Mishandling client money is among the top client complaints about attorneys. When we think of mishandling, we often think first of misappropriation—taking client funds to spend on oneself. But such actions, however sensational, represent a distinct minority of trust account problems. More commonly, problems with law firm trust accounts, also known as IOLTA (“interest on lawyer trust accounts”), arise from errors of expediency and neglect rather than nefarious intent. Still, such errors may prove a serious threat to your firm, your reputation, and even your law license.

Fortunately, legal technology has advanced well beyond ledger books. Today, approachable, feature-rich, web-centric programs make managing law firm trust accounting simpler. CosmoLex, a leader in online law practice management software, includes robust tools that help attorneys address potential trust accounting pitfalls. Furthermore, since these capabilities are built into CosmoLex, you have access to all matter facts and finances in a single, integrated experience.

Guard Against Trust Account Mishaps

Prevent Commingled Funds

Ethical rules require law firms to separate trust account money from operating account money. Money you receive but have not earned, for example, a retainer from Client 1 or a settlement check for Client 2, must go into the trust account. You can move that money from the trust account to your operating account as you earn it, such as working hours on the matter (Client 1) or paying yourself the 30% contingency fee (Client 2). You must also document such movement appropriately.

Each client’s money in trust must be separately accounted for. Using the example above, Client 1’s retainer and Client 2’s settlement amount are not a single pool of money, although they could reside in the same bank account. If your work for Client 1 exhausts the retainer, you cannot continue to withdraw money from the trust account even if there is money in the account from the settlement check. The settlement check money belongs to Client 2. If you continued paying yourself, you’d overdraft Client 1 and misappropriate money owned by Client 2.

Proper trust accounting necessitates coordinating client, matter, and money data. CosmoLex holds all three and automates individual client ledger management to prevent commingling and overdrafting.

Ensure Proper Payments and Timely Disbursements

Building on our example above, when Client 1 signs an engagement agreement and pays your retainer, that payment must be paid into and reside in your trust account until you earn it. Assuming they’re like most Americans, Client 1 may want to pay with plastic.

Your credit card infrastructure must understand the unique complications of trust accounts. CosmoLex’s credit card processing handles tricky situations like chargebacks and disputes, and allocates money, fees, and service charges appropriately for an IOLTA setting.

Similarly, you must timely disburse funds. For some situations, the desire for timeliness is obvious—Client 2 would like his settlement money. In other cases, the need for timeliness is less stark, but no less true. With Client 1, you should move money from the trust account to the operating account as you earn it.

In both cases, you must document the transactions. CosmoLex makes it easy to record disbursements as they are made. Documentation’s value for Client 2 is obvious. But it’s also important for Client 1 because:

• you have an obligation to separate the firm’s money from client money;
• regular, timely transfer of earned money to the operating account smooths firm cash flow; and
• transferring earned money from Client 1’s trust to the operating account promptly informs you when you have exhausted the retainer. It’s then time to send a replenishment request or begin billing Client 1.

Examples of other CosmoLex features that streamline trust account management include:

• Automatic trust-to-operating account transfers;
• Tracking and disbursement of third-party lien claims; and
• Importing of electronic bank statements.

Many of the activities described above affect both the trust account and operating, or general business, account. One of CosmoLex’s great advantages is the ability to present a holistic picture of your billing system (e.g., invoices sent to clients), your trust account (e.g., money you hold on behalf of a client), and your operating account (e.g., your general business ledger). Your view of the business benefits from a compressive portrait possible only with an integrated solution.

Integrated Data Produces Powerful Reports

CosmoLex’s reporting tools make both the tracking of and reporting on trust account activity easy and intuitive. Additionally, CosmoLex provides simplified reporting for recordkeeping and auditing. With CosmoLex, you can run bank reconciliations, including the critically important three-way reconciliation, in just a few clicks, and archive financial data reports for safe-keeping and later review.

Complete trust financial reports include:

• Account balance reports
• Ledger activity summary reports; and
• Ledger transaction reports.

CosmoLex’s effortless trust reconciliations and audit-ready tools ease mandatory trust accounting obligations. Having these trust reports on hand ensures attorneys are prepared in case of an audit.

Avoid Errors and Alleviate Trust Account Burdens with CosmoLex

With comprehensive trust accounting baked into its law practice management software, CosmoLex provides a complete picture of your firm’s matters and activities, helping to:

• Preventing common trust account errors;
• Simplify precise online payments;
• Facilitate prompt distributions;
• Properly record transactions; and
• Effortlessly produce the reports you and your accountant require.

To learn more about using CosmoLex’s legal-specific accounting tools to stay ethically compliant with client money, visit their website.

The post Avoiding Trust Account Errors with CosmoLex appeared first on Lawyerist.

ShareFile is well known for secure document sharing and external collaboration capabilities. It provides an easy and secure way to send and receive client or third-party files. Built on that strong foundation, the newest ShareFile for legal innovations give law firms the power to create unparalleled document and client-centric efficiencies.

ShareFile for legal builds on the core features you’re familiar with, adding capabilities that expedite client onboarding, ease document workflows, and better protect business and client information without the need of complex, IT-managed security protocols.

Built Specifically for Legal Professionals

Many legal professionals (75%) spend more than 20 hours a week on non-client-facing work. Reclaim some of those hours with the powerful features of ShareFile for legal.

