Would a Virtual Law Office Work for You?
Rania Combs is a wills, trusts and estates lawyer, licensed in Texas since 1994. When her spouse got transferred to North Carolina, she examined her options for practicing law there. Opening a virtual law office seemed like the solution to a challenging circumstance. She launched her virtual practice in January 2010.
Many lawyers may wonder whether a virtual law office would solve their problems, too. Here are some examples of why they might be considering it:
• Newly licensed attorneys may want to avoid the overhead and long-term commitment of a traditional brick and mortar office.
• Experienced lawyers may want to expand the geographic reach of their existing practice to garner more clients.
• Many lawyers have a thriving practice in a smaller town, but have difficulty finding locally the high caliber legal talent they need to help handle the work flow.
• Family obligations or other circumstances make it difficult for some attorneys to keep traditional office hours.
• For some attorneys, the international scope of their work demands technological innovation to serve client needs.
• Some attorneys just long to escape the snow in the winter or the heat in the summer without interrupting their law practice.
To help answer some of your questions about what it’s really like to open a virtual law practice, I interviewed Rania Combs. You can view Combs’ website at http://www.texaswillsandtrustslaw.com/. The interview follows:
Read more
Post Date: October 2, 2012
Warning: Avon May Call You, But Microsoft Won’t
The internet crawls with scam artists circulating myths, bogus horror stories, urban legends and snake oil sales pitches. I often use the Snopes website to verify or debunk any weird or cautionary emails I receive. According to a New York Times article about the Snopes founders, their fact-checking website gets around 8 million unique visitors per month. This time I didn’t need Snopes to verify the warning I received in a recent email. It came from our trustworthy IT consultant, Lee McAdory. Here’s what Lee wrote: Read more
Post Date: May 3, 2012
The Solution Is Templates with Userforms: What Was The Question?
By Tamara Portnoy
What an attorney really needs is a simple way to produce regular forms and frequently used documents which, of course, means; templates, templates, templates. Yes, there can be a learning curve to create truly useful templates but you only have to create them once. Then you just use them over and over. If something changes you only have to change it in one place. Using automatic dates, line and page numbering, internal referencing and table of contents make templates even more useful and accurate. Too often attorneys cannibalize documents and end up with something that says Read more
Post Date: April 27, 2012
Technology Toolbox: These are a few of our favorite things…
Cathy L. Ribble, ACP
This week I had the privilege of participating in the virtual professionals round table discussion sponsored by The Paralegal Mentor. After hearing each other’s stories as to how we ended up as virtual professionals in the legal services industry, the discussion quickly turned to technology.
The very next day Law Technology News published the article Virtual Paralegals Move Legal Work Online. LTN’s news editor Brendan McKenna covered the bases by gathering information from at least 9 different paralegals, myself included, concerning the definition of virtual paralegal, inspiration for starting a virtual paralegal business, and the technology used. McKenna even registers the preference of several paralegals to be described as freelance rather than virtual.
Participation in both of these discussions with at least 12 other virtual paralegal professionals led me to the following conclusions: Read more
Post Date: March 20, 2012