Leveraging Your Time - Part 2

In a recent blog, I posed the question: How can lawyers leverage their time? I suggested that there were four things lawyers can leverage: (1) other people’s time, (2) knowledge, (3) technology, and (4) packaged services. After thinking about it further, I would expand that list to include office space, equipment, and facilities. The truth is that you can probably leverage any asset or resource that is used in the legal profession. The challenge is to learn how to leverage those assets, and then to maximize your leveraging power.

Leveraging your time requires a different mindset. It is a change in the way you think about the practice of law. It is not just delegating your work to someone else or learning to use a Blackberry. It is not something you do just once. Leveraging your time requires continuous dedication. Also, leveraging your time requires separating yourself from your business. How can you run your business more efficiently without you personally doing all the work? As Michael Gerber wrote in his inspiring book The E-Myth Revisited, you want to think about "replacing yourself with a system."

Leveraging People

Leveraging people is what big law firms do best. Partners hire associates and paralegals and then bill out their time to clients at 2-3 times the amount of their costs. Leveraging people is an option open to every lawyer. Even a solo practitioner can do it. For example, Grant Griffiths mentioned that he uses a virtual assistant to help his home-based law practice. The virtual assistant can increase his staff and productivity without hiring a full-time person, without having to rent office space (or expand his home), and without having to educate and train that person. And with advent of the Internet and new technology, it is easier for lawyers to hire virtual assistants than ever before. In my practice as a corporate lawyer, I have used outsourced assistants from the Virtual Paralegal Services. Founded by Denise Annunciata, VPS has a team of experienced paralegal with a variety of different practice skills who are available on short notice.

Leveraging Knowledge

As noted a year ago, I believe Knowledge Management ("KM") will drive the law firms of the future. The ability to capture, organize, store and retrieve the knowledge and experiences of other lawyers will be critical for law firms in order to deliver high quality legal services in a timely and efficient manner. Leveraging knowledge requires an investment of time to create templates or forms that can be reused in the future. Most lawyers believe they are too busy with client matters and cannot afford to spend time developing "forms". However, if the legal profession goes into a recession and competition drives prices down, then lawyers may not be able to afford not to invest in KM. Cutting costs, improving product quality, and increasing efficiency will likely be the key to a successful law practice over the long term.

Leveraging Technology

Technology, by its very nature, is designed to be leveraged. The reason we buy technology is because it makes our work easier to do. Drafting documents with computers and printers is a lot more efficient than writing out multiple pages by hand. Today there are thousands of ways to leverage technology, more ways than ever before to reduce unbillable time and overhead. For starters, every law firm should consider implementing digital pbx, fax-by-email, voice mail by email, e-billing, e-newsletters, contact managers, client extranets, document assembly, remote access, PDAs, personalized scanners, desktop search engines, and Google alerts. If you are not already using or at least thinking about using these new technologies, now is the time!

Leveraging Packaged Services

Packaged legal services are the efficient delivery of repetitive matters. The first time you take on a matter in a new practice area, or even a slightly different approach to an old practice area, there is a learning curve. You can not know how to solve every problem or streamline the process the first time that you try to do something. However, by the 10th time, or the 100th time, you get pretty good at it. A critical component to leveraging your time is developing legal services that are repetitive.

Repetitive work, does not happen by accident. You have to design (and market) your firm around the kind of business that you want to attract. It is counter-intuitive, but the more you specialize, the easier it is to attract the kind of work that you want to do and the easier it is to develop efficiencies. If you market yourself as an intellectual property attorney, you will get work relating to patents, trademarks, and copyrights and be competing with all lawyers who practice in those areas. If you market yourself as only a trademark lawyer, it will be easier for people to remember what you do, you will be competing with much fewer attorneys (who "only" do trademarks) and the work you get will be more repetitive (and therefore easier for you to develop efficiencies).

