Managing a better professional services firm requires that you excel at providing superlative client service. Good technical skills and quality legal advice met the grade in the past but times have changed. The legal services marketplace is now more competitive then ever, and the competitors are not just other lawyers. Clients have become more demanding and questioning about the legal services they receive.

The following self-assessment will help you evaluate the level of professional service that you and your firm currently provide to clients.

Click here to rate your firm’s professional services

This assessment originally appeard in practicePRO’s Managing a . . . [more]

On occasion you will meet with people who are connected with a matter but not otherwise your client. For example, where you have met with several people during the creation of a business and will end up acting for the business but not for one or more of the individuals. Or, where you meet with the children of an elderly couple in the course of doing estate planning work. In these cases an “I am not your lawyer” letter can serve to make it crystal clear for which individuals you are and are not acting.

Here is a model “I . . . [more]

Setting and achieving goals are a necessary skill today. Effective goals and internalized, nurturing, specific, planned, in your control, reviewed regularly, are energizing and are recorded in writing.

We’ve compiled the list of the forty most popular downloads for 2010. Many of them are consistently popular year to year, such as Peg Duncan’s e-Discovery reading list, limitation periods charts, retainer precedents and various technology articles (such as Essential Smartphone Apps and The best Blackberry tips). Some more popular recent articles include:

• The Sample Budget Spreadsheet continues to grow in popularity, up 20% this year compared to last (in which it had doubled in downloads from 2008). Clearly lawyers are intersted in taking steps to improve their bottom lines.
• There was also obviously a desire for

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The debate over legal outsourcing is going mainstream, with a special report in yesterday’s Toronto Star (print copy only; Legal temps fill holes, cut costs).

The article focuses on Toronto-based LexLocom, a joint venture between Warren Bongard of legal recruiter ZSA and Scott Ewart. The services offered range from senior counsel with specialized expertise for specific projects, to low-end document review and due diligence work, and do it for about a third less than traditional firms.

Sue-Lynn Noel of Livingston International explains in the article why she used LexLocom’s services, when the boss of her in-house legal . . . [more]

Translating these five leadership categories to a law-firm environment, we can see the clear parallels for a law firm to achieve transformational results.

“How long do I have to keep my closed files?” is one of the most frequent questions lawyer ask me. Certainly you don’t have to keep all files permanently – this just doesn’t make practical or economic sense. Nor is the solution as simple as a one-size-fits-all rule for when to destroy closed files (e.g., toss everything at 10 years). For many reasons, file retention and destruction is a complex issue. This post examines why and provides some direction on how long you should keep your closed files. It includes information about how long claims take to surface for different . . . [more]

Cynthia Vukets of The Star covered today a new study that predicts the success of lawyers based on their law school yearbook photo,

A University of Toronto professor has found that he can predict how much money a law firm will make just by looking at university yearbook photo of the managing partner.

“We found that power is what predicts their success,” said Nicholas Rule, a psychologist. “It’s the impression of power that one gets from someone’s face.”

He took yearbook photos of the managing partners of the 100 top US law firms and showed them to college students. Students

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Careful readers of Slaw’s Linkblogs may have noticed Steve Matthews post on adding RSS feeds.

While that’s very useful, I also want to point Slaw readers’ attention to the new website Attorney at Work on which Steve’s post is published and to an invitation to receive “One Really Good Idea Every Day”.

The project is the brainchild of Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, and Joan and Mark Feldman who were responsible for many years for the excellent Law Practice magazine of the American Bar Association. So I must declare an interest. You’ll see a number of members of the . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada is currently reviewing the ethical and procedural issues relating to the “unbundling” of legal services, otherwise known as “limited scope representations” or “limited scope retainers.”

Unbundling is the concept of taking a legal matter apart into discrete tasks and having a lawyer or paralegal provide limited legal services or limited legal representation, that is, legal services for part, but not all, of a client’s legal matter by agreement with the client. Otherwise, the client is self-represented. While the Law Society’s Rules of Professional Conduct and the Paralegal Rules of Conduct do not prohibit such . . . [more]

A new study by the University of Toronto and Tufts University states that appearance matters a great deal when it comes to judging people in a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. “This includes clothing, posture, and hairstyles, but the real window to judging people is the face. We developed a method to measure facial power and found that it is a strong predictor of law firm profitability."

In most areas of law practice, lawyer/client communication problems are the number one cause of claims, followed closely by deadline and time management issues. Together they typically account for more than half the malpractice claims LAWPRO sees. Failures to know or apply substantive law typically account for about 10% of claims. See The Biggest Claims Risks article for more detail about the most common malpractice errors.

So, while knowing substantive law is important, from a claims prevention point of view you get more for your risk management efforts by focusing on improving client communications and focusing on getting things done . . . [more]