Category: Law Office Management

What Is the CARES Act and How Can It Help Legal Professionals?

On March 27, Congress passed the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) to mitigate the negative economic impact of COVID-19. The CARES Act provides small businesses and individuals with extended unemployment insurance benefits, loans for paycheck protection, refundable tax credit, and business tax provisions. Attorneys who own their own practice can take advantage of the 2020 CARES Act to protect their business and employees during the economic downturn brought on by COVID-19.

How the CARES Act Applies to Lawyers

The CARES Act could alleviate the negative economic impact of COVID-19 on your law firm while the entire world waits for what’s next.

The CARES Act helps law practices with:

  • Paycheck protection program (PPP): completely forgivable loan to cover payroll costs
  • Employee retention credit
  • 2020 Payroll tax deferment
  • Economic injury disaster loan emergency advance (EIDL)

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for Attorneys, Legal Administrators, and Staff

For more detail, please refer to the PPP FAQs published by the Treasury Department on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

Coverage for Payroll Costs

  • Salary, wages, commissions, or tips
  • Employee benefits including costs for vacation, parental, family, medical, or sick leave
  • Allowance for separation or dismissal
  • Payments required for the provisions of group health care benefits including insurance premiums
  • Retirement benefits
  • State and local taxes assessed on compensation

For more detail, please refer to the Tax Foundation’s summary of the SBA Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES Act.

Coverage for Sole Proprietor or Independent Contractor

  • Wages, commissions, income or net earnings from self-employment, capped at $100,000 on an annualized basis for each employee
  • Extends duration of benefits from 26 weeks (available in most states) to 39 weeks
  • Provides an additional $600 per week in benefits for first four months

For more detail, please refer to the summary from the law firm Rudman Winchell.

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loan Forgiveness

Applications are already in play. While there is a lot of money available, it is not unlimited. Apply as quickly as possible.

  • You use the money strictly for allowed expenses
  • 75% of the loan amount is spent on payroll costs
  • You maintain your entire full-time staff until June 30
  • Rehire fired or laid-off employees quickly
  • Caps payment at $100,000 per person
  • You do not cut employees wages more than 25% for any employee who made less than $100,000 in 2019
  • For whatever amount is not covered, PPP loans have a 1% interest rate and payments are deferred six months with interest during the deferment.  The loan must be fully repaid in two years.

For more detail, please refer to the Small Business Administration’s Docket No. SBA-2020-0015.

Employee Retention Credit

You may qualify for a refundable payroll tax credit for 50% of wages if:

  • your law practice was fully or partially suspended due to COVID-19 related shut-down orders.
  • you lost more than 50% in gross receipts compared to last year’s same-quarter performance.

Payroll Tax Deferment

To further lower expenses at your law firm, you may defer your share of payroll taxes and split the deferred payments over the next two years, with half due by Dec. 31, 2021, and the other half due by Dec. 31, 2022.

Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance (EIDL)

If you are a sole proprietor, you may be eligible for a EIDL loan of up to $2 million, repayable over 30 years at 3.75% interest rates for small businesses and 2.75% for most private non-profits under the EIDL. Payments are deferred for the first year, but interest accrues during that time.

  • You’ll have to put up collateral for loans over $25,000 and a personal guarantee for loans exceeding $200,00.
  • If you qualify for an EIDL, you can use the money for any business expense (with a few exclusions).
  • Under the same provision, small business owners may be eligible for a one-time grant of up to $10,000 that you won’t have to pay back.

For more detail, please refer to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s “Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance” overview page.

What Happens If You Enroll for PPP and EIDL?

If you decide to enroll for both the EIDL and PPP, the amount of the EIDL grant will be subtracted from the PPP amount eligible for forgiveness. In other words, you’ll ultimately wind up paying it back.

The 2020 CARES Act Can Help Your Law Firm

Law firms are uniquely poised to understand the full extent of the CARES Act and its protections. With the financial boost from the CARES Act, attorneys are more likely to retain talent and be ready to hit the ground running when court activity ramps up again.

