The Law Coach Blog

Helping lawyers get more done since 1978.

Court Cancels Sale of Haunted House

It's the perfect story for Halloween. In 1989 Jeffrey Stambovsky bought an old Victorian house on the banks of the Hudson River at the bottom of a dead end street in the Village of Nyack, NY. At first he thought he got a good deal. But he didn't know what the seller knew.

It was haunted.

You can find the court case in a reported decision - 169 A.D.2d 254, 572 N.Y.S.2d 672 is the citation where you can find the case in a lonely law book hidden away on a dusty shelf in the dark damp corners of an empty law library that echoes your footsteps down the hallway as you search among the stacks of musty leather bound volumes no one reads anymore, tucked away in rooms no one dares to enter.

As the court of appeals laced its decision with ghostly references to literature and lore, the court also did something that no other court seems to have ever done - it held that the home was haunted as a matter of law. No if, and or but about it. The poltergeist, it seems, was legally declared to be real. Or was it?

Quipped the judge, "I am moved by the spirit" as he proceeded to declare that "From the perspective of a person in the position of plaintiff herein, a very practical problem arises with respect to the discovery of a paranormal phenomenon: 'Who you gonna' call?' " Of course, we all know the answer to that one.

The buyer had signed an "as is" clause so the seller, Helen Ackley, argued to the court that there was nothing the buyer could do. He certainly couldn't sue her, she said, and the trial court agreed. Apparently the buyer had never asked if the house was haunted so, technically, the seller never really lied or hid it from him. He just didn't discovery it until he moved in. Haunted by the seller's treacherous deceit, the plaintiff appealed.

Like the 3 ghostly apparitions residing in the home, the appellate papers worked their way through the twists and turns of the legal system until they ended up on the desk of Justice Rubin of New York's Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department. Then, on an undoubtedly stormy summer night in 1991, no doubt with a headless horseman effigy hanging from a tree out front in the dark, Justice Smith sided up with Justice Rubin and together they crafted their wiley words that would undo the heartless seller's dirty deed.

No doubt with a straight face, the appellate judges noted the difficulties a buyer would face if the ghostly-burdened seller was allowed to avoid liability by her silence. "The notion that a haunting is a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection of the premises is a hobgoblin which should be exorcised from the body of legal precedent and laid quietly to rest." And so they proceeded.

With citations to the ghost of Hamlet from Shakespeare, joined by Prosser on Torts, and muddied with actual case law to support the fearful logic of it all, Justice Rubin noted the difficulties faced by all home buyers if the seller's "as is" clause allowed her to sweep under the rug the loud proclaiming she had made (both nationally and locally) about her home's regular (and irregular) hauntings, made in the years before this unsuspecting buyer came along.

"Applying the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying the structural engineer and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale," announced the court of appeals. A normal "subject to inspection" clause might never be the same.

In a written decision that resulted in 17 published points of law [which lawyers call "headnotes", not to be confused with the headless notes of less worthy court decisions, no doubt], the court ruled that since the house was haunted with poltergeists, then the seller did not deliver the premises "vacant" as required by the sales contract. Ahah, with the contract breached, a remedy had to be found.

To that end, the court declared the contract rescinded by the Law of Equity - and with that the seller's ownership of the home arose like a zombie from the grave to haunt her again. And the buyer's purchase was cancelled as the court ghoulisly called the sale "a most unnatural bargain."

So, if this Halloween season you are lured into buying a house without knowing it's haunted, you might want to call the fabled lawyer who got this seller back his money. He went on the become the town attorney for a nearby New York community - presumably where there are no poltergeists.

As for the seller, Helen Ackley, she finally sold the house and moved to Florida in the early 1990's. And just by a curious coincidence, perhaps, just across the river from the haunted house is Tarreytown. Sound familiar? It should. All little children have heard the story. That's where the famed Sleepy Hollow is - the one described by Washington Irving's Halloween tale of the headless horseman, "The Legend of Sleepy Hallow."

