On July 20th, I am one of several panelists for an American Bar Association seminar titled "Overcoming E-Mail Overload: Techniques and Tips for Avoiding Malpractice, Streamlining, and Improving Effectiveness." It is presented by teleconference and also live audio webcast and is sponsored by the ABA Law Practice Management Section. You can click on the link in the program title to enroll or for more information. The other panelists are Emily J. Eichenhorn, Director, Lawyers’ Risk Management, CNA Global Specialty Lines, West Bloomfield, MI; Richard G. Ferguson, Lynass, Ferguson & Shoctor, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and Adriana Linares, Legal Technology Trainer and Consultant, Orlando, FL. This should be a worthwhile seminar.

However, in my role as citizen-journalist blogger, I also have to inform my readers that the ABA LPM Section has also seen fit to publish a really nice free article titled "Your Inbox Spilleth Over? E-mail Management Strategies that Work" by Debbie Foster in its Law Practice Today webzine. LPT is going to regularly feature "Best of ABA TECHSHOW" article it seems. My readers know I am all for free practice management content on the Internet, but I can’t help but be bemused at the timing of publishing this article a few days before the teleconference. Don’t worry. We have quite a few additional things to say and the online seminar has been submitted for MCLE ethics credit in the various states. Read the LPT article, and then attend the seminar, and you should be up to speed on the latest e-mail management techniques and tools.

Tom Kane has posted his Top Ten Marketing Tips with links to some explanation and elaboration. There is great advice you can absorb in a couple of minutes. I regularly follow Tom’s blog.

I noted with interest a comment posted by someone noting that many of these ideas do not apply in a criminal defense practice. For example, it is probably a poor career plan for the lawyer to visit the client at his place of business. (Grin) Like so many aspects of marketing, the primary challenge is setting aside the time to think, formulating a plan of action and then taking action. Criminal defense work may be an area where Yellow Pages ads make sense. You want to make yourself known to those who come into contact with those charged with crimes: bondsmen, counselors, towing services, etc. (You cannot offer fees, but you can convince others you are capable and believe in good client service.) You want to make it known to other local lawyers who do not practice defense law that you will take their referrals without stealing their client’s future business. You may decide to take a high profile case for less-than-adequate compensation and then work like your client paid you millions. You may teach CLE’s on search and seizure, forfeiture or expungement for your state or local bar, knowing that many in your audience will decide just to refer you the work when the situation presents itself. You may have an extremely informative web page. In other words, there’s not that much different about marketing this type of practice than others. Think, plan and execute the plan.

I would have warned everyone that I was taking a week off from blogging, but it really wasn’t my intent. I was hosted much of last week by those great folks at the Mississippi Bar at their 2006 Summer School for Lawyers. (I have no idea how much longer that second link will be live.) Anyway, between the CLE presentations I did for them, the amenities of the Hilton Sandestin Beach Resort, the beach chairs with umbrellas, the shopping, the surf and the other activities, blogging didn’t seem like much of a priority. In fact I can now claim a personal record of going an entire week without checking my work e-mail. Thanks to Miss. Bar Executive Director Larry Houchins, Jeanie Watkins and the rest of the MSBAR staff for a grand dose of Southern hospitality. As I talked to lots of lawyers about technology, marketing and other topics, I often found myself learning from some of them when I was supposed to be teaching. Blogging returns this week. Stay tuned.

One of the hardest things about the private practice of law is the number of hours most lawyers work. TV shows and movies about lawyers don’t show the long hours reading published opinions and deposition transcripts. (And rightfully so, it just wouldn’t be entertainment.) When you work too much, the rest of your life suffers, including important relationships. The Summer issue of LawPro Magazine was just released on the web yesterday. Its focus is Work and Wellness. I’d be very happy to mention this great feature even if they hadn’t included a reprint of an essay from yours truly. Do a good deed today and pass this link along to a friend. We all can benefit from thinking and reading about maintaining better balance in our lives.

I’d also like to publicly thank LawPro and PracticePro for placing their content on the web freely available to everyone instead of locking it behind a policyholder’s only password.