CARES Act 2020 Resources

 

© Copyright 2020 PracticePanther
ARTICLE BY Reece Guida at PracticePanther.
For more on the CARES Act, see the National Law Review Coronavirus News section.

Make Remote Access for Your Employees Safer & Quicker with Disciplined User Rights

During times of disruption as well as an unpredictable future, your organization’s focus on “the basics” regarding a fundamental remote access strategy and design is essential. The newly widespread remote working environment dictated by various states’ stay at home orders due to the Coronavirus pandemic, demand that successful organizations of tomorrow fully grasp the fundamentals of safe and remote access protocols and prepare for the elastic growth of a disciplined remote access initiative.

The landscape of remote access is forever changed. Regardless of your organization’s existing hardware, software or network (WAN) and cloud design,  basic planning activities – which pave the runway for successful remote access – ensure your organization’s sustainability and enhance your competitiveness in a crowded marketplace.

First and foremost, it’s recommended you audit your current infrastructure design – including a review of your hardware, software, infrastructure, bandwidth, security etc. Any high performing organization’s s remote access strategy should maintain SLAs (Service Level Agreements) or project deadlines and objectives with all internal users and exercise resiliency when confronted with the performance, compliance, and security demands needed to scale.

Three core strategic planning activities are highly recommended prior to, or in parallel with, an audit of your remote access posture:

Clean Up Your Users

Identity hygiene is a constant necessity of any organization to ensure its security stance and guarantee fluidity in the face of dynamic change. Legacy user account cleanup falls into this category, but the lesser practiced aspects of identity hygiene include organization unit restructuring and security group management. These components of a well-tuned identity management infrastructure represent the organizational layout of a business and mapping of processes to business roles which too often grow organically as companies mature. Complacency to organic growth has led many organizations to make drastic and costly decisions to start over rather than re-organize, in order to remove the cancer that has developed in their identity management infrastructure.

Segment User Roles

Likewise, segmenting roles is critical to identity hygiene. Most enterprises have adopted the bifurcation of administrator and personal accounts to ensure audit trails but considerably fewer have aligned security stance to personnel role. As tenure grows and roles change to meet the needs of the organization, new rights and responsibilities are created and added to those individuals with few taken away as the firm’s requirements change. Aligning roles to responsibilities, and more importantly permissions, assures audit compliance without complex explanations and eases transition should those trusted employees ultimately leave the company.

Assign Least Access Rights to Segmented Roles

Finally, the selection of rights assigned to those segmented roles solidifies a corporate identity management strategy. Whether assigned through a workflow engine or maintained through formalized manual processes, assuring least access aligned to each role eliminates the organic growth of unnecessary permissions or access to no longer appropriate applications. This last part is a key facet of a comprehensive strategy that many organizations – including large enterprises – develop complacency around. And the removal of access is no longer strictly necessary. It is too easy to allow excuses that support and even justify this laxity but it’s this very lassitude for least access which opens doors to ransomware propagation, disgruntled and disaffected IT administrators and glaring audit infractions.

In summary, organizational resilience is steeped in discipline. Crisis management and the daily “X factor” can create havoc even with the best laid plans for systems maintenance. The ways in which your firm interacts with clients, partners, suppliers, and others will undoubtedly change with the heavy reliance on remote access capabilities. Those who grasp this concept now will be ahead of the game.

Remote access prowess is now an entry ticket to conducting business post-COVID-19 and absolutely can be viewed now as a true competitive differentiator. When organizations run with elephants there are only two types: 1/ the quick and 2/ the dead. Let’s encourage each other to be in the former category, rather than the latter.

© 2020 Plan B Technologies, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

For more on remote work considerations during the COVID-19 Pandemic, see the National Law Review Coronavirus News section.