Burdge Law Office
http://www.burdgelaw.com/

Helping consumers protect themselves everyday, even from poltergeists.

Special thanks goes out to Nadine, a great friend and source of the case citation above.

The photo above is copyright by Warner Bros. from their 1940's movie "I Walked With a Zombie"

Monday

Part 5. How Your Web Site Can Make You Look like a Buffoon

This is the last in our 5 part series.

Last time we talked about the danger of broken links.

The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here.

The second installment (Stay Above the Fold) can be read by clicking here.

The third installment (Forget About Your Site Map) can be read by clicking here.

The fourth installment (Links That Don’t Link) can be read by clicking here.

Now, here’s the fifth and final installment . . . Rule #5. "Stoopid Speling Erors"

Okay, so now your prospects can contact you easily. Your most important content is on the top of your pages. Your site map is all straightened out. And your links work again.

But did you check the spellilng (pun intended) on all your web site pages? Remarkably, most lawyers don't.

Misspelled words in your content might sound like nitpicking, but it aggravates people who spot them and more people spot them than you think. Worse yet, they are spotted most often by persons with higher education (read, more discretionary cash on hand to hire a lawyer with).

All those nice pages of really good content and it wasn’t proofread carefully enough to avoid the spelling errors? And you didn’t know that the word “there” could end up as “their” in that voice recognition software you dictate with either, did you?

Worse yet, misspelling names of people or places can be highly offensive to some folks. And don’t try to proofread it yourself. After all, you’re the one who made the mistake in the first place.

Lots of studies have shown that writers often miss the same error they made when they were writing the article in the first place. So have a "second set of eyes" do your proofreading. You can use computer programs to spell-check, but there's nothing like a professional reader to catch syntax, grammar and spelling issues for you.

These 5 common problems we've been discussing are not all of the errors that a lot of web sites have, but they are the high points. And if you just fix these, it’ll put you ahead of 90% of the rest of your competition. And that is the whole point.

Helping attorneys help clients, since 1978.

PS: The ABA notes a few other frequent errors in this 2006 article here.

Tuesday

Part 4. How Your Web Site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon

This is the fourth in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you. The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here. The second installment (Stay Above the Fold) can be read by clicking here. The third installment (Forget About Your Site Map) can be read by clicking here. Now, here's the fourth installment, Broken Links Stink.

Rule #4. Let’s put up links that don’t link.

Sure, everyone just loves to see those “page not found” messages, so let’s have a web site with links that don’t work or pages that aren’t listed in the Site Map at all so the Google spider can’t find them either.

If a prospective client takes the time to find your site and then can’t find what they want in only one or two clicks, they think you could be a buffoon. Check your outbound links to make sure they all work. And then six months later check them again to make sure other people’s web sites are still out there to even be linked to.

And make sure your links are to web sites that are relevant to your site visitors. Links to irrelevant sites can actually hurt you because it can resemble a link farm. And search spiders hate link farms.

A link farm is a web page whose sole purpose is to post outbound links to as many other web sites as they can get someone to pay for. Search engine algorithms don’t like them because they have been programmed to know that it’s just an effort to make them think that the target site pages have more meaningful “real” links to them (from non-farmers) than really exist. In other words, they know a con when they see it.

There are software programs all over the net that check links on your page for free. An easy one to use, which checks the first 60 links on a web page for free is Webmaster's Link Checker. It's quick and easy to use.

So check your links regularley. And that reminds me of another common problem. We'll cover that one next time.

Ron Burdge
www.TheLawCoach.com
Helping lawyers help clients. Since 1978.

Sunday

Part 3: How Your Web Site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon Without Really Trying

This is the third in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you. The first installment (Make it Hard to Contact You) can be read by clicking here. The second installment (Stay Above the Fold) can be read by clicking here. Now, for Rule #3, Forget About Your Site Map.

Rule # 3. Make a web site, but don’t make a Site Map.

