It’s not even surprising anymore for me to find interesting articles about lawyers and their use of Twitter.  After the great (and still growing!) list over at JDScoop I personally gained several followers from the legal field and found several new people I wanted to follow as well.

Ever since there has been an increasing number of fabulous articles about how Twitter can benefit legal practices.  Thanks to a couple of tweets (hat tips to @StephKimbro’s retweet of a comment by @kevinokeefe!) I just read a very interesting article over at Lawyers USA about the growing number of lawyers using Twitter to network and market.

I know I only recently I was contracted by a new client who tweeted about needing a virtual assistant. I responded and the rest is history! So for anyone who is still just thinking about using Twitter, or who maybe doesn’t feel they are realizing Twitter’s potential, come on over to Twitter, sign up if you need to and follow me!

Oh and if you need a guide to using Twitter I’ve got a couple places you should check out. Darren Rowse (of Problogger fame) has a great site called TwiTip full of fabulous tips for using Twitter. Also, Grant Griffiths has a really great series called Twitter for Lawyers on his Blog for Profit site.

Hope to tweet with you soon!

Do you run a solo practice, but have more work than you can handle? Or do you have a full time in-house legal assistant that can’t keep up with your busy workload? Or even a practice that is just getting going and you need help ramping up so that you do have too much business?  A virtual legal assistant may be just the solution in any of these situations! That’s the beauty of virtual assistance, it is a flexible solution that can fit so many needs.

So for example maybe you are a lawyer who doesn’t think you need a full-time assistant.  Do you do all your own typing? Research? Email? How much time does it cost you every day? In a previous post I addressed this lost time cost and demonstrated the cost effectiveness of hiring a virtual assistant to increase your productivity.

Do you have a full-time legal assistant or paralegal already? Think you don’t need any more help? You know in my years as an in-house legal assistant the most effective practice I worked in was one with one lawyer and three assistants.  So much work got done!! That particular lawyer utilized dictation to his advantage because he realized he spoke far faster than he typed.  Isn’t that true of most of us? And with the digital dictation options available it is very easy to send your virtual legal assistant instructions via dictation or to have them transcribe lengthy memoranda, court documents or agreements.

And if you are just getting started you can partner with a VA who offers some marketing suggestions and works with you to grow your network. I bet she’ll suggest you try Twitter!! Or you can get a good working relationship established and have your VA work just a few hours a month to start and eventually add hours as your practice grows.

There are plenty of other ways to utilize a virtual legal assistant. You may partner with a VLA only for large files or projects, specific research assignments or even vacation or sick leave coverage of your in-house staff. I hope you’ll think about taking advantage of the wonderful resources offered by virtual assistants - and if you are thinking of hiring one, don’t forget to check out my main site!

I love working as a virtual assistant, but there are things I miss from my days in a law office environment.  One of these is the legal research I was sometimes able to assist with.  For me, it was a really fascinating aspect of my job.  Probably partly because I enjoy reading so much that I happily read anything and everything. I also enjoy puzzles and solving things, so reading caselaw to find the nuggets of information that could help or hurt our case was a very rewarding task.

Of course as a virtual assistant I can still do legal research.  I can access online legal databases like CanLii or NexisLexis.  I can search through decisions on some of the court sites (like the Supreme Court decisions). I just need someone who wants me to do it for them!  I even would enjoy going to the law library if the need ever arises.

This morning (courtesy of a tweet from @DToddSmith) I read a Law.Com article by C.C. Holland called Where Are All The Female Law Bloggers?  It was a great article and while the stats are a little discouraging, that doesn’t mean women law bloggers aren’t out there! I personally follow several wonderful female law bloggers, and I know there are many more out there!

If you look at the ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory you will often see a woman’s law blog in the most popular category - in fact one of my favorites often holds one of the top spots in that category - Susan Cartier Liebel’s Build a Solo Practice LLC. And today at least there were a couple of other women in the top ten: Ann Bartow’s Feminist Law Professors and Althouse by Ann Althouse. Daily Kos is on the list and it has a female executive editor and several women who are contributing editors.

