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welcome to an exciting new feature of the New Jersey State Bar Association website we're now offering with affinity consulting a new practice management advisory portal called the practice HQ and my name is Jeff Shamburger I work with affinity consulting and I'd like to walk you through the features available on this new practice HQ website so first of all to get to the website you would go to the normal NJ s be a.com and it will be linked to from there so super easy to find once you land on the practice HQ you will see the page on the screen now and this is where we're going to start together so you can see at the top that this is of course a free resource there's no additional charge no added fees or anything like that so everything on this portal is completely free to bar members and as it says there we provide all sorts of written material videos and other resources additionally in some of the most valuable tools that we found for other Bar Association's are the email hotline and the remote consultations and you just have to click on either one of those buttons to quickly engage the experts that we have an affinity consulting on your legal management and technology questions so for example if I go to this email hotline area and I click where it says click here it fires up an email window and it will send that email off to our experts here at affinity who will evaluate your question and respond within 48 hours one of the interesting things here is that there are a couple of different items that folks might be pointed to when they use the email hotline one would of course be resources available on the practice age you the second one would be knowledge that our experts at affinity have accumulated but is not particularly noted here in the practice HQ so if you write to us and say for example what's the best note-taking app on an iPad for example well we have a difference of opinion between a few of us here at affinity but we could give you a couple of choices on that so that would just be knowledge that we have innately and then of course there might be questions you would ask that would be more Bar related and so we might point you to resources that the New Jersey Bar has already made available or has on their website in which case then we would direct you to those resources the bar has for you as members with the remote consultations what you would do is simply click this link here and it will take you to a bookings web page and that bookings web page is hosted by office 365 what it allows you to do is book 30-minute consultations with our affinity experts on whatever topic you have so it is going out and it's pulling in the available experts at affinity and they're available times and so for example if we wanted to book a 30-minute consultation today the day I'm recording this video we have several available slots one of the one of the nice things here is that if you pick a time say if we pick 12:30 on February 25th then you can scroll down you would fill out your name email how you would like us to contact you usually we would give you a phone call if you tell us in advance that you want to show us something that's oil with your system we might arrange a go-to meeting or a another remote session so that we could see your screen and help you through whatever issue you're experiencing nice thing is when you fill this out you schedule the appointment it sends an appointment reminder not only to the person you're going to be speaking with but it also sends one to use so assuming you're using an electronic calendar and you keep all of your appointments there it will go on to your calendar and you can know exactly when the person will reach out to you below the email hotline and the remote consultation options are different categories that the bar has created for written materials and links that we at affinity have provided so we've sort of set this up as the life cycle of a law firm so if you're just coming out of law school maybe you're opening a firm maybe you're leaving an established practice to create your own practice in which case then you would also be opening a firm or maybe you're further along in your career and you're looking to sell your practice or transition out of active practice into into retirement in which case for those interested in opening or succession planning or closing a firm you could go ahead and click on the opening slash closing firm it's going to load up the page for opening or closing law firm it gives you a description of the content of these materials sort of what their approach is what their target is and then we've broken down the materials into different classifications so for example we have white papers on basic accounting we have a discussion of how to build a technology budget and maybe we have a discussion of notebook PCs or desktop PCs all these sorts of white papers go into considerations you might want to have front of mine when opening a practice particularly so if we for example we click on the checklist on starting a firm you'll see it brings up a list of considerations that you would want to focus on when starting a firm so what sort of formation structure you're going to have what's the business structure going to be where are you going to get the funds to start up this new entity how are you going to find an accounting professional to help you manage the the tax and other business operations under compensation you might want to consider of course the ownership structure of the firm if you're going out as a solo might make it fairly easy but there could still be some considerations you would want to focus on as far as entity structure and if you're adding or starting with additional employees there are certainly many things to consider with respect to compensation and benefits going on down we have accounting and billing considerations TVA being time billing and accounting for those of you not of the industry jargon and it asks questions regarding simply setting up new bank accounts of course if you're starting a new law firm you're going to want not only an operating account but also a trust account or an IOLTA account as as the term of art and further on down different insurance policies you may wish to have what sort of procedures would you have for billing what kind of reports do you want to see that your business is producing as far as revenue or number of new clients in the door etc etc so you want to give some thought to what sort of reports you want to see and that might help drive considerations as to perhaps what sort of practice management software or accounting software you might want going back to the opening or closing or affirm we have additional checklists down there such as I mentioned earlier the succession planning so if I click on succession planning for