Statements for legal services are a critical part of law office operations, yet often insufficient attention is given to the appearance and formatting of legal billing. Bills are an important communication with clients that can impact the clients’ view of the law firm and its lawyers.

In my column Your Statement for Legal Services is Enclosed in the May/June issue of Law Practice Magazine, I cover many aspects of legal billing, from the greater likelihood of a third party audit of law firm bills to how much detail the bill should contain. I also discuss whether the ubiquity of Big Bill 2electronic billing now means that the use of tools like color and hyperlinks in the statement should now be considered for law firm billing. There are many creative things that can be done with billing, although one wouldn’t want to go overboard as client billing is a serious matter. But if you are sending out ebilling with a black and white version of the law firm’s color logo, changing to the color version seems to be a quick and easy “upgrade.”

The late Harris Morgan and Jay Foonberg published the second edition of How To Draft Bills Clients Rush to Pay in 2003. The primary takeaway from the book is that bills should be detailed and legible, reflecting both value to the client and effort on the part of the lawyer. That is still a great touchstone today and, a dozen years later, this book is still a classic with many valuable lessons for those who can locate a copy. I hope you enjoy my Practice Management Advice column.

We hosted attorney Jennifer Ellis for our Digital Edge podcast "Website Wizardry: The Right SEO for Your Law Firm." Jennifer manages the online presence of the law firm where she works and also assists law firms with their websites, social media and other aspects of their online presence.

As most lawyers now know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and involves techniques to make it more likely a search engine will direct someone to your site. Every lawyer should do some basic things to promote their website, like linking your LinkedIn page and other social media to your website, including the address in email signature block, and always including the link when you write for publication, particularly online publication. But, while those efforts will make it easier for someone looking for you to find you, they won't bring you to the top of search results for "bankruptcy lawyer" or "divorce lawyer" in your area (unless you practice in a tiny community.)

My reaction to hearing Jennifer talk about SEO as it is today was complete sticker shock. Jennifer estimates that high-quality SEO should cost from $3,000 to $10,000 a month– and if you are only paying $1000 per month, you probably aren't getting much. Many small law firms would consider that wildly unaffordable.

We also discussed Google's recent announcement that its algorithm will change to disfavor web sites that are not mobile friendly when the search is done on a mobile device. If this change is going to impact an estimated 40% of Fortune 500 companies' websites, you can probably be assured it will impact your web site if it is not "mobile-friendly." Jennifer strongly suggests that you check your website's mobile friendliness with Google Developer's Mobile-Friendly Test page. Today's news reports say Bing will be following Google's example.

Jennifer also has suggestions for the law firm that has to operate on a tighter budget, so check out our podcast.

In case you missed it the first time, I would also direct your attention to our 2013 Digital Edge podcast How People Search for Lawyers: The Consumer Law Revolution featuring Stephanie Kimbro.

A small firm lawyer who doesn't know where to start on getting a website could get the basics from my older column Web Site How-To Tips for the Small Firm Lawyer and should also take a look at my 2012 column Getting Noticed Online.

Most lawyers hate filling out timesheets to record their billable time. Lawyers are also not perfect at Time sheetaccomplishing this, leading every company with a time and billing product to tout how much money can be made if only every bit of “lost” time was recorded. But the practice of recording time by hand on paper timesheets really does need to go the way of the Dodo bird.

Your attention is directed to my Oklahoma Bar Journal column, Those Timesheets, Those Hated Timesheets: Are You Still Using Them?, where I wrote:

“[T]here’s one observation that I can make today with a great deal of certainty. A lawyer entering their time by using pen and ink on a paper timesheet is employing an inefficient practice that should no longer be used. You need to enter your time digitally. This means you.”

There are a number of reasons for this, but two major ones are 1) that lawyers need to invest the time to digitally enter their time records so they are relieved from later spending some much time proofing billing and 2) in today’s working environment, lawyers need to be able to enter their billable time from any remote location by using their smart phones or tablets. I then go through several examples of how the companies involved with our Practice Management Shootout at the OK BAR all allow for remote time entry. I also link to a blog post by Brian Focht discussing other stand-alone time keeping apps.

If you are still entering your time by hand on paper, you really need to read this column. Changing a deeply ingrained habit won’t be easy, but I firmly believe this will result in freeing up staff time, lawyer time and producing a higher-quality bill for the client.

There won’t be guns blazing or blazing saddles, but there is going to be a shootout at the OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference on June 19, 2015. We are excited to be hosting Practice Management Shootout at the OK BAR, featuring six of the top practice management solutions for lawyers.

I believe it is absolutely critical for small law firms to embrace practice management solutions that help them organize their client files and move to a more paperless workflow. Oklahoma Bar members will have an unparalleled opportunity to compare and contrast these great tools at our conference at the Hard Rock Casino Resort at Tulsa.

Riding into town are MyCase, Firm Manager, Firm Central, Clio, RocketMatter and PracticeMaster/Tabs3. I know most of these company reps and they are a wild bunch. The presentations will start in the morning and be finished before high noon.

Shoot out2

Oklahoma lawyers may never have a better opportunity to choose their weapons. Each vendor will have a ten minute TED-style talk and then they will be at their booths for the rest of the conference so attendees can follow up with questions. Picking a practice management solution can be challenging and it is critically important. So, many law firms find themselves struggling to “pull the trigger” on a decision. Other law firms have made the leap and now wonder if they have the best tool for their practice. You will never be better armed to make this decision.