The Bar and Grill Singers are an all-lawyer musical review group. They provided entertainment for our Oklahoma Bar Solo and Small Firm Conference this past Friday and the attendees absolutely loved them. In addition to the very funny lyrics of their songs set to familar tunes, they are just excellent singers. I’m naming their website as my site of the week for last week in gratitude for a great evening. Go listen to the clips of their songs there and you might even want to order a CD. (To my friends in the professional bar staff world: This would be a guaranteed hit for your event. Trust me.)

Tom Mighell and Ross Kodner were our special guest speakers, but we had lots of Oklahoma stars doing presentations, too. We had lots of great content. The initial look at the reviews was great.

The subject line of this post is obvious in many ways, but there’s really some depth behind it. In all of our endeavors, we are generally satisfied when we get what we expect. (Well, that may not be true for the pessimists, but this post isn’t about them.)

Therefore it is important to the attorney-client relationship to do your best to make sure that the client has realistic expectations. It may be tempting when the new client is retaining your services to err on the side of "closing the deal," but it is a poor long term plan. When the client predicts an unrealistic result, it is tempting to say "Well, retain us and let’s see" or "Possibly." But be careful. It is appropriate to explain that there are many undertermined facts and/or questions of law. But starting the attorney-client relationship with a client who believes that they are likely to get certain relief when that isn’t that case is going down the wrong path. You can leave the predictions to the psychics. But you can’t leave a new client with a false belief.

Equally important are client expectations about how the attorney-client relationship will be managed. Modern technology allows us to be available to clients around the clock. That might even be acceptable if you have only one really well-paying client (who would have to sleep and have a life of their own.) All of us need down time and all of us have shifting priorities. Our clients need us to be there for them when it is required, but not on every whim. Patricia A. Yevics, Director of Law Office Management for the Maryland State Bar, has a great article entitled "Taming the Beast: Managing Client Expectations in a 24/7 World" in the June 2006 issue of GPSolo magazine. She has great advice on establishing client’s expectations about communications with your office.

Those great folks at PracticePRO have a great feature on dealing with the difficult client. It has four parts, including the brief summary at this link, which will take you to a fourteen page paper on the topic. There are also two extremely useful forms in MS Word format. One is an "administrative" document outlining how the law firm operates, including many topics such as hours of operations, how to make appointments and why you shouldn’t just "walk in" to see your lawyer. The other Word document details billing rates and practices in plain English. (Well, Canadian.) It is hard to overstate how beneficial these documents could be if customized to your practice and given to every client.

Readers of this blog are seeking law practice tips. Well, here’s a huge one. Read all of the information linked about–twice. Schedule a meeting with your staff and discuss how you help your new clients have realistic expectations. With the guidance of the forms noted above, draft handouts that will be given out to every new client in your two largest areas of practice. Implement the policy and set a review date for six months from now.

Let me start by saying that I generally hate lawyer ads on television. I’ve seen many of them and they are generally tacky and detrimental to the public’s perception of the legal system and the legal profession. Of course it could be said that they reflect the state of modern television. But having said that, I recognize several "truths" that some in New York do not seem to appreciate:

  1. The First Amendment has proven to be a very good idea and society should enact restrictions on what others can write and say with extreme caution.
  2. In any human endeavor, more information is preferable to less information.
  3. Since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized lawyer advertising in Bates v State Bar of Arizona, there have many results (among them sleazy TV ads.) But competition and lowering of prices on some routine consumer legal services has been a result, too. Many injured people would have never learned of a potential claim or how to bring it were it not for lawyer advertising.
  4. Limiting information about the availability of legal services favors the powerful and established at the expense of the small firm, the beginner and the upstart. Many lawyers have been able to successfully establish careers since Bates when they would have been unable to do so under the old rules. The composition of any committee seeking to restrict advertising is therefore always a concern.

So the news that New York is considering radical new restrictions on lawyer advertising should give all of us concern.