You go through all this trouble to create great content, launch the site and then realize that Kevin Costner lied. If you build it, they won’t come.

Well, not all on their own anyway. Visitors need help. That's what search engines are for. What no one may have told you is that search engines need help too, and that's what they use spiders for.

Search engine spiders are what the search engines send out, little programs that crawl through a website and report back to the search engine what they find. You can make their job easier.

Simply put, the search engine has to be able to find you if you want people to find you on search results like yahoo and google and bing, etc.

And one of the fastest and easiest ways for that to happen is to put a Site Map page on your site. Search engine spiders love it. So if you don’t have a site map page on your site, the search engine spiders will stop crawling your site and just give up and go on to your competitor’s web site.

The Site Map page is just a page that lists the names of every one of your web site pages with a link to each one of them too. It is kind of like a map to a city, the city being your web site pages. The site map makes it easy for search engine spiders to find and "index" every one of your pages, meaning to tell the search engine what the content is that is on each web site page.

And when the search engine knows what is all over your web site, that increases the odds that your content will be fully considered when someone runs a search to find you and your content. That means you rank higher in search results and all of your pages get put into that great Mr. Googler in the sky who answers all the search inquiries (or Ms. Yahoo, or whatever they want to call it).

Why make it hard for search engines to read your content when you can make it easy?

If your web site doesn’t have a Site Map, you look like an unorganized buffoon and that’s worse than looking like an ordinary buffoon (not that there’s much difference anyway).

And the links on the Site Map remind me of another common problem, but we’ll talk about that next time in part 4.

Helping attorneys help clients, since 1978.

Part 2, How Your Web site Can Make You Look Like a Buffoon Lawyer Without Really Trying

This is the second in our 5 part series. last time we talked about how some web sites make it hard to contact you (to read the first installment on Rule #1, click here).

Since then, coincidentally, I was in Novi, Michigan on a trip and needed to contact a lawyer who had just entered a case so I searched and found their web site and started looking for a phone number. Not on the front page, which is where I thought it would be. Not on this page. Not on that page. So I looked for the "contact us" link, clicked, and there it was finally.

Now it may seem obvious that the phone number would be on the contact us page, but to the average consumer looking for an attorney's help, if your phone number isn't right out in the open on every page, if it takes several clicks to find your phone number, then you are just putting roadblocks between you and that prospective client. Why do you want to do that? Consumers don't want to waste time looking for something they can't easily find.

I noticed something else about that website too. It violated rule #2, Stay Above the Fold. The front page just went on and on and on, scrolling down for what seemed like forever.

When you look at a newspaper you can see that the headline is at the top and grabs your attention. When you unfold the paper you see the rest of the front page. The top half is called "above the fold" and the bottom half of the page is what's called "below the fold" in the newspaper business.

Well, your website page has a "fold" too. Above the fold is whatever shows up on the screen when your web page loads. The stuff you have to scroll down to read? That's all "below the fold" and that's where your problem is.

Your important contact info, name, phone number, maybe your location or logo - the important info about you should NOT be below the fold for one simple reason.

You've got "15 and 2" to sell yourself to that surfing potential client. In other words, after landing on your web site, that prospective client will likely spend no more than 15 seconds and 2 mouse clicks, max, to decide if you are what they are looking for. They may not bother to scroll all the way to the bottom of the web page to find your phone number - if it's there at all. And they certainly won't click around in search of it either - or anything else they are looking for.

If you put any important info (like your phone number) below the fold, and your web site visitor doesn't take the time to scroll down to find it, they won't call you at all.

Now, we aren't saying don't go below the fold with more info at all. Indeed, there's a lot of value in having content that is complete, whether it goes below the fold or not. Just be careful what you put where on your web pages.

Below the fold is where lawyers and law firms often put their normal "business" type links, such as About Us, Site Map (you do have one, don't you?), Terms of Use, etc. And that reminds me of Rule #3, but we'll get to that next time.