example we get a nice succession planning checklist what should you think about if you're looking to wind down a practice you'd have to do obviously some things with client information can you know ongoing cases and the like there's going to be issues of digital assets as it says there so everything from the email accounts that you use as a business to communicate with clients to the domain to the bank accounts to who handles and processes credit cards assuming you accept credit card payments and then on down there of course all sorts of tax and employee issues related to any sort of succession planning in this checklist gives you an idea of what you should think about in those situations going back to the practice HQ top level we also have under these eight categories that are listed here client development so if you're going out on your own for the first time either starting a new firm or hanging out your shingle for the first time you're going to want to think about how you can go about getting and retaining clients and so we've broken these categories down into marketing social media client relations communications and workflows so under the getting clients we've got some white papers listed there as far as steps for doubling referrals how to guide marketing on a on a Facebook page for example how to convert prospects and leads into paying clients and then we've also got a sample client intake form which might be particularly helpful so when I bring that up we put it up there that you're going to you know put your logo in and then it asks for all the sort of basic information you would want to collect what a client walks through your door and it wants to engage you for for a matter going back one step to client development let's take a look at keeping clients and under keeping clients we have a white paper a checklist on email etiquette and this could be particularly helpful for folks and it goes through things that you would want to consider with regard to emails in a professional capacity this is particularly useful for those of you just starting out in practice so if you're coming out of college and then law school and you want to bring more of a business voice to your emails this gives you some great guidance there and then going back to the keeping of clients we have these comparison charts for example so you want to be able to meet with clients and you of course want to be able to communicate with them so there are a couple of different tools out there that are very popular for meeting so if you need web meeting services we've done a comparison of the various web meeting providers out there and if I go ahead for example and click on this it's going to load up a comparison chart of the various web meeting services out there so the one that I'm most familiar with is go to meeting so maybe some of you have heard of that but there are a bunch of others out there and they're you know reasons to consider each of them if for example ringcentral is going to also host your telephone service for your office maybe there's a deal if they provide web meeting services as well and then of course there are larger players out there like Adobe and Cisco so depending on the size of the meetings you would tend to hold maybe they might make more sense we also have comparison charts for answering services so maybe you've heard of Ruby receptionists which is now just Ruby or perhaps Smith AI these are different sorts of services that can answer phones for you they serve as virtual receptionist they can take down client information confirm appointments all sorts of stuff like that and then on the last comparison chart on this particular module we have the voice over internet feature comparison chart so for those of you unfamiliar with VoIP what it means is that your telephone service runs through the same lines or same provider as your internet service nice thing about that particularly if you're interested in being a remote working attorney is that your business phone number travels with either your computer and/or your smart phone and/or your iPad so you can make calls that look like they're coming from the office no matter where you are super handy and super useful so those are some good ways to us to stay in touch with clients and build those long-term relationships going back to the main page for practice HQ we have a section for documents so of course for most attorneys the end product of their work is a document whether you're doing an estate plan or perhaps you're forming a new entity for a business in many ways whatever the attorney does is eventually are effectively memorialized in a document and so we've got three different areas of document issues to consider in the practice of law versus document assembly so if you're producing the same document repeatedly and you want to do it faster and with greater accuracy so that you don't have to constantly check for correct pronouns or verb conjugations or things like that under the document assemble the module we have different papers that discuss how you go about implementing a document assembly system and sort of the reasons that you should consider it and then we've got a checklist right below that that goes through the various major providers of document assembly services and we've also got a checklist that will start you down the road to creating your own automated documents and you can start for example with this white paper here on template building which I think is really the foundational value for a law firm when they consider a document assembly so document assembly of course can mean anything from filling in fields that the computer answers for you all the way up to making complex logic decisions based on the sort of entity you're forming and how many members or managers or whatever there might be but either one of those whether the simplest or the most complex start with starts with the idea that you have all of your language in one place and so even if you just create a simple word processor document with your language in one place you've made a tremendous step forward in how quickly you can go from zero to a completed document and this checklist walks you through the steps both to get all of that language in a single place and reconcile it with the different different starter documents you've done in the past all the way up through actually automating it in a drafting system under the document management module we have different discussions of how you can control and get your hands around get your arms around all of the documents and papers that come in to your practice so whether you're receiving PDFs via email whether you're receiving paper mail whether you're generating documents in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect or whatever all of those documents have to live somewhere the smaller the firm the