Techplace Tickler: eDiscovery Challenges in a Remote Work Environment

In the first episode of our Techplace Tickler series, Danielle Ochs, Tom Lidbury, and Traer Cundiff discuss various eDiscovery-related issues that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people are working remotely. They cover data security concerns while working from home, remote document review, and best practices for collecting, capturing, and transferring data remotely.

© 2020, Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., All Rights Reserved.

For more legal & data security issues amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, please see the National Law Review Coronavirus News section.

National Law Review: Coronavirus Update

The National Law Review continues normal operations
as we are a virtual company.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact us at Info@NatLawReview.com or at 708-357-3317 M-F 7-7 and midday weekends and holidays.
Due to the virus and surrounding legal issues our traffic has soared to over 200,000 visitors and over 250,000 page views yesterday alone. We’re on track to have 1,500,000+ visitors in March.
We sincerely hope for your family and co-workers to remain safe – if you’d like resources about how businesses and individuals are navigating the pandemic, we have a dedicated page with over 200 articles written by the nation’s top law firms on the topic.  Groups including SHRM have directly linked to this resource page.
If your company or professional association needs a consolidated, reliable resource that is updated hourly, we encourage linking to our Coronavirus Resource hub.

Copyright ©2020 National Law Forum, LLC

Supporting Diverse Attorneys: How Marketing Pros Can Become a Business Development Ally

The path to partnership, which many attorneys aspire to achieve, can be a long and challenging road. In order to get there, an attorney’s ability to generate new business is a critical component. The partnership track can be even more difficult for diverse attorneys, as this group tends to lag behind their counterparts in business development. It begs the question: Why do diverse attorneys face challenges in business development, and how can marketing and business development professionals better support their diverse attorneys?

During the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Southwest Region Conference in September 2019, Tasneem Khokha and Holly Barocio from GrowthPlay, presented on how we can better understand and counsel diverse attorneys, and examined the main challenges these attorneys face in building and sustaining their book of business.

Some of the key challenges Tasneem and Holly discussed, include:

  • A lack of, or much smaller network of, potential business as compared to their counterparts.
  • Feelings of being labeled as the token diverse attorney to add to a pitch.
  • Feeling as though they lack a common ground with decision-makers because of different life experiences.
  • Feeling pressure to have to work harder in order to “prove” themselves.
  • Feeling uncomfortable asking for opportunities as compared to their counterparts.

So how can marketing and business development professionals help their attorneys navigate these concerns? It starts with listening and understanding. No one can make the experiences that diverse attorneys face disappear, but marketing professionals can help them turn these challenges into opportunities and set them up to handle future experiences with ease. It’s important to remember the underlying characteristics of great business development, which are:

  • Being an authentic relationship builder.
  • Having the ability to provide solutions to problems, even if you aren’t always rewarded for your efforts.
  • Avoiding pitfalls, such as rushing to sell too soon.

While some diverse attorneys may inherently have a smaller network, if they are armed with the skill set to build authentic relationships and provide solutions to problems, they will be viewed as someone others can trust – a key characteristic of someone who can build a strong book of business. As a marketing and business development professional, being able to authentically counsel diverse attorneys is invaluable. Here are some techniques:

  • Not having commonalities with decision-makers because of different life experiences is not a make or break situation. You can find commonalities in anything – love for sports? hobbies? pets? You’d be surprised the connections people can make if they listen and pay attention to the person they are talking to.
  • From a poll of the audience, some diverse attorneys may feel that being the token diverse attorney is a negative and does not allow them to be recognized for their skills and experience. Be candid and acknowledge the elephant in the room, but advise them to take the ball and run with it. Encourage them to open up about whether they like the work or prefer to do something different, but they must seize the opportunity.
  • Another common concern is that diverse attorneys are less inclined to ask for opportunities. For marketing professionals, be there to help connect the dots and nudge diverse attorneys to openly discuss what excites them and what they want more of. Diverse attorneys may feel siloed, but you can help connect them with others in the firm who can propel them further in their careers.

