For a long time I have shut my eyes and done things my way, ignoring what you are ’supposed’ to be doing, and what everyone else does.  Now it seems that the boys at 37signals have been doing the same.

For example, here are some of the chapter headings (the chapters are very short):

Planning is guessing.  How true!  When I set up my business (back in 1994) I did write a business plan, but the business I eventually ended up with turned out to be nothing like what I had naively envisaged.

Doing the plan was not a complete waste of time.  I got the bank loan, and typing it up helped me learn how to use my new computer (and also incidentally discover the internet and my future ..).  However had I  stuck to my ‘plan’ I probably would have gone bust. You have to feel your way towards what works and what is right for you.  I’m still getting there.

As they say in the book ‘unless you are a fortune teller, long term business planning is a fantasy’.  And in a fast changing world, how can you plan properly based on the past?

Why grow? Indeed.  Initially it was me and the cat.  Now I work with my husband.  We did discuss taking on staff and growing, but I never really wanted to.  I don’t want to manage people.  I prefer to write and develop new ideas.  Having a lot of staff would get in the way of that.  I may take on a few staff eventually, but I now outsource things, such as telephone calls (I use Moneypenny) and web design rather than have employees.  Much better.

As they say in the book ‘What’s the attraction of big besides ego?’ …  ‘Small is not just a stepping stone.  Small is a great destination in itself.’

Put yourself into your product.  To quote from the book: ‘If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do.  Its just a fact of life. But there is a great way to protect yourself from copycats.  Make you part of your product or service.  Make it something no-one else can offer.’  Yup!  Done that too.

Outside money is plan Z. Maybe with the new regulation rules for solicitors I might be able to get outside funding, but do I want some investor telling me what to do?  Do I hell!

You get the picture.  Go with what you think is right and what feels right, rather than what tradition and other people tell you is the thing to do.

If you are running a business, read this book.  It will help you see clearly.

You can buy the book ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever from Amazon (affiliate link).

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Are you feeling ignorant about the internet. Worried about wikis? Baffled by blogs? Or intimidated by twitter? You need a bit of professional training and guidance.

Allow me to introduce the answer. This is the new ebook and CPD course from Nick and Delia on Modern Practice Topics for Solicitors.

Nick and Delia have been involved in and writing about the legal internet for years. Must be at least ten, probably more. Both have informative web-sites, Delia runs the best set of legal links on the internet, as does Nick, as Infolaw. Together they produce the fabulous and award winning Internet Newsletter. Every now and again they produce an ebook / CPD product and this is the most recent offering. It is very good.

The ebook is in five parts.

1. New ways to organise firms.  This is largely about virtual firms and to me was the perhaps most interesting part of the series. The first article is an introductory one by Delia, followed by studies of three different ‘virtual’ firms.

I have to say that I was HUGELY impressed with the article on Blacklaws Davis, a mostly legal aid firm based in South London and the internet. Of all the articles in the book, this is the one which stayed with me the most and made me happy to look at the ebook again for this review. What a fantastic system them have! If I were a legal aid solicitor I would be beating a path to their door. I also enjoyed the article by sole practitioner Dick Jennings, and quite agree that SPs can be far more innovative than the (often patronising) larger firms.

2. Social Media for law firms. This is an intelligent look at the usual suspects, blogging, twitter, wikis, facebook and LinkedIn. Well worth reading if you are thinking of using these platforms but don’t know much about them.

3. Referral and Marketing companies. This section did not hold many surprises for me as, actually, I wrote much of it! My articles are on Quality Solicitors (which you can read on this blog >> here), Contact Law (which you can read on this blog >> here) and LawNet (which you can read >>here). Delia did an article on TakeLegalAdvice and Justin Patten did one on legallybetter.com.

4. Your website – accessible, interesting and productive. All law firms with a web-site (and that should mean all law firms) would do well to read this section. The first part looks at making websites accessible for disabled people. The second is about ‘converting browsers to business’ and looks at the AIDA principles of marketing. The third looks at online legal drafting software company DirectLaw, creators of that ‘destructive technology’ Rapidocs. Finally there is an article on client satisfaction surveys.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Another very helpful and interesting look at an important subject which can be a bit (whisper it) boring … It features articles by Nick Holmes, David Gilroy and Susan Hallam. (Although I just use Scribe now.)

So there you are. If you fancy finding out more about all these topics AND getting five hours CPD, you want to hop on over to Nick’s site >> here where you can read more and buy it online.

Have you bought this or any other of Nick and Delia’s ebooks? How did you find them?

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I read somewhere, a long time ago, that when you first read a book you learn a bit from it.  If you then read it again, you absorb a bit more.  Most people take their examinations at this stage (it was a book about studying you understand).  But, the writer went on, if you read the book a third and a fourth time, you take in much more from it.

That struck a chord with me, which is the reason why I changed my revision strategy from trying to condense the whole of the law of England and Wales onto one A4 sheet of paper so I could learn it off by heart, to reading around the subject a lot more.  I think it worked.  I passed the exams anyway.  But I am rambling.  Today I am going to tell you about The E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber.

The E Myth book is a good book.  A very good book.  Which is why, of course, it has sold over 1 million copies (as we are helpfully told on the cover).  It goes on a bit in places, and I did get rather tired of Sarah and her pies (read it and you will understand), but I feel he gets to the heart of things.

The book starts out by saying that most businesses fail within a few years (cue glow of smugness on my  part as I have been self employed now for over 14 years).  The reason they fail is that they don’t think about their business in the right way.  Everyone, says Gerber, who runs a business has three elements, three types of business person, warring within him:

• the entrepreneur
• the manager and
• the technician

The entrepreneur is the visionary.  He lives as it were, in the future working out what could be.  The manager sorts things out and organises them.  The technician does the work.

I have to say that I identified very strongly with the entrepreneur – who says Gerber, has a strong need for control, who creates a deal of havoc around him, and who often regards people as ‘problems who get in the way of the dream’.  I did actually laugh out loud when I read that (not a thing I do very often) as that is very me. As my husband would no doubt agree.

However I can see the other elements in me also.  I like systems.  I am a sole practitioner working without support staff – if I did not have systems and precedents I would never get anything done.  You need the systems in place, then you do not have to re-invent the wheel, and can find space and time for the dreaming and the thinking. Which for me is the most exciting and fulfilling part.

But, Gerber says, most business owners just carry on being technicians. Doing the work.  Because they are good cooks, or mechanics, or accountants, or whatever.  That is why they fail.  What you need to do, he said, is look at the business from the outside and set it up, with systems in place, so it can work without you if necessary.

The heart of the book is about franchising.  Looking at your business as a product in itself, something that is so well organised that it will work perfectly, like a well oiled machine, so that you can then eventually sell it for lots of money.

That sounds rather cold and clinical, which is not what Gerber (who is a bit of an old 1960s hippie at heart) means.  Far from it.  The system should be set up to be as caring as possible, so people enjoy working  in it and the customers enjoy using it.  He describes a hotel where customers are asked their preferences, which are then noted on the system and never forgotten.  The service is then tailored to the customer, so he feels cared for and looked after.

He also says that consistency is important.  Having systems in place to produce the perfect whatever (burger, hotel experience etc) so that this is reproduced *every time* without fail.  Customers will then appreciate the reliability and come back, again and again.

He is right of course.  That is a good way to set up a business, and will make it far less likely to fail.  Reading the book again for this review, I have rediscovered the setting up of systems part, the planning to provide the perfect experience for the customer.  Which is very timely as I am now planning a major change for my online legal service, so, hmmm.

So yes, highly recommended for all business owners and aspiring business owners. You can buy it here from Amazon.

And I think I had better read it again …

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Probably the best blogging site is Problogger which is  written by Australian blogger Darren Rowse.  He is a full time professional blogger who apparently makes a very good living from it.  If anyone is contemplating starting a new blog, I highly recommend an evening reading the Problogger site.

He has also written two books.  One is an e-book called 31 days to build a better blog, and is excellent.  I bought it some time ago, and often read it when I am stuck for ideas, as it gives me inspiration.  Although it is an electronic rather than a ‘real’ book, this is actually really useful, because it makes it so much easier to follow the many links out.

The other book is called ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income, and is also very good although not, for me, as useful as the 31 days book. But if you are thinking of blogging professionally, worth a read.

Finally Problogger has now started a blogging forum, which I joined when it was very cheap (I think the price has gone up substantially since).  It also is very helpful, as you can ask questions if you are stuck about something.