less complex perhaps the solution you need so we talked about everything for example with managing your documents without a document management system and the fundamental part of that discussion talks about how you can use a sync service like Dropbox or onedrive or any number of other ones out there as your central repository it's going to live on your computer it's also going to be backed up to the cloud and then you can share there's individual affordable with other folks either co-counsel or clients etc for those of you in larger practices or with a more robust document handling needs we talked about managing your documents with a document management system and then further on down we have comparison charts of cloud document storage providers so think onedrive dropbox etc and comparison charts of document management system so world Docs net Docs I manage the the major players in that particular sphere and then finally under the documents module we have a cybersecurity and disaster preparedness grouping and this is a sort of stuff everyone needs to think about nobody really wants to think about but it talks about for example having a three to one backup strategy which is an excellent very simple way to explain how you should be caring for your electronic data three copies of your data to different types of storage media so flash drive and spinning hard drive or flash drive on the computer and cloud storage and then one of those backups is off-site we've got some excellent materials on email encryption and how you handle that of course email such a common practice throughout the business world and and in legal we have this special requirement that we got to make sure we don't accidentally or intentionally reveal information about a client that they did not authorize and so we go into how you can work with with the email programs out there and the encryption services that are available for attorneys so that you can communicate via email in a safe and secure manner with your clients going on down to the checklists we've got some checklists here that go through how you can prepare for different disaster scenarios with tornado or winter weather everything out there that you should probably consider from a natural disaster or external event kind of scenario and then with cybersecurity in mind our comparison charts focus on password managers encryption services and a virtual private network so VPNs for those of you not familiar with it would be a discussion of how if you're working at a library or a coffee shop or some other public place that when you get on that Wi-Fi you're in the same so t of network pool as everyone else at that building how do you make sure that nobody else in that building is snooping on your traffic or in your communicating and VPNs provide a secure what they call a tunnel between your computer and some external computer out there on the internet so nobody physically near you can snoop on what you're doing and going back up to the top level of practice HQ under technology this goes through a lot of different subcategories of Technology some of which we've touched on a little bit already others of which we have not so under hardware and networking for example we have all sorts of white papers on guides to purchasing laptops desktops even down to simple things like what surge suppressor or uninterruptible power supply should you think about so if you're interested in getting the the skinny quick answer on what sort of hardware you should consider I would start under the hardware and networking area practice management this goes into not only what considerations should be forefront of mind when considering a practice management solution either a new one or implementing one for the first time we also have comparison charts there that discuss the two main classes of practice management software now the cloud based practice management software and the traditional server based products that have existed for some time and of course there are always pluses and minuses to each of those under the document management software tab we've got some of the same items that we talked about earlier with respect to managing your documents with or without a document management system and then checklist in comparison charts related to document management a bit of a review here for document assembly as well where we talk about again template building and how you can work through for example automation stumbling blocks and then how to walk yourself with a checklist through creating your first template of all of your information and then beginning the process of automating that template document under time billing and accounting software we walk you through the basics of law office time million accounting we talk about how you do budgeting and account management and then we even talk about time versus value billing a bit more of a management concept but is more and more clients demand that attorneys give them upfront and I'd a firm idea of what it's going to cost more and more firms are moving the value billing and so that's something you probably want to take a look at and then again checklists to walk you through different items like year ends accounting issues and comparison charts so again just like with the practice management software the time billion accounting software is now also something that can be either cloud based or server based as servers having been the traditional route so there are different different avenues there that you can explore on those comparison charts cybersecurity and disaster preparedness is what we just covered a minute ago so just another way to get there because of course one of the things that that would be most in danger of damage from some sort of natural disaster or some other event of that type would be anything in a physical office so we've we've put that here to talk about how you might want to think about in conjunction with a document management system becoming a more paperless practice if you're not already a paperless practice under office 365 we have one simple link and this takes you to a comparison chart hosted by one of our partner companies Excellus it goes through the different office 365 options that are available at the different price tiers so if you haven't considered office 365 which is a subscription-based way of obtaining the latest Microsoft Word Excel PowerPoint outlook those programs I would take a look at office 365 for that and then the software features in comparison charts these this is just a simple link that puts all of our major comparison charts in a single place so answering services cloud document storage a lot of these are available under their respective subcategories on other pages but if you just want to find the comparison charts they're all here in one place under the software and services features comparