Features
Firm Marketing Initiatives: Trends We See for 2013
When lawyers no longer feel they are at a place that can support and reward the ambitions they have for their practice, they head for the door.
Features
Standard Law Firm Operating Procedures: Optional or Critical?
Without Standard Operating Procedures, law firms suffer from inconsistency, chaos and lack of control. Having SOPs is a must for legal IT departments. From lost equipment to lost passwords and data, not having written policies and procedures can create liability and losses that are sometimes unrecoverable.
Features
Profiting from the Learning Curve
A recent study published by Altman Weil listed the ways in which chief legal officers would like to see their outside counsel embrace service improvements and innovation. The top four responses were greater cost reduction, non-hourly pricing, more efficient project management and improved budget forecasting. To anyone paying even cursory attention to the legal marketplace in the last half decade, these should not come as a surprise.
Features
Why Every Lawyer Needs to Lead
In a law firm environment, great leaders are necessary to provide client service, build client relationships, develop more junior lawyers, and generally ensure the profitable use of firm resources. This requires everyone's best thinking. How does a leader harness the group's best thinking? The most effective leaders use coaching skills. In other words, all they do is ask the right questions.
Features
Protect Your Firm!
Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) programs, which allow employees to use their personally owned smartphones, tablets and laptops in and out of the work environment, are significantly changing information technology (IT). Law firms around the country are embracing BYOD as it lets executives and employees use the mobile devices, service providers and operating platforms of their choice.
Features
Legal Issues Involving Obesity and the ADA
Three federal cases indicating growing acceptance of obesity as a condition covered by the ADA, combined with obesity rates among the nation's workforce at an all-time high, portend additional claims from plaintiffs demanding accommodations for their conditions ' and more suits against employers that fail to provide them.
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CA Workplace Religious Freedom Act
Employers often are faced with tricky legal dilemmas when employees ask to display religious symbols and take time off for religious observance. The most common religious request by retail employees is time off for a religious holiday, followed by requests to be excused from a dress code. Recent developments in both legislation and case law suggest that employers should only deny a religious accommodation when it would cause a quantifiable undue burden.
Features
Understanding Partners' Capital Accounts
Law firm management should ensure that partners and senior associates (potential partners) understand the basic concepts pertaining to partners' capital accounts.
Features
Legal Project Management in a Practice Management World
The expectations of today's clients cannot be met by the trappings of traditional law practices. Considering the way clients now expect and demand that their lawyers engage with them, using project management is a perfect way to support the process.
Features
Who Is Reviewing Your Firm's Partnership Agreements?
This article focuses on the specific areas of law firm partnership agreements that require an accountant's input and expertise.
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