For now, make sure your most important info on your web site pages is above the fold where your visitors can find it and read it quickly and easily.

Helping lawyers help clients, since 1978.

Monday

Small Law Firm Break-Even Analyzer

With a tip of the hat to Texas attorney Jim McMillen, a Consumer Law attorney in Houston, we just learned about the Small Business Break-Even Analyzer program. It's free and it takes info about your small business and generates a month by month table for the next five years that can predict when a business can reach a break-even point.

While not intended for lawyers starting out on their own, the program can be used for it and can help young lawyers put on their entrepreneurial hat and plan their business future much better than the old pen and paper approach.

It's just one of several online services you can get free from Small-Business-Ideas.net. You can comjpare different scenarios, see what happens when you increase (or decreas) your income or expenses, and it reminds you of the categories of expenses that you have to account for.

We highly recommend every young lawyer try it out before you strike out solo on your own.

Ron Burdge

Helping lawyers run their business, since 1978.

Saturday

How Your Web Site Can Make You Look like a Buffoon Lawyer Without Really Trying

I was looking for a specific attorney in another state the other day to call them with a referral to send and noticed a problem on their web site that irritated me. The site was okay, but I had to click 6 times to find their phone number. That reminded me... there are some simple tips that can help your web site make it easier for clients to find and contact you. Here's the first of five.

Even a top notch lawyer can put off prospective clients with a web site that creates friction. That’s anything that slows down moving the shopping prospect to a retained client status. Here’s some common problems.

1. Make it hard to contact you. For some reason, lawyers get so enthralled with putting together a great web site with lots of content and slick graphics that they forget the purpose of the site. Some tend to think that their web site only needs to have one place where your e-mail or phone number might appear so that the prospective client can contact you. And then they hide it.

That's not only wrong, it's silly too.

If you went thru the trouble of building a great site so it would get noticed by the search engines, and the client went through the trouble of searching for your web site and then found it, you should make it easy as possible for them to become your client.

Think of it this way: Click, Call, Mail, Stop by. That’s how easy it should be for people to contact you.

At the very least, your phone number and e-mail link should be on every web page. And not at the bottom of the page, either.

We'll continue this series with four more tips so subscribe to our coaching blog or stop back soon to read the rest of our tips on how your web site can look its best and do its best to attract new clients for you. These won't be all the common problems a lot of web sites have, but they are the high points.

And if you just fix these 5 problems we will point out, then it’ll put you ahead of 90% of the rest of your competition.

Helping attorneys help clients, since 1978.

Thursday

Spyware Disguised as Fake Security Warnings

There's nothing worse than to lose all your hard drive contents to a virus infection you didn't even suspect was coming at you. Attorneys don't have time to wrestle with computers.

Here's some tips to recognize some of the viruses, spyware and other nefarious computer programs that try to get installed on your computer by fooling you into thinking they are security warnings, often requiring some kind of "update" to a program that sounds legitimate.

"Windows has detected a virus" Nope. Microsoft Windows doesn't do that. It can display a warning if your virus software is out of date or not turned on, but it does not scan your computer on its own.

"The Surprise Program" If an anti virus program appears on your desktop and you didn't install it, get worried. Then get rid of it. A security warning that comes from a program you didn't install is a ruse intended to fool you.

"Sounds Right" Sometimes an impressive sounding program name is a tip that the program is not legitimate. Like "Antivirus 2010" or "Spyware Detector" etc. If you don't know what it is, don't trust it.

"Download this Norton Virus Update Now" Real anti virus programs don't prompt you to download anything. They get rid of a virus without having to go get an update to do it. They won't prompt you to get an update in order to remove a specific virus threat.

"The Living Color Message Box" Legit programs don't waste time using flashy, colorful boxes to tell you something. If the message box is fancy, then it's probably fake. It should be a simple, clear and small box. If it's in living color, your computer soon won't be.

Helping lawyers help clients, everyday. Since 1978.

Monday

Is there marketing help for lawyers?