If you’d like to be informed about the drawbacks to this proposal, I urge you to read Peter Boyd’s point by point criticism of the proposed rules. It is extremely well-written and should make you think twice even if you personally would like to ban lawyer advertising. You can read the proposed rules here. I just have to note that the idea it should be unethical to display a picture portraying a lawyer in a courtroom is just plain silly.

Dennis Kennedy calls the new rules "draconian" and "micro-managing." Dennis asks "Are we seeing the last gasp of an attempt to apply 19th century concepts to a 21st century world, or will lawyers be the only group able to roll back the changes the Internet has brought to the rest of the world? "

Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle, always a champion of the solo and small firm lawyer, has a thoughtful post with links to many other online criticisms of the rules, including this comment discussing the 30 day solicitation rule on the Legal Ethics Forum.

Let me note that the above comments are mine alone and not the opinion of my employer. My personal opinion is that we lawyers would probably be better off if all advertising was banned. Look at all of the money spent on the Yellow Pages ads that would remain in law firm bank accounts. I just don’t see how one can or should do that in a free society in the Information Age.

I have several good friends and colleagues who do similar work for other state bars and Canadian law societies. We have some great discussions via e-mail. Recently we had a lengthy discussion about who or what answers your phone. For many law firms, economic reality dictates that the firm should no longer pay a full-time employee just to serve as receptionist with occasional typing duties. But often the alternatives can be unattractive. Outsourcing to a live answering service can be expensive and cause concerns about client confidentiality. In addition the quality of service may be uneven or generally poor. (Of course having a minimum-wage, unmotivated employee in-house may be no better.) On the other hand, having a phone call answered by an automated answering system can seem less than professional. Many clients detest voice mail.

A summary of our discussion was prepared by Ellen Freedman and posted on her blog here. This is a long post, but this is an important and often-overlooked issue. Your receptionist, in person or on the phone, is often the first person that gives an impression of the law firm to a new client.

Microsoft Outlook’s autocomplete feature is handy. You type in a few letters of an e-mail address and the rest is filled in for you. But there’s more to the feature than first meets the eye. Noted legal technologist Ross Kodner believes the feature is so dangerous it should be disabled in all law firms. (I’ll link you to the instructions to do that in a moment.) His theory is that you can used to typing in "Mar" and hitting enter to send it to your secretary, Mary. Then suddenly you do it with a e-mail containing a critical confidential file attachment and it mysteriously goes to another Mary, the opposing counsel on the case. While Ross may have a point, I think we should first understand how this works.

Outlook Autocomplete "guesses" the name or e-mail address you are beginning to enter. But if you assume it is guessing from your Contacts list, you’d be wrong. Instead it compiles a list of Nicknames from recently sent e-mails (and maybe sometimes from your Contacts.) That’s why Mary A-something can suddenly replace trusted Mary your legal assistant in Autocomplete. So you can easily send something to the wrong person without realizing you did, or even worse, just as you realize what is happening. (Ross Kodner also defined a time unit called the oh-no-second, which is the time period when it registers with your brain that you should not click the mouse or hit enter and at that instant the unstoppable finger does so anyway. You then follow by saying "Oh, no." Well, oh, something anyway!)

So anyway, here are some autocomplete tips:

  1. Here is a page explaining how to disable autocomplete that I Googled up.
  2. Alternatively, you can easily prune dangerous entries from the Nicknames list. When a list of autocomplete entries appears as you type, use the down arrow key to select names or addresses you use only rarely (or are opposing law firms) and delete them from Nicknames with the Delete key. This cab be quite helpful when someone you only send one e-mail to suddenly is in the way of your frequently used Nicknames.
  3. If you are e-mailing someone who is in your address book, the key combination Ctrl + K will search your Outlook Contacts (but not Nicknames) for the text you have typed so far. If only one match is found, it completes the address. If there are several, you are given a list from which to make a selection. This works whether or not autocomplete had been disabled.
  4. Finally, sometimes the Nickname list will become corrupted and have to be reset. Microsoft tells how here.

Now no one tell Ross I was being a Nicknames enabler, OK?