Keeping overhead low is one of the most important things a new solo can do while building a practice.  While there are lots of ways to save money — from your office choices to technology — something we shouldn’t limit is our education.  That is, staying updated on the law and learning how to run a practice.  Fortunately, there are many tools for this that are free or reduced cost.  Here are some of my favorites:

Read your newsletters. You get a lot of them.  Whether electronic or paper, voluntary or involuntary, these are good sources for recent changes in the law or upcoming CLEs and networking events.  You don’t have to read everything, but glance through them before recycling or hitting delete.  Having a hard time managing the influx of information?  Rather than unsubscribing to everything, learn how to to filter your emails so you can go through this non-urgent category once a day or week.  (I use tags and filters in my Google Apps and Gmail accounts to keep things under control.)

Buy a season pass. One of the best things I did when I started my practice was buying a season pass.  I bought mine with Minnesota CLE, which offers a few different levels of passes, and some of the county bar associations offer them too (RCBA and HCBA).  Take into account how many CLEs you might want to attend and compare the cost of buying a pass to the cost of individual courses.  You might find yourself attending many more than you’d otherwise attend without the added cost.

Last year I attended the Probate & Trust Law Section Conference, Strategic Solutions for Solo & Small Firms in Duluth, Real Estate Institute, Tax Institute, plus a handful of one-day courses. I recently attended the Family Law Institute to stay up-to-date for practicelaw, and am looking forward to attending most of the others again this year, especially the Solo Small Conference again in August. (I hope to see you there!)

Join bar associations and sections. Shameless plug, I know.  But your membership gets you discounts  on CLEs plus access to other free services, such as practicelaw.org, Fastcase, and Court Opinions.  Depending on your needs, the cost of membership might be cheaper than paying full price or using other services.

Look for free CLEs. Many MSBA sections, county bar associations, and law schools also frequently offer free CLEs.  Find these by keeping up with the other sources listed here.

Use social networking. Not only for connecting with your colleagues, social networking sites are also a great way to stay updated.  On LinkedIn, join groups related to your practice area and read articles posted by the groups or your connections.  On Facebook, become a fan of your favorite organizations or law firms.  These might overlap with each other or any blogs you follow, so pick and choose what methods you prefer.  Many of my lawyer friends also post interesting legal stories on Facebook and LinkedIn, and keeping up with your connections is a great way to stay in touch with people who might be a good referral or resource.

Join groups and listservs. MSBA section members can sign up for e-mail listservs where subscribers can ask and respond to questions.

Also ask around to other attorneys in your practice area if they know of any study groups.  I belong to an estate planning study group and I know there are a handful of others out there.  Can’t find one that fits your needs or schedule?  Start one yourself.  Find a few other attorneys with similar interests.  The key is to do it regularly, preferably once a month on a set day, and make sure you’re comfortable asking questions to the group.

Subscribe to blogs. Google Reader is one of my favorite tools. While many people know it as a way to keep up with blogs, it aggregates any site with RSS, making it easy to add news sites and even Twitter feeds. If you’ve never seen it in action, check out this quick explanation of the basic concept, and another for an example of how to set it up. I like it so much because it only shows me the items I haven’t read, so I don’t have to scroll down pages on blogs I haven’t visited for a while, plus I only have to go to one site to see everything. It’s much easier to check Google Reader once a day than to check 20 or 30 blogs every day (or even every week). You also have much more control over what you see than from getting your news on Twitter or other real-time sites since you can decide what to follow, how to view it (expanded or list, new or all), and you can easily mark them all as “read” if you’ve had your fill for the day.

You can also organize your feeds by tags. For me, I have tags for Minnesota, Estate Planning & Probate, National Legal News, Solo-Small, Marketing/Practice Management, Ethics, Legal Writing, Funny, General Business, Opinion, and Technology. I don’t use Twitter, so I also added the mnbar and mypractice feeds to Google Reader. You can view all your feeds at once, by tag, or individually.

Don’t like Google Reader? There are many other feed readers like Feedly or Firefox add-ons. My final tip? Don’t get bogged down by blogs. Either use the “mark all as read” button liberally, or weed out your feeds periodically to keep just the really good ones. Looking for more? Most of my favorites are on the practicelaw blogroll.