There's a nice article over on Law.com's Small Firm Business page by Kimberly Rice titled "How Can law Firms Help Their Lawyers with Marketing?" with some great tips.

Kimberly discusses the basics of practical business development and notes that just throwing time at marketing is not a good use of an attorney's time or skillset. She's well qualified to talk about marketing too, judging from her marketing website.

She wisely points out that "One of the most valuable lessons firms can learn from this recession is that their overall health depends upon attorneys who are well educated and disciplined in the nuances of the business development process."

Take a minute to read the article and you'll likely find it worthwhile for your own practice too.

Helping lawyers succeed, since 1978.

Why LinkedIn Should Matter to You: Using Social Media

For the new generation of lawyers and law firms, using social media will be a key part of their marketing strategy. That is particularly true of LinkedIn since it caters to professionals.

The Legal Intelligencer has posted a short, less than 5 minute, introductory video to the use of social media that marketer Gina Rubel presented at a seminar. Nicely done, it gives you a brief overview of LinkedIn and other social media.

It's well worth the watch. You can view it here: http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202461733777&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=The%20Legal%20Intelligencer&pt=TLI%20AM%20Legal%20Alert&cn=TLI_AM_LegalAlert_20100621&kw=Why%20LinkedIn%20Matters%20for%20Law%20Firms

One click back in the url will take you to a list of other informative videos that are worth a look, each on different topics. While the site is heavy on the home town lawyer scene of Pennsylvania, it has lots of articles and posts that apply to the legal industry in general. It's "Today's Headlines" feed is one of my regular subscriptions and the entire site is worth a look-see.

Ms. Rubel is right to tout the advantages of LinkedIn and other social media. Learning to use it well is the one great advantage that young lawyers and upstart law firms have in the ever-competitive legal services industry.

Ron Burdge

Helping lawyers build their success since 1978.

Sunday

11 Ways to Avoid Being a Workaholic

Yesterday we talked about where Father's Day came from, with a big thanks to Ernest Oriente for the feed on that.

Today reminded us that too many long work days prevent too many fathers from appreciating what they are blessed with every day, so we're going to suggest all you fathers out there take a look at these 11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic from Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens.

She's got some very good pointers on why you shouldn't work constantly, even when you think you need to. It's very easy to think that the task at hand, any job task, is a crisis that needs all your attention at the moment. The reality is, we suspect, that every crisis is only a crisis because someone else says so.

It's never too late to get ahold of your life and slow down to enjoy the joys that exist around you. Today's a good day for that. Tammy Strobel's article can help you get a grip on every day so we heartily recommend it to all you workaholics out there.

Helping lawyers help clients every day.

Friday

Where Father's Day Comes From

The post below is with our thanks to Ernest Oriente, a long time friend and mentor and coach, for this reminder on where the day came from, on which we honor our fathers.

The idea for an official Father's Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother's Day in 1910-two years after the first Mother's Day observance in West Virginia.

The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrificed-raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.

Her proposed local Father's Day celebration received strong support from the town's ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5th, Mrs. Dodd's father's birthdays were three weeks away-had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.

Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother's Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father's Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd's idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother's Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, "too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child."

Father's Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother's Day.

Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father's Day observances. He wrote to the nation's governors that "the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."

Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father's Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that "Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable."

Eventually, in 1972-sixty-two years after it was proposed-Father's Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon.

Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father's Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers-but only those deceased.

In America today, Father's Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged. Don't forget to send a card and make a call. Every day matters, but especially this day.

Helping lawyers build their success.

Thursday

Resources for Lawyer Entrepreneurs

Being your own boss can be tough. But there are resources that can help you run your law practice and here are a few, alphabetically listed.

American Marketing Association, www.marketingpower.com. Marketing seminars, advertising tips, and free online resources.

Attorney Fee Survey Data, www.consumerlaw.org/feesurvey. Find out what attorney fee hourly rates are in your area, along with other data, and you can participate in the current fee survey too.

