Congratulations!  You’re about to wrap up another year.  Hopefully, it was productive and profitable.  I’m proud to say my firm had another year of double-digit growth.  If your 2016 was strong, you probably had a solid business plan in place.  Much of the consulting work I did for my clients, focused on practice management.  It was especially true for my solo practitioners.

Note:  My article was originally published by the Louisville Bar Association (Bar Briefs, December 2016, Page 7).

If you’ve ever taken a family vacation, you know how difficult it can be to lug all of your baggage to the car and through the airport.  Once you’ve handed it off at the counter, there’s an instant feeling of relief.  There’s freedom in checking your mental baggage as well.

If you feel as if you’re lugging too much mental baggage (it’s easy to do if you’re running a practice), consider a technique I use with many of my clients.

Find the biggest white board you have and divide it into 3 vertical columns:  Admin, Lawyering and Building.  Your goal is to offload all of that mental baggage.  It’ll help you to visualize areas/tasks that are weighing you down.  At the same time, simply capturing those problem areas is the 1^st step to bringing a little order to the chaos. Read more →