Rocket Matter Company Blog

Introducing the Legal Productivity Blog

Legal Practice Management · August 25, 2010

Well, we’ve had a good run talking about legal practice management and productivity here on the Rocket Matter blog. But the times, they are a-changin’.

In an effort to more clearly articulate our ideas and vision on legal productivity techniques, we’ve created a dedicated blog, Legal Productivity, so that any Rocket Matter product and company announcements we make on this blog won’t dilute the content.

Instead, the current blog you’re looking at, http://www.rocketmatter.com/blog, will carry all things related to our flagship legal practice management and time tracking software (or legal productivity software, as we like to call it).

As we state on our new About page:

We’re witnessing tectonic shifts in legal services.

The way we see it, what better time to have a conversation about new and exciting ideas on how to effectively run a law firm!

Legal Productivity’s mission: to provide creative and useful insights into the business of law and have fun doing so. We wish to help people navigate the truth and the myths when it comes to alternative fee engagements, social media, and other current topics which suffer from an abundance of quackery, herd mentality, and misconceptions.

We hope you join our conversation!

Performance Measures for Your Law Practice: Free CLE Webinar*!

Productivity, Webinars · August 23, 2010

On a scale of 1-5 (5 being the highest) rank your level of agreement with the statement: I regularly scan a couple of core numbers to determine at a glance how healthy my firm is.

This webinar is sponsored by Rocket Matter, the leading online legal practice management and time tracking software, and is free to attend!

Click Here to Register!

* FREE CLE Credit for attendees who pay attention!
* Date: Thursday, August 26th, 2010
* Time: 12PM – 1:15PM EST
* In addition, our podcast and YouTube channel are great resources for trends in legal productivity, technology, and managing your practice.

Description:

Although lawyers try to stay far away from numbers, tracking numbers in your practice can be one of the most instructive activities you do. This webinar will show you how to track your more profitable activities, chart the growth of your firm, and will help you highlight gaps and leaks in your practice. Running a more efficient practice can help you reduce the chance of committing malpractice and will help you be a more effective manager.

Join us for a fun, highly interactive session that could help put you ahead of your peers.

Outline:

* Problems lawyers encounter by not tracking performance indicators.
* How to get started tracking performance.
* How you can chart the growth of your firm.
* Which key performance indicators are most important for your practice.

Click Here to Register!

About our speaker, Victor Medina:

Victor J. Medina, managing partner of Medina Law Group, devotes his practice to estate planning, helping parents and grandparents to leave their wealth to whom they want, when they want them to have it, and in the way they want. His clients include seniors, young families with minor children, lies with special needs children of all ages, entrepreneurs with business considerations, and established families with dynasty goals. His philosophy of estate planning is based on a forward-thinking approach that focuses on passing on more than just financial wealth, but also spiritual, emotional, and intellectual values.

Victor grew up in the Northeast and attended college and law school in Boston, MA. He is married to Jennifer, a school psychologist in the New Jersey public schools, and has two sons, Aidan and Lucas, who are of school age.

Victor is an active member of the legal community and serves as Vice-President of the Princeton Bar Association. He is also a member of the National Network of Estate Planning Attorneys, American Association of Trust, Estate& Elder Law Attorneys, and the Mercer County Estate Planning Council. He is accredited by the Department of Veteran Affairs to assist veterans in filing claims.

*CLE Accreditation will be supplied for FL attorneys. A certificate of completion will be provided for folks in other states.

Beautiful Law Office Shingles From the Northeast

Fun · August 13, 2010

I recently returned from a trip to New York and Pennsylvania where I enjoyed walking around old, historic small towns with beautiful architecture and signage. I couldn’t help but snap some photos with my iPhone of gorgeous law office shingles.

I’m going to keep adding to my collection on Flickr. If you’d like to have your shingle as part of our Flickr collection, we’d love to have it! Send us a good quality JPEG, your city and state, and a brief description of your firm (think one small paragraph) and we’ll get it up there!

Here’s a few samples:

View the rest of our law office shingle photographs on Flickr!

Maximizing Productivity with the Emails Glutting Your Inbox

Podcasts, Webinars, Work-Life Balance · August 9, 2010

Amol Sarva from Peek gave some great insight for email-overloaded attorneys in today’s inaugural Vendor Webinar. If anyone would have some great suggestions for email usage, it would be Amol, whose award-winning Peek mobile email client has enabled small businesses to increase productivity and reduce stress through email.

If ya missed it, no worries. Here are some Tweets of wisdom sent out during the session, as well as a slidecast and audio recording of “Maximizing Productivity with the Emails Glutting Your Inbox”

Today, @PeekInc observes their business users average over 100 emails a day – a significant increase from before.

Less Time on Email Tip: Don’t Respond Right Away to emails. Make sure to avoid conversations; use the phone for those.

Mobile email is not about productivity, but rather about liberation. – @AmolSarva @PeekInc

Consider using email for note taking and task management.

Poll Results: Do You Get Too Many Emails? See results.