Share Files Securely

When we think of exchanging documents over email, we often think of file size, but not always file security. ShareFile for legal handles both easily. There is no file size limit like email has for attachments. The Outlook or Gmail plugin makes attaching documents and entire folders to an email easier and more secure. The attached documents are uploaded to and are secure in ShareFile, and you can send links to only download the file. You can monitor the downloads, password protect them, and limit the number of times and how long the download links work. Receiving files works similarly. Provide the client with a secure link and they can upload documents via a web portal. ShareFile notifies you of newly received documents.

• Projects: When you and the client collaborate on files, ShareFile for legal offers a centralized client management space for each case or matter that helps simplify, organize, and secure common document workflows. This helps give more visibility and control on who has access to what and when they last accessed files, all in one spot.
• Document Requests Lists: For a list of documents you collect frequently (e.g., the same five documents for each deed you prepare), ShareFile for legal includes digital document collection to create and send requests to clients, explicitly listing each document and the date you want to receive it by. A blanket “upload everything here” link often works, but for specific or discrete items, document requests tell the client what you need. You can review what the client uploaded, comment, and even reject a given document, state why, and request the correct files (e.g., if the client uploaded two years of tax returns but not the most recent two years).

Keep Track of Tasks

Even when you tell clients exactly which documents you need from them to proceed, you or someone at the firm often has to follow up repeatedly. You may be able to bill for the time, but it’s neither effective nor rewarding. ShareFile for legal provides two helpful tools.

• Task Tracking: You can configure ShareFile for legal to track matter-related tasks. Statuses include “yet to start,” “in progress,” “overdue,” and “completed.” You can create tasks for individual documents (as in estate plan drafting), or entire classes of documents (as in discovery or due diligence work).
• Keep the Client Informed: As part of task tracking, you can easily share task access with clients. When granted access, which is discretionary, clients can receive prompt status updates that detail all work for their matters.

Security First

Although document scanning and safety have improved in recent years, they can still be a vector for malware and infection. This fact is even more pronounced among lawyers, where 2023 statistics reveal that 69% of attorneys rely on email, often unencrypted, for client communication and document exchange. ShareFile for legal proactively scans document contents and provides suggested actions or automated actions for mitigating threats.

ShareFile’s security capabilities include alerting you to unusual sign-in and authentication attempts and monitoring file uploads for malware.

Works within Your Tech Stack

ShareFile knows that firms rely on multiple programs to perform different functions. That’s why ShareFile for legal integrates with key tools like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and more to reduce tech complexity and help your firm boost efficiency.

ShareFile for Legal Simplifies and Secures Your Document Workflow

Digital documents workflows can help improve your firm’s speed, accuracy, and security. ShareFile for legal makes transmitting and collaborating on documents easy and secure. Whether your clients upload dozens of discovery documents, a discrete list of enumerated files, or a collaboration space for ongoing engagement between the client and the firm, ShareFile has you covered. Learn more about ShareFile for legal by visiting their website.

The post Efficiency, Security Made Easy with ShareFile for Legal appeared first on Lawyerist.

A product that makes time tracking simple benefits attorneys irrespective of practice area or fee structure. For attorneys who bill by the hour, easily entering, editing, and reviewing times holds obvious advantages.

But what about flat fee and contingency firms? While those practices need not always record time (unlike hourly attorneys, time is not directly the product you’re moving), it’s still worth doing. Why? Recording time reveals profitability. Hourly billers get a sense of profitability with every pre-bill, discount, or write-down they give a client.

Flat fee and contingency firms lack that regular “check-in.” By recording time and knowing, for example, that a $10,000 flat fee estate plan takes $5,000 to prepare (i.e., comparing the fee charged against staff salaries and other expenses), the firm gains a profit margin “snapshot.”

TimeSolv, a web-based law practice management system (LPMS) with deep roots in the business of law understands the importance of time tracking. TimeSolv understands that making time entry simple and quick ranks of first importance.

TimeSolv Delivers Comprehensive Time Tracking Tools

Track Multiple Events

With TimeSolv, users can have multiple timers available simultaneously. Starting one timer automatically pauses the currently-running timer. For example, if an attorney is drafting a document, and a client calls on an unrelated matter, clicking to start a new timer for the phone call automatically pauses the document-drafting timer. When the call ends, the attorney can stop the phone call timer and enter it. Or perhaps the attorney expects to look something up and make a return call to the client later that day, they can pause the phone call timer and resume the document drafting timer.

Track Time Anywhere

This feature is key. A great solution works on the web, laptops, tablets, and especially smartphones. TimeSolv meets this need. It even works offline; no internet connection necessary! And, of course, TimeSolv includes powerful sync capabilities. If you make a time entry in the desktop app, it syncs with the TimeSolv servers so that entry saves to the cloud and is visible to others. If you’re away from the internet when you make a time entry, TimeSolv automatically syncs the next time you launch the desktop app when connected to the internet.

Draw Meaningful Conclusions

There’s no value in entering a bunch of information if you can’t use that data to make decisions. TimeSolv excels here too. Users and firm administrators see metrics on time entry and time entry behavior (e.g., contemporaneousness) for each timekeeper.

Speed Up Time Entries with Abbreviations

When creating time entries, speed and consistency rank among the top requests. TimeSolv addresses both concerns by supporting custom abbreviations for text fields, including time entries. Rather than sending a client a bill where some phone calls read “call with client,” a few read “phone call with client,” and still others “called to [or from] client,” create a simple TFWC abbreviation. When a user types “TFWC,” TimeSolv expand that shortcut to “telephone call with client.” The same activity reads consistently on bills, across all users and clients. Plus, it saves a bit of time too.