If you want to read some wonderful posts by female law bloggers check out this list from Law.Com.  Maybe they aren’t 50% of law bloggers - but they are out there and they are well worth reading!

I know many of you lawyers out there are realizing the advantages of blogging, every day it seems I find a new (at least new to me!) law blog out there.  Just this week I discovered Lindsey Krolik and MamaLaw.

I bet many of you are inspired by law bloggers like Grant Griffiths, Carolyn Elefant or Susan Cartier Liebel. Looking at someone else’s blog is a great starting point, but after that you still need to actually get your own blog set up, start posting and try and attract some readers. I was reading a great post today over at Chris Brogan’s blog, 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level.  It’s great for current bloggers, but actually even better for prospective bloggers, as it is best to start out on the right foot in your blogging attempt.  You will make mistakes, we all do, but at least you can avoid some of the pitfalls.

I think all of Chris’s tips are helpful, but if you are just starting out I really, really recommend that you look at tips #4, 6, 11 and 12:

If you’re going to be a professional about your blog, carve out the time to do it right. Never, ever, ever post a “sorry I haven’t posted lately” blog post again. Ever.

It’s okay to use a personal voice. In fact, there’s no point blogging if you’re going to write like a cold robot. But keep personal and useful in balance.

Get your own unique URL. It matters in the long run, especially should you choose to change hosts. For instance, if you move off a blogger account at *.blogspot.com , you lose all link equity and page rank for that domain. This means you’d have to start again from scratch.

Consider moving to a hosted blog

I regularly search for new law blogs to follow in my google reader and I can say that irregular posting and lack of personal voice are two things I notice far too often.  Not much point in subscribing to your blog if you only post 4 times per year or you only post reprints of decisions.  Add some commentary, add your opinion, post at least once a week if you can - and more is better!

As for the unique url/hosted blog - really it’s important people.  There are options that aren’t quite the same but pretty good, but if you go with them (ie a site like typepad) you can find yourself stuck there because you don’t want to lose your traffic later.   And while I think Typepad has a lot of benefits, it’s not cheap, especially if you decide to go with something past their “basic” offering.  If you find a reasonable host and do your own wordpress, moveable type or something newer like Habari it can cost you around $100 to $150 a year, including your domain name! And there are some beautiful free themes available (I love these ones!) Currently I use wordpress and LOVE it - I had no html/css type of knowledge before and yet in a very short time I learned to manage and update my wordpress and even alter my themes a little!

Good luck in your blogging journey!

I was on Twitter earlier today, checking out some new followers and I have to send a quick thanks out to a couple of the lawyers I noticed following me today (yep that’s you Stephanie Caballero, Gerry Riskin and Adam Dlin)!  It’s nice to think I’m starting to reach some of my target audience!  (**found out that my new followers are courtesy of this great post at JDScoop!)

Also on Twitter today I found this article about Twitter!  It’s a great read, especially if you are new to my favorite microblogging/social networking platform.  There is one point in particular I think we all need to remember when using ANY new tool, it takes time to see results.  As noted in the article:

many professionals consider Twitter pretty much worthless on first look. But those who stay for about a month start understanding the value. I didn’t think much of Twitter for 60 days, until my casual mention that I was in Boston landed me a dinner with a nearby friend who saw my post. Since then, I have been invited to speaking engagements in five countries and even get to write a guest column for a prestigious old media publication.

Remember that old, old saying - good things come to those who wait.  Twitter is definitely like that - you don’t get 1000 followers in your first week (not usually anyway!) and you don’t make sales left, right and centre.  But if you interact with your customers and have some patience Twitter will be good for business!

If you are interested check it out and feel free to follow me on Twitter!

Thanks to Jordan Furlong of Law 21, I found this recent article from the American Bar Association, which is very positive sign of the growing acceptance of legal outsourcing, including outsourcing to non-lawyer support staff such as virtual legal assistants and virtual paralegals.

Lawyers with concerns about the ethics should be reassured by the ABA’s opinion on the matter.  A couple of points noted in the ABA article:

U.S. lawyers are free to outsource legal work, including to lawyers or nonlawyers outside the country, if they adhere to ethics rules requiring competence, supervision, protection of confidential information, reasonable fees and not assisting unauthorized practice of law.

And this:

Outsourcing can reduce client costs and enable small firms to provide labor intensive services such as large, discovery intense litigation, even though the firms might not maintain sufficient ongoing staff to handle the work, according to a new ethics opinion issued today.   Ethics Opinion 08-451 details ethics obligations of lawyers and firms that do elect to outsource legal work.

With a recognition of the cost benefits to law firms AND approval as to the ethics of legal outsourcing I think more and more lawfirms will start to take advantage of outsourcing arrangements.  2009 may just be a real turning point in the outsourcing field.

I found this article recently on the CBA website - A to Z: 26 Trends for the Legal Profession.  It’s a fascinating read and it posed the question - which trends matter the most to you? If you give it a read I’d love to hear your opinion!

For me, a few of the mentioned trends really stood out as areas in which the contracting of a virtual legal assistant could help legal practitioners manage and grow their business.

B is for BLOGS

You need to write your own posts of course, but you can get a virtual assistant to help you with research, coming up with some topic ideas, proofreading, managing comments and spam and monitoring google alerts for mentions of your company and blog.

H is for HOME

Do you work from home or a small office? If you do, maybe you’ve realized you don’t have much room for office/support staff.  A virtual assistant gives you a lot of flexibility to get help when you need it, without worry about them invading your physical space.

O is for Outsourcing

Outsourcing your administrative and paralegal work to a virtual legal assistant is a tool I really think lawyers should start opening up to.  Save some money, some on carbon emissions by eliminating commutes, save your time since your VA is going to be ready to hit the ground running and get the work done!

Interestingly, the article I mentioned is not that recent, but most of the items are still applicable and often have not been embraced by lawyers.  There are opportunities for those who have vision - reach out and grab them!

Check out my guest post about virtual assistance this week over at Grant Griffiths’ Home Office Lawyer. Grant was kind enough to ask for a guest post from me - I just love his work! Grant also has a couple of other sites you may want to check out G2 Web Media and Home Office Warrior.

Have a wonderful long weekend everyone! I’m going to enjoy it - we’re having a birthday party for our just turned four year old and getting ready to send the biggest boy to grade one!

Not too long ago I wrote this post on the financial cost of hiring a virtual assistant. In today’s post I’ll address a different kind of cost - the cost of time spent unnecessarily.

How much time did you spend on email this week? How many emails are sitting in your inbox? Have you struggled with formatting your documents in a time crunch or have you missed sending invoice reminders because you are too busy to get to them? Do you have a regular assistant but she too is overwhelmed with tasks?

Most of us feel like we could use more time in our days, but we rarely realize how much can be delegated if we find someone reliable, dedicated and trustworthy to take on some of the burden. The right virtual assistant will help you streamline the running of your business or your law practice and you will have more time in your day finally!

I read a great article today from Law Practice Today where one lawyer documented her first use of a virtual legal assistant and how quickly it lead to an ongoing partnership with a VA, as she realized the potential benefits were significant. One thing you might note in this article is that the lawyer needed assistance on an urgent basis - something a virtual assistant can often easily step in and provide. Virtual assistants each set their own working hours, but many of us are open to assisting after regular office hours, on weekends and on a rush basis.

I challenge those of you who think you don’t “need” a virtual assistant, but who are running a business, to document over the next few days how much time is spent on tasks that could be delegated - whether that is your email, document proofing and formatting, calling a client to schedule a meeting or doing a draft of court documents from your client meeting notes. Realize that if you gave clear instructions to a qualified virtual assistant that you could save all that time and put it to wonderful use - or you could just enjoy some free time!