Having all this information and company reps in one location will help you summon the true grit to make the call—this summer. In all seriousness, if you haven’t done this yet, it is time to strongly consider this important upgrade for your practice. Come find out why.

One way to improve your client’s experience with your law practice and indirectly help with marketing is to Value Add determine how you can provide added value to the client in a way that doesn’t use the lawyer’s billable time. This does NOT mean a refrigerator magnet with the law firm’s phone number and website.

How to do this really depends on the kind of legal services rendered and the types of clients generally served.

The Value Add was the subject of my Practice Management Advice column in the March/April 2015 issue of Law Practice Magazine. I used an estate planning practice for some of my examples. But in any type of law practice, the question is whether there is something extra you can provide the client that is related to the legal services and is useful to the client. It does not mean something that has the lawyer’s contact information on it necessarily. It is 2015. You have a website and the client has work product with your contact information on it. They will be able to find you again if they want to do so.

For example, when I was in private practice I had a standard “getting your life back to normal” letter, we sent clients after their divorce case was concluded. It had a lengthy list of reminders of things that needed to be done post-divorce. Some of the items were mundane and I confess that part of the original motivation was clients wanting to do things themselves post-divorce instead of paying my firm to so, like changing the name on the car title. But the letter had a positive tone and I didn’t bill the client for it. (I wish I still had a copy of the text.)

There are many variations on this theme. But if you can surprise the client at the end of the representation with something useful that they didn’t expect, you increase the chances that they will use your firm again, refer others to your and pay their final billing. What unique value can you add to your client’s lives this year?

This month's Digital Edge podcast, Why the iPad is the Best Tablet for Litigators, features Tom Mighell, IPad in one hour litigators author of the ABA book, iPad in One Hour for Litigators, Second Edition. While there are now many interesting versions of tablets and "phablets" these days, according to Tom, the iPad is still the best tool for courtroom presentations because of litigation-focused apps like TrialPad.  But Tom also discusses note taking apps, reviewing discovery documents and other functions of interest to litigators. He also discusses and rule collections and what an important app TranscriptPad is for lawyers.

On a related note, Tom was a speaker on the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes (iOS) at ABA TECHSHOW last week. iPhoneJD.com has posted the complete list of apps with the links along with links to reviews of many of the apps.

Our Digital Edge podcast on Speech Recognition and Dictation Solutions for Today’s Lawyer was so good that I have already listened to it again. But that is not bragging because what Sharon Nelson and I did was to sign up an great expert for our guest on this topic, Britt Lorish of Affinity Consulting Group. This podcast was packed full of useful information. As someone who uses speech recognition tools daily in my work, I can assure you that not only do these tools work, but they can really increase your productivity. Britt has a wealth of information on this subject. If you are still paying someone to transcribe dictation, you may want to listen to this Digital Edge podcast.

Are uniformity and creativity two competing concepts? Does striving for uniformity kill creativity?

My column in the February 2015 Oklahoma Bar Journal is titled Uniformity vs. Creativity and I argue that law firms, especially small- to mid-sized firms, need to put more effort into internal standardization to better serve their clients. But perhaps the examples I included make this point very well. If your staff was interviewed by an outside consultant, would they hear any of these complaints?

• “We have to set up the files one way when they are Bob’s clients and a totally different way when they are Fred’s clients.”

• “We can’t cross train anybody to cover for vacation or illness because Mary insists that her matters be handled differently than everyone else in the law firm.”

• “Jim doesn’t handle a certain type of matter frequently, but when he does we have to go search in his old files because he wants things done differently than everyone else in the law firm.”

• “We have five lawyers in the firm and so we have to use five different forms as the starting point for drafting a relatively routine document.”

Sound familiar? It sounds familiar to every law firm consultant and many law firm administrators. If you have associates, you can bet that they have noticed, too. Please read my column and share it with some lawyers who really needs to read it.

 

You know when Newsweek is publishing a story on needed reforms for law schools that the conversation has extended past the legal community. Unfortunately rapid change has not been a trait of academia or of the legal community. But serious questions are being asked and they deserve discussion outside of the halls of academia.

Here are two thought-provoking articles for you to review and share.

“Facing up to the challenge: It’s time to prepare law students for their profession” was published on the ABA Journal’s New Normal page near the end of January. The author is Michael Roster, a former managing partner of Morrison & Foerster’s Los Angeles office. He now teaches Contract Drafting and Strategy at the USC Gould School of Law. He is uniquely qualified to critique law schools because he was a consumer of what law firms produce- newly-minted lawyers looking for a job. It is hard to argue with the goals he outlines for legal education change.

The newly published Newsweek article “Law Schools: Reform or Go Bust” is written by James Huffman, Dean Emeritus and a professor of law at Lewis and Clark Law School in Oregon. His critique is The cliffwell-written. His solutions will not be well-received by law professors, beginning with his proposal to cut faculty numbers in half by requiring faculty to devote most of their time to teaching. Would anyone think laying off half of the people in their field was a good idea, after all?

I am not really in a position to advocate specific changes. I can echo the oft-repeated phrase that law schools should produce “practice ready” graduates. But James Huffman brings up one interesting point− how much better off would these new lawyers and society be if they were able to graduate law school relatively debt free?

Attorney@Work gave me the opportunity to share my thoughts today on their regular Friday Five feature. I Attyatworklogohope my Five Thoughts on the Future for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers will be useful food for thought for many lawyers. They have hosted a lot of great Friday Five features in the past, so it was nice to be asked to be a part of that series.