After you define a narrow field in which to practice, packaged services requires a dedication to the simple mantra "documentation, standardization, and automation." Start with documentation of procedures (ideally, as you do them the first time), create standardized forms and templates that you can reuse, and then and continually improve those tools over time with the goal of automating the process. Many parts of the legal profession require creative thinking. As a result, legal services cannot be fully automated. However, by using document assembly, citation checkers, online databases, and other innovative tools, the service delivery process for lawyers can be streamlined. There is no reason for lawyers to continually "reinvent the wheel."

Leveraging Office Space, Equipment and Other Facilities

Today, lawyers do not need to be physically present in the office on a daily basis in order to be effective. There are many ways that firms can leverage office space, equipment, and other facilities by encouraging lawyers who want (or need) to work out of their homes or at a remote location. This opens the possibility of sharing resources among virtual staff members. Video conferencing, teleconferencing, and digital (IP) phones all help to reduce costs and leverage valuable resources.

Determining the Leveraging Factor

Once you have considered the different alternatives described above, you may wonder how you can maximize your leveraging power and, therefore, optimize your law practice. To do that, you need to develop a way to measure your productivity enhancements. I'm sure the experts have some other name for it, but I call it the "Leveraging Factor." The Leveraging Factor is the amount of leveraging you achieve by making certain dollar investments in new resources.

For example, if you hire a paralegal at an "all-in" cost of $60K per year who can produce $120K annual revenues (1200 billable hours invoiced at $100/hour), the leveraging factor is 2 ($120K/$60K). Note: if you charge $150/hour, the leveraging factor is 3.

Technology makes it easier to increase the leveraging factor. If you buy a high-speed scanner for $10K that reduces the amount of unbillable time a paralegal spends on organizing and finding case files by 30 minutes per day, the paralegal could convert 120 hours of unbilliable time each year to billable time, resulting increasing the paralegal's leveraging factor to 2.2 at a billing rate $100/hour or 3.3 at a billing rate of $150/hour. However, if the scanner saves time for 10 people in the office, the leveraging factor improves by a factor of 10. As a result, $10K spent to purchase the scanner would have a leveraging factor of at least 12 ($12K revenues x 10 people/$10K cost). If the scanner reduces unbillable time for lawyers as well as paralegals, the leveraging factor would be even higher.

For an investment in knowledge management or resources, the leveraging factor could be higher or lower, depending on the volume of business. By determining the leveraging factor for each investment you propose to make, you can begin to allocate funds to those resources that produce the highest return. The more successful you are at allocating resources, the faster you can grow your business.

To summarize, if there is an asset or resource that may be useful in your law practice, think about how you can leverage that asset or resource. What new technology should you adopt? Whom should you hire? What leverage will those investments provide? How can you replace yourself with systems? How can you make those systems more efficient?

If you have thoughts on how lawyers can leverage their time, I encourage you to share them by posting a comment on this blog. If you have any other feedback on this topic, feel free to post that as well.

The case for collaboration among lawyers

Historically, firms grew by continually increasing their billing rates, but that strategy is no longer working. As billing rates of big firm lawyers top $1000/hour, clients (e.g., Cisco and other companies) are pushing back. The impending recession will make it even harder for law firms to raise rates. The alternative to raising rates is to cut costs by leveraging techology and existing resources. The dramatic growth and consolidation of big law firms over the past 20 years will also drive firms to implement new technologies that facilitate the sharing of common resources and improve their return on investment in both people and infrastructure. The bottom line is that big firms are getting, and will continue to get, more efficient by leveraging technology. Where does that leave the rest of us?

The problem for the solo practitioner and small firm is that it will get increasingly difficult to compete. Although the Internet is heralded for leveling the playing field, the rules of the game have changed. The new game is about having real-time, virtual, and personalized access, to people, information and tools that enhance productivity, improve results, and facilitate the practice of law. How will the solos and small firms develop these new resources?

