I’m starting a bit of a personal mission right now, to improve my health, and a couple of the books I’m reading  that are intended to give me advice on being a healthier person, actually have some great advice that is applicable whether you are concentrating on self-improvement, weight loss or growing your business. I love that ideas for one part of my life can really help me in other areas.

For example, one of the big pieces of advice was about positive affirmations. I know affirmations can be powerful. I’ve read about it before, but have not ever gone really far in implementing what I’ve read. Silly, huh? I work hard on growing my business, I believe in myself, but I need to go one step further. I’m adding some great affirmation blogs to my reader right now, and I’m going to have the right affirmations for me, and for Halo Secretarial, set by the end of this week.

This is going to be great!

Working from home as a virtual legal assistant is not all work – no play! In fact, one of the best things about working for myself from home is the ability to have flexibility in my day. Today I have had quite a varied day already and it’s not even 2pm yet! I’ve done some client work, reviewed next week’s schedule on my calendar, bought buspasses for my kindergarten/grade two kiddos and had the pleasure of a phone conversation with Vicki Voisin of The Paralegal Mentor.

Next up in my day is a very rare evening out with my best friend and then a weekend of about half work and half fun.

If you want a little bit of relaxation this Friday afternoon, here are a couple of fun links for you:

Want to see a fun little graph of how the Internet sees You? Try this link (my graph is below, and semi-accurate, lol)

Some truly hilarious quotes over at The “Blog” of Unnecessary Quotes  (hat tip to @RandallMoeller)

And a couple of my favorite little jokes from a recent forwarded email. I never even READ forwarded joke emails normally, but this had me laughing hysterically (ok some of the funnier ones turn out not to be blog post appropriate, sorry, but still these are good!):

Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the “people you
may know” feature on facebook people that I do know, but i deliberately
choose not to be friends with?

I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on
shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my itunes.

It really pisses me off when I want to read a story on
CNN.com and the link takes me to a video instead of text.

Have a great weekend!!

This morning I was involved in a wonderful webinar all about finding and working with a virtual legal assistant. Larry of Rocket Matter included some poll questions, including one about support staff to lawyer ratios. This is an interesting topic to me, as I’ve actually got a really wide range of experience with respect to staffing ratios. My very first legal assistant position was one where there were three assistants and one lawyer. Then I worked in a firm where the ratio was generally two lawyers and one legal assistant and finally I worked somewhere where the official ratio was three staff to one lawyer, but due to general shortages, vacations and set-up there frequently was only one staff to every four lawyers or so.

Now, obviously I’m only talking about my experience but I can say that I think the first two firms were far better run than the last. In the first the lawyer kept very busy with clients. His staff could do everything else. In the second, a ratio of two to one actually kept the assistants both busy and happy, as they had more variety in their daily work routine. But when there are three or four lawyers to one support person? Things get missed, balls get dropped, lawyers do a lot of their own admin work. It was inefficient and created some serious morale issues for staff and lawyers alike.

Consider this when wondering whether a virtual legal assistant is right for your practice. If you get extra help will it make you more efficient? If you already have staff, could providing supplementary assistance make them more efficient? Correspondingly though, if you already have good processes in place and excellent administrative staff, don’t consider switching to a VLA to reduce costs. Depending on the size and style of your practice a virtual assistant may in fact not be necessary, or only needed on an occasional basis.

I read a post with some good points and law practices and efficiency over at The Virtual Lawyer.  Roger notes that to truly be efficient lawyers must leverage their time appropriately, whether by utilizing other people’s time, using appropriate technology or finding ways to package your services. Kathleen Brady shares some great suggestions about improving the productivity/efficiency of your law practice in her Law Practice Today article called Achieving Life/Work Balance Through Effective Time Management and in her post Read These 10 Secrets To (Fill in the Blank) Susan Cartier Liebel points out that good processes and choices will lead to a productive law practice, but also notes one of the most important points when it comes to growing your business: It Takes Time.

So if you want to improve the efficiency of how your practice is running, look at what you have in place, evaluate what tasks and work you need help with and then see if a virtual legal assistant might just be the perfect solution!

I was reading over at The Lawyerist this morning about the Ten Great Rules of Client Service, which reminded me that I want to order something to maybe give as a client gift and to use for promotional purposes in general. I’m planning on ordering some travel mugs with my logo on them, but I can’t decide! I’m probably ordering from this website, they are a Canadian site (easier for delivery to me) and have decent prices.
So far these are my top two choices, I’d love some input on your fave!

I like something with color, rather than a plain silver mug, as I think it may be slightly more attention grabbing!

Thanks to Rocket Matter, I’m participating in a webinar with Andrea Cannavina where you can learn all about choosing and working with a virtual legal assistant.

The webinar will be this Thursday at noon (EDT), which is 10 am if you are on mountain time like me!! It’s a free webinar, so if you have the time you should definitely join us. And if you don’t have the time but want to know more about partnering with a VLA, feel free to check out my series all about choosing and working with a virtual legal assistant, I have lots of great tips for you!