The next person whose blog has helped me is Grant Griffiths, a former American Attorney who blogs as Blog for Profit. His son, Clay, wrote the Headway theme which is used for this blog, and his blog has also been a bit of an inspiration to me. Perhaps in some ways more so than Problogger, as he understands lawyers. He has now given up the law and runs a business designing blogs, mainly I think for lawyers.

In October 2009  he ran a series, called 31 days to Kick your Blog in the Butt (not a title, I am sure, that would have ever been chosen by an British solicitor, but there you go, its another country over there), which was also extremely helpful, particularly as at that time my web designer and I were building my new Landlord Law Blog. After his 31 days, Grant too turned his series into an e-book, which is also highly recommended, and you can buy it from his web-site, along with a work book and helpful book on twitter.  Although actually you can also read the blog series here.

Those are the main two sites that I have used.  However there are several other sites which I have found very helpful.  Blogussion, which appears to be run by a  bunch of school boys and college students, is a brilliant site and just shows that we old ‘uns can learn a lot from the modern yoof.    Copyblogger has some great posts on writing, although recently I have been finding some of them a bit irritating.  Lawyerist is another blog about legal blogs, interesting but not as good as Blog for Profit.  Remarkable Communication is a helpful blog on marketing, particularly online marketing, and if we are talking about marketing, we also ought to mention Seth Godins blog, considered by many to be the master of marketing, and whose blog is good for ideas.

You will probably have noticed that none of these blogs are British.  I haven’t really found anything similar here, mainly I suppose because we have not taken up blogging to the same extent as in other countries, or have not been doing it for as long (I set up my Landlord Law blog in February 2006 and I was one of the first legal bloggers here, Problogger (an Australian)  however started way  back in 2002).

What do you think of these sites?  Had you come across them before?  Have you found any sites you would like to recommend?

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Here clients can post their problem to the site, discuss it with the lawyers registered, and then choose which one they want to use. It is completely free to clients, but the lawyers pay a modest fee (£50, or £150 for PI claims). There is also the option of the lawyer paying the client for the chance to take on their case (i.e. the money they would otherwise have paid to a claims company).

It is a good site for clients as they can shop around, see other clients recommendations, and talk (electronically) to law firms before making their choice. Both the lawyer and the client are anonymous until they agree to do business. The site is an international one so the client and the lawyer can be from anywhere in the world.

At the time of writing the site has only just launched so there are only a few law firms. However all firms should register as a matter of course – it costs nothing and could bring you in work, so why not?

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Susskind covers quite a wide range of legal IT related topics in the interview, but it is some of the comments at the end which are most worrying (for lawyers). Both he and his interviewer make the point that lawyers are not (on the whole) natural innovators and tend to be resistant to new developments, particularly if they are making a good income as they are.

However he believes (and I have to say that I agree with him) that technology and the internet will have huge implications for the profession, and it is worrying that the Law Society and the government are planning new rules and regulations for the future of the profession, without really taking these properly into account.

For example one thing he mentioned was shared knowledge on forums and how this may develop in the future. In fact however this is happening right now, as there are a number of consumer forums where people exchange information about legal matters, for example this forum here on tenancy deposits. Shared knowledge of this kind could well reduce the need to use qualified lawyers in the future.

The conclusion, more or less, was that there will always be a place for some lawyers and the subject is an interesting discipline in itself, but that the profession has probably passed its high point and things will never be the same again. He also made the point that new lawyers are entering an uncertain profession and many law students should be prepared to use their law degree for something other than practising as a lawyer.

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Run for many years by the superb Delia Venables (who runs the best legal links site on the internet) it won a major award a few years ago. Delia now runs the newsletter jointly with Nick Holmes (who also has his own site, Infolaw, which has been online since about 1995). It is snip at a mere £45 pa for six issues.

I have been a subscriber to the Internet Newsletter for more years than I care to think about, and it has always been interesting, informative, and thought provoking. For example in the current issue (May/June 2009) there are fascinating articles on LegalOnRamp, blogging for lawyers, writing for the internet, and email campaigns.

I cannot recommend the newsletter highly enough. If you are a solicitor and do not already subscribe you can do so here, or email delia@venables.co.uk.

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