• Posted an At-a-Glance Jump Start titled “Counseling the Distressed Homeowner.” Several Nutshells (short summaries of issues) are linked to and part of this new resource. More information here.
• Solicited and added a few new checklists to those already on the site.
• Added seven brand spankin new civil litigation forms.
• Revised 35 Guardianship and Conservatorship forms and procedural checklists. More information here.
• Went multimedia by posting a video series by Minnesota Lawyers Mutual on disaster planning and recovery, plus related PDFs. More information here.
• Posted the quarterly Labor and Employment Law section newsletter and the monthly Probate section Tax Committee Newsletter.

Last but not least, we’ve responded to user calls and emails and consulted with practitioners on future needs which will enable us to post again in August on What’s New at practicelaw.

© Nancy Hupp for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
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Now you can relax a bit too, or at least have a better chance of making a solid impression on one of Minnesota’s state district court judges. The Minnesota State Bar Association’s Civil Litigation Section has just published the results of its first Judicial Survey, which comes with judges’ answers to many frequently asked questions, including:

• Do you regularly conduct hearings and motions by phone?
• Will you accept telephone calls from attorneys to rule on discovery disputes that occur during the course of a deposition?
• When do you normally set the pretrial in relation to the trial?
• Do you require counsel to sit or stand during questioning of witnesses?
• When do you require that final witness lists be exchanged and filed?
• Have you ever held counsel in contempt of court?

All in all, there are more than 50 questions that the Civil Litigation Section asked all Minnesota state court judges, with most responding to all questions. Of the 289 state district court judges in Minnesota, the survey responses include 138 judges, a nearly fifty percent response rate. That’s pretty good for the first chapter of a new and valuable service.

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Directory, Judges, Judiciary

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Bench & Bar of Minnesota, the MSBA’s monthly magazine, can make it a little easier to find new job listings as soon as they are posted. Starting in October, mnbenchbar.com, the online site for the magazine, began offering email and RSS subscriptions to all of its classified ad listings. Now, whenever a new job is posted with Bench & Bar, you can get instant notification by email or in your RSS feed reader (don’t know what RSS or a feed reader is — check out our post here on the topic). Sign up for either of the services on the mnbenchbar.com classified ads page, or by clicking on one of the subscription buttons below.

Subscribe by Email Subscribe by RSS

Or you could just go old school and search the classified ads online or, if you want true old school, wait for the magazine to hit your digital or snailmail inbox around the middle of each month.  Your choice.

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
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Addresses. This is the bulk of the moving to-do list, but is one of the easiest things to do. First and foremost: forward your mail. You can do this online at USPS.

Financial

• Bank accounts
• Credit cards
• Accountant
• Any automatically billed accounts (e.g., online or office supply stores, website hosting, courier services)
• Other financial accounts (e.g., small business loans)

Professional Memberships

• Attorney registration with the Minnesota Supreme Court (information here)
• Minnesota State Bar Association (address change form) Note: Make sure to double check your published address preferences
• District bar associations
• Minnesota CLE (update your profile on its website)
• National, specialized, or minority bar associations (e.g. ABA, MWL, MABL, MLBA)
• Other state bars where licensed
• Law school alumni association

Insurance

• Professional liability (malpractice) insurer
• Liability insurer, as this is probably with a different provider

For Business Entities

• Minnesota Secretary of State (for change of registered address and/or agent: login or download PDF)
• Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board
• Tax-related information

Client Matters

• Make sure your clients have updated contact information
• Update the court and opposing counsel in any active cases

Office Supplies and Marketing Materials

• Order new checks and deposit slips
• Order new business cards
• Update your email signature
• Update your website
• If you keep a stock of printed letterhead, envelopes, invoices, return address labels, brochures, or other marketing materials, reorder with your new address.
• If not, update your letter templates.

E-mail

If an email change coincides with your address change, also update: listservs (your listserv email will not be changed automatically when you update your MSBA contact information), e-mail newsletters not from the above organizations, LinkedIn and any other online accounts that use an email address as your username. Consider sending an email to everyone in your contacts.

Utilities. It seems like there is hardly anything we can do without internet these days. Make sure everything is ready to go on day one, or plan for some reduced efficiency.  Switch over your:

• Internet service
• Phone and fax service
• Depending on what services your landlord provides, also check into: liability insurance, electricity/gas, water/sewer, trash/recycling, etc.

Notaries. Complete instructions here. If you are registered at your home address and only moved your office, you may not need to file this change.

• Change your address with the Secretary of State
• If you changed counties, register in your county and order new stamps

Marketing. A new address is a great opportunity to send out announcements to friends, clients, and business connections. Remind them of your practice areas and any new services they might not be aware of.  Here’s a short list of ideas:

• Mail new address announcements or “we moved” postcards
• Have an open house and invite people to check our your new digs
• Add your firm or attorney nameplate to the lobby in your new building

Tips. A few final thoughts:

• Plan to take a few days to settle in and get everything set up. You might feel like you’re losing a few days of work, but you’ll make up for it in efficiency once you start back up. It will be much easier to take client calls when you don’t have to open three boxes to find their file.
• Keep your active files, checkbook, and phone numbers handy for emergencies.
• Pay your monthly bills early so you don’t have to hunt them down (or forget) to mail them.
• Measure to make sure your furniture will fit into your new space. If it’s an option, consider painting before you move furniture.
• Get rid of things you don’t need and to switch to a paperless office system, if time permits. I’ve been switching over to paperless since I got my scanner a few months ago, and can say without a doubt the most annoying things to move are all of my CLE binders and magazine articles that haven’t make it through the scanner yet. Save yourself the backache and get organized before moving.
• At risk of subjecting myself to teasing for being an organizing geek, I will share with you my *secret* for making sure all of your addresses are changed: Make a spreadsheet. Check off when you request an address change, then when you actually receive mail at the new address.

Do you have anything to add? In particular, I’d like to hear from anyone with employees or a litigation-based practice, as I have neither and I expect there are things I didn’t think about with regards to each.

Once all of my address changes have gone through (so I know I haven’t missed anything), I’ll make a downloadable checklist for practicelaw.

© Andrea for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Logistics, Moving

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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.

© Andrea for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MSBA Sections, RSS, Social Media, Solo

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