© 2020 Berbay Marketing & Public Relations

For more on legal business development, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

How Firm Marketing Leaders Can Shake Up the Law Firm “Caste System”

Marketing professionals and other non-lawyers are all too familiar with the age-old hierarchy that pervades law firms and treats attorneys differently from everyone else. Reminiscent of a caste system, this throwback aspect of law firm culture offers attorneys and staff two separate benefits packages, two separate leave policies, two separate dining rooms.

While this system never could have been called equitable, a few professional generations ago firm leadership could provide an understandable justification for it. Law firm staff worked a predictable nine-to-five schedule, while the lawyers put in hundreds more hours per year, working many “all-nighters.” Lawyers’ jobs were highly specialized, while the firm’s non-lawyers performed administrative tasks that were not central to generating revenue.

What a difference a few decades make. Technology has changed the nature of every role within the firm, allowing lawyers to at least assert some work-life balance by working remotely while non-lawyer staff members likely spend longer hours than ever in the office. In addition, today’s forward-thinking firms have expanded the c-suite to include chief marketing officers, chief information officers and chief financial officers. Increasingly they are also hiring internal operations managers and other pricing experts who can speak the same language as the procurement professionals GCs count on to save their companies money. Each of these members of the team bring highly specialized training and skills to their role — and make a measurable impact on the bottom line. And whether managing partners genuinely value their skills, or are simply responding to client demand for their expertise, the result is the same: these professionals now have a seat at the table with clients.

Given this new reality, it no longer makes sense to cling to a law firm culture that renders non-lawyers second-class citizens. And yet old habits die hard. CMOs may finally be getting (a portion of) the respect they deserve, but what about the members of their teams who execute marketing strategy and play a crucial business development role with existing clients?

To be sure, marketing professionals still face an uphill battle in demonstrating their value to firm leaders. But the upheaval in the old system has created an opportunity for CMOs and marketing directors. With the right strategy and messaging, they can use their newfound platform to advance a discussion about firm policies and shed light on the fundamental work of non-lawyer professionals. Here are three ways to get started:

Rebrand your legal marketers as a business development team. Think carefully about how you talk about what you do when you interface with other stakeholders in the firm. Craft your messaging to emphasize the ways in which marketing directly generates revenue. For many large firms, a significant portion of new business comes from expanding engagements with existing clients, and marketers are on the front lines servicing those client relationships and creating opportunities for attorneys to sell across practices.

And make the case with data. Marketing leaders can use many available tools — from the simple to the sophisticated — to collect and process information about their campaigns and initiatives, and understand what really gets results. Firm leaders respect and respond to hard numbers that help them assess how your department is converting firm resources to new opportunities for business development.

Speak up about policies that don’t pass the smell test. The broader culture is extremely sensitive to matters of diversity and equity, and while law firms may be later arrivals to this conversation, their corporate clients are paying close attention. Is the cost savings of a two-tiered benefits package (assuming there is one) really worth the potentially damaging optics of a negative news story on the firm’s throwback culture? Is your diversity and inclusion initiative really embracing inclusion if only lawyers — and not professional staff members — are invited to participate? Legal marketing leaders can use the credibility they have gained to make the case for reexamining problematic policies and suggesting alternatives.

For most legal industry veterans, it’s impossible to imagine law firms that don’t elevate lawyers high above the rest of the staff. And while we probably won’t be saying goodbye to this outdated aspect of firm culture anytime soon, the demands of the marketplace have introduced some much-needed wiggle room into long calcified roles. Don’t miss this opportunity to help firm leaders appreciate the crucial contributions of legal marketers.

© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on law firm marketing, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Law Firms Are Increasingly Using Case Studies to Build Client Trust

Case studies are one of the most powerful forms of marketing communication.  This is hardly a controversial stance; a survey of 600 marketers by the B2B Technology Marketing Group found that case studies were viewed as “the most effective tactic and format”. But while they are widely deployed in the tech industry, case studies are far less common in legal.

