South Carolina Tax Attorney

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It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

    I have been reading the classic Dale Carnegie book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recently and came across a line that really hit home to me.  To paraphrase, it was the statement that you can make more friends in two months by being genuinely interested in people than you can in two years by trying to make people interested in you. 

    I have heard this said another way in the past: people don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care. 

    I believe that by showing your prospective clients that you are genuinely interested in them and helping them solve their problems you can build up your client base with great clients quicker than by tooting your own horn all the time.  I find this is pretty standard for all professionals - not just attorneys.  The feeling is that if I want someone to hire me, I need to tell them all of the great things about myself like how high I graduated in my undergraduate and law school classes, how many certifications or professional merits I have received, how many similar cases I’ve won, etc.  While this information is relevant and helps me to sell myself, what really sells the client is that you care enough to know what their problem is and that you know how to get in all of those personal highlights in a manner that shows them how it helps solve their problems rather than building up your ego in front of them. 

    How can you go about showing people how much you care?  Get involved in the community in similar areas that your law practice servcs.  This gives you an opportunity to speak to people in a non-threatening environment, without all of the formality of law books, suits and big desks, and just talk. 

    This thought goes against some advice I received in law school which was: "never have coffee with your clients."  I think the visiting attorney was trying to get through to us that we want our business relationships to remain business so we don’t internalize everything and take every set-back or loss personally.  I think there’s a way to show clients that your are genuinely interested in them and their problems without becoming so personally intertwined that we cannot focus on serving our clients.

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“You cannot solve a problem in the same state of consciousness in which the problem arose.”

- Albert Einstein

I came across this quote recently while attending a legal conference. It immediately hit me how close to home this hits for a lot of my clients. All of my IRS tax resolution clients have a problem. Sometimes they have been dealing with the issues for years. I can see how many clients get stuck in these situations because they never change their level of consciousness. They never get past some of the initial issues – even when the IRS tells them no matter what excuse they have they will still be liable for the taxes, penalties, and interest.

Once you can raise your level of consciousness where you can get past seeing the problems exclusively and how they arose, and begin to look for solutions to the problems you can get to a place where you are ready to solve the problem.

Hopefully, as an attorney, I can assist my clients in raising their level of consciousness by providing them competent counsel, good legal advice and all of the information they require to get make a decision that will allow them to solve their problem.

I just finished reading the new book by Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week, where Mr. Ferriss talks about how he broke free from his job working crazy hours each day, sleeping under his cube at night, and never doing anything he wanted to the “job” of his dreams where he is able to manage a global business from anywhere in the world in less than four hours per week.  Tim tells of how he was about to go crazy when he decided to drop all of his work and leave the country for a much needed break.  He made a promise to himself that he would only check his e-mail once per week.  The book is not a time management book, but rather it is designed to explain how you can reduce the amount of “work” that you do by having low cost help take as much away from you as possible and free you up for the important things.  One of the ideas that really hit home with me was you don’t have to be at work from 8:30 to 5:30 each day if you don’t have the work to do.  Do your work and get out of there.  I have caught myself many times in the past thinking up crap to do just so I could stay at the office and get the full fourty hours in. 

Now when I think about that and compare it to my law practice, I see many similarities to Tim’s old job.  I have to work a lot of hours to make sure I get the work done, but also to stay informed, to stay on top of the law, and then to take care of the administrative office stuff.  I sure spend a lot more time at the office than I do at home.  When I think about how possible it would be to run a law firm working four hours per week, I have to admit that would be a daunting challenge - and nearly impossible.  While it may not be totally impossible, because, hopefully, you’re spending at least four hours each week meeting with prospective clients, but there are ways to increase your productivity, decrease amount of time spent on “junk” and get paid for providing your professional service and not based on how many hours you work to complete it. 

I recently read a blog post about “The 4-Hour Work Week” and another interesting series of posts about the perfect law practice over at the Lawyer Profit Systems blog.  It’s my goal moving forward in my practice to define my ideal practice and develop a way to make that fit my ideal lifestyle that I want rather than let it control me.  More on that to come. 

In my prior posts, I laid out my 10 steps for lawyers becoming better salesmen.  The first step is to find out what the client wants.  The second step in the process is to figure out how to provide the service your prospective client wants.  Since you did such a good job listening in the first place, you now know most of the details you will need as you progress through your representation.  There are always several potential solutions to your client’s problems and being able to navigate through all of the possibilities to provide the best outcome for your client is essential. 

I think this is the step where you need to actually know the law - or be able to learn it.  Being a new lawyer, I come into contact with areas of law that I am unfamiliar with, or unique situations in my practice area very frequently.  Rather than sending all of these prospective clients away to more experienced attorneys, or attorneys with specific knowledge of a practice area, if I can spot the issues then I can work hard and research the specific problem to represent my clients. 

One of the most successful companies in the world is Google.  They have the third most visited web site in the world according to Alexa.com.  But their website is one of the most simple sites you will find online.  There are probably 3 or 4 elements.  A title graphic, search box, some buttons and a couple of links across the bottom.  This is a theme among many of the top websites and companies.  Simplicity. 

As a lawyer, my business gets very complex.  My firm has over 200 active cases and I am the only attorney at this time.  I get spread thin, and I am looking for ways to simplify my work so I can increase my efficiency and do more of the things I want to do.  Earlier, I wrote a post about using your employees efficiently and well.  I also think that you should use technology to be more efficient.  I have a long way to go in this arena.  I don’t have a blackberry, or even a palm pilot.  My laptop is 4 years old and is dying a slow death.  However, I recently discovered a new online tool that will prove to be useful for lawyers, realtors, business people, and pretty much anyone else.  One thing I found that I was doing all the time was thinking of great ideas, trial strategies, important deadlines and then I would have to scramble to find a pen and piece of paper.  Most of the time I had these epiphanies, I was driving.  Recently, I discovered Jott.com.  This is a pretty cool service.  It allows you to call the Jott toll free number from your cell phone and speak a message.  That message is then transcribed and sent to your e-mail address or any other e-mail address that you have in your Jott address book.  For example, last week I had to travel about an  1 1/2 hours away for a seminar, but on the way I thought of some work that needed to be done at the office, so I call Jott and had my idea transcribed and sent to my paralegal.  A few minutes later she received my e-mail and was able to take care of what I needed. 

The only problem that I have encountered so far is that the transcription is a little less than perfect.  Some of my messages just don’t make any sense at all.  But don’t worry.  In the e-mail message, it also includes the recorded message, so your intended target will be able to listen to your message if they cannot deciper what you were trying to get across to them.

Good luck simplifying your life.  Do you have any ideas that can make your business or life simpler?