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Ed Poll on Technology for Lawyers: Buy with the Head, Not the Heart

By on November 15, 2011 | Category: Link

Legal consultant and coach, Ed Poll, is an expert at offering advice to attorneys on everything from practice management, business development, succession planning, and strategy for lawyers and law firms. In addition to his outstanding blog, LawBizBlog, Poll also offers a free, yet extremely valuable email newsletter.

In the latest edition of his newsletter, Poll tackles the subject of technology for lawyers. He illustrates that while some technologies offer a competitive advantage, both in terms of productivity and the coolness factor, technology investments should be based on sound business decisions:

However, technology expenditures should not be made on emotion. They must be made because they provide an adequate return. There is no one right or correct rate of return. The return selected or expected is a function of personal choice, available alternatives, and available resources for investment. ROI is positive when the cost of repair exceeds the cost of the investment minus the sales proceeds, if any, on the used equipment. And the expenditure is most manageable when the firm creates and buys according to a budget, not according to emotion fueled by what’s cool or what other firms are doing – that is, buying with the head, not the heart.

Link: LawBiz® TIPS – Week of November 15, 2011


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Amy Campbell: First Time Homebuyer – Or how a professional services marketer became a customer

By on August 3, 2010 | Category: Article
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Image by nancyarora2020 via Flickr

Amy Campbell provides marketing consulting to professional service firms, primarily law firms. When she recently purchased her first home, she got the chance to experience professional service as a client, and the experience was eye-opening:

No one ever offered the: “here’s what’s going to happen, this is what you can expect, here’s a document to help you understand the process.” Not even a “check this page on our web site for more information.”  The tagline on the bank’s emails was a clever play on words about how important the customer is. Ha! Professionals beware. It’s old hat to you… but it’s often the most important thing in your customer’s life. Treat it that way and you will be remembered. I realize that a personal meeting at the start of the process (with both the mortgage broker and the real estate lawyer) to describe what will happen is likely time consuming, but it would have changed the experience from a faceless gauntlet of hoops to jump through and mysteries to unravel, into a personal/professional relationship with a much greater chance for satisfaction and referral.

Link: My Moving Experience – Or, What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

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Announcement: AECForensics.com is the source for Architectural, Engineering and Construction News

By on July 26, 2010 | Category: Article

Below is a quote from the announcement at AECForensics.com:

After a lot of work behind the scenes, I’m proud to announce that AEC Forensics is now fully operational. I have scoured the internet and continue to do so daily, selecting and curating the content that appears here. Since no other website has risen to the challenge of compiling news about our industry (construction defect litigation, construction law, bad faith, green forensics, etc.), I have thrown my hat in the ring. Those of you that know me personally are aware that I am a full time employee and shareholder of KPA Associates, Inc., a San Diego-based architectural firm that provides expert witness testimony in construction defect matters, in addition to ADA compliance and residential/commercial/institutional design services. In other words, this website is an avocation for me and something I pursue solely because of my passion for this industry. Admittedly not everything you find on this site is strictly related to construction defect litigation. (Please visit the About page for a more thorough explanation.)

Let me explain a little bit more about why I’m doing this and how. First, this is truly a labor of love. I have been working in the AEC forensics field for over a decade, yet nobody has a decent run-down of relevant information about the industry. We in this industry are by nature, obsessed with information, but it almost seems as if there is an elitist approach to knowledge management in the construction defect realm. Plus a lot of people are understandably reluctant to openly publish their opinion for free when the person is billing north of $150 per hour for their opinion. Me? I’m no expert. I just work for one. Next, I want to discuss a little bit about how I am doing this. Most importantly, if it were not for WordPress (specifically version 3.0), none of this would be feasible within the limited amount of time I have. I have spent years developing a workflow that works for me with regard to reviewing, analyzing, categorizing, publishing and distributing information from online sources. At the heart of it all is Google Reader. Using the tagging functions, I’m able to quickly review, annotate and categorize articles from thousands of sources. The tagged items are then fed through various plugins as drafts in WordPress. I manually edit each post one at a time before publishing. From there, Hootsuite and some other tools distribute the content through various channels. What is important is that I have culled thousands of posts daily to find the truly noteworthy articles (in my opinion) that pertain to the topics I’m interested in. In a way, I’m trying to keep true to the original notions of blogging – as in weblog, or a log chronicling web-based publications of interest. That’s all I’ve got for now. Time for dinner and some more time with the family…


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