This weekend I was asked to do a job profile for a friend who is thinking about a career as a paralegal. Although my answers are somewhat atypical, being a self-employed legal assistant/paralegal, it was still an interesting experience to really take a few minutes to do a broad overview of what I’m doing, what I’ve done throughout my career and if I would do it again if my choices were different today.

I should have pointed the friend to a great blog that often profiles paralegals as a resource for learning more about her potential career path. Lynne DeVenny offers tons of helpful information and news items relating to the paralegal world, but my favorite posts on her blog are the paralegal profiles. It’s a great way to show the various choices within the profession that are available to someone who thinks that this is the career for them! Hmmm, think I better go shoot off a follow up email!!

Well, I’ve done it! One week down with a post each and every day for Blawger Survivor. And that means I made it even longer than the host of the contest, lol.

So far it has been a great reminder of how useful and interesting blogging can be. And I have read some wonderful posts from the other entrants in the contest. A couple of my faves:

• The Haiku post at Leadership, Women, Lawyers (short and sweet)
• Orientate Me at No Reins Girl (love the attitude!)
• D. Jill Pugh’s post about privacy and social networks (makes great points)
• And best for last? I think so! The Nutmeg Lawyer’s post Canada is Trying to Kill Us is hilarious (especially to me as a Canadian!!)

Do take the time to enjoy some of these posts this weekend and see you Monday (I won’t forget to post of course, I’m organized, so it’s in my calendar!)

Keeping organized and on top of projects is how I keep up with my growing virtual legal assistant business, three boys, a house, a dog and general life, especially with my husband regularly working out of town for weeks at a time.

I stay organized with a number of tools, each with its own purpose. I use Google Calendar a lot, because not only does it help me stay on top of meetings and appointments, but it also lets me share calendars with some clients, which allows us to plan and work together easily. I can access my Google calendar on any computer and even a mobile version on my phone’s web browser – perfect! If you are a student like, Izzie, 1L Poet or No Reins Girl, you may want to have a shared calendar with your study group even!

For keeping track of personal appointments I use both my Google Calendar and a family wall calendar. I used to only use the wall calendar for this, but learned the necessity of having personal appointments in my work calendar thanks to one incredibly frustrating double-booking experience.

In addition to my calendars, I use task lists to help me stay organized and on my game. I use the task list in my email system for a simple daily to-do list and I use the milestones and tasks within my project management system to stay on top of project deadlines. I also use a wall chalkboard for personal to-dos (yup, I like lists!!)

In general, I personally like cloud applications for organization and business management, but having a physical reminder in front of me (like a to-do list on the back of some scrap paper, or my wall chalkboard) is also very helpful.

The war over Microsoft Word that is. I was fascinated to see that Canadian firm i4i Inc. has won a permanent injunction against Microsoft in relation to a patent infringement issue dealing with custom xml translations.

I4i sued Microsoft in March, 2007, claiming the Redmond, Wash., company had infringed on a patent awarded in 1998 for manipulating complex data in electronic documents. The jury verdict had initially recommended damages in the amount of $200-million.

I’ll certainly be watching to see what happens, as it’s been indicated that Microsoft will appeal the verdict. Of course they will, right? Big money even for such a big company. For a little more on the topic have a look over at Jeff Krause’s Practice Management blog.

And on the topic of Word, can someone please tell the version on my laptop to stop causing Vista to freeze? Thanks!

Last week I participated in a really interesting call with Laura Lee Sparks about outsourcing. Obviously I’m a fan of lawyers outsourcing work to a virtual legal assistant, but there are so many other ways to outsource and thus streamline your business and hopefully increase your revenue. In fact, as a virtual assistant there are tasks I should be outsourcing!!

Some great examples:

• Bookkeeping/billing
• Web site design
• Client intake
• Document drafting
• PR
• Call answering
• Court filings

I already do outsource some of my web design needs; I had neither the ability nor the desire to spend hours and hours trying to design a pretty logo for example! I also use an accountant to help me with my taxes and am working on training someone to assist me with transcription eventually. What tasks are you outsourcing and which ones do you think you *should* be outsourcing, but currently you are muddling along with?

Another point of the discussion on outsourcing addressed where to find good people to outsource to. You don’t want to waste time on in effective outsourcing after all! I realized I had never really considered it but even some tools are a way of outsourcing, like using Ruby Receptionist for call answering. And the best way to find help is of course to go to your network and ask for reliable references! Just yesterday I went to my Twitter peeps and asked for suggestions for one of my client’s needs and quickly hooked her up.

Speaking of Twitter, I have noticed in checking out my Blawger Survivor companions and many of them have Twitter feeds in their sidebars – love it! Check the feeds out at  Two Lawyers in a Pod[Cast], The Connecticut Employment Law Blog,  Leadership, Women, Lawyers, No Reins Girl.   Twitter is my biggest online network and I love how involved so many lawyers seem to be getting in it. Okay, and I love that clients have found me on Twitter too!!