In thinking about how to grow my own practice, I feel overwhelmed by the of scope of knowledge necessary to build a first class law firm today. Sure, I can just keep doing what I have always done: use my intellect to solve client problems. However, looking into the future and seeing the obvious competitive pressures from bigger law firms, relying on my intellect is no longer enough. There is a whole range of new technology, information, and systems that must be implemented in order to remain successful. And even as a solo practitioner (or now, in a two-person law firm), my goal is provide first class legal services, not just earn a living. How can a solo or small firm keep up?

The trend of law firms getting bigger, developing their resources, and implementing new technologies is presently at odds with the typical solo practice or small firm. Solos and small firms simply do not have the time or resources to invest in infrastructure, which disdainfully adds to their overhead. Solos and small firms are painfully aware that every dollar spent on overhead immediately reduces their available cash. The mantra of the solo or small firm is “do without” rather than do anything that would reduce their cash flow.

Here is the typical thought process of a solo practitioner. I can only generate X-dollars for my time. So, why should I reduce my take-home pay by adding to overhead? No matter how many computers or software programs I have, I still have to spend an hour of my time in order to be paid for an hour of work. Where is the incentive to invest in technology or spend time developing new systems?

This traditional mindset is a threat to the continued success of the legal profession in the United States. How can lawyers innovate, deliver better results for clients, and improve profitability if they don’t invest in new systems and technology? How will lawyers compete with the inevitable outsourcing of legal functions to virtual law firms in India, Russia or China? How will the profession respond when big law firms develop knowledge management systems that enable paralegals to perform better legal work and at lower cost than work produced by seasoned attorneys who work as solos or in small firms?

In the United States, over 50% of lawyers are solo practitioners and over 75% of lawyers work in firms with fewer than 20 attorneys (See ABA's lawyer demographics). And there is some reason to believe that these percentages are increasing as gen X and gen Y lawyers increasingly choose lifestyle over money in pursuing their career goals. How will the 75% consisting of solos and small firms compete with the 25% working in big firms? Should all lawyers just join (or become) big firms? I don’t think so. Solos and small firms fervently protect their independence and freedom to control their lifestyle as well as their style of practice. Lawyers who work as solos or in small firms need access to shared resources that enable them to develop the efficiencies of large firms without joining large firms. The answer, I believe, is collaboration.

What does collaboration look like? I don’t know yet. The legal profession, historically, tends to be more adversarial than collaborative. Collaboration is breaking new ground. And getting there means trying new things to see what works. Social networking, Internet communications, and online services hold a lot of promise for facilitating collaboration among lawyers. If lawyers generate new business through these new activities, they will naturally have an incentive to collaborate in more substantive ways. This is a phenomenon that we are beginning to see in our law practice. We started by forming an informal networking group for lawyers (and other professionals) called the “Business Lawyers Network” (BLN). Over the past three years, we have experimented with a number of initiatives that facilitate collaboration among lawyers including the creation of the LEXpertise.com website.

So far, the collaboration process has been very slow in progressing. However, I am very encouraged by the results. Many BLN lawyers have generated new business by participating in the various networking events and by sharing their knowledge and information on the LEXpertise.com website. And, based on numerous anecdotes from BLN members, these collaboration efforts have improved lawyers’ satisfaction with the profession. One lawyer commented to me that he was re-energized and, for the first time in years, he was enjoying being a lawyer and building his law practice.

How can collaboration help to grow your firm? In what ways can and should lawyers collaborate?

[This is the first of, what I hope will be, many articles about collaboration among lawyers. I'd love to hear what other lawyers thoughts are on this subject and encourage readers to post their comments on this blog.]

What do clients want, really?

So often in business you hear “listen to your customers”, “be customer-driven,” “focus on the customer’s needs”. Companies spend a lot of money on customer surveys, focus groups and market analysis to really understand their customers. If it applies to every other business, why not the legal profession?

