BarTalk April 2001
Volume 13, Number 2

Spring tune up tips...

by David J Bilinsky

The flowers that bloom in the spring,
Breathe promise of merry sunshine.
As we merrily dance and we sing,
We welcome the hope that they bring.

Libretto by William S Gilbert
Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan

Oh – spring time! Time to reflect on the winter past – and focus on changing old habits and making new ones for the year to come. Here is a selection of tips to help give your practice a spring tune-up:

Let your Electronic Calendar Manage your Time
Use your electronic calendar’s alarms to manage your time. When you are meeting with a client, schedule another appointment to start when you wish the prior appointment to end. Set an alarm for 10 minutes before the start of the second appointment and turn up the volume on your computer. When the alarm goes off, (which your client can’t help but hear) announce to your client that you have an upcoming appointment – and use the alarm as a gentle reminder for your client that their time is up.

Use your Contact Manager to Market your Practice
Set up lists of clients who have different interests – wills and estates, construction law, small business, personal injury – and when a new case or a bit of news of interest comes up in a particular area, print up the list of people in the corresponding list and have your secretary send the newsworthy bit off to those people on the list with a little note: “I thought this may be of interest to you”. It’s a great way to keep in touch with your clients and reinforce that you are thinking of their interests even if you don’t have an active file on the go.

Make Appointments with Yourself
Plan your day – by making appointments with yourself. Take your “To-Do’s” in your electronic calendar and schedule appointments with yourself to do the “To-Do’s”. While you are at it, schedule time to keep in shape, to go out with your significant other or with your children – or to read about current developments in your field. As lawyers we tend to set aside our own priorities in favor of those of our clients. Furthermore, we allow the crisis of the moment to take over. By making specific appointments with yourself in your calendar, you will graphically see your time commitments (by seeing the time you have already blocked off) and think twice about taking on new responsibilities before you have cleared your calendar.

Use Your Repeating Appointment Feature to Advantage
In your electronic calendar, schedule a repeating appointment for the same day each week or month – just to bill – say Thursday afternoons or the third Wednesday in each month. Go through the files that you have just worked on and make a conscious effort to produce a bill. Once staff and partners realize that this is your “billing time” they will leave you alone. Moreover, since you have set this time aside to attend to this task, soon it will become automatic for you to do your billing regularly. Your accountant (and your partners) will thank you!

Get to Know Your Accounting System
Ask your accountant to explain to you how your accounting system works or go take a class (don’t just send your bookkeeper!). Get the cheques from the bank and do reconciliation (or learn about on-line Internet bank account queries – and find out to the moment if those wire funds have come in or a cheque has cleared. You can even do your bank reconciliation on-line – without waiting for your bank statement to come in). Understand how to determine what funds are sitting in your trust account. Go through the accounts payable and question the reason for the invoices. Learn how to produce management reports such as: WIP summary by responsible lawyer or receivables by lawyer or by client. By understanding how the financial end of your practice works, you will be less susceptible to internal theft and fraud and less likely to have problems with the Law Society if your trust account is audited.

Leverage your Knowledge
Send your employees and partners to sessions to learn how to use their existing software tools or new developments in the law. Then ask them to give a demonstration on the top five things they learned at the session. In this way you will spread the knowledge around the firm and ensure that the attendee pays attention during their time out of the office. Nice exposure for the employee who gets an opportunity to demonstrate their new knowledge. Further tip: Make the first person who does this the most senior partner – to send a message to everyone that sharing knowledge and staying current is a priority for the firm.

Establish Email and Internet Policies
Determine what are the proper guidelines for e-mail use in the office. It should be similar to your policy for using the office letterhead – in other words, if something would not be suitable to go out under your letterhead, it should not go out on your e-mail. Determine your position relative to: personal communications, jokes, chain letters, legal advice, solicitations, religious or political causes, gambling, and personal opinions. Build in a confidentiality notice for every email similar to the one used on faxes. Advise staff to set up “Hotmail” or other such web-based e-mail to avoid using the office e-mail for personal use (and establish a policy on downloading attachments via web-based accounts that could contain viruses – as these usually are not caught by the anti-virus software on your regular email system). Consider a policy for sending “flame” or inflammatory emails to a partner for review first before sending it out to the intended recipient. Also determine appropriate use of the office Internet system (visiting obscene or pornographic sites for example). Once you have created policies, distribute them and make employees aware that they will be expected to adhere to them. Email me if you wish to see a draft e-mail and Internet use policy.

Get Redundant
What is your office data back up policy? Where do you store your backup media? How vulnerable are you to office break-ins and vandalism, thefts, fire, flood or earthquake damage? Consider that something as innocuous as a toilet or sink running over from the floor above can cause considerable damage to your electronic equipment. Protect your data – have a policy of making regular data backups.

Get Current
Most software (applications and operating systems) that you use in your office are capable of being updated, or have security patches available. How do you find out? You can check each software program individually or go to Updates.com, a free service of Ziff-Davis. This site will check your system against their database and advise you of what software updates, fixes and patches are available. Furthermore, Updates.com provides you with hypertext links that take you directly to the relevant downloads.

Here we can all hope that spring can breathe change into even the most case-hardened of us.

David J Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor at the Law Society of BC. Email: daveb@lsbc.org. The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the author’s employer, the Law Society of BC.

This article originally appeared in the April 2001 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.