Manage Matter Budgets

While many LPMS vendors offer matter budgets, these are often overall dollar amounts for the matter. TimeSolv provides a more effective, timely, and granular version of budgeting. With TimeSolv, you can set limits on the hours billed on tasks. Such finely tuned control and tracking of expended effort means that no bill or overage surprises you or the client. If someone views a matter with overbudget tasks, TimeSolv displays a prominent banner alerting the viewer that “Plan Task Assignment fees and hours budget exceeded.” By using matter plans to set task budgets, both you and the client can keep a close eye on the meter.

Start Tracking Time for Productivity and Profitability

If you bill hourly and hate tracking time, you’re probably working for free, at least part of the time. If your work is flat fee or contingency, knowing your “cost of goods sold” requires knowing how much you expend in providing a service. TimeSolv gives you the tools to painlessly record and review time entries. Learn more about this feature and everything TimeSolv offers by visiting their website.

The post Measure Your Time, Don’t Just Track it with TimeSolv appeared first on Lawyerist.

One of the strongest cases for law practice management software (LPMS) is that it understands how legal professionals work. Practice management software excels where Outlook or the Google Suite fails because an LPMS works within the concept of a “matter,” something unique to the legal market. An LPMS combines a host of otherwise disparate data—emails, notes, documents, phone messages, calendar appointments, and more—under the umbrella of one collective (e.g., Smith v. Jones or the Thomas estate plan).

If an LPMS stopped there, it would nonetheless be a boon to legal professionals. But great, innovative practice management software like Rocket Matter reaches beyond the mere recreation of a casefile folder. Rocket Matter includes comprehensive LPMS features and supercharges those features with robust project management and reporting, available to Rocket Matter Pro and Premier customers.

Manage Matters Visually with Kanban Boards

For example, in a family law practice, one might have the following stages (i.e., columns) arrayed left to right across the screen:

• Prepare Initial Filings
• Temporary Relief
• Discovery
• Mediation
• Pre-Trial Discovery
• Trial
• Closing

As you work each family law matter, you move the card from left to right across the Kanban board columns as the matter progresses toward a conclusion. Experienced family law practitioners may notice a couple of things immediately: (1) these seven stages are excessive for some cases (e.g., an amicable “no kids, no property” dissolution) and insufficient for others, and (2) matters may “bounce” back and forth between stages—it’s not a linear path forward. Rocket Matter’s Kanban boards address both concerns.

You can customize the respective stages for each matter type. A family law attorney likely has several matter types, such as divorce, dissolution, custody, post-decree, and more. Each matter type possesses its own unique set of statuses, all customizable by the firm to meet how they work. Additionally, the Kanban view accommodates a matter card moving from any one status, which Rocket Matter calls “swimlanes,” to any other status. You could move a matter’s card directly from discovery to trial or flip back and forth between discovery and mediation a dozen times, if necessary. Rocket Matter built its Kanban boards with the flexibility to manage matters how you work.

In addition to managing your matter workflow visually, Rocket Matter’s Kanban view also lets you:

• filter the displayed matters by primary the attorney;
• view the total days a Matter has been in its current status;
• filter the board to see matters by client;
• filter the board by matter health (has “sat” in a status too long, based on timeframes you set); and
• jump directly to a matter’s dashboard by clicking its card.

These boards, part of Rocket Matter’s robust legal project management platform, offer a visual snapshot of case statuses, promoting efficiency and collaboration with their easy-to-use, customizable layout.

Project Management and Powerful Reporting

Kanban boards are but one part of Rocket Matter’s strong toolbox of legal project management capabilities. Other project management-specific features available to Pro and Premier customers rely on the matter status to:

• make calendar calculations unique to each status;
• add custom tasks that appear when a matter reaches a status; and
• display specific custom data based on the matter status.

These and other powerful automation capabilities rest on understanding and using matter templates.

Rocket Matter pairs advanced reporting and business intelligence along with these status-based workflows. As a Premier customer, dive even deeper into your matter and project management data with Rocket Matter’s Business Intelligence Module (BIM). With the BIM, your firm can review all types of data across matters, activities, contacts, and billing information. Using simple “drag and drop” steps, you can easily create reports that offer remarkable insights into your firm, its processes, case handling, and financials. Read this earlier article on Lawyerist to understand more about the BIM and how it can help you see more clearly.

Get Started with Kanban, Project Management, and Advanced Reporting

Rocket Matter offers an unrivaled combination of robust LPMS functions, project management tools, featuring user-friendly Kanban boards, and highly capable business intelligence reporting to draw meaningful, actionable conclusions to boost your business. If you want to build a better practice by elevating your firm’s productivity and strategic insight, visit Rocket Matter’s website to learn more about their comprehensive solution.

The post Seize Your Day with Rocket Matter’s Office Management Tools appeared first on Lawyerist.

Your legal practice produces abundant data from many sources. What happens when you have to search two or three places within a program or website to find what you seek? Or worse, when you must combine and massage information from various locations to see a complete picture of your business? Frankly, you’re less likely to retrieve and act on that information. Instead of illuminating and helpful, the experience becomes frustrating and time-consuming. And you can’t make informed decisions on data, even if you have it, because it’s not presented conveniently or timely.

