Having dealt with projects most of my professional career, I’m happy to share my experience with Agile Project Management (with which I’ve had much success) with the legal profession.

For my friends at Lawyerist, one of the most cutting-edge legal blogs for modern law firms, I recently authored my first post as a regular contributor on this subject. Specifically, I looked at the concept of the iterative “Sprint”:

Sprints allow teams to leverage incremental improvements. When a company decides to work in two-week Sprints, it has the opportunity to reflect, make adjustments, and plan every fourteen days based on events and conditions.
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The nice thing about Agile Project Management is the prescriptive nature. It serves as a guidebook for how you operate and continually improve your business. Few of us are born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to steer a business, whether a law firm or software company, so a set of rails to follow greatly helps. It’s used by thousands of software companies, large and small, internationally, and is supported by books, consultants, conferences, and training events.

Read the full article, Project Management the Agile Way. And a big thanks to the folks at Lawyerist for taking me onboard as a regular writer. I’m proud to be part of a next-generation, forward thinking group!

Today we’re very excited for a new guest blog experience at Lawyerist, a very progressive source of information for attorneys.  I’ve had a number of converstations with Lawyerist’s Sam Glover, a brilliant writer and technology tinkerer, who has reviewed Rocket Matter a couple of times.  Click here to read the full blog post:

In our series so far we’ve discussed the basics of GTD, and introduced important concepts.  We looked at writing your to-do’s as “Next Action” items, and aggressively capturing all “open loops” (incomplete items).  Now it’s time to start looking at organizing and prioritizing.

When you capture items needing attention, via your initial Mind-Sweep or daily activity, you’ll need to put them into an inbox for processing, whether physical or virtual.  You’ll also have an email inbox to look through as well.  It’s at this point you need to decide whether to Do it, Defer it, or Delegate it.

Do it: The Two Minute Rule

You look at an item in your inbox.  Can you take care of it in two minutes?

Today, Rocket Matter is very pleased to announce the roll-out of a major product upgrade: tasks!

A total rewrite of our existing to-do lists, tasks help attorneys take their productivity to new levels.

With the new task functionality, you’re able to integrate tags (a more powerful form of keywords), into your tasks so you can more easily describe and organize them. In addition, the new tasking functionality provides the following:

• *  The ability to assign tasks to other employees and track their progress.
• *  A simple way of assigning due dates to tasks, which are then easily viewable on the user dashboard and highlight as as due dates near or expire.
• *  Filtering capabilities that help users quickly find and organize tasks, which, in turn, can easily be converted to billable activities.
• *  Drag and drop organizing that allows users to prioritize tasks.
• *  New, intuitive icons and an elegant look and feel that makes the product easy to use.

To celebrate our roll-out, we’re conducting a weeklong Legal efficiency-fest. Yesterday, we introduced the Getting Things Done productivity system at a high level, including its advantages and general ideas.  Each day, from here to the end of the week, we’ll write guest posts at prominent legal blogs exploring the system in more detail.

We’re proud to announce that today’s article on Legal GTD is hosted at The Mac Lawyer by Ben Stevens.  Click here to read the post in it’s entirety.

In a profession such as law, where time is quite literally money and losing track of tasks and events incurs significant penalties, an organizational system such as GTD is key.  The current economic downturn places even more emphasis on streamlining operations and gaining efficiencies.

Granted, you may have your own system that works wonders.  But if “the art of stress-free productivity”, as the GTD book is subtitled, seems compelling, and you’re wondering what exactly GTD is, take a look at my first post here.  But let’s say you’re ready to take the plunge.  How do you start?

The good news is, you don’t need your entire firm’s buy-in.  You can come up with your own GTD system just fine.

So you’ve been hearing the words Virtual Assistant pop up just about everywhere lately? Not surprising, because although the virtual assistant industry has been around for awhile, in our current economy using a virtual assistant is becoming a wise economical decision. For lawyers, especially solo practitioners and small law firms, a virtual assistant is the perfect choice. You get an experienced professional with no need for additional office space, office equipment or other costs associated with hiring an on-site employee. Internet technology has made working remotely not only possible, but practical.

Since a virtual assistant usually has a specialty niche, you can easily find those that have legal experience and training. You can search the Internet through a search engine using the terms ‘legal virtual assistant’ or go to one of the websites for VA’s like the Virtual Assistant Forums or VANA. You’ll find a wealth of highly capable professionals to choose from.

The internet based collaboration product that Rocket Matter offers is the perfect tool for an attorney/virtual assistant situation, allowing access from any computer with an Internet connection, anywhere. Rocket Matter becomes your ‘office’ where you and your virtual assistant ‘meet’, collaborate and share information. And it also offers the tight security measures that an attorney’s confidential documents require, so a virtual assistant doesn’t have to be concerned with the added responsibility of high security storage of files.

If all of this talk of virtual assistance has you curious and wanting to know more, I’ve written several articles on the industry over at the Home Office Warrior; Home Office Virtual Assistant, including my recent 4 part series on finding and working with a VA. Contracting with a virtual assistant could be your administrative answer to gaining more billable hours.