During my almost fourteen years with the Oklahoma Bar Association as the practice management advisor, I have planned or helped to plan quite a few CLE programs, including our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. (This year's Solo & Small Firm Conference will be held June 9-11, 2011.) But today I want to direct your attention to what I think is an extremely important OBA CLE program this week with lots of information about your future.
Supercharge Your Law Practice will be held this week- on May 18, 2011 at the Oklahoma Bar Center and May 19, 2011 at the Renaissance Hotel in Tulsa. The May 18th program will also feature a live webcast. The live webcast will be a bit more expensive, but all of your staff can sit in and watch it with you.
There is a lot of change ahead for lawyers who want to be successful. It is not just about technology or even hard work. One of our “Supercharge” speakers, Tim Green, gave me this interesting quote from "Making It All Work," a sequel to "Getting Things Done" by David Allen:
"[S]tudies have proven that the vast majority of all performance improvement is systemic. Additional motivation and intelligence make only a negligible difference in the long run."
Given that observation, we are going to spend some time talking about designing efficient law office systems. We’re going to talk about future trends impacting the legal profession. Some of these trends are quite scary. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read this article from this month’s The Economist– A less gilded future: The legal business has undergone not only recession but also structural change. Ever-growing profits are no longer guaranteed. Nor, for some firms, is survival.
We are going to discuss digital law practice and digital client files. We’re going to demonstrate some tools to use for document assembly in the law office. Law firms need to incorporate document assembly tools to be effective, but that impacts billing and other business matters. I will demonstrate a document assembly tool that a solo practitioner with no staff support and no technology skill can use to automate his or her own forms. This is particularly significant to estate planners. In fact the demo documents in this document assembly program are estate planning documents.
Here is the link for more information and to register for Supercharge Your Law Practice. I hope to see you there, or at least for you to see us via the Internet.
If you cannot make the scheduled dates, the program will be archived for future viewing later. But why wait? Summer is a good time to make some changes.