Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

**Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Bryan Sims for sharing some technological advice with our readers. If you missed previous segments of the interview look here and here. Very sage advice…I found his 5 “must have” pieces of technology particularly informative and are you kidding me, he uses three monitors! If you like what you’ve heard here, I see he’s also joining me on the dais at the ISBA’s Solo and Small Firm Conference, October 22-October 24 (really I’m joining him on the dais). Or just come on down to see Exhibit A in the history of Illinois pay-to-play politics:  The Abraham Lincoln Hotel & Conference Center.  5th Annual Solo & Small Firm Conference:  Creating a Thriving Practice in Challenging Times.

SIC: List 3 cheap and simple technology changes/upgrades a lawyer could make with the potential for a big payoff.

TCL:

The first thing I would recommend echoes what I just said. Learn how to use the stuff you have already paid for. Leverage the technology you already own before you think about spending money on something else.

Second, scan everything. Being able to work with electronic documents only is unbelievably liberating. With my laptop, I have access to every document on every file on every case on which I am currently working. Further, being able to access a document, a pleading, a piece of discovery, anything to do with my file without having to find the file and then search through it is a huge time saver. However, this works only if you scan everything. If some of your stuff is in paper and some is electronic, you will never know what is where. However, if you scan everything, you will be rewarded with savings in time and greater efficiency.

The final recommendation I would make is to add a second monitor to your desk. When I first added a second monitor, I was amazed at how much more efficiently I was able to work. This is especially the case in situations such as quoting from a case, or responding to a motion. The best testimony I have seen to the effectiveness of a second monitor is that I have never found anyone who uses two monitors that would ever be willing to go back to just one. The biggest drawback to using two monitors is that you feel cramped when you are away from the office and have only your laptop screen to use.

That being said, I love my multiple monitor set up (I now use 3) and do not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who asks.

SIC: I see you’re a big Adobe Acrobat fan, how do you use Acrobat beyond merely reading/ creating PDF files?

TCL:

I use Adobe Acrobat on a daily basis in my practice. One of my favorite ways is to use it with my research. When I find a relevant case, rather than printing it to paper, I print it to PDF. I then highlight, annotate, and otherwise mark up my cases, just as I would if I had printed them to paper. However, now I have my cases with me, wherever I go. Plus, if I need a copy for the judge, I can simply print the case, without the annotations. In the Print Dialogue, on the upper right under Comments and Forms, you can choose whether to print just the documents or the document with comments.

I also use Acrobat to handle all of my documents in a case, whether pleadings, correspondence, discovery, or anything else. I store them all in PDF and run Adobe’s OCR (optical character recognition) process on them. By doing this, I can easily build an index to search all of the documents in a particular case.

I have also found that Adobe works great to store deposition exhibits. At the conclusion of a deposition (dep), I can put all of the exhibits together keep them as a single PDF that I can keep with the electronic copy of the dep. This means I never have to search for a paper copy of a dep exhibit. Also, by bookmarking the file, I can easily jump to any particular exhibit that I want to.

Additionally, I find Acrobat invaluable in preparing discovery. For example, the Bates Stamping feature allows me to stamp hundreds of pages of documents in a span of a couple of minutes. Also, if there is any information that I need to redact, I can use the redaction feature to securely and completely redact the information from the document.

Acrobat is a very powerful program with some great features. I urge anyone who has never explored some of these features to check out the webinars that Adobe has put together to get an idea of all of the things that you can do with Adobe Acrobat.

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I just finished another re-read of Jim Collins’ Good to Great:  Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t. With business books it’s kinda like movies for me, there aren’t too many I like so I re-watch and re-read the same 5-10 every couple years. But Good to Great is an excellent read because it’s not just some CEO spouting crap, it’s some 200 pages based on sound, academic research regarding Fortune 500 companies that either fit the criteria or they didn’t. Plus it makes 6 simple (not easy) points shared by the so-called “Great” companies:

1.  Level 5 Leadership;
2.  First Who…Then What;
3.  Confront the Brutal Facts;
4.  Hedgehog Concept;
5.  Culture of Discipline;
6.  Technology Accelerators.

Plus he makes several good triathlon references (looking forward to Lake Geneva on 9/12/09) including a story of multiple Hawaii Ironman Triathlon champion Dave Scott, who would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off to give him an edge.  But I digress…

The absolute golden takeaway point of the book is contained within the chapter entitled The Hedgehog Concept where Collins makes the analogy between great companies and those small, porcupine-like hedgehogs. The point being the “great” companies simplify their complex business world into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs aren’t pursuing several different ends and such, rather, they’re focused like a laser on their own, specific vision. 

And how to discover your “Hedgehog Concept”? Three questions:

• What are you deeply passionate about?
• What can you be the best in the world at?
• What drives your economic engine?

How ’bout applying those three questions or looking for the overlap in the “three circles” in your legal services business, as mentioned in the book.

When I apply the 3 circles to my practice I end up asking myself, why the heck am I representing anyone in residential real estate matters? I’m not particularly passionate about the subject matter and the economics of that practice area flat-out suck. Conversely when I think about elder/family/disability law I do consider those areas about which I am passionate, very accomplished in, and with pretty decent economics as the elderly and disabled populations sky rocket.

Maybe I need to pull a Cork Walgreen (he eliminated food service within Walgreens over a five year period) and just stop it with the residential real estate? I think so…but when?

