February has announced itself with cold winds, wet snow and an absolute disregard to January’s rather mild precedent. Which hurries my steps along when I venture out of the little law office on the prairie and away from my Keurig – a wondrous fount of coffee, tea, and other warm delights; given the time of year, perhaps the most vital piece of technology I currently own. But I come not to sing the praises of the various bits of tech that keep me and the LLOotP working like a reasonable oiled machine or to wax poetic over my found infatuation with open source document management and private cloud software. No this time the love goes out to the work life balance. Work life balance is a bit of a myth out here in the little law office on the prairie for both work and life tend to blend one into the other for better or worse. But somewhere in this mélange, there are those times when me needs to take precedence. So, on the odd occasion I find it necessary to kickback at take some time to slow down in order to speed up. Now I’m not one for taking a spa day or heading out to buy shoes – farm equipment is an entirely different thing; I’ve been known to take a day, drive 300 miles just to look at a mower (now when I talk mower, I’m talking 100 horsepower and 14 feet of cutting width). I prefer to take my me time and learn about something entirely unnecessary. To that end, I fly planes and grow orchids. But if I really want to earn a few points, I’ll tackle something on the honey-do list (yet another use for Evernote). For those of you who’d like to play along and fit a little more life into your work there is a perfect opportunity heading your way. On February 14th, turn your tech off, let your social media go quiet, tell your staff you won’t be in the office, and spend the day getting to know yourself and your family again – remember a sitter and dinner out may earn you bonus points. And now for something completely off-topic – have you ever wondered how to check if your marketing efforts are working as hard as they can? Then Stacy Clark’s article Are your law firm’s Marketing Efforts Being Sabotaged? is for you. She provides a 10 question test to help you identify some of the common weaknesses in your marketing strategy, things like: – Is your staff involved in your marketing efforts? – Are you staying in touch with previous clients? – Are you keeping your website up to date? – What’s your value-add? It’s worth the time to google the article and to take the entire test. As solos, it’s hard to keep all the balls in the air and this may help you focus on your efforts as you start those 2015 marketing efforts. Speaking of updating your website, 2015 should be the year that you implement that responsive design website and stop losing those mobile eyeballs. While you’re at it, take the time to develop high quality content; once you get those new eyeballs, the very least you can do is give them something to read and you can stop worrying about keeping your content above the fold; mobile users are used to scrolling down. So as long as your content is compelling you are good to go long. By the way, the stodgy old law firm website has outlived its usefulness; try experimenting with typography. Google Fonts can give your website some visual impact without breaking the bank, Bruce M. Cameron Having decided that going to law school and opening a solo law practice would be a sufficient response to the male midlife crisis, Bruce now practices Collaborative Family Law and Estate Planning in rural Minnesota. When not in the law office, he can be found on his small farm where he and his wife are at the beck and call of a herd of horses, a couple of cats, a few dogs and one extremely spoiled parrot. http://www.rurallawyer.com