That’s changing, as more law firms realize the immense potential. For this reason, case studies were included in the “2020 Legal Marketing Trends Report”, which identifies the year’s most significant developments.

There are many differences between marketing a SaaS platform and marketing a law firm, of course, but let’s look at the commonalities. In both industries, marketers need to demonstrate that a service solves a problem. They need to articulate an approach and show how this provides value to clients.

Too many law firms expend all their efforts telling prospective clients why they are great. Case studies show why a firm is the best choice. They go beyond vague claims about “client service” to show what that looks like in action. They offer concrete evidence that a firm has what it takes to solve complex problems and they do so in the form of a compelling narrative with a problem, a cast of admirable characters, and a resolution.

Why has the legal industry been so slow to embrace case studies? Client confidentiality is a real concern. But often this barrier is less absolute than imagined. Ask your clients—you might be surprised how many are willing to speak openly about their experience with your firm.

It is interesting that law firms, which are built on the expertise of their people, tend to avoid telling stories and putting a human face to their marketing. You can often find more emotive storytelling from a financial tech company than from a corporate law firm. Part of this is the legal industry’s aversion to risk and the widespread belief that it’s better to be safe and boring than flashy and gimmicky.

The truth, however, is that people are expecting more concrete information from the companies and firms they interact with. The internet has trained us to check reviews, rating, testimonials, and case studies before making purchasing decisions. We no longer accept marketing claims at face value. Instead, we look for social validation.

Purchasing legal services is not the same as filling up a shopping cart on Amazon, of course. It’s far higher stakes. This means that social validation and concrete evidence are even more important.

In 2020, we’ll see more firms investing in video case studies. Video production is costly and some firms will have sticker-shock. But others will see the value in investing in core marketing content that can be repurposed for blog posts, newsletters, advertisements, podcasts, pitches, and proposals.

To choose your firm, clients need to know you and they need to trust you. Trust begins with a good story.

© Copyright 2020 fSquared Marketing

For more on building law firm client trust, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Brand Storytelling for Lawyers

Creating a narrative is vital as an attorney. Just as you want to lead your potential jurors or a judge to the kinds of emotional conclusions that will drive the right kind of verdict or settlement, you need to guide your potential clients on their understanding of how your brand was formed. Brand storytelling is the perfect vehicle to connect outsiders with your successes, your story, and your law firm’s core values.

What is Brand Storytelling for Law Firms and Why Do You Need It? 

Brand storytelling blends natural creativity with marketing efforts, establishing a marketing tool that helps firms foster more genuine connections with clients and write a narrative that people remember. As an attorney, you can use this technique to draw in new clients and increase client retention.

Build Emotional Connection

Brand storytelling gives potential clients a way to become engaged with your brand in a personal way—a necessity amongst younger demographics like Millennials and Gen X.

A recent study from Cone Communications shows that 87% of consumers would purchase a product based on values alone. Brand storytelling allows these potential clients to see your law firm as “standing for something” and shows the human side of a brand.

Create a Marketing Foundation 

Storytelling is also a flexible marketing tool. Once you have shaped your brand’s narrative and started utilizing it, you can continue using the dialogue you build with your brand story to engage with people in different ways. Consider engaging through social media to strengthen the connection you have started to create. You can also use the narrative you have crafted to guide content marketing strategies, increase traffic to your web properties, and ultimately improve conversions. For example, a multi-part series produced by a law firm may boost traffic and encourage community engagement with your brand.

Hone Your Core Values

When people choose a law firm for legal services, they want to know that they are part of something that is both bigger than themselves and aligned with their core values. In the process of creating a cohesive narrative about your law firm’s brand and how it has come to be, you have the opportunity to really hone in on those core values—and core clients—that are most attractive for your law firm.

