We’ve saved the best for last – or potentially, I’ve just been avoiding this topic because time management is an area where I need to be taking my own advice.
If you ask a lawyer what one of their biggest issues is, you’ll find that time management is top of the list. Especially when it comes to maximizing billable client time.
Let’s look at five things you can do today to start to improve your time management skills.
Continue Reading Five Ways to Improve Your Time Management Skills Today
Regular Zen readers will know that I’m a runner. When you first start running, you tell yourself that it’s the cheapest sport – all you need is a pair of sneakers, and you can head outside and do it. While this is (essentially) true, we runners love our gadgets and our products, and sharing our favorites of the same.
It won’t surprise you to learn that I’m in a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to running, including a pretty large one, and we often share products we love. A popular one among the group is the sunglasses brand, Goodr, who have been known as a fun, edgy brand with glasses that stay put on your face during long, sweaty runs, have a basset hound mascot, and catchy names for their sunnies. I own three pairs myself.
Continue Reading Good( r ) Leadership Means Having to Say You’re Sorry
We’ve discussed the idea of change extensively here on Zen, and although it’s a long time coming in the legal industry, there are pockets of exciting innovation. One such pocket is the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, or CLOC, which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years (as in 40 members to 1800 members in 3 years). One of CLOC’s core tenets is bringing together the ENTIRE legal ecosystem in order to achieve real, systemic change, and that’s a tenet I can really get behind.
Last week, I had the pleasure to join their CIO/Cybersecurity Initiative task force, and it got me thinking about what’s really necessary for collaboration in the legal ecosystem (and other professional services industries, for that matter). I’d like to share with you my three tips that I saw in action during this CLOC meeting that you can implement today in your firms as you seek to ride the wave of change.
Continue Reading Lawyers: Collaboration Drives Your Success. Here’s How to Do it
Successful communication comes in many forms, and we may be already convinced either by virtue of our training or personality that we’re naturally good communicators. Whether you’re confident in your communications skills, or looking for a refresher, there are four tasks you can undertake today to improve your business communication skills.
How do you currently communicate with others on a professional level? For this purpose, we’re going to consider all of your means of communications to be “professional.” The list may surprise you:
All of these are means of communication and translating the message of who you are as a lawyer to colleagues, clients, potential clients, and referral sources. Knowing what channels you use is helpful to ensure that your communication skills are up to par across all of them.
Continue Reading 4 Tasks to Improve Your Business Communication Skills
This post was originally published in Legal Business World on November 5, 2018
It’s no secret that the legal market is a challenging place to be today.
Mergers, non-law firm players, clients continuing to take work in-house, increasing investment in technology, changing demands from different generations…the list goes on.
With a staggering number of reasons in front of us for why change is imperative, what’s holding lawyers back? And what steps can we take to face these challenges head on?
Continue Reading Breaking Down the Barriers to Change
“Innovation” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days, right up there with “disruption.” It sounds like something that’s foreign in the legal industry, but it shouldn’t be. Believe it or not, we, too, can be innovative.
If you’ve been following along here for a while, you may know that I have a section of my bookshelf that’s dedicated to business books on my “to read” list – I love to read, but I’d rather pick up a mystery and plow through it than bury my nose into what feels like a textbook. But when I do, I’m more often than not pleasantly surprised by the inspiration that it affords me, and the comfort that it gives me in following some of my own plans and ideas moving forward. One such book is Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup (not new to many of you, I’m sure). I’m about halfway through this book that promises to show me how “today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses.”
“But law firms aren’t startups and lawyers are entrepreneurs,” I can hear you saying.
What if we were?
Continue Reading Three Truths About Innovating for Radical Success
We’re continuing our series on soft skills that lawyers require in order to achieve success. We’ve looked at some suggestions for improving networking and presentation skills, and the next item in our series is raising the level of our business writing.
You may feel that this is something that you’re already pretty adept at, since you do a lot of writing – but my guess is that it’s primarily focused on legalese. And while you, and other lawyers, will understand this clearly, most of your clients and potential clients don’t want to be reading a lot of phrases like “inter alia” or highly technical writing. Even the lawyers among them will want you to get right to the point, and distill your writing into direct, actionable items that they can understand efficiently.
So how do you practice that?
Continue Reading 3 Tips to Raise the Level of Your Business Writing
We’ve been talking about the soft skills that young lawyers need to hone in order to become successful, and how these translate for more experienced lawyers. Another skill I reviewed for the ABA student law blog was that of presentations (and I think we can agree this is something that many of us can work on).
A quick note on this – for some, the idea of public speaking will make you want to run for the hills (and I totally sympathize). It’s entirely possible that you focus on other types of business development and professional activities in your legal career, and these are better suited for your personality. However, even if that’s the case, getting comfortable with public speaking can be an excellent talent to keep in your back pocket. It’s one of my least favorite things to do, as an introvert, but I’ve done it so frequently over the course of my career, that I’m now both comfortable speaking in front of an audience, and also speaking in other situations, like networking opportunities, on the spot in meetings, etc. So, it can really have wide-reaching benefits – I promise, it’s not that awful, even if it’s not your strong suit.
Continue Reading 4 Ways to Improve Your Presentation Skills
We’re already almost mid-way through September (can you believe it?) and this time of year can feel like a new beginning! Though January is typically the time for resolutions, September can also feel like a refresh as kids go back to school, and we jump back into the grind after our own summer holidays and a quieter period with our clients away for their holidays.
Bearing that in mind, it’s also a great time to refresh your goals and business development efforts. Yes, business development is an ongoing effort, but it doesn’t end simply because the calendar year is wrapping up.
There will likely be three groups of you reading this – those who started the year with business development plans and goals, who split them up throughout the year and made progress on them; those of you who had those plans, but who may have only made some inroads here and there; and those of you who had no plans or goals set at all. But no matter where you are, think of September as your do-over month, and the opportunity to plan for the remainder of the year. (Not sure about planning? Take a look at our recent guest post from Joanne Thorud for some help.)
Continue Reading Restart Your Business Development Efforts
If you’re a regular reader of Zen, you know that I’m a big fan of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). They’re working to revolutionize the legal industry, and engage all facets of it to do so.
One of the ways that legal departments excel and law firms majorly lag behind is with tracking metrics. While the law is indeed a very specialized set of skills, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to track the data that matters. We’ve heard a lot of calls from law departments over the last few years, demanding that their firms institute more tracking, and many firms are doing this to a greater or lesser degree. A huge part of legal operations is managing and understanding data, so that CLOs can identify areas of inefficiency as more pressure comes down from above.
Continue Reading Metrics isn’t a Dirty Word – What you can Learn from CLOC