Well…it does! But, it is harder to do with legal and other professional services, where you are providing more intangible than tangible work product. What lawyers are selling is the application of knowledge in a personal relationship based on trust. Great legal work is not delivered in a fedex package, but in a timely, thoughtful, consistent and effective manner. Right?

Yes, and no. The quality of an attorney’s work product is not always as important as the perception of its quality. Lawyers may provide great services, but that only addresses what their clients need. Lawyers must also understand and address what their clients want. According to Seth Godin, a marketing guru, people buy what they want not what they need (from his book All Marketers Are Liars). So, how do you know what clients want?

One way is to take a client (or prospective client) to lunch. Jim Hassett, a business development trainer, suggests that lawyers specifically ask what clients like and dislike about working with law firms. Another way is to send clients a questionnaire (electronically or on paper). These are useful exercises, which I have done in the past, but seldom do clients feel comfortable answering these questions directly. And, even if they do, their responses are limited at best.

Well, an extraordinary thing happened on January 25, 2007, Mark Chandler, General Counsel of Cisco Systems, Inc., made a speech answering the question as to what clients want and detailing exactly what he as a client dislikes about law firms today. In that speech, he said clients want “access to information, strategy, and negotiation” and he challenged the legal profession to change its delivery of services and to improve its productivity and efficiency through the use of new technology. His presentation is accurate and insightful. And his conclusions are compelling.

For anyone trying to build Law Firm 2.0, the law firm of the future, I highly recommend that they read Mr. Chandler’s speech. In it, I believe, you will find the blueprint for building Law Firm 2.0. The article starts with the premise that technology is driving change in knowledge-based industries and concludes that law firm need to respond to those changes.

Based on this speech, here is a list of questions that I think every law firm must consider:

• How does the Internet, with its easier access to information, people and tools, affect the legal profession? Where and how should legal work get done today?
• What does it mean for a law practice to be metrics-driven? What measurements can be used to improve productivity and efficiency of a law practice?
• What kind of knowledge management systems are needed? How can lawyers more effectively share information and resources with clients?
• How can lawyers more effectively share knowledge or otherwise collaborate among themselves?
• How do law firms attract and retain associates today? What technologies are needed to communicate with younger associates? Is it instant messaging, online chat, forums, podcasts, RSS feeds, or some new legal management system?
• How should legal information and services be delivered to clients? In what ways should law firms change delivery of their services from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many? What information is suitable for distribution to clients on the basis of 1-to-many?
• How can legal services be billed so as to ensure that greater value is provided to clients every year? How can legal services be standardized?
• How can technology drive down the cost of delivering legal services?
• How can contracts and forms be standardized? What tools can be used for development, access and maintenance of those contracts and forms?
• How can clients assume more responsibility in the preparation and delivery of legal services that will improve the quality of the work product and lower their costs for legal services?
  

Also worth noting is the Peter Lattman’s blog for the WSJ and the comments from his readers on Mark Chandler’s speech.

How is technology driving change in your law practice? What do your clients really want?

Would you marry your business partner?

No, I don’t mean literally. Most people spend years looking for the right person to marry. But, when it comes to business, they spend very little time by comparison looking for the right person. Especially lawyers.

In order to build Law Firm 2.0 (the law firm of the future), I need to add lawyers to the firm. They could be partners or associates. I am open to either one. But, I know whomever it is will have a profound impact on the direction and culture of the firm. How do I find the right lawyers to work with?

You cannot build the law firm of the future unless all of the lawyers have (or adopt) a similar mindset. It just won’t happen. When I think about adding partners or associates (or anyone to the firm), I think about finding other people who are open to change and want to continually challenge themselves to make improvements.

Over the past five years, I have been approached several times by other lawyers asking whether I would be interested in joining them, or suggesting that maybe we could build a firm together. Each time, I approach those discussions with openness and a willingness to share my vision for the future. I explain that I want to build a new type of law practice for small business that leverages technology, increases efficiencies, provides high quality service, and reduces costs. I further explain that if the practice can be profitable with small businesses, it will be even more profitable with larger businesses.

