By Jim Calloway Prepaid legal fees and refundability of those fees was the subject of American Bar Association Formal Opinion 505. The recently released opinion states that under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, a fee paid to a lawyer in advance for services to be rendered in the future must be placed in a…

By Julie Bays Informed Delivery is a free service by USPS (United States Postal Service) that enables users to preview images of their incoming letter-sized mail and receive notifications about scheduled packages. This feature can greatly benefit lawyers and businesses by streamlining mail management, enhancing security, and improving organization. Key Benefits for Lawyers and Businesses:…

By Jim Calloway You may have noticed a button in the upper right-hand corner of your Outlook screen that says try the new Outlook. Being a busy lawyer may have meant you thought “No time for that now. Maybe later.” And some who clicked on the button were so surprised by the new look of…

By Jim Calloway Empirical data about solo law practice used to be difficult to locate. Clio, a legal practice management solution, has stepped into the breach with its Legal Trends reports. Its 2023 Legal Trends for Solo Law Firms has been released. It uses anonymized data from Clio customers and survey data from legal professionals…

By Jim Calloway Some of you may recall at the beginning of the year, our Digital Edge podcast covered The Ten Most Popular Office 365 Tips For Lawyers and featured Danielle DavisRoe of Affinity Consulting. It was a great podcast and, if you missed it, it is not too late to listen. Recently Danielle DavisRoe…

By Jim Calloway Avoiding free charging stations in airports, hotels and shopping centers is important for your digital security, according to a warning recently posted by the FBI. As the tweet noted, “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices.” While it is not…

By Jim Calloway Today’s photo editing software can be amazingly powerful. But power creates complexity. For tools like Photoshop, significant training will be required to use it. For the rest of us, a tool like Google’s Magic Eraser is all we need because we normally just want to remove unwanted images or people from photos….

By Jim Calloway Approximately one year ago, it became more challenging to record phone calls on Android phones. In April 2022, Google announced Android apps in the Play Store could no longer use Android’s accessibility APIs for non-accessibility purposes. Since that was how most third-party call recording apps operated, they were effectively killed when the…

By Jim Calloway I would imagine most lawyers by now have a Gmail account, although many do not use it for their professional email account. Catherine Reach, Director, North Carolina Bar Association Center for Practice Management last week published Gmail Tricks You Can Use. There are some handy tips included in this post. My Gmail…

By Jim Calloway Marketing was the theme of the March/April 2023 American Bar Association Law Practice Magazine. While there are many articles of interest in that issue, let me direct you to Marketing Tips For Young And Not So Young Lawyers by Stephen Embrey, Chair of the ABA’s Law Practice Division. This is a short…

By Jim Calloway Barron Henley, of Affinity Consulting, spoke at ABA TECHSHOW on mastering Microsoft Word (my title, not his). Barron has done similar programs for the OBA before. His program is half great tips and improved efficiency and half voicing all the frustrations we have experienced with Word. You know these, e.g. “How can…

by Jim Calloway Many lawyers use Dropbox. One of its powerful features is file sharing. However, there have been several highly publicized instances of sharing errors where confidential client documents were compromised. If you are a Dropbox user, the post Exchanging Files with Dropbox is a great read, which outlines the different ways you can…

Another major security breach has made the news. Ars Technica reports, GoDaddy says a multi-year breach hijacked customer websites and accounts. The report notes the “most recent event occurred last December when the threat actor gained access to the cPanel hosting servers customers use to manage websites hosted by GoDaddy. The threat actor then installed…

By Jim Calloway Oklahoma City attorney Mark A. Robertson defies the stereotype. He heads a small law firm doing securities work and representing both large and small businesses. In his feature for the ABA’s Law Practice Today, Advising the Business Client, he provides a thorough review of how lawyers can build a clientele of business…

By Jim Calloway One challenge of practicing law is that it often seems there are only two standards of conduct: absolute perfection and malpractice. Those of us who have worked in law firms know that perfection isn’t possible with fallible humans doing the work. But one can design systems to hopefully catch most errors before…

By Jim Calloway Our new Digital Edge podcast, The Ten Most Popular Office 365 Tips For Lawyers, is really quite special in that I can almost guarantee you will learn at least one thing that you will immediately start to use. Our guest is Danielle DavisRoe, who is a senior consultant at Affinity Consulting Group….

By Jim Calloway Communication tasks are a lot of what lawyers do daily. It is certainly a challenge to stay current with all client communications while keeping up with all of the other work in a law office. But what is the purpose of this communication? In most cases we want a response. Productivity expert…

By Jim Calloway Every lawyer or law firm should have a website. Most people no longer use the Yellow Pages and search for everything from purchasing legal services to buying a car on the internet. The web is how most businesses obtain new customers. The law firm web site can provide many functions and resources,…

By Jim Calloway During the last couple of months of 2022, I taught several CLE programs on ethical issues with lawyers’ use of technology. Password managers are one key to ethical digital security because you can create extremely long passwords no one could guess, and you won’t be tempted to use the same password for…

By Jim Calloway ABA TECHSHOW 2023 will be held March 1-4 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The OBA Member Discount Code is EP2306.  TECHSHOW is always a great event for those working in small to medium-sized law firms to attend and receive a lot of information. There is a lot to see and do at…