Or should I say I was searching for a needle in a haystack? Alright, enough of the farming analogies by a mostly life long suburbanite…

My challenge of a few days ago was locating a copy of a court order within the Cook County Circuit Clerk’s office, on an expedited basis. Generally, every copy of every order entered in a case is part of our hard and soft client files. This is an area where you do still need some paper copies since you’ll generally have your client’s case file with you in court. But, in this particular case what I recall had happened was I had had to rush out of court on a certain day and could not wait for the judge/clerk to have this order entered and the opposing lawyer never forwarded a copy of the particular order to me.

Fast forward to earlier this week…I’m preparing for a substantive argument on a motion to dismiss for which I NEEDED a copy of this old order that I had never gotten a copy of. I do know that the Cook County Circuit Clerk’s Office does at least now scan all orders and saves them on microfilm so I thought I could quickly grab a copy of the order in room 802 before my case…and I could, it just took a while.

Why?

Back to the chickens and the hay…

Because when you look-up your case online (or within the Clerk’s own DOS based system) all that each case lists is a very, very rudimentary outline of the case that helps with dates but makes it very difficult to see exactly what happened or what was ordered on a particular date. I knew a rough 2-3 month date range for when the order I needed was entered so I could narrow it down quite a but it was still a 30+ minute process that could have been 5 minutes if all the orders were readily available on the Internet.

That’s post # 15 and counting regarding filing difficulties in the Circuit Clerk’s Office, for those of you keeping score at home.

Tags: Cook Circuit Court Clerk

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I’ve enjoyed participating in Ed Poll’s new forum’s site here. Several discussion categories and a treasure trove of Ed’s writing from over the years. I think the forums are fairly new and just starting to generate significant activity. I’ve gotten some good advice directly from Ed myself, and no consulting fee.

How’s that for a sexy headline? Doesn’t it make you want to keep reading? Well, then…

I attended a training earlier this week over at the Cook County Arbitration Center at 222 N. LaSalle to become elgible to serve on the arbitration panels in the mandatory arbitration program. If you’re not familiar, these are generally municipal division cases where the damages at issue run between $10,000 and $50,000. These cases are governed procedurally by Supreme Court rules 86-95 and Part 18 of the local rules for the Circuit Court of Cook County. I was told I’ll get called to sit on a panel every couple months and can also sign-up for panels at the suburban branch courts. The pay is $100 per hearing so you’re NOT going to get rich but for pre-judiciary practice and learning a new area of law I think it may be a fruitful use of my time. Would also recommend for a part-time or retired practitioner wanting to keep his hand in the practice.

The article’s title says it all:  Law Firms Make Easy Pickings for Embezzlers. The piece outlines a series of support staff horror stories of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars being stolen from law firms. Generally the stories seem to just be examples of too little oversight.

I’ve never had too complex of a set-up…essentially we have three accounts:  1) Client funds trust account; 2) General checking; and, 3) High balance checking. My assistant(s) have access to #2 to pay run-of-the-mill office expenses and that’s it. There’s never too much money in the general checking account since it’s non-interest bearing and we don’t have too many expenses…court filing fees are probably the largest checks I’m ever writing.

I really enjoyed my 830am pre-trial conference this morning over at 32 W. Randolph (and I’m not talking about the specifics of the case). I’d like to see waaayyyy more of these in Cook County. I can’t recall an 830am case set in Cook County EVER before. In a previous life I used to appear on occasion at an 830 arbitration call out in Wheaton. It’s a splendid scheduling move on so many levels…

• For me the lawyer it’s almost like adding an additional billable hour to my day. Because when my court days starts at the typical 930 it’s kind of like I’m killing time on non-substantive work the first hour of my day just waiting to walk over to court. And of course it’s nice to spread out those 5ish cases set at 930am.

• For judges and court administration, wouldn’t things flow better just by moving 50% of those 930am cases to 830am/845am?

Nice to see some bar associations folks following our lead, no problem, maybe just throw a link our way.

Here’s the ABA Journal’s take on lawyer ads over at the Cook County Circuit Clerk’s Website…we previously hit this topic here.

And from Illinois Lawyer Now, Four must-have tech tools for solos…hey, we had five!

• Closing the client’s file from Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog. Here’s the column he wrote for USA Lawyers. A very good discussion of the “life of a client file.” I know it doesn’t sound too sexy but you have one with every client, right? So lets do things properly.

• And in another take on a game I used to play back when I was teaching high school social studies entitled ‘What’s in the bag?’ where I think I tried to relate a bag of artifacts with useful American History here’s The Connected Lawyer’s version, What’s in my Travel Bag? An informative list of technology gadgets…I think I only own 2 of the 10 items he lists. I’ll be renaming this blog:  The Unconnected Lawyer.

Just a quick follow-up to a post last week about a Pennsylvania litigant recently released after spending 14 years in jail related to an indirect civil contempt finding, from the Chicago Tribune regarding a Will County judge who seems he can’t get enough of this contempt stuff.

Clifton Williams arrived at the Will County Courthouse in Joliet and sat in the fourth-floor courtroom where his cousin was pleading guilty to a felony drug charge. As Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak handed down the cousin’s sentence — 2 years’ probation — Williams, 33, stretched and let out a very ill-timed yawn. Williams’ sentence? Six months in jail — the maximum penalty for criminal contempt without a jury trial. The Richton Park man was locked up July 23 and will serve at least 21 days.

I had a knock-down-drag-out hearing the same day I read this article and after 45 minutes of testimony the judge starts to give his ruling and my client keeps interrupting the judge as he was speaking. My client was fortunate we had a patient judge.

**Update, the yawner was released August 13, 2009.