The Alabama State Bar has recently received multiple calls from lawyers targeted in collection/settlement fraud scams. As scammers grow more sophisticated and believable through trial and error, Alabama lawyers should become…
As a new bar year begins the theme of “back to basics” seems to be coming up over and over. ASB President Rich Raleigh has adopted it as his guiding…
If you’d like to learn to make yourself invaluable to current and future clients, the latest addition to the PMAP Checkout Library can point the way. Although seemingly aimed at…
I often get questions about underserved areas of practice that other lawyers might not have thought of, so when I see what I think may be a potential new practice…
What’s on your shopping list? Walmart in Canada is getting into the legal business. An article in the ABA Journal reported that a handful of Walmart locations in Toronto have…
The July/August Law Firm Profitability issue of Law Practice is available on the LPM Section's website, and you don't have to be a section member to take a look. With…
I received some interesting stats from the bar's IT department this morning. In September, the bar's web site received around 100,000 visits. Of these, approximately 8,000 were from mobile devices.…
From time to time I get calls from lawyers who are seeking to build more business. They invariably want to know whether I can suggest any underserved practice areas. My…
Many solo and small firm lawyers don't spend much time reviewing financial data from their practices. They are busy and just feel lucky to get through the day without too…
Richard Susskind’s book, The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, has recently come out in paperback. The book discusses how changes in technology are eroding, and will continue to change, the work available for lawyers. Today, though, I’m more concerned with the possibility of the end of clients – those of solo practitioners and small firms.
Despite the fact that the recession has been declared officially over, I continue to receive calls from lawyers, especially solo and small firm lawyers, who are having trouble maintaining their practices. Almost uniformly, they report that their business has just fallen off and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of returning. I’ve been puzzling over these mysterious, disappearing clients. Were they going to other lawyers? Were they solving their problems without resort to the established legal system? Is it simply that so many people have lost their jobs? Last week the happenstance of finding two diametrically opposed news items at the same time gave me a clue to what I’m afraid is happening. (more…)