Consider Apple, which has developed a commercial campaign showing its users changing the world and finding their own paths (and using their products along the way). The company has developed a reputation as an innovator and now uses that reputation to frame its customers’ stories in a similar light. By using a similar strategy, you can reinforce your own competence and abilities while still making your clients the focus of your marketing efforts. A good example for a consumer based practice would be the showcasing the journey that a family law attorney helps their client on before, during, and after their divorce.

Key Questions for Developing Your Law Firm’s Story

Writing your story and editing it to suit your audience is a powerful way to change how you market yourself and shape perception of your brand. There are three key questions to consider when you are developing your law firm’s story.

What are Your Goals? 

Although any type of legal marketing has the goal of building your law firm, the reason for presenting your brand story when and how you choose to will depend on the specific goals for doing so. If your firm is experiencing rapid growth, your brand story might be a reflection on successes and celebration of upcoming high-profile projects. If you are in the midst of a rebranding campaign, you may want to change public perception about your brand or give your firm a metaphorical “face lift.” By defining the ideal outcome of your storytelling efforts, you can determine whether or not it is an effective tool for your brand.

What is Your Emotional Hook?

An emotional hook speaks to the character and vision of your law firm’s brand while encouraging visitors to dig deeper and learn more. Explore client feedback to find out how your services have made their lives easier. If you’re an employment attorney, you may find that clients feel supported and validated with you as their attorney. Those working in bankruptcy law may speak to the overwhelming relief their clients feel once they are free of their debt. Always acknowledge the strong emotions your legal services bring out in people. A quarterly case review is an excellent way to find out which cases reflect your core values and drive your brand growth.

How Can You Tell the Most Compelling Brand Story? 

Whether you choose a three-act structure, a compare-and-contrast model, or even tell your story backwards, every brand story should include a few key items: the background of your business, the “characters” that drive the action of your story, the challenges that you and your law firm have faced, and the failures and ultimate successes you have earned. Then, explore the role your brand will have in your community as the years pass, how the brand will evolve and give back, and how clients will benefit.

Storytelling marks a major shift in how law firms big and small are making a name for themselves in the world. Social media and digital technology make pushing this aspect of your marketing out as easy as ever. By telling your firm’s brand’s story in an honest and approachable way, you can show current clients that they made the right choice and win over your future clients.

© 2020 Denver Legal Marketing LLC

Three Messages Next-Generation Recruits Need to Hear from Law Firms

By sheer numbers, millennials make up the largest generational group at midsize and large law firms today. Within the past few years, the oldest members of that generation began reaching partnership, and soon they will take over leadership positions as well. But the transition hasn’t been easy. Law firms know they must adapt in big ways to recruit, motivate and retain these lawyers, while at the same time working to stay relevant to firm clients. After all, the majority of legal services buyers will soon be millennials too.

Firms understand what matters to these younger lawyers; meaningful work, equity and inclusion, and work-life balance are all factors that determine where they choose to build their careers.

Most firms are at least beginning to reimagine some of the ways they do business in order to accommodate the needs of this new generation of lawyers. But not all law leaders grasp the important role communication strategy should play in their efforts to modernize. You might be taking the right steps, but how are you talking about that work with your target audience?

Here are three messages your firm must express:

 “We have a plan to make our firm more diverse and inclusive.”

Millennial lawyers know that most firms have been talking about diversity and inclusion for years without making much progress on advancing women, people of color, LGBT lawyers and lawyers with disabilities. They want to work for a firm that goes beyond lip service to articulate a plan of action and ambitious benchmarks that will hold leadership accountable for leaving the country club culture behind. What does that look like?

  • Provide PR support for diverse attorneys to help them build their profiles and develop business. Deploy your communications resources strategically to shine a light on your firm’s future superstars.
  • Address pay equity and the need for change. Millennials value authenticity, and they interpret silence on issues like this as complicity with unfair practices.
  • Demystify networking. Business development training and participation in professional associations can help these lawyers build their business in ways that feel natural and effective.
  • Equalize access and opportunity. How do cases and matters get staffed at your firm? Do you have a method for fairly distributing work and making sure a wide swath of your attorneys get to take a crack at high-profile work?