Benefits Link, www.benefitslink.com. Info and resources about the laws and regulations governing employee benefits. Educational seminars too.

Business Plan Center, www.businessplans.org. Sample business plans for all sorts of businesses, as well as software and guidelines for your business.

Club E, www.clubenetwork.com. Podcasts, interviews, and forums. And it's free. Plus, there's info on live local meetings.

Entrepreneur, www.entrepreneur.com. Guides, tips, articles, columns from experts for every type of business.

Entrepreneur Connect, www.econnect.entrepreneur.com. An online community of business owners who post questions, discuss answers, and share business experiences.

Independent Community Bankers of America, www.icba.org. Sometimes a local community bank is easier for an entrepreneur to work with than those large, multistate banks with Wall Street boards to report to. Here, you can find a smaller, local bank near you.

Score, www.score.org. A non profit organization whose members use their decades of experience to help new entrepreneurs (and any business person) with mentoring and counseling on business issues and problems.

Small Business Administration, www.sba.gov. Yes, it's the government. But they've got tons of info, business tools, plus grants and loans, lots of business tips, and links to Small Business Development Centers nationwide. And, since it's the government, it's free too.

Strategy Stew, www.strategystew.com. Practical marketing strategies for small business. Perhaps technically a blog and not a website, it's still got great ideas and lots of fun to read.

There are other resources that you may be able to dig up, but this list covers the basic resources that any lawyer entrepreneur should check out when you are looking for free help with the business side of your law practice.

Helping lawyers run their business since 1978

Friday

Chicago Seminar Links May 2010

The following are links to articles discussed or used at the Chicago & Columbus Seminar Series in May 2010 on Consumer Law Issues. This list is in no particular order at all. Each link is followed by a description of the document found at the link. Also, you will need to cut and paste the link to your web browser (the links are not "active" from this list for security reasons). Should you find any link not working for you, please contact the author, Ron@TheLawCoach.com, and the article can be sent directly to you. This link list will be deleted on or after May 30, 2010.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/A%20FORM%20Corr%20Atty%20Fin%20Settlement%20Only%20032509.pdf

This is the link to the form letter advising financiers of a settlement offer being made under the FTC Holder Rule.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/FTC%20Rule%20Explained.pdf

This is the link to the citation and definitions applicable for the FTC Holder Rule.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/2%20Running%20a%20Successful%20Practice.pdf

This is the link to the article on Running a Successful Law Practice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/8%20How%20to%20Strengthen%20Your%20Claim%20for%20Atty%20Fees%20041610.pdf

This is the link to the article on How to Strengthen Your Claim for Attorney Fees in a fee shifting case.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/Practicing%20Six%20Sigma%20Consumer%20Law%20to%20Achieve%20Better%20Fee%20Awards.pdf

This is a link to the article on efficiencies in law practice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/1%20FORM%20I%20dont%20believe%20that%20you%20and%20I%20have%20dealt%20with%20each%20other%20before%20Clause%20072107.pdf

This is a link to the clauses of the first settlement letter to a new defense attorney that has no experience with you firm and who you want to warn that the settlement offers in your fee shifting practice is not handled like a personal injury practice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/1%20FORM%20Ron%27s%20Timeslip%20Revised%20011110.pdf

This link is to a standard all-inclusive time slip form for law office use.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/A%20FORM%20Startup%20Time%20Sheet.pdf

This link is for the time lip form used at case start up in a law office, to record on one form all start up activities.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/PROCESS%20How%20to%20Write%20a%20Letter%20to%20a%20Client%20041408.pdf

This link is to an article on How to Write a Letter to a Client, intended for new lawyers but useful tips for more established lawyers too.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/The%20Spartan%20and%20the%20Trial%20Lawyer.pdf

This link is to an article on the value to a trial attorney of never giving up, even in the face of a strong defense.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/US%20Consumer%20Law%20Attorney%20Fee%20Survey%202008-9%202nd%20Ed%203.pdf

Link to the latest version of the national US Consumer Law Attorney Fee Survey report, including more detail and data than is found in the regional reports that are separately published on the NCLC website.

