Articles

When you find yourself in a hole and you want to get out, as the saying goes, the first rule is to stop digging.   Nowhere is this more true than in digging out of an altogether too common hole among law firms today: reducing attorney and staff turnover. Employee turnover is expensive, disruptive to workflow, frustrating to clients and damaging to team morale. Not to mention soul-sucking when you have to sit through hour after hour of terrible interviews seeking gamely to replace the person who just left with someone – you are getting the sinking feeling – who won’t be quite as good.   Read More +

Want to rejuvenate your Law Life?  Stop working so hard and start playing more. The key to a saner, safer and more sensational Law Life might just be to have more fun, not bill more hours. And there’s a growing body of evidence to back that up.      Read More +

"We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st Century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth...to AI.”1  These lines, spoken by heroic Captain Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix, tell the story of [spoiler alert, though it’s arguable that no such warning is needed when talking about a 24-year old movie because, well, if you haven’t seen it by now you probably aren’t planning on seeing it anyway] the war between humans and artificial intelligence driven machines. Read More +

The web browser is one of those things that flies under life’s radar. It is almost definitely one of the top two or three pieces of software used on your phone and computer (competing with Outlook and Word, for most lawyers), and yet it also probably gets among the least amount of brain space and attention. This is kind of a shame because browsers are kind of amazing software. Free, easy to use and almost infinitely customizable, they can be huge value adds to your workflow, as well as make the other non-work parts of your life (you do have some of those somewhere, right?) smoother and easier, too.   Read More +

Could your Law Life use a miracle? How about 50 to 100 miracles an hour?  Well, they’re available now and absolutely free, right outside your window. The annual Perseid meteor shower – the Best Celestial Event of the Year, according to the American Meteorological Society – is playing now in a night sky near you. The show runs from July to September 1, with peak viewing in mid-August.   Read More +

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. It is specifically trained on a diverse range of internet text, making it proficient in a wide array of topics and able to respond to a variety of queries. The artificial intelligence (AI) model can be used for a variety of purposes, such as answering questions, providing explanations, generating creative text, assisting with writing tasks, and much more. It is capable of natural language understanding and generation, allowing it to engage in human-like conversations with users and provide contextually relevant responses.   Read More +

Law firm website are, for many firms, the albatross around the neck of their business development efforts. They are expensive and time consuming to create and for a lot of lawyers they are not an especially productive part of their business development systems. You have to have one, because when a potential client is referred to your firm or a potential employee is interviewing for a position with your firm, they will very likely first go to your website to see what it is your firm says to the world about itself.   Read More +

Tips and resources for hiring paralegals. Read More +

Law firms are known for being notoriously slow in hiring. One of my favorite jobs took me five months to get after making the initial contact. I was employed at the time, but five months is a long time to wait. Job candidates tell me they can go weeks or even months without hearing a status update from a potential employer. While I was willing to wait five months, this scenario is unlikely to work in your favor in today’s employment climate.   Read More +

Do you ever ask yourself, “Shouldn’t it be getting easier?”  By “it” I mean practicing law. But I also mean practicing life. If you’ve done it long enough to get the hang of it and learned a few lessons along the way, shouldn’t it be getting easier every day?  Yet it isn’t. Occasionally your JD is the opposite of Just Delightful, and you find yourself standing on the front lawn at 2 AM shaking your fist at the cosmos bellowing: “Why is everything so hard?”    Read More +

I did not grow up in a boat family, but my wife did. They had a little Boston Whaler that they trailered to the Chesapeake on the weekends and used for water skiing, crabbing, and otherwise doing fun summer stuff on the water. The photos from that time look amazing, and they all reminisce about how fun those days were. But one day when my wife and her folks were reliving some fun boating memory, my father-in-law pulled me aside and told me: “the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day you buy the boat and the day you sell it.”   Read More +

Next time someone tells you “No good deed goes unpunished,” don’t believe them.   The truth is, no good deed goes unrewarded, although the payoff might not occur until later – maybe years or decades later – and in a way you never imagined.   Read More +

Happiness is a hot topic in the self-help world. There are more than 20,000 books that have been published with “happiness” in the title. An entire industry has been built around the goal of happiness. But do we even know what we mean when we say we want to be happy, and should it be our ultimate goal? I would suggest that there is something far greater than simple happiness. That something is the concept of well-being.   Read More +

Just back from my 2023 Spring Training baseball tour with exciting news to report on chili slaw-dogs, Shohei Ohtani and the privilege of pressure. Not to mention the Pitch Clock – the biggest rules change in Major League Baseball since the Designated Hitter. Plus the marvelous World Baseball Classic, which was just getting underway as I wrapped up my most recent visit to MLB training camps in south Florida.   Read More +

I was mad at Microsoft for a pretty long time. I am finally over it (mostly).  To understand why, you must first know that I spent an absurd amount of time and energy looking for the perfect task management program. I tried, almost literally, everything I could find. No kidding, I probably cycled through … Read More +

Recent bank failures have caused concerns for lawyers holding client funds in their trust accounts. Many of our insureds have contacted Lawyers Mutual to ask questions about their ethical and malpractice exposure and any steps that they can take to protect themselves and their clients.  Read More +