“We want you to have a life outside work — really.”

Millennials are more skeptical of institutions than past generations, and that means they are pretty good at spotting empty promises. So in order to appeal to these lawyers, your firm will have to get beyond platitudes and commit to specific policies and initiatives that encourage and protect work-life balance. How can you convince them you mean it?

  • Embrace flexible scheduling. Firms that will not budge on schedules virtually guarantee that parents — and women more often than men — will be forced to make impossible choices between their children and their career.
  • Destigmatize parental leave. Men and women both risk being viewed as “out of the loop” or not sufficiently committed to the firm if they choose to take time off after their babies are born, and that can have real negative consequences for their careers. Hold up and celebrate cases of men in leadership who take parental leave. Make it the new norm.
  • Address mental health issues head on. By now we’re all familiar with the alarmingly high incidence of depression, substance abuse and suicide among attorneys. Millennial lawyers want to know firms are not sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to mental health.

“We want you to succeed.”

Enduring and succeeding in the survival-of-the-fittest law firm culture may have been a badge of honor for generations past, but not for millennial lawyers. This cohort values collaboration and fairness more than gaining a competitive edge on their peers, and forward-thinking firms will adopt new policies and practices that assure millennial lawyers the game is not rigged. How can you communicate your support to these associates and younger partners?

  • Make your billable hour expectations transparent. According to the Young Lawyer Editorial Board of the American Lawyer, associates just want their new firms to be straight with them about how many hours they are expected to bill. And they don’t mean the published hours requirement.
  • Take mentorship seriously and prepare young lawyers to take advantage of it. Mentorship programs succeed when firms devote time and resources to them, and when they make thoughtful decisions about which partners should participate. (Not everyone is cut out to be a mentor, and that’s okay.)
  • Consider a sponsorship model. Sponsors move beyond the traditional mentoring engagement to advocate for their protégé. This may mean expanding the perception of the kind of work the lawyer can take on, brokering connections with other partners or with clients, or advocating when it comes time to staff cases. A sponsor uses his or her power and access to ease the younger lawyer’s advancement, particularly if that younger lawyer is a woman or other minority in the firm.

Firms who get their messaging right — and implement policies and processes that back those messages up — will be well-positioned to recruit the best and brightest next-generation lawyers.

© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on the law firm workforce, see the National Law Review Law Office Management page.

E-Filing is Coming, E-Filing is Coming!

Spreading the news that e-filing is coming might not have quite the same importance as the message delivered by Paul Revere and his fellow riders in 1775 – but e-filing is still worth noting. I attended the Maine State Bar Association winter meeting in January, which gave Maine practitioners a sneak preview of the state courts’ new e-filing system, File & Serve. It was an interesting and informative session.

The tentative plan, as attendees were informed, is to begin the process of rolling out e-filing at the end of this year. As many already know, e-filing is likely to be introduced first for Penobscot and Piscataquis Counties. But, of importance for appellate practitioners, it sounds like the court is also considering including not only the Business Court but also the Law Court in the initial implementation.

We are still waiting to see all of the rules surrounding e-filing, but the system that was previewed at the winter meeting appears to be user-friendly and promises to significantly streamline the process for filing with the Law Court. And, happily, filings will be easily available online (without cost). Also of note, the e-filing system includes a search tool, re:Search, that will make it easy to find previous filings – including Law Court briefs.

These tools will be very helpful for the appellate practitioner. But, it also means that appellate practitioners (as well as any other lawyer), will need to pay attention to the new filing system. As we were reminded, Rule 5.3 of the Maine Rules of Professional Responsibility obligates lawyers to supervise their assistants and ensure compliance with all filing requirements.

So take note: e-filing is coming!

©2020 Pierce Atwood LLP. All rights reserved.

Learn more about e-filing on the National Law Review Administrative & Regulatory law page.