Even before I finish explaining my vision, the other lawyers often lose their attention and start talking about what they want in a firm. Too many lawyers are looking for “bodies” or functional specialties. They think if they just have some number of lawyers (typically 5-20) with complementary areas of practice, then they can build a successful law firm. They are most concerned about physical size, physical location, and overhead. They talk about buildings, technology, and clients, but they are surprisingly silent about people, values and goals.

Don’t confuse new technology with new law firms. All of the computers and communication tools in the world will not change a law firm if the lawyers themselves are not open to change. It’s all about the people. What kind of law firm do they want to build, how will they build it, and who will be involved. Building the Law Firm 2.0 is not about technology, it’s about people implementing technology in new ways that will facilitate and improve the practice of law.

So, what does the ideal partner look like? What type of lawyer is needed to build Law Firm 2.0? Bruce MacEwen said it best when he declared that these lawyers would need to be “exceptional individuals of uncompromised vision” and suggested that they would have the following characteristics:

-deeply inquisitive
-risk-taking, open-minded, and eager to experiment
-trusting (by default – until crossed)
-instinctively dissastisfied with the a static status quo, and
-unwilling to settle for unimaginative, brute-force business models.

(David Maister's article entitled "Are Law Firms Manageable" and Bruce MacEwen's commentary are must reads for anyone trying to build a law firm today.)

In the past, I have had good partners and bad partners. Having a good partner expands my ability to generate business and be successful; the relationship breeds synergy. Having a bad partner contracts my ability to generate business and be successful; the relationship breeds mistrust and anxiety. The one thing I have learned is that it's all about the people.

What do you look for in a partner? How will that partner help you to build Law Firm 2.0?

A virtual lawyer may need a physical office

I apologize for my absence last week. I had a greater than normal workload and spent most of the week fighting fires. I also closed the deal on my new office lease and needed to select vendors for all the normal office services.

So, why does a virtual lawyer need an office?

I started my own law practice five years ago, working out of my house. On the rear of the house is an addition with a separate entrance, which provided a perfect space for an office. The office looks out on the tall pines and mature maples trees in the woods behind the house. It is also separate from the main house so that I hear none of the family activities. And, the office has tall plate glass windows, which makes it look and feel like an office.

So, why leave? Why not just operate a virtual law practice with other professionals each working out of their homes? I did that for over four years. It was great! I kept my overhead low and built a corporate practice working with start-ups companies and entrepreneurs. Many of my clients liked the fact that my business felt like a start-up, similar to theirs. I liked the fact that I had no commute, no overhead, and more time and flexibility to spend with my family.

The problem is that after 4 years, I got to the point where I wanted to grow my business. I could have just focused on moving up the value chain, attracting better quality clients, raising my rates and letting the smaller fledging clients go. But that was not the kind of practice I wanted to build. I enjoyed working with early stage companies (as well as larger ones) and I believed that the market for small business legal services is underserved. I wanted to build a law firm that leveraged technology and provided high quality, practical legal services for emerging businesses.

To build a business, you need to work with other people. My home office could fit one or two other people, but having other people regularly show up at home would be an intrusion on my family. And no matter how great my home office was, I still had the image of working out of a “home office.” If I wanted to grow my business, I needed more space in a traditional office environment.

Last week, Chuck Newton wrote a great blog on the benefits of working at home. I agree with him and we had an interesting exchange about whether there is a need for a physical office. In my opinion, having or not having an office is all about choice. You have to decide what you are trying to build and whether a home office is a good place to start or a good place to end up. The good news is that today, with the advent of the Internet, you can choose.

In August of last year, I started to move the office out of the house. I rented a single office from another law firm that provides access to a conference room, copier, fax, and Internet. The space was great; I had the collegiality of working in an office with other lawyers without significant overhead. I also noticed an immediate increase in business. No matter how well people know your work or like you, they may not be comfortable referring business to you unless you have a traditional office.