Helping Lawyers Help Clients Since 1978.

Dropbox is Cool Tool for Syncing Docs on Multiple Computers

If you have a file on your desktop that you want to be able to work on from your laptop, or you want to be able to review from your smartphone, what do you do? Print it off and take it with you? That is just so 1990's. Well, there's an app for that, of course. It's called Dropbox and it works simply and beautifully.

The last few weeks we've been working on some presentation materials for some seminars coming up. Sometimes working at home, sometimes at the office, and sometimes while waiting for a court session to start. And every time, we were working on the same document and didn't need to update the copies that were stored on different devices or computers. That's what Dropbox does.

Dropbox is an internet service that has only one job. It will synchronize the contents of a single folder on multiple computers so that the contents of that folder are always the same. If you save a file in the Dropbox at work, it will show up on every other computer where you have installed Dropbox.

And if you left your laptop at home, you can use any laptop to access your Dropbox over the internet. Of course, there's an iphone app for it too.

The service is free and has a moderate cost above 2GB. But 2GB will hold a lot of documents, powerpoints, spreadsheets, etc. Folks, if you move around a lot and need to have portable docs with you that are up to date, this is one perfect way to do it.

Ron Burdge

Helping Lawyers Helping Their Clients, Since 1978

List of Social Networking Sites for Lawyers

While the jury is still out, so to speak, on the actual value of social networking for lawyers on professional sites, it is still something to consider and may have considerable value for networking and referrals. To help you understand the possibilities and investigate the issue on your own, here are some of the more popular social networking sites for attorneys.

If you launch into the social networking arena, remember the golden rule: keep work social networking focused on work and stay away from the personal stuff. Also, it's a good idea to check out some of the pages already posted on these sites by other law firms before setting up your own.

http://www.facebook.com/ is widely used by everyone who isn't a lawyer and some lawyers too. The formal is personal but can easily be turned into a professional page and has with it lots of options for privacy.

http://www.lawlink.com/ is common for information sharing and networking among attorneys. You can apply or be invited to join so there is some "vetting" of the authenticity of the participants. You can find legal news, some groups, ads, and forums. Document sharing is big here.

http://www.legalonramp.com/ touts itself as focused on collaboration, but then that's what underlies all social networking sites anyway. The difference here, though, is that LegalOnRamp requires it. For instance, just to get in the door you have to specifiy what knowledge you would like to share with others in the LegalOnRamp community. Some news and blog posts are visible to nonmembers so you do have the chance to build your reputation, but that is more of a side benefit to this site because its real focus is on developing relationships between attorneys.

http://www.linkedin.com/ is the most common social network site for legal professionals. Huge amounts of lawyers on members. It's easy to create a profile and to connect with others. Odds are that at least half of the lawyers in every big city are members here and you probably will recognize names right away. If you join anything, at least join this one.

www.Martindale.com/join.aspx is the "Martindale-Hubbell Connected" networking site and its purpose is obviously both for networking with other atttorneys and creating visibility for potential clients. The company has been around for what seems like forever, so their credability is well established. They offer an easy format with lots of optional additional "add-on's" like blogs, forums, groups, directories, Q&A, and more.

http://www.twitter.com/ does have lots of business and law firm members but their mainstream is the lay public. Still there are law firms, law libraries, government officials, and lots of business leaders on the service. It requires more of a committment to "tweet" your short messages on various topics and using it for promotional purposes of specific legal services, one at a time perhaps, may be its best use for the legal profession.

More and more attorneys are using social networking as a tool for marketing themselves and their practice so maybe it's time for you to get started or to expand too. Before starting, think about what you want to do carefully. Create a cohesive networking presence that you "tweak" to fit each networking site's best capabilities and its target audience. And check your law firm's Social Networking Policy as well as your state's ethics rules for guidance.

Ron Burdge