Category Archives: Practice Management

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Being Productive Despite the Kids

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One of the things that leveraging technology to practice law allows you to do is to practice law anywhere. Sometimes, this means that you are practicing law at home, with the kids around. If you have ever tried this before, you know how difficult this can be. Web Worker Daily has a post on how to work productively with kids at home. The list seems aimed at those who work at home a lot. However many of the tips work just as well for those who are working at home with the kids on a irregular basis.

Some of the best advice is for you to get up early or stay up later than the kids to get some work done. If you are a morning person, you can probably get some work done before the kids get up. Alternatively, if you are a night person, you can use the time after they have gone to bed to get some work done.

Another great tip is:

2. Team up with your spouse. It really helps to have a great, supportive spouse. My wife is a teacher, so she needs to do work herself, so we take turns working at the computer while the other keeps the kids at bay. Take the kids outside, or take them to a park, or read to them, while your spouse does some work. Then switch.

If you have a spouse that can help you with this, it is a great technique. It allows you to both get some work done and keeps the kids occupied.

Check out the entire post for the rest of the tips.

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Another Story Emphasizing the Need for Off Site Backups

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I saw this interesting story about a Florida woman (Marie Lupe Cooley) who thought that she was about to lose her job. She had concluded this because she “saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss’s phone number listed”

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

The twist to the news story, of course, was:

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

However,

 The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

I guess that is one way to ensure that you do lose your job.

Anyway, the moral to the story does not involve the allegedly felonious acts of the employee, instead, they apply to the employer. Your employees have access to all of your data. How able would you be to function if one of you disgruntled employees destroyed all of your data?

Given that almost everything is store electronically today,  I would guess that it would take quite some time to get your office back to normal. Also, it is likely that, in some ways you would never recover from the damage.

The quote in the story I found most interesting was:

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

Here the employer had to employ a data recovery service to try to salvage his information. If, however, he had employed a proper off site backup strategy, he likely would not have had to incur the cost of “an expensive data-recovery service.” Instead, he simply could have restored his information from his off site back up.

Obviously, there are only so many things we can do to ensure that our offices do not get hit by some sort of disaster, be it fire, flood, or disgruntled employee. However, there are simple steps we can take to make sure that, in the event of such a calamity, we can easily restore our data and get back to work.

If you are not sure what a good backup plan looks like, or how to implement one, you cannot find better suggestions and directions than this post from Ross Kodner

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Ernie the Attorney on a Paperless Office

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If you have thought about moving toward a paperless workflow but have not yet made the commitment, check out this excellant post from Ernie the Attorney at PDF for Lawyers.

I think his last paragraph hits the point dead on:

If you don’t start purging paper from your desk you’ll never realize the full benefits of scanning.  After a few weeks you’ll start to notice little things about how you used to deal with paper.  Mostly, you’ll learn that people hoard too much paper, keeping it close by in case they need to access information.  Soon you’ll notice that having too much paper around you makes it harder to find information, not easier.  The less paper you have around you the less stress you’ll feel, especially once you learn to trust the paperless system.

I think this is the point most people don’t understand. They think if that if they keep the paper close at hand they can find things more easily. Instead, however, they just end up sorting through more paper to try and find what they want.

Ernie also emphasized another point that I think most people miss, which is that the electronic version of the document, is probably more secure than the paper version. You can lose the paper, or it can be destroyed by fire (or hurricane for that matter). With the electronic version, however, it is easy to have multiple copies of the same document.

For example, on the cases that I am working on, a copy of everything sets on our server. Those copies are regularly backed up as a matter of course. Additionally, for all of my active files, I have a copy of them on my laptop hard drive. The likelihood that all copies of these documents would be destroyed is fairly remote, and certainly much less likely than just the paper version being destroyed.

Check out the rest of Ernie’s post and, if you have not started to make the move to a paperless system, there’s no time like the present to get started.