John K. Zaid of John K. Zaid & Associates has used a paperless system since the start of his law firm over 17 years ago. In today's video, Micheal J. Swanson interviews Attorney Zaid about his experience with going paperless. Check it out for some helpful tips.

Attorney Craig Carlson of The Carlson Law Firm in Killeen, Texas shares with Author  and Educator Michael J. Swanson the importance of being a true counsellor at law and taking time to listen to your clients.

Attorney Sean Claggett of Sean K. Claggett & Associates, LLC, in Las Vegas, Nevada shares with Author  and Educator Michael J. Swanson his law practice management book that he will be publishing soon.

Invest in your employees, and they’ll invest more effort into your business.

One of the things small business owners often over-look is employee development. This is understandable, since time and job duties are limited to a small number of employees. If you allow your employees to better their current skills and learn new ones, your business with often reap the benefits of doing so. This can be just as true for the paralegal who’s been working in your office for ten years as well as the office manager who has been tirelessly filing away your documents for the past two weeks.

Why? It’s quite simple really. When you invest a few resources into bettering an employee, that employee will often come to two conclusions:

1. You actually care about their personal careers.
2. They want to make use of their skills to better your business.

Once they take what they learned from the training, they’ll use it to better themselves in their job duties. This increase in efficiency helps operations at your firm, Freeing up more time for you to do more case-related tasks. Not to mention you’ll be increasing your employees’ loyalty and desire to come to work.

Granted yes, there is always the chance they’ll take the new training and then find a job somewhere else. You should know it does not happen nearly often as people think it does.

Want to hear it from an expert? Check out Forbes contributor Victor Lipman’s article, Why Employee Development Is Important, Neglected and Can Cost You Talent.

Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo

It’s said that partner compensation can be a fairly tricky issue when it comes to law firm management. After all, when you’re making decisions on how someone gets paid, things can get complicated rather quickly. With this in mind, I recently came across an article titled, Partner compensation: Start making sense. It was written by Jordan Furlong, who is a partner with Edge International and a Senior Consultant at Stem Legal.

Jordan helps make sense of partner compensation by covering three main points:

• “Stop over-valuing sales”
• “Start properly valuing everything else”
• “Stop paying partners to bill hours”

To view the full article and find out more about what you can do to improve your firm’s compensation, click here.

Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo