The ABA GP Solo and Small Firm Division put on some nice programming at the ABA Annual Meeting. (And I’m not saying that just because they asked me to speak.) I participated in two 90 minute programs called Perfecting Your Practice and Protecting Your Practice. I joined Uber-consultant Ross Kodner, Catherine Sanders-Reach from the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center and Hawaiian legal technologist Ben Schorr for what we hope was a thought-provoking exchange of information.
The materials for those sessions have been placed for download online, along with some other materials. Let me focus on two sets of the materials, although all are worthy of your attention.
Perfecting Your Practice is about creating and maintaining good client relations. We talk about listening to your clients (as many of you know, this is one of my favorite topics,) setting expectations, client communications during the representation and handling the matter effectively. The materials available for download are brief and can be reviewed in a few minutes, but the concepts are a life’s work.
The Sweet Spot: Buying Law Office Technology is a program Ross did for the OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference in late June, but you can also download it here. It gives advice on buying laptops, desktops, phones, cameras and more. You don’t want to miss this one.
Sadly, hardware buying this year may be more difficult as there are now signs that Microsoft won’t be able to ship its new operating system Vista by year’s end. It sure is a lot more simple to buy a computer with the OS installed than to upgrade. We’ll just have to wait and see at this point. But if you do buy a new computer make sure it is at least Vista Capable and probably Vista Premium Ready. See all of the specs here. 2006 is not the year to cut corners when buying computers. There are many new features of Vista that you will want sooner rather than later.
All of the materials I mentioned above, including Protecting Your Practice, can be downloaded here. There is a ton of great material at the link. Have fun reading and feel free to e-mail me any comments or suggestions.