A collection of 23 posts in the “how-to” style

Categorical “best practices” often leave me disdainful and recommendations made when the recommender does not know the context of a law department leave me dubious. Yet as a consultant of 20 years’ experience advising lawyers on ways to manage better, it turns out that I have written a passel of “how-to” posts. Each of the following 23 posts written since May 11, 2007, and some earlier posts cited during that period, offers a number of ideas for how to improve a particular management action.

Here are the posts with their topics in alphabetical order and for many of the them the number of suggestions I make (See my posts of Nov. 8, 2007: align with clients, 8; Nov. 8, 2007: create a balanced scorecard, 8; June 20, 2007: survive the arrival of a new boss; July 9, 2007: reduce conflicts among reports, 5; June 26, 2007: get individual lawyers to care about cost control; Aug. 26, 2005: measure delegation to paralegals; Nov. 7, 2007: be more productive with email and 10 references cited, 4; Jan. 6, 2006: calculate the fully-loaded cost per hour of inside lawyers; May 28, 2007: handle headhunter calls, 5; Dec. 11, 2006: learn more from invoices; Nov. 13, 2007: measure investments in knowledge management; Jan. 30, 2006: integrate clients with litigation; July 29, 2007: run better meetings, 6 and Nov. 18, 2007 and April 2, 2007 with 10 references; June 14, 2007: reduce weaknesses of performance metrics, 7; June 12, 2005: prepare for retirement of a veteran lawyer; Oct. 26, 2007: prepare better RFPs; Nov. 5, 2007: get more from software demos, 5, plus five references; Nov. 7, 2007: relieve stress, and March 9, 2007: evaluate the effectiveness of training.).