Law Firm Management

Redoing your firm's website is a collaborative process with specific steps that you should try to follow. The purpose of this three-part article is to review each of those steps so that law firm professionals have a better understanding of website design and development in order to better manage internal expectations when they undertake a website redesign project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.