However, there wasn’t much space to grow a practice; I had just one 10 x 13 room. I used the new office as a place to meet clients and business contacts. I used the old office (at home) to maintain files, billing records and primarily did my work there. Since the new office was less than 2 miles away, I could be there in five minutes. So, I ended up having two offices: a front office for meetings and a back office to do the work.

At the end of last year, I realized the business was growing faster than I thought. I had over seventy separate small business clients that actually paid money. That is a lot of clients for a solo practitioner. The dollar figures are not as impressive as the number of clients, but that is by design. As a small business lawyer, I constantly strive to provide value to my clients, partly for reasons of personal integrity and partly because I believe that technology should improve the efficiency of legal services and my goal is to build a model firm.

Although I enjoyed the simplicity of a solo practice, I decided that I want to grow the business and that I am ready to bring on additional people. The bottom line is that I need a physical office in which to build a team that can help provide legal services to clients. As the firm grows, I hope to add lawyers and associates both physically and virtually to the practice. For now, I plan to hire a paralegal who can handle more of the routine paperwork that cannot support my hourly rate.

I’m looking forward to the next step and would welcome your thoughts and comments on opening an office and growing a practice. Which do you prefer: a virtual office or a physical office? What’s the best way for you to grow your practice?

Virtual Lawyer vs. Virtual Law Practice

Yesterday, I helped a lawyer in a mid-sized firm by sharing some information about how to perfect a security interest in a patent. She expressed her appreciation and asked how she could help me. I said, "read my blog called The Virtual Lawyer". Her response was "Oh, I have a friend who turned down a partnership at a big firm to start a virtual law practice with a few others and they have no office. I'll tell her about your blog."

I wanted to say, "Wait! The Virtual Lawyer is not just for lawyers without an office. It's for you too!" But I didn't say that because I didn't realize it before. The Virtual Lawyer is not just for solo practitioners and virtual law practices. It's for all lawyers that want to evolve their practice virtually.

On Tuesday, I made a first attempt at defining "virtual lawyer". Upon reflection, that initial definition seemed to confuse the notion of a virtual law practice with a virtual lawyer. It makes more sense to separate them, as follows:

A "virtual lawyer" is a professional authorized to practice law, who works with people all geographically dispersed, and whose law practice is carried on by means of a computer or computer network.

A "virtual law practice" consists of one or more professionals authorized to practice law, whose law practice is carried on by means of a computer or computer network, without a physical office space.

These definitions suggest that there is a difference between a "virtual lawyer" and a "virtual law practice." The virtual lawyer may or may not have a physical office. The virtual law practice has no physical office.

The concept here is that as the legal profession evolves, most lawyers will work virtually by means of a computer or computer network even if they are sitting in the office next to you. I don't mean to dehumanize the profession or offend anyone. Virtual lawyers will continue to work with people, but their primary means of communication and delivery of work product will be by email, telephone and computer networks. This is quite different from traditional lawyers whose primary means of communication was meeting in person and whose primary means of delivery of work product was on paper.

Most of us are working "virtually" already, but we still think about the law practice in physical terms. We try to make the virtual practice fit into the traditional law practice. The next generation of lawyers is going to think virtually first. They are going to think about how to take the traditional law practice and fit it into the virtual world. This is what will open people's mind to a new and improved profession.

The purpose of The Virtual Lawyer blog is to help lawyers think about how to change and develop their lawyering skills for an increasingly virtual world. This is for all lawyers, not just solos and office-less lawyers.

What are you doing to adapt your legal skills for a virtual world? How will it affect your practice?

Will Knowledge Management drive law firms in the future?

There is no doubt in my mind that Knowledge Management ("KM") will drive law firms in the future. In the past, law firms were driven by recruiting the best and the brightest lawyers and developing a reputation for good work. Hiring talented lawyers will be important in the future, but not as important as developing the best KM systems. Why do I believe that? Because the Internet makes people and information more accessible. It's scary to say, but the Internet makes people more of a commodity (not that I believe that personally). With regard to professional services, talent will no longer be the differentiator. The biggest challenge for law firms will be to harness that talent and their reservoirs of knowledge in ways that improve product quality and efficiency. In other words, "Knowledge Management".

Ok, but what is KM? Here are some definitions:

According to Wikipedia, "There is a broad range of thought on Knowledge Management with no unanimous definition current or likely." Wikipedia itself defines Knowledge Management as a "range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organisations." The fact that wikipedia spells the word "organization" differently than I do does not give me much comfort in their definition.

The definition of Knowledge Management that I prefer is "Capturing, organizing, and storing knowledge and experiences of individual workers and groups within an organization and making this information available to others in the organization." (Ironically, I found this definition on Google from a link that is no longer working.) It is the collaborative element of this definition that I find compelling. Lawyers sharing information will make all of us better lawyers and more efficient. KM will facilitate the process.

More practically, I think that KM encompases all of the systems, tools, and infrastructure needed to practice law effectively. In an upcoming blog, I will attempt to break down the concept of Knowledge Management into practical terms and identify how law firms can start to lay the ground work now for developing the systems, tools, and infrastructure that I (and most lawyers) will need to access in the future.

What do you think will drive law firms in the future? Will it be KM or something else?

Can blogging help grow a law practice?

This year, my New Year's resolution was to start writing a blog and to contribute regularly. Okay, I'm a little late in starting, but I'm finally ready to put my New Year's resolution in place.

The Plan is to use the blog as a motivator for building a law practice. Not just one that makes money, but one that looks forward, leverages technology, and anticipates new trends. If you will, the law firm of the future. That said, I am currently only a solo practitioner. What I know is that I want to grow my business. I don't know whether that means recruiting partners, hiring paralegals or associates, or adding other staff. I don't know whether that means growing the business physically, virtually or a combination of both.

So, how will a blog help grow a law practice? The idea is to write about one thing at the start of each work day that is critical to building the business. I have a vision for building a law practice. One that provides great quality, leverages technology, and emphasizes customer service.

I imagine that this is how IBM started. The founder of IBM, Tom Watson Sr, as quoted in The E-Myth Revisited, described how IBM built its success:

"IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

"The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

"The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look like when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

"In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

"From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, and discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

"Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one."

Back to my New Year's resolution.... The promise that I made is that every day I would write about one new thing that would help build a law practice. I plan to focus on five separate areas: legal services (product quality and packaging), business development (marketing and sales), office management (technology, systems, knowledge management), recruiting (virtual and real team building), and finance (billing rates, pricing models, cash flow).

My hope is that by writing this blog everyday I will move my business forward and inspire others to do the same. I also want to encourage others to share their thoughts on growing a law practice, either by posting comments on this blog or by sending email to me directly at v-lawyer@lexpertise.com.

The Virtual Lawyer - Introduction

Today, lawyers are not tied to an office. With the advent of the Internet, they can work anytime, anywhere. They can work from a client site, from home, or from a remote vacation spot. All lawyers need is access to people, information, and tools (e.g., software and computer systems). Having access to people, information, and tools doesn’t mean lawyers have to work all the time; it just gives them control over where and when they choose to work. The Virtual Lawyer is all about building the law firm of the future, enabling lawyers to meet in person or in cyberspace, access resources and information, and leverage systems and tools. The end goal is make the practice of law more creative (and less mundane), more productive and more profitable. The legal profession is changing, not just because of technology but also because people are changing and the institutions used to practice law are changing.

In this blog, I will share my journey in developing the "law firm of the future". My perspective is that of a solo practitioner who wants to expand and grow his practice. I will explore new ideas for marketing, client development, legal knowledge, systems and equipment. I hope to encourage others to do the same. It’s a journey, of where and how to build a better law practice. This is just the beginning…