Before you open your new law office doors, there’s one thing you must have. A balance sheet. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a balance sheet is. Maybe you went to law school right after getting a degree in biology, chemistry, communications, or the history of Europe. It doesn’t matter. If you got into law school, then you have what it takes. Anyone with enough smarts to get into law school can write a balance sheet. Here’s how.

First, I’m not talking about an official, accountant-approved balance sheet that meets generally accepted accounting principles. I’m talking about a balance sheet that lists on one screen all your assets and all your liabilities. What you have and what you owe. Today. Subtract what you owe from what you have and that’s your net worth. What you’re worth. Today. If you owe more than you have, your net worth is negative and you need more assets. If you have more than you owe, then your net worth is positive and you still need more assets. Because this is America, and we must grow.

Second, start with a blank screen in your favorite word processing software. I like Apple Pages, but Microsoft Word will work just fine. Don’t use a spreadsheet like Excel just yet. That’s too detailed and it’ll try to do the thinking for you, and you won’t learn anything. Because what I’ve learned is that when we humans add, subtract, multiply and divide on our own, we are thinking and that gets us thinking about all kinds of good things. Sure we make mistakes, but when we transfer the balance sheet to a spreadsheet, it’ll catch them. In the meantime, we’ll do the arithmetic ourselves. Which of course means that a blank piece of paper works just fine if you’re not at your computer screen.

Third, make a list of all your assets. Just describe them in everyday words like Northern Trust bank account, office furniture, computers, printers, books (some people still have them, but I too sometimes question why),…to be continued

We live in a time-based world where the When holds critical meaning. If only the Present existed, we could do without dates. But the Past and Future require them. We would be quite confused otherwise.

Think about it. If everything happened at once. If you woke up, ate, worked, and went to bed all in the present. If everything happened in just one day. You’d be drowning in a sea of Happenings. What a mess.

We need time broken into parts. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. This morning, now, this afternoon. July 1st, December 15th, March 22nd.

So why the [blank] is it that people don’t date their documents, spreadsheets, and email when they write them. Why do people save files without putting the date in the filename? Undated filenames create a sea of mess. Just try to find the right file when it doesn’t have the date it was written.

And don’t tell me that the file modification date the computer assigns to it is good enough. That date changes when you move the file from one computer to another and when you send it by email.

People, date your files. Put the date right in the filename. Put it at the front, in the middle, or at the end. But put in there somewhere.

And if you put it at the front, format the date so that it aligns your files in chronological order. This means the year goes first, then the month, and then the day. And you must use 4 digits for the year (to avoid Y3K problems), 2 digits for the month (so that November comes after October instead of January), and 2 digits for the day (so that 11 comes after 10 and not 1). So today’s date November 26, 2011 converts to 2011.11.26 when inserted into a filename.

[Note: You might wonder why the period instead of dashes. Well, I find it easier to type periods than dashes. And the computer doesn't care anymore how many periods I put into a filename. So I use periods instead of dashes. But just in filename dates. Not in words. So a former spouse is still an ex-wife and not an ex.wife.]

But it’s a pain to type 2011.11.26 instead of November 26, 2011. So let’s use the computer to automate the task. If you have a Mac, you can install TextExpander to create a macro to insert the date in any format. Another Mac program called QuicKeys does the same thing.You can even assign a shortcut key. I just type t then d then a to insert the date in this format 2011.11.26. See, I just typed 2011.11.26, I mean t then d then a, and then it inserted the date in that format. I can’t type t-d-a because when I do it inserts the date in that format. It’s such a good macro. It performs every time.

And even if you have alternative technology, like a PC running Windows, there are programs that allow you to create macros to insert dates into filenames. I’ll come back and post the one I used when I still had an office full of PCs and converted a million pages of paper (30 years of closed client files) into PDFs. Each one with a dated filename, mind you. So, I know this works on PCs as well as Macs.

Will free online websites like Rocket Lawyer and Law Pivot replace law firms? An article by Jordan Furlong suggests that question. In “Welcome to the Crucible: How Traditional Law Firms Can Compete” (Inside Legal Digest, Oct 2011), Furlong reports that Google Ventures was among the investors in these two websites, that Rocket Lawyer provides legal document-assembly systems for users who pay just $20 a month to access, assemble and store their legal forms online, and that it brings in 70,000 visitors a day and $10 million a year in revenue.

What’s interesting is Furlong’s next statement: “They’re becoming platforms through which lawyers market their expertise, reach clients, and deliver products and services to them. And when you think about it, that’s all a law firm really is – a reliable, high-profile platform upon which lawyers and clients find each other and through which they conduct their business.”

But where’s the quality control? In non-existent senior partners? In law schools? In bar associations? In established law book publishers? Experienced lawyers know that poorly-drafted legal forms can end up in court years after they are signed. Legal forms can only be drafted properly once: before they are signed. It’s too late to fix them after that. Their legal consequences, good or bad, are fixed upon signing.

Furlong asks these questions: “What is the point of your law firm?…Why do you exist? What specific need for what specific legal audience do you meet?” I suggest that quality control in the drafting of legal documents, in the giving of legal advice, and in the providing of legal representation is a primary purpose of law firms. Every law firm should have a Chief Quality Officer who oversees the quality of that firm’s work. Otherwise, what differentiates it from RocketLawyer?

A quick look at Rocket Lawyer’s board of directors discloses it includes LexisNexis’s vice president of strategic business development and Google’s vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer. So what’s your law firm got?

When my son was in college, I gave him some career advice. Draw three intersecting circles. Like this:

Then put in one circle all the things you like to do. Put in another all the things you’re good at doing. Put in the third circle all the things someone will pay you to do. Like this:

Where the three circles intersect is where to center your career. It has the things that you like to do, you’re good at doing, and someone will pay you to do. Like this:

In my son’s case, he liked photography, film and music and was good at them, as well as writing and logical thinking, and he went into interactive marketing and web design, so the three circles worked.

It works for lawyers, too. In all the areas of law, there are some you like, some you’re good at, and some you can get paid to do. What I’ve found is that (a) it takes years to find out which areas of law to put into which circles, and (b) it changes. The world changes, and you change, so what goes in the circles changes. And that’s what makes law practice so dynamic and fun.

How to practice law one lawyer at a time. With or without other lawyers. Isn’t that the essence of law practice management? Whether you practice in a one-lawyer office in Greeley, Colorado, or a thousand-lawyer global law firm in New York City,  it all boils down to just one lawyer. You. What are you going to do? Where will you do it? How are you going to do it? Who will you do it for?

These are the questions that have intrigued me for forty years. That’s when I moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, home of sunshine, beaches, and Stetson University College of Law. Three years later I answered those questions by joining a two-lawyer firm down the street from the campus. That’s the largest law firm I’ve ever worked for. But that didn’t keep me from hiring associates, paralegals and legal assistants, office managers, law clerks, and secretaries. About fifty people over the years, if you were to count them one-at-a-time.

I downsized to one lawyer–me–more than once. And that’s my office size now. One lawyer. Like they say: The buck stops here.

Jim Martin 11/25/11