Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

Take a look here at a post from Larry Bodine’s Professional Services Marketing blog. It’s about a mid-sized Illinois firm and some pretty innovative and successful marketing techniques they use…good stuff.

I know the Firm was profiled in the Law Bulletin within the last couple years too, but this gives more specifics.

Saw this post here from PDF for Lawyers. Note that the post includes a PDF document (how fitting) with a great point-by-point breakdown of how this lawyer has gone paperless and how he manages client files without paper. Very useful!

A fun day at Daley this week:

You have a court order saying your trial is set for 915 a.m. So you appear there and at 940 your case gets assigned to another courtroom…not great, but somewhat expected.

Next, you go to the new courtroom and new judge and have a short pretrial but trial is inevitable. However, in the meantime another case has been sent to this same court/judge for hearing (despite the fact we’ve had this trial date for some seven weeks). So the judge says to come back at 2 p.m. for the trial. That said, as we’re heading out after the pretrial the judge is following us down on the elevator…hmmmm.

So trial happens at 2pm and we do get it done by 430pm or so. Granted, my angst is somewhat tied to the fact that my wife and I were trying to get an early start on some time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but don’t litigants/citizens/taxpayers deserve a bit more efficiency? Seriously, why not have a consultant come in to analyze how our court system is functioning? Why do we have status hearings (at least in-person)? Thoughts on other wasteful pieces of our “system”?

Well, at least today we have our monthly golf tournament with NIMAGA.org. Just became a member this year…monthly tournaments for the semi-serious yet mediocore golfers out there.

Hey gang just wanted to post something this summer Saturday morning because I’ve been falling behind on my blogging. But it’s been an educational experience and hopefully I can highlight a couple of learning points.

First, my situation has not been unusual, but it is eye-opening to note how little “rocking-of-the-boat” in my life it can take to getting me over my head in legal and life stuff. I have a rare dissolution of marriage trial this coming week that is taking a lot of preparation time. Then, we got pulled into court on an Emergency Motion on Thursday. Next, my wife is a new flight attendant with United so she’s on call rather than having a schedule which typically means getting a call at 3 a.m. telling her to be at O’Hare by 5am or so (we do live close to the airport thankfully). And lastly, very positively, we’ve gotten a handful of new clients recently.

So what’s going to happen:

–A new employee is in the pipeline. We’ve changed our technology setup to have a static IP address so we’re going to add someone who can work from home and share our network.

–I need to have a more formal network of other lawyers to handle stuff for me. This does exist informally right now and really has developed a great deal through this blog, but this needs to be a more formal arrangement of people we can call spur of the moment. Can you help me?