Tips to Build a Better Practice

Scott Drake, host of the Legal Broadcast Network's "Speaking of Justice" show, gave his audience a unique, behind the scenes look when he interviewed Abacus president Judd Kessler, Esq. As lead author of the Amazon best-selling book Dangerous Law Practice Myths, Lies & Stupidity, Mr. Kessler shared insight into his career, Abacus and how law firms are solving today's problems.

To view the interview click here.

Solving Your Life/Work Balance Challenge Through Effective Time Management

In her recent article, "Achieving life/work balance through effective time management", Kathleen Brady spoke about how managing your time effectively doesn't necessarily mean doing more throughout your day."The ultimate intent of time management is to improve the quality and balance of your life- not just to speed it up. Trying to squeeze more into a day leads you to do less of it well and makes it all less enjoyable. By striving for balance and harmony in all areas of your life, you can alter your current perception of time thereby reducing your stress and increasing your productivity.

Being 'productive' does not mean 'doing more'. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing - to give your battery a chance to recharge. There is no magic to time management. Invest the time to plan each project in order to minimize the amount to time you spend in “reactive” mode. Careful planning will enable you to reduce the number of crisis in your life so that you will have the energy, stamina and time to react when a true crisis does occur and to live a well balanced life.

People get so busy in the day-to-day tasks and obligations of living their lives that they forget they have choices. By learning to control your time on a daily level, you are more inclined to be successful at managing obligations and achieving your overall goals.

The first thing you need to do is examine routine activities. Consider every mundane activity from the moment you get out of bed until the moment you go to sleep at night. Studying existing procedures will enable you to question the value of each activity and consider if it could be altered, delegated, or eliminated to save time. Then you can develop new procedures."

For more ways to improve your work and life, visit
http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/ftr08092.shtml
 
Kathleen Brady is Principal of Kanarek & Brady, LLC, a career transition firm for lawyers and Brady & Associates Career Planners, LLC, a professional development training company specializing in the legal community.

Avoiding Malpractice Through Abacus Reports

With AbacusLaw, you can create a report for just about anything, such as everyone in your database who lives in a specific zip code or of all employees at one specific firm.

Special reports are a more advanced way of using the reports feature in AbacusLaw. They are extremely useful if you want to improve workflow management. For example, if you want a report that lists all the contacts who are expert witnesses, you could use the special reports function to generate the list for you. Or, if you want a report of all contacts who are opposing attorneys you could do that as well.

Two of the most important features of the special reports are the ability to do a name synopsis as well as a malpractice report. A name synopsis allows you to run a report for a specific name and see all of the matters, events, forms, emails etc. associated with the name in a specific time frame.

The malpractice report allows you to go through all matters within a particular date range and list those with no scheduled future events or no notes attached. If you have an open matter without one of these two items, you are at risk of malpractice.

To learn more about generating special reports click here.