 minutes of their day.
- Are trusted by their leaders to the right thing for the firm and its customers.
- Are passionate and self-motivated, and don't need constant supervision.
If the above describes your firm, congratulations — you are a true knowledge organization. Perhaps nothing illustrates the value knowledge workers can add to a business than last week's purchase of Pixar by Disney for $7.4 billion in Disney stock.
Disney will have to respect Pixar's culture and continue to let it make quality movies at its own pace, in its own way. Otherwise, if Pixar's creative talent leaves, "Disney just purchased the most expensive computers ever sold," according to Lawrence Haverty, a fund manager at Gabelli Asset Management.
Unfortunately, most professional firms we've come into contact with around the world do not fit Dan's criteria, which is why he makes such a strong case they function more like manual laborers than knowledge workers.
UPS founder Jim Casey remarked in 1947: "A man's worth to an organization can be measured by the amount of supervision he requires."
The moment you feel the need to hover over your knowledge workers, either physically or metaphorically with the Sword of Damocles — the timesheet — you've made a hiring mistake.
Until professional service firm leaders begin to grant their team members autonomy — Greek for self-governance — and treat them like self-respecting knowledge workers, I think Dan's argument trumps mine.
What do you think?
Technorati Tags: ron+baker, knowledge+workers, law, firm
A Tip for Sleepy Lawyers
The Caffeine Nap is simple. You drink a cup of coffee and immediately take a 15 minute nap. Researchers found coffee helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy. So in testing, the combination of a cup of coffee with an immediate nap chaser provided the most alertness for the longest period of time. The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.
Thirty-Nine Cents per Happy Client
Are you including self-addressed stamped envelopes when you send your bills to your clients? You should be.
links for 2006-02-12
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"If you want to get people to participate in a workshop or presentation, ask them "What questions do you have?" and wait for someone to answer. The usual "Any questions?" acts as a participation deterrent, as it requires the questioner to be a speed bump
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Some good tips for designing your home page.
Practical Tech
I’ve known Adriana Linares for a few years now. She’s cool, hip, and on top of her technology. And she’s blogging! If you want practical, no lingo advice on using the technology you already have, check out her I Heart Tech blog, and you’ll “Heart” Adriana too!