Inbox Anxiety … fear of being away from email for too long or feeling overwhelmed by messages upon return. – @PeekInc

Poll results: Do you have a systematic approach to using email? See results.

Ask yourself: Do you consider email to be a high-value usage of your time? #RMWebinar

Consider providing staff with affordable access to mobile email. The avg worker will work an additional hour a day. @PeekInc #RMWebinar

“Mobilizing” your team is an inevitability. – @AmolSarva #RMWebinar

How to Avoid Email Overload And Inbox Anxiety – with Peek

View more presentations from Rocket Matter, LLC.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Free Webinar: Maximizing Productivity with the Emails Glutting your Inbox

Webinars · August 6, 2010

Monday, August 9, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Click here to register for this free webinar!

Peek’s fast, focused, and cost-efficient mobile has helped many lawyers and professionals stay better connected to their customers through always-on, always-with-you email. Along the way, Peek has collected many best practices for maximizing productivity in the new email-centric world where we conduct business.

Attorneys who attend this webinar will discover
* how to spend less time doing emails
* typical, wrong “conventional wisdom” on handling Inbox Anxiety
* how mobile email can reduce the time you spend emailing
* the impact email responsiveness has on your clients
* the trick that will get your staff working longer hours and feeling happier about it for free

Amol Sarva is the founder of Peek and Nader Soudah is its director of national sales. They both spend their time talking and emailing with customers, and designing Peek to help them get more done at lower cost. Peek is an award-winning product that helps you connect everyone, everywhere; it recently launched service across Europe and in India

Monday, August 9, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Click here to register for this free webinar!

SoloCorps Launches Video Testimonial Site For Small Firm Attorneys

Podcasts, Videos · August 2, 2010

Rocket Matter is the proud flagship sponsor of SoloCorps, an exciting new video testimonial project focusing on small and solo law firms. Run by MyShingle icon Carolyn Elefant and the incredibly innovative Solosez and Twitter tour-de-force Lisa Solomon, SoloCorps is modeled after the StoryCorp project featured on National Public Radio.

Lisa and Carolyn are currently traveling around America’s heartland, to legal conferences in Minnesota and Nebraska, where they’re busy conducting video interviews of solos and small firm lawyers. ABA’s exciting Legal Rebel project is covering the project this week as well.

In this episode of the Rocket Matter podcast, Lisa gives us an overview of the project and their exciting initial week traveling through the heartland.

Are you a solo? Get involved yourself! Tell your SoloCorps story to Lisa, Carolyn, and the world. Check out http://myshinglesolocorps.magnify.net. You can even shoot and upload your own testimonials.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Video: Learn Legal Trust Account Basics in Less Than Ten Minutes

Training, Trust Accounts, Videos · July 27, 2010

Last night our new Trust Accounting functionality emerged from beta and is now available to all existing and new Rocket Matter customers!

For those of you who appreciate our signature ease of use and intuitive approach to building legal software, please take a look at our approach to managing advanced client fees.

The following video is part of our trust accounting informational kit. Take a look if you want to revisit or understand the subject. You’ll also see trust account maintenance demonstrated on Rocket Matter software so you can see how we’ve made what’s normally an excruciating, error-prone task intuitive and simple.

Download our multi-media free resource kit, “Understanding Trust Accounts For Legal Professionals” to learn more.

Looking Forward to ACLEA Annual Convention

ACLEA · July 23, 2010

This weekend and early next week, the leaders of continuing legal education will gather in New York City for the 46th annual convention for ACLEA.

As speakers and providers of educational legal content, we’re proud supporters of ACLEA and look forward to both exhibiting and attending.

We like ACLEA not just for the novelty of having an extra ‘A’ at the end of the name (it stands for Association of Continuing Legal Education), it’s a terrific group of people with a great mission.

So we’ll be there trying to find great new speakers for our monthly legal webinar series, our legal productivity podcast, and other educational content. We’re also seeking to meet state bar representatives so we can bring to your location cutting-edge content on quality topics:

* Running a Green Law Office
* Understanding Cloud Computing
* Project Management for Law Firms
* Running an Efficient and Error-free Law Office
* Using Macs in a Law Office
* Blogs, Twitter, & LinkedIn for Legal

Find out more and download a speaker brochure to see how we can provide CLE content for Cloud Computing, Legal Project Management, Business Efficiency, Legal Productivity, Green Law Offices, and more.

Need Tips for Legal Productivity Book

Productivity · July 23, 2010

I’m writing a book on legal productivity and I’d love to get some real-life tips and practices from successful practicing attorneys for inclusion in the book.

Here’s the form for the legal productivity survey.

We’ll be judging the entries. The top 20 will be included in our volume, with complete attribution and reference to your firm and website, along with a flying Rocket Matter rocket. The top 5 will receive a Rocket Matter Flying Cow, and the winner with receive a Rocket Matter Snuggie® and a $100 gift card to iTunes!

The question is simple and takes 5 or 10 mins to answer: