Software

A New Year, a New Venture

/ Bruce Cameron / 3 Comments
Blowing horns on Bleeker Street on New Year's Day

Marjory Collins, photographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,LC-USW3-013050-E

With the new year comes a new blog for me – Little Law Office on the Prairie (LLOotP for short). My plan is that LLOotP will be a place to discuss the business of running a rural law firm – everything from the marketing and business challenges rural solo’s and small firms face to the technology that makes our jobs easier. Don’t worry, RuralLawyer will still go on, but  RL is going to focus more on the why than how – more mens rae than actus reus if you will.

Now, there’s not much going on over at LLOotP at the moment, but you are welcome to cruise on over and see if I fixed all the 404 errors. And if that doesn’t set the bar low enough, LLOotP will have roughly the same posting regularity as RuralLawyer – generally monthly, some times bi-weekly, occasionally weekly but always when I think about it.

Happy New Year.

End Of An Age?

/ Bruce Cameron

If you listen to the tech-savvy pundits, the age of the transactional lawyer will soon be coming to an end as cloud-based artificial intelligence software will soon be producing all the legal forms a person could ever want at prices so low, no lawyer could ever compete. The thing is, this is not what a law practice, especially a rural law practice, is about.

A rural law practice is not about the “product” – those forms, those missives of legalese we lawyers produce on behalf of our clients – if it were, law firm size would be measured in terms of the number of paralegals rather than the number of attorneys. I have no doubt that software can produce a form that is correct in all particulars, that clever engineers can gin-up an interface that will ask all the necessary questions to have the form comply with statutory requirements, and that this cheap, elegant, correct form will be totally unsuited to a client’s specific situation.

Practicing rural law is not about asking the necessary questions, it is about asking the right questions and understanding not only what the client wishes to accomplish, but why as well and only then moving on to the how. The oft-told stories among family law lawyers about spouses asking and getting the family home in the divorce settlement who turn around a sell the property within the year simply because they could not afford the property on a single person’s income are classic examples of understanding the what-a-client-wants part of the equation while ignoring the why; understanding the why allows the lawyer to function as councilor not just as advocate and opens up the possibility of other options that may provide a better outcome and a better service to the client. Technology will always get the “what” part, but it is unlikely to ever get the “why” part and therein lies its weakness.

A rural law practice (or most solo or small firm practices for that matter) is about service – service to clients, service to community. Technology, even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence software, can’t provide service – it simply cannot make that intuitive leap that uses both “what” and “why” to get to “how”. The lawyer who forgets that his true value lies in service not in product will not last long in rural practice. If you provide quality service and market your practice on the value you provide you need not be concerned about being replaced by CheapLegalForms.com any time soon.

Relationships, Not Contacts

/ Bruce Cameron / 1 Comment

This type of balancing act is more the rural lawyer's speed

Here’s the rub, if you are going to build a solo practice you’ve got to network to get clients, but when you get clients you’ve less time to network, but when you network less, you get fewer clients, which gives you more time to network, which gets you clients which … a cycle that can repeat ad infinitum while your accounts receivable develops more humps and bumps than a roller coaster. The cure – as suggested by many a wiser author than I – is to always schedule time to network into your daily routine regardless of client load; constant contact for constant clients. The problem is that it is way to easy for constant contact to simply become a rut – a once a month lunch with the local bar association, a few “how ya doing” weekly e-mails to your lawyer buddies, the bi-weekly chamber of commerce get-together, and a bit of on-line social networking.

The question is: is this really a good way to spend your time – are you really maximizing your return on your investment? Sure an e-mail to Bob the contractor (the guy that referred the last 3 real estate closings to you) puts your name in front of him for the 20 seconds it takes for him to delete it, but did it really buy you anything in terms of network building? And lunch with Delores the banker (a statuesque nordic blond that has never referred a client to anyone) may be an hour of divine and picturesque conversation but other than briefly making you the envy of guy-kind did investing that capital really do anything for your bottom line?

Given that you have limited time to invest, the business of relationship building comes down to a balancing act between the frequency of the contacts, the type of contacts, and the quality of the relationship you want to build. Now, the easy way to handle this is to cop out and simply grab minute amounts of face-time with your network at mass attendance events like bar association lunches or chamber of commerce breakfasts – develop a taste for scrambled eggs and baked chicken and you’re set for the business world’s version of speed dating. The hard way is to develop a tickler system that reminds you to take someone out to lunch on a regular basis and then to remember that “someone” needs to alternate between old friends and new contacts. Continue reading →

Not Dressing Respectably

/ Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments

George Bernard Shaw said that his “main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably” – I’ve been test driving a Virtual Law Office in the hopes that, like Mr. Shaw, I could, on occasion, dress a bit less respectably (or at the very least wander about the office barefoot) and  TotalAttorneys  has been good enough to allow me to abuse their product, picking nits, and ask odd questions since mid-June. I’ve come away very impressed.

Continue reading →

It went bump in the night

/ Bruce Cameron / 1 Comment

Well, I knew that one day I would lose a disk, but I really didn’t need it to happen today, I really didn’t need to lose the disk with my database on it, and I certainly did not expect a 2 month old disk to pack up and go south. The cool thing is that I was down for less than 90 minutes and half of that was spent running to the local big box computer store to get a new drive.

It took all of 3 mouse clicks and less than 45 minutes for CrashPlan to do a complete restore from my on-site backup. Had I not wanted instant gratification, I could have restored from my off-site personal cloud in little over 2 hours. Had I ever wondered about justifying the cost of having a highly redundant back up system, today put all my doubts to rest. Rather than spending countless hours rebuilding my contact list, document database, forms, etc. I went to lunch while my hardware and software did their thing.