Articles Posted in Managing Your Practice

I admit it:  I am a fan of the Wall Street Journal.  I have read it almost every week day since I was 19, and actually got chill bumps when they started a Saturday edition a couple of years ago.  The editorial page makes me mad as hell every morning, but quite frankly I think it is important to get mad as hell about something every single day. 

Yesterday the WSJ had a great article titled "So, You Want to Be an Entrepreneur."   The intended audience is those who want to start a business, but many of the points made apply to those who intend to start their own law practice.  Here are the ten questions that the article encourages you to ask to see whether you are "up for the challenge of entrepreneurship:"

1.  Are you willing and able to bear financial risk?

The goal of lawyers who represent plaintiffs in personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits is to help the client.  But sometimes the receipt of proceeds from a lawsuit can actually cost your client money. 

How can that be?  If your client is receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and the settlement results in your client having more than $2000 in the bank your client loses his or her SSI payments.  More importantly, people who receive SSI usually receive Medicare benefits – and the loss of SSI for people under 65 will result in a loss of Medicare benefits.  So, you may "win" the case for your 45 year old previously disabled client and put $50,000 in her pocket, but without appropriate planning  she will lose her SSI benefit and her health insurance.  If she has a significant health issue while she is without insurance, she may end losing not only the balance of her personal injury settlement but also whatever she had before the litigation started.

What is a lawyer to do?  First, learn whether or not your client receives SSI and Medicare.  Second, understand how receipt of settlement proceeds will impact those benefits.  Third, determine if there is an appropriate way to structure the receipt of money to preserve the benefits.   Fourth, if there is not a way to do so, make sure your client understands that the settlement will result in a loss of government benefits before your client agrees to accept a settlement proposal. 

I know that I have had several posts in the past few months that referenced the work of Paul Luvera, a highly-regarded plaintiff’s lawyer from Seattle.   Here is another one – this time on the subject of settlement forms.

Why do I cite his work?  Quite frankly, I will cite any good lawyer’s work if I think it will be of interest to the readers of this blog.  The whole idea behind is blog is to share information, and not just information from my own head.  I am thrilled that great lawyers like Paul are willing to share what know, and am happy to pass his knowledge on to you.

Are you a subscriber to Tennessee Trial Law Report – Tort Law Edition?    The January 2009 issue is now available.

The January edition contains Part One of a three-part article on motions in limine as well as a listing of 29 cases currently pending before the Tennessee Supreme Court  or the United States Supreme Court that are of interest to tort lawyers.

The January edition also contains a summary of  the 20 Tennessee appellate court decisions issued between November 16 and December 15, 2008 that addressed some aspect of  the law of torts, civil procedure, evidence, and trial.  The significance of each opinion is ranked to save you reading time.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about use of PDF Portfolios to organize documents.  The source for that post has recently given us access to an eseminar that he did on creating electronic closing binders using PDF technology – either PDF Binder or PDF Portfolio.  The differences between the two programs are explained in great detail.

The author  has also given us access to a 36-page guide called Creating Electronic Closing Binders using Acrobat 9.

These programs  can be used to create electronic briefs, demand letters, etc.

I have been doing some reading about Adobe Acrobat recently and came across this post about organizing documents using PDF Portfolios.  I have not tried this method of document organization and, I confess, will probably ask one of our paralegals to look into it for our firm rather than attempting to do so myself.

However, I thought I would share the post to (a) see what experience any of you have had with this method of document organization or (b) give you the opportunity to experiment with it.

This original post is a two-part post.  I will post the second segment when it appears.

The folks at Robert Half Legal did a survey of 300 attorneys among the largest law firms and corporations in the United States and Canada. All respondents had at least three years of experience in the legal field.

Apparently, lawyers were asked, “If you could change one aspect of your job as a lawyer, which one of the following would it be?”  an article says the responses were as follows:

One of Robert Half Legal’s conclusions after reviewing the survey:  "When it comes to retaining top legal talent, less stress and fewer hours on the job may matter more than compensation."

OK – that is probably true.  What would be much more helpful is to know what amount of pay decrease lawyers willing to accept to get less stress and more free time.    For example, 30% less pay for 30% less work?  No employer in its right mind would accept that deal under ordinary circumstances.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a successful plaintiff may recover paralegal fees in a case against the government covered by the Equal Access to Justice Act.

Although not binding on Tennessee courts in those limited cases where attorneys’ fees are recoverable,  the result can be used as support for the general notion that paralegals perform valuable services in litigation and therefore should be given fair consideration in fee awards.

Read Richin Security Service Co. v. Chertoff,  No. 06–1717 (USSC June 2, 2008) here.

Regular readers know that one web site I frequent is that of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel.  Its  "Hot Cases" section frequently has cases from other jurisdictions that I find interesting and its quarterly magazine has articles I enjoy reading.

Here is an interesting article that discusses how to introduce electronic data into evidence.  It is written by Seth Gausnell and Allison Stoll of St. Louis.

At a minimum, the article reminds us of the simple fact that we must not only gather evidence during informal and formal discovery but we must be able to get that evidence before the fact-finder.  Sometimes that task is easy, such as when the witness actually saw an event occur.  Other times, it is much more complicated.

I have written on the subject of case selection on this blog in the past.  Here is a  link  to an article on the subject that I had published recently in Trial  magazine.  (Available only to AAJ members).

I gave a speech on this subject recently in Memphis and generally received excellent reviews.  However, one attendee blew me out of the water, basically saying that I was trying to turn the law into a business.

Let me respond here (and I have no choice, since the evaluator was anonymous).