As a solo or small firm lawyer, you were a lot of hats and don’t have the luxury of just delegating lots of aspects of your practice to others. As a result of a conversation that I had today with a fellow small firm legal professional, I created this list of sites that I follow that help me keep track.

LPM blogs

Build a Solo practice. Susan Cartier Liebel’s blog and one of the first I started following when I developed my consultancy.

There are quite a few others that I dip in on regularly, such as Chuck Newton and Home Office Warrior. These days I mostly just see what is out there via the twitter people I follow, though I very sorely tempted to join Solo Practice University to give it a go.

Tech for the solo/small firm

Keep up to date with Future Lawyer and for the Mac users, subscribe to MILO and read iPhone JD if you have an iPhone.

SEO

SEO Moz comes in very handy and has lots of tools to help with SEO. My Pro subscription has been useful, but there are plenty of things to get you started for free.

SEO Book. I bought and read Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and it’s been a great help to understand the issues and where to improve (even if I don’t get to do all of what he and SEO Moz recommend).

UK

In the UK we have the SOLO IP group, which I’d hoped would offer more practice management tips and tricks, and still has the potential to be a really useful resource specifically for IP practitioners.

Your apple mac comes with a handy tool for doing screen grabs, funnily enough called Grab. It’s located in the “Utilities” folder within “Applications”.

Applications –> Utilities

If you use an application launcher such as LaunchBar (which is an awesome app that I highly recommend), you can just type “grab” and it will pop up. Otherwise click through all your folders in the Finder.

Grab is pretty self explanatory after that. You can do the whole screen or just a window.

Think about it. Why are you blogging as part of your business?

The answer: to help build your business!

You have a business. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely a solo or small firm lawyer. But this applies whether you are a lawyer in Chicago, a consultant in London, or a widget manufacturer in Kazakhstan. You have a business, and it is not selling advertising on your web content.

Lawyers sell their services, not ads.

Blogging help you sell your services in many ways. Through it, you can increase your SEO, making it easier for potential clients to find you, and build out your networks and reputational capital to build referral business and boost your standing as an expert (and so charge higher rates).

Putting ads on your site sends the wrong message in this environment. It says you aren’t serious about blogging as part of your practice and it’s a distraction to the people you want to stay focussed on your site and your content (and not clicking through to other sites to buy things).

Besides that, those ads aren’t likely to be very successful. That one beer a month that you can buy with the GoogleAds on your blog will be useful to console you when you think about how the blog isn’t helping your business.

Just a quick note to reflect back on a webinar that I was a part of last month. I helped organise the event, but didn’t speak. While all of the speakers were presenting over the webinar, I consistently tweeted supplemental information. For example, links to speaker profiles or relevant papers, links or supplemental materials.

This was admittedly a bit of a last minute idea for me, but realised that it worked pretty well. For next time, I think I’d:

• develop and deliver some exclusive Twitter content given during the event
• and do a bit of promotion around the Twitter feed.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, I needed a reference to insert the copyright symbol (as you do) - wikiHow has a nice list of all the shortcuts on how to make the various symbols on a mac, such as “ALT and g”. ©.

I had to add in a funny looking “e” for a contact today (the one with the accent but going the other way, “è”), and didn’t know how to insert the character easily. Apple lets you access the full character palette by going to the international preferences pane and selecting “character palette”. You then will get a little flag icon on the menu bar which has the palette option.

See the full tip at Apple.

Just a quick note to say that I’m testing out the new Safari 4 beta and am liking it quite a bit — not sure whether I’ll switch from Firefox just yet, but it is giving it a bit of a run for its money in terms of speed and look and feel.

I’ve been on a drive to hack some common tasks that I do as part of my workday on the laptop. I listen to music and podcasts on iTunes quite a bit as part of my workday (mostly when doing filing, cleaning, or coding). I’ve mostly ignored doing much with iTunes to improve its fit with my life, but that has changed as of this week. So I bring you four tips to implement greater iTunes efficiency:

Music Only smart lists for shuffles etc - better random tunes from via 43 Folders

SRS iWow - for better sound out of your system.

Launch bar - not something that you do inside iTunes but rather a killer launch app (like Quicksilver or Butler) that lets you pause and play tunes from the keyboard as well as start specific playlists, albums, and songs.

Constant fresh songs on your iPhone/iPod - if you are anything like me you have more music and videos than will fit on your iPhone. Use the music smart list from above to create a random music list of songs not played in the last 14 days and limited to a certain file size (I set mine at 1 gig). Then sync that playlist with your iPhone.

Any suggestions - I’m working on tweaking my system and there are so many choices out there that it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m going to test out OmniFocus for the next week as so far it looks like a leader.

Any other recommendations? My Moleskine and Hipster PDA system needs expanding.

Just discovered iPhoneJD for all the tips and tricks for you iPhone lawyers out there.