Remerge office

Last year, I invited attorneys to submit questions for an interview I was conducting with Michael Gerber, the author of a number of books on entrepreneurship including the best selling Awakening the Entrepreneur Within and The E-Myth Revisited. For more than 40 years, he has been teaching business owners who possess significant technical skills but few business skills how to transform their companies into world-class organizations.I fielded about 40 questions and was amazed at the number of those that dealt with personnel issues.  Not just finding good people, but training them and keeping them motivated.  This is something that bedevils a lot of businesses, not just law firms.First, hire good people.  You can’t fix stupid, so don’t hire it.  Sure, we have all made hiring mistakes — people who interview great but their rubber never meets the road.  Learn from those mistakes and put together a process for hiring that ensures you get the best … [Read more...] about How to Motivate Your People and Profit–Law Office Management

If  you do not have physical presence in a specific city then it is unlikely that you will be able to obtain local map rankings within that city. If you are targeting a small neighboring city there is a greater chance that you can work your website optimization and business listing optimization to get your business listed in the local rankings. In our experience, we have seen businesses achieve such local rankings, but this typically happens when city populations are under 60K, within a 20-mile radius, or without strong law firm competitors.If you are in a larger city like New York and are trying to target small neighboring cities, it is much harder to rank locally due to the large amount of competition and distance from the center of the main business cluster for your industry. That center is one of the top 10 foundational ranking factors as seen in the image from the 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors from Moz. However, for local businesses that want to rank for local … [Read more...] about How To Obtain Local Ranking For Cities Where Your Law Firm Does Not Have An Office

The U.S. Department of Labor's recent guidance on the exempt status of mortgage loan officers has survived a federal court challenge by the Mortgage Bankers Association.  The dispute began in March 2010, when the DOL declared that mortgage loan officers are not exempt from the minimum wage and overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  Reversing and withdrawing two prior opinion letters on the subject, the DOL stated in an administrator's interpretation that employees who perform the typical duties of a mortgage loan officer do not qualify as administrative employees exempt from overtime under the FLSA.Under the administrative exemption, an employer need not pay overtime to an employee if three conditions are met:  (1) the employee is paid on a salary basis of at least $455 per week; (2) the employee's primary duty is the performance of office or non-manual work directly related to the management or general business operations of the employer or the … [Read more...] about Federal Court Agrees with DOL: Mortgage Loan Officers are Not Exempt

 Yesterday, at the 16th annual Wharton Leadership Conference, I was lucky enough to hear musings from Adam Bryant, senior editor for features at the New York Times, where he not only leads a team of reporters but also authors the popular “Corner Office” column in the Sunday business section and online — a recurring piece that he first began writing in 2009.When he started interviewing leaders of the world’s largest, most successful organizations, he decided he wasn’t going to ask them simply about their business strategy. He began asking broad, open-ended questions about the most important leadership roles they’ve learned throughout their life. “We have to make sense of leadership for ourselves,” he said. ”I started asking why some people get promoted over others time and time again. This is what separates leaders, from what I’ve learned, and I believe these qualitites are truly useful … [Read more...] about Leadership Lessons From the Corner Office

It is a fact that none of us majored in legal marketing in college.  While some of us did receive a formal education in general marketing or business, it only takes a few months before you realize that working with lawyers is a whole different ballgame.  How lucky we are as LMA members, then, that veterans are eager and willing to share their wealth of knowledge with not just legal marketing rookies, but also other veterans, and everyone else in-between. Anne Schuster chief marketing officer at Thompson Coburn LLP, and Lou Ann Wilcox, chief marketing officer at Armstrong Teasdale LLP, recently collaborated to create a checklist on how other legal marketers can make a difference at their firms, which they kindly shared with their colleagues in St. Louis. 1)  Understand the Big Picture   Clearly, marketing is not carried out in a vacuum.  Our speakers encouraged everyone to know what the firm’s management is trying to accomplish (both short term and … [Read more...] about Making a Difference at Your Firm: A Checklist from Two Law Firm Chief Marketing Officers