Previously, a law firm needed a database or tech guru to sort through its data to craft meaningful, visual reports. Hiring such a person, or tasking the techiest staffer with that responsibility, leads to inefficiently cobbling together disparate data, eating time and money that could have been better spent serving clients.

Lawmatics knows this pain and created its Custom Dashboards feature to address the problem. With Custom Dashboards, you now have a way to see meaningful data, make an informed decision, and act promptly.

Custom Dashboards are the Place for Your Data

Custom Dashboards allow Lawmatics users (on the Team tier and above) to consolidate their firm’s metrics. Furthermore, customization tools let you pick the information that matters to your firm and display it in relevant ways.

Custom Dashboards serve as your firm’s new homepage, putting key data at your fingertips. System administrators, and authorized users, can view, create, and edit as many dashboards as they’d like. There’s no limit!

Building a dashboard is an easy and flexible “point and click” process. Lawmatics knows that each firm, and practice areas within a firm, rely on various data points to gauge business health. They haven’t tried to guess what yours are. Instead, they’ve taken a toolbox approach, allowing you to display what you want, how you want it.

Here’s a sample Custom Dashboard with data panels displaying values in several formats and a header dividing “top-level” numbers from marketing-specific numbers.

Users can easily drag Panels and Groups to relocate and resize them. Simply click, hold, and drag to move. Resize a panel by clicking on the panel’s corner, holding down the mouse button, and dragging to expand or contract the panel.

Building Dashboards Customized to Your Firm

Custom Dashboards can provide firm leadership with views on how areas of the business are operating, such as marketing, client intake, and billing. Depending on who creates a dashboard, that user may want to review marketing success, such as referrals and return on investment, team performance, or countless other metrics.

Examples of business metrics you could track on a dashboard include:

• E-signature completion statistics
• Upcoming tasks
• Staff performance and productivity
• Upcoming appointments
• Progress towards established goals

Dashboards’ options and flexibility give you a holistic and clarifying view of what’s happening at your firm. All dashboards are visible firmwide to users with permission to create and edit dashboards.

A user builds a dashboard with four types of panels:

• Text: This panel is the easiest to understand. It’s a simple note area. Use it for teamwide memos, inspirational quotes, or other messages.
• Data: This panel displays information from myriad data sources. It could pull records from standard metrics (e.g., appointments, esigning activity, invoices, tasks, or time entries) or from a Lawmatics custom report.
  • Standard metrics behave similarly to Lawmatics’ existing analytics page, and offer basic calculations like new leads, conversion rate, cost per lead, and cost per client.
  • A custom report data panel can draw from either a custom report you create specifically for the dashboard or from custom reports your firm previously created; ones they already know and use.
  • Dashboards visualize data panels as number values (e.g., the total number of matches from a given custom report), pie charts, bar charts, and gauges. The choice of presentation rests with the dashboard’s creator.
• Headers: This panel type divides a dashboard into sections with helpful labels for collections of text and data panels
• Groups: Use this panel type to cluster several data panels together. Combine as many data panels as you like. Move them around as a unit for the perfect dashboard layout!

Get Started with Custom Dashboards for Your Firm

Custom Dashboards help keep everyone in the firm on the same path toward the same goal. How might you use Custom Dashboards?

• A marketing specialist follows how many new leads the firm has and their potential value.
• An intake specialist tracks new cases opened by practice area and engagement agreements returned.
• An attorney keeps track of upcoming matter appointments and tasks.
• A bookkeeper follows paid and outstanding invoice amounts for the month.

Whatever your practice area, you have numbers that mean success to you. Lawmatics’ Custom Dashboards make it easy to create and review the data that powers profitable results. Visit Lawmatics’ website to learn more about making the most of this new feature.

The post Measure What Matters with Lawmatics’ Custom Dashboards appeared first on Lawyerist.

Do you know the largest source of client complaints about lawyers? Communication—unreturned calls, unanswered emails, etc. The second largest source of complaints? Money. More specifically, how attorneys handle their clients’ funds.

Law Firm Accounting Complexities

Accounting plays an essential role in any business. No matter the industry, a business tracks profit and loss, tax events, and other financial measurements. Law firms do all of that while also precisely accounting for receipts and disbursements on a per-matter basis.

In some respects, trust accounting—tracking the funds we receive from or on behalf of clients, but haven’t earned for ourselves yet—is easier than standard business accounting:

• We don’t have to monitor profit or loss;
• We don’t record depreciation of physical assets or amortization of intangible assets; and
• We don’t worry about interest earned or tax events.

If law firms only had to worry about their trust account (also called an IOLTA, IOLA, or escrow account, depending on your jurisdiction), they might have it easier than a generic business or non-profit. Unfortunately, a lawyer’s trust account burdens exist in addition to general business accounting requirements.

Software Simplifies the Situation

Fortunately, the additional needs of trust accounting match what computers are good at:

• Tacking client funds on a per-matter basis;
• Matching each receipt or disbursement to supporting documents; and
• Painlessly reconciling numbers between the firm’s electronic ledger, the bank’s reported amounts, and the trust balances for each matter.

General purpose accounting can do some, but not all, of this. Maybe it could hold “audit-important” documentation and reconcile between itself and the bank, but it lacks the core tools lawyers need. In the same way firms benefit from law practice management software to keep matters organized, firms need accounting software that understands trust accounts, matters, and their unique roles in legal.

The right legal-specific accounting software alleviates much of the stress.

CosmoLex Offers the Right Trust Accounting Tools

CosmoLex’s robust, approachable trust accounting makes it easy to record and report your trust account activity properly.

Leverage Tools to Do it Right the First Time

The money-centric client and disciplinary complaints mentioned above don’t stem from attorney malfeasance. Most disciplinary complaints result not from deliberate misappropriation but from negligence. A solution, like CosmoLex, that encourages (and can compel) good recordkeeping, promotes compliance and prevents problems.

If your firm relies on a “general purpose” accounting program and a separate matter management program for case information and billing, that split introduces unnecessary complications. Using separate programs creates a gap for human error to seep in. If you maintain both an electronic and paper calendar, and they disagree, you lose time determining which is correct. Similarly, no one should play a “financial telephone” game, relaying numbers between products and hoping no errors arise.

CosmoLex provides practice management and full, general ledger accounting in one place. Manage case details, bill clients, and track and reconcile business and trust accounts in one web-based, mobile-friendly product.

Beneath that single-source umbrella, CosmoLex:

• Collects all necessary transaction reference information in an audit-ready fashion;
• Separates trust account money and transaction activity by matter and client, preventing commingling of different clients’ funds;
• Supports computer-printed checks to prevent duplicative check numbers or writing checks from the wrong account;
• Guards against overdrawing not only the overall trust account, but also overdrawing any individual matter’s trust balance;
• Allows you to “close the books” on a matter or time period to prevent further edits or alterations; and
• Connects to your bank or financial institution to directly import transaction data for you to review and confirm.

Quickly Run Reports to Verify Accuracy and Completeness

Meaningful, actionable reports begin with good data. Quality reports depend upon quality bookkeeping. CosmoLex produces reports that keep you informed and compliant with jurisdictional obligations. Core, insightful reports include:

• Trust Ledger Balance Report: This report, known to Canadian practitioners as a Trust Listing, shows trust balances for each client by matter, the last date of any activity, and whether the matter is open or closed.
• Client Trust Ledger: This report is a mini bank statement for each matter. It shows credits and debits for the matter, complete with a running balance. If you have a single matter’s funds in multiple trust accounts, it also accommodates that variation.

• Reconciliation Report: This report compares the bank’s ending balance to your recorded ending balance. It also reveals uncleared transactions, such as uncashed checks.
• 3-Way Reconciliation Report: This report builds upon the reconciliation report, showing the bank’s numbers, your trust account’s overall numbers, and client ledger numbers. 3-way reconciliation reports ensure that bank totals match trust account totals and that both totals agree with what matter-level ledgers report. Auditors love this report.

Best Practices Produce the Best Results

The fundamentals drive stress-free trust accounting.

• Run the reports monthly and act on issues. Closed matters shouldn’t have trust balances. Investigate dormant accounts and uncashed checks. Relocate unassigned funds to their proper matter.
• Know your audit requirements.
• Keep records, including copies of deposit slips, canceled checks, and statements, for the relevant time period.

Make accounting more effortless by doing the right thing promptly with easy access to relevant, verified financial information. CosmoLex helps your firm’s trust accounting keep the proper records, meet jurisdictional and audit requirements, and generally run smoothly. Learn more and schedule a demo at CosmoLex’s website.

The post CosmoLex Trust Accounting is Anything but Basic appeared first on Lawyerist.

Running a small law firm is hard. Between client work, administrative tasks, and business growth efforts, managing limited time and resources can be a challenge for even the best practitioner. That’s why law firm owners are turning to Get Staffed Up. Offering remote assistants ideal for client-facing administrative tasks, Get Staffed Up (GSU) finds the fit from the top 1% of degreed, professionals from Latin America and South Africa. Since Get Staffed Up was founded by two attorneys, they understand the unique staffing needs of law firms. GSU sets its services apart with their propriety match making process.

For any lawyer, getting the phones to ring and then the phones ringing is a challenge. That is why GSU offers Marketing Assistants and Intake Specialists.

Generating Leads

The time and energy you spend practicing law is time and energy you don’t have to run and grow your business. Adding a Get Staffed Up Virtual Marketing Assistant (VMA) to your team increases your bandwidth for marketing strategies. These proactive problem-solvers provide needed support and can work on a variety of tasks to bolster your marketing campaigns.

Reaching modern audiences requires creative, tech-savvy minds thinking on your behalf. Get Staffed Up’s VMAs are equipped with a wide range of digital marketing skills, and can help with anything from sending email newsletters to managing your podcast. Other potential marketing hats include:

• Content Creator
• Social Media Coordinator
• Video Coordinator
• Graphic Designer

Growing Your Firm

Even with the best marketing, a lackluster client intake process can ruin your efforts. New clients want to feel valued, without sacrificing attention to current ones. A Get Staffed Up Intake Specialist can help shoulder the burden by employing a customer-first onboarding process.

A Get Staffed Up Intake Specialist will work directly with you or your office manager, learning your existing procedures for client intake and helping streamline them. After mastering the details of your firm’s policies, they can address potential clients’ questions and concerns with a smile. Intake Specialists help with these crucial tasks:

• Screen out bad prospects
• Retrieve medical records
• Refer incorrect prospects to your referrals and keep track
• Keep your referral partners updated on matters they’ve sent you
• Set paid consultations and take the money
• Follow up with all prospects who are a great fit
• Prep for each consultation
• Keep track of all calls and prospects in the CRM

Confidently Delegate to Top Talent

Modern remote and hybrid work models allow you to hire diverse, qualified candidates wherever they are. Get Staffed Up makes the process even easier, bringing you top talent from around the world while managing HR and payroll for your virtual positions. Their meticulous vetting process identifies important qualities that ensure these professionals exceed expectations.

Get Staffed Up focuses on specialization in their recruitment strategy. Each assistant comes to you with a deep knowledge of their job responsibilities. As a result, you receive the highest quality candidates, dedicated exclusively to your firm and working the same hours as everyone else.

Get Back to What Matters

Get Staffed Up brings top talent to your doorstep and alleviates added stress on your firm. With their legal-specific Marketing Assistant and Intake Specialist positions, they have made it easier than ever to acquire and impress new clients. Learn more about what Get Staffed Up can do for you by going to the Get Staffed Up Website. See why customers call Get Staffed Up a “game changer” for their firms.

The post More Intake, Less Headache with Smarter Staffing Solutions from Get Staffed Up appeared first on Lawyerist.

If you have engaged a “law firm marketing agency,” you know that phrase can encompass everything from defining your firm vision and ideal client, to font and logos, to the technical mechanics of website building and ad buying. Maybe you’ve felt that the end goal—more prospects and, ultimately, more clients and more revenue, gets lost in the shuffle.

FirmPilot understands that feeling and has “flipped the script” on law firm digital marketing. They start with data instead of design.  By synthesizing data and marketing, FirmPilot provides law firms two benefits: hard numbers that give you a framework for decision-making and the ability to  turn reams of facts and figures into actionable marketing intelligence.

FirmPilot’s AI and Marketing

One AI strength lies in data analysis and summary. FirmPilot takes advantage of AI’s data audit and summary capabilities to analyze your competitors and automatically improve your firm’s marketing to attract clients. Traditional marketing firms rely on basic tactics, gut feelings, and many “manual adjustments” to tweak marketing campaigns. In contrast , FirmPilot uses cutting-edge AI to automate law firm marketing.

FirmPilot’s decision engine, which can modify search engine optimization (SEO) keywords, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, and more, synthesizes two valuable data sources. FirmPilot not only looks at your own marketing data, it also looks at your top competitors’ data. The combined sources drive FirmPilot’s software to predict and deploy effective marketing to reach your ideal client. That data-driven, predictive algorithm is FirmPilot’s “secret sauce.” Instead of simply writing a website post, publishing it, and hoping for the best, FirmPilot precisely targets prospective clients with the highest conversion likelihood.

How FirmPilot Produces Results

Your existing client data powers FirmPilot’s AI. Think about what you know about your past and present client population. You know where they live, what concern brought them to you, the resolution they sought, and the resolution they got. Depending on the practice area, you may have insightful demographic data—married or single, number of children, financial well-being, etc. FirmPilot relies on this sort of data to profile and identify ideal, high-value clients.

Once FirmPilot’s software knows who it’s trying to find, the AI then reverse engineers where these lucrative prospects are searching online by studying the content and keywords of competitor law firms already attracting them. FirmPilot algorithms then suggest website edits, content optimization, and other steps you can take so that your firm appears prominently in search results when these would-be clients perform a web search.

These three legs of the stool—your data, FirmPilot’s intelligent recommendations, and the results they produce, work as a continuously improving system. The client-result data from your first set of changes informs future changes and so on. The AI makes ever-better recommendations by learning which content and tactics performed best. As you use it, FirmPilot constantly refines as retargets so that, over time, its lead generation delivers for your most profitable segments. Ultimately, FirmPilot’s AI-powered marketing engine starts with your existing client data and, through a series of finely-tuned iterations, attracts and converts prospects that drive law firm growth.

A New Marketing Approach to Law Firms

Many people think that marketing is all hunches and instinct, and there’s certainly some of that, particularly with visuals and word choice. But there’s plenty of data too, more now than ever before. Data tells marketers to air commercials for “product A” during evening news programs and “product B” during college football games. Data ties your web search for a product to the subsequent ads you see for that product, its accessories, and its competitors. FirmPilot’s technology marries sophisticated, AI-powered analysis to the needs of your firm’s marketing.

FirmPilot’s AI creates and optimizes marketing assets to achieve profitable results. Furthermore, its performance tracking mechanism, powered by continuous results analysis, gives unmatched visibility into the return on investment that FirmPilot brings to your firm.

Visit FirmPilot’s website to learn how modern, data-driven AI marketing benefits your firm.

The post FirmPilot Pioneers a New Era in Legal Marketing with AI appeared first on Lawyerist.

Google launched Local Services Ads (LSA) in 2015, starting with home services-type businesses. Google made LSAs available to attorneys in 2021. Jim Christy, President of Postali, spoke with Zack Glaser, Legal Tech Advisor, about how law firms can use LSAs and their potential rewards and risks. 

LSA Primer 

LSAs differ from Google’s primary advertising tool, pay-per-click (PPC), in two ways. First, instead of displaying in line with organic search results, LSAs display above the traditional results list. LSAs are prominently set apart. Second, Google prices LSAs on a “pay-per-lead” model. 

Under a PPC model, which Google still offers and should have a place in firm advertising budgets, clicking the ad costs money, irrespective of what the user does afterward. Clicking the ad and closing the browser tab costs the same as a user clicking the link, spending an hour on the attorney’s landing page, and completing a contact form. 

The LSA model is different. Google does not charge the advertising attorney merely because a user clicked on the LSA. The user must contact the law firm. Only a successful connection costs money. 

Making LSAs Successful for Your Firm 

The LSA algorithm also differs from PPC in how Google chooses which LSA to display for a search. With PPC advertising, prominence flows from spending. Paying more puts the firm’s ad higher. In contrast, Google selects LSAs based on many factors, including user (i.e., star) ratings. A firm must have a particular number of Google reviews to be eligible for LSA inclusion (Google requires up to 5 reviews depending on profession & practice area). Beyond that, location, business hours, responsiveness, profile quality, and, of course, marketing budget, play a roll in an individual firm’s LSA ranking.

Pay Only for Leads, Not Clicks 

Google charges firms for contacts, not clicks. When configuring its LSA profile, the firm sets practice areas and geographies. If a user reaches out through the LSA but doesn’t match your practice area and geography, the firm can dispute the charge with Google and seek a refund. 

Unlike PPC ads, Google offers limited specificity concerning practice areas and keyword matching. Jim gave the example of a personal injury firm that only represents wrongful death matters. While PPC ads could tightly target this niche, LSAs could run too broadly (e.g., all personal injury searches). 

With LSAs, a firm may get calls that aren’t disputable but not a great fit, so they might pay the higher LSA cost. With PPC, Google charges the firm for every click, but the ad may get more desired exposure because of the additional specificity and targeting tools PPC has. 

Costs of LSAs 

When LSAs initially launched for attorneys, ad prices were relatively inexpensive and predictable. Both benefits are fading. For example, some specific personal injury locations, LSA prices have climbed 300% since 2021. In some categories, the return-on-investment of PPC ads may now exceed that of LSAs, even though LSAs promise higher quality leads. 

Using LSAs as a DIYer 

While Jim encourages firms to engage professional assistance when running PPC ad campaigns, LSAs are something a solo or small firm can experiment with on their own. For the inspired DIYers, Google’s LSA profile provides three tools. 

• Category: The firm tells Google its areas of practice. Family law is a category, for example. The firm must have at least one category and can have more than one. Google also permits excluding categories, mediation, for example. That’s about the extent of LSA granularity. An attorney could seek auto accident injuries, but if the firm specialized in auto accident head injuries, LSAs could not be that specific. 
• Budget: The firm must set its LSA budget weekly; that’s the only option. Google presents two options: Maximize Leads and Manually Set a Max Bid. Setting the budget to Maximize means the campaign uses the current market rate for that LSA placement to serve the LSA to the most viable users at the most viable time to optimize for getting leads. Setting the budget to Manual means that the firm controls the amount they are willing to spend per week, the price is still as variable as with Maximize, but fewer or no users may see it due to the price cap. 
• Geography: This option controls who sees the ad based on a user’s state, county, city, or ZIP code. Users see LSAs based on their location when searching, so it’s possible firms may receive “out of area” contacts (e.g., if someone searches while at work versus home). 

Getting Started 

Jim advises that LSAs involve some strategy, and he’s happy to discuss strategy with you. Once the firm decides on a direction, “pulling the levers” is much simpler than Google’s PPC tools. The LSA area of Google search results is prime real estate. If you have not set up Local Services Ads yet, Jim encourages you to do so, even if you don’t intend to run ads immediately. 

To learn more about Postali and why you should use LSAs, visit their blog. 

The post Understanding Local Services Ads for Lawyers with Postali appeared first on Lawyerist.

After 30 years, discover the inspirations behind Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and its legacy as a certified pop-culture experience.

What is it about Jack Skellington that is so compelling? Why does the love between Sally and Jack resonate with so many? The feature-length, stop-motion movie about the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town who becomes obsessed with celebrating Christmas is a fascinating musical and love story that has transcended the original film and captivated the world. From the improbable tale to the lovable characters, Tim Burton’s creation has turned into a lifestyle, branching into fashion, video games, card and board games, live-action concerts, themed celebrations at Disneyland, and even cameos in other movies.

Featuring an original foreword by Tim Burton himself, Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town celebrates the film and the culture that has grown around it with exclusive and original interviews from:

Author and creator, Tim Burton
Animators, sculptors, and other artists of the film
Jack Skellington himself, Danny Elfman
The iconic voice of Sally, Catherine O’Hara
Musicians on the Nightmare Revisited album

Delve into the magic of Halloween and Christmas in a story told through unlikely heroes that started 30 years ago. This beautifully designed coffee-table book is sure to captivate die-hard and casual fans alike.

Review

When I first watched this movie, I liked it but I didn’t love it. For me, there are some things missing (Why does Sally love Jack? It’s not that he ignores her as he’s aware of her talent as a seamstress but beyond that he doesn’t pay much attention to her until she saves Sandy Claws.) Then I watched the episode from Netflix’s “The Movies that Made Us” that features this film and thought, I really need to watch this again. Shortly after that, I saw this book, then bit the bullet and bought a copy of the film. I still think the Sally-Jack relationship needs fleshing out (and I say that knowing full well that Sally is a rag-doll and Jack a skeleton) but the creativity of it and the mad skills that made it wowed me.

The book delves into the inspiration and sources that influenced the look of the movie, the voice talents behind the characters, the massive amount of work that went into set construction and building the models, and problem solving. Lots of problem solving. The World of “Nightmare” has expanded but not via the usual “Nightmare 2” or “Return to Nightmare” films that other franchises have done. Instead there have been books and manga that have delved into aspects of the world. Disney theme parks have added (or changed existing rides to) TNBC attractions. The crew has also stayed in touch as well as worked on other films.

Emily Zemler obviously loves the film and was given lots of access to tell how the film progressed from Burton’s ideas (that Disney initially dismissed) through all the problem solving (those involved used that term a lot) to the finished film that … didn’t set the box office on fire. But it stuck around, and thanks to VHS and then DVD copies it kept going, and has now become a firm favorite that has inspired all kinds of merch (including a crock pot), homemade costumes, and devotion (weddings, cosplay, and full sleeve tattoos). During my recent rewatch, I decided that Lock, Shock, and Barrel are my favorite characters. Who is/are yours? B

~Jayne

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An in-depth and hysterical look at the making of 1980’s comedy classic Airplane! by the legendary writers and directors of the hit film.
Airplane! premiered on July 2nd, 1980. With a budget of $3.5 million it went on to make nearly $200 million in sales and has influenced a multitude of comedians on both sides of the camera.

Surely You Can’t Be Serious is the first-ever oral history of the making of Airplane! by the creators, and of the beginnings of the ZAZ trio (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) – charting the rise of their comedy troupe Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin all the way to premiere day. The directors explain what drew them to filmmaking and in particular, comedy. With anecdotes, behind the scenes trivia, and never-before-revealed factoids – these titans of comedy filmmaking unpack everything from how they persuaded Peter Graves to be in the movie after he thought the script was a piece of garbage, how Lorna Patterson auditioned for the stewardess role in the backseat of Jerry’s Volvo, and how Leslie Nielsen’s pranks got the entire crew into trouble, to who really wrote the jive talk. The book also features testimonials and personal anecdotes from well-known faces in the film, television, and comedy sphere – proving how influential Airplane! has been from day one.

Four decades after its release, Airplane! continues to make new generations laugh. Its many one-liners and visual gags have worked their way into the mainstream culture. This fully organic expansion of the ZAZ trio’s fan-base, prompted solely by word-of-mouth, comes as no surprise to longtime fans. When all around us is in flux – laughter is priceless.

Review

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”

This is another book I knew, as soon as I saw it, that I wanted to read. I mean the movie is not only iconic but hilarious and as I watched it after reading this book, I realized the truth of what so many people interviewed for it said – it’s timeless. Other great movies from 40-50 years ago have not aged so well but Airplane! has resisted (for the most part) getting old. 

“Get me Rex Kramer!”

Like Ron Shelton’s “The Church of Baseball,” which details the story of “Bull Durham, the book begins with a bit (actually more than a bit) of bio on the three co-creators and then follows them as they move to LA in the early 1970s. Their experience with writing for and appearing in their live comedy sketch show “Kentucky Fried Theater” is crucial to the existence of Airplane!. 

“The life of everyone on board depends on just one thing: finding someone back there who not only can fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.”

But their hope began to shift from making a living doing comedy to writing and bringing to life a deadpan humor remake of a little known 1950s film called “Zero Hour!” (complete with exclamation point). So with a naivete that is stunning in retrospect, they wrote a screenplay and began shopping it around. It was so shopped around that someone contacted them about the screenplay and when they asked how this person had read it, they replied they’d found the script on a bus.   

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.”

Years of effort, agony, and hope passed. Necessary connections were made with industry people, the script was rewritten, rewritten again, shopped some more, rewritten, rinse and repeat. Finally Paramount showed interest, more people critical to the film’s existence got behind it, and ZAZ got (in the contract) the right to co-direct it with the proviso (also in the contract) that they could be fired after two weeks of filming if things weren’t going well. After a day or two of filming, the number of people watching the dailies (usually something to be endured rather than enjoyed) was expanding and soon two rooms were needed to allow space for everyone who wanted to see them. 

“It’s a damn good thing you don’t know how much he hates your guts.”

But before that came ZAZ’s efforts to get key actors interested in taking part (Leslie Nielson, Robert Stack, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges all had to be coaxed into agreeing to be in it) as well as finding the two leads with the needed chemistry, innocence, and “I’m the sane one here” expressions required to carry the dramatic backbone necessary to get film goers invested in the movie. Yes, it’s the drama and the “will they land the plane” that is the hook of the last third of the film. 

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up amphetamines.”

Other key bits had to be worked out (including staving off a lawsuit from Universal regarding the “sick child on the way for a heart transplant” scenes). The two actors involved worked out and wrote the “jive” dialog and ZAZ were thrilled that Barbara Billingsley agreed to be the white woman in the scene. Frankly I was a bit concerned about this part but Al White and Norman Alexander Gibbs said they enjoyed doing the scene and apparently African American audiences loved it then and now. 

“I just wanna tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.” 

Despite most of the actors finally “getting” the type of delivery that ZAZ wanted (totally straight acting of hilarious lines), a few had to see how well the film played in theaters (with audiences literally clutching their sides and howling with laughter) to realize how good the film is. It revitalized the careers of Bridges, Stack, Graves, and Nielson who then found themselves viewed as comedic actors. It changed how people viewed comedy including several well known actors and writers who tell what an influence it has been on them.  

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.”

Yet despite telling the story behind a funny film, the book is more informative than funny. Of course I had to rewatch the film after reading the book and now I need to find time to watch it with the trivia track on. It’s been one of my favorites for years and now I know the inside info. B

“Well, I’ll give him another twenty minutes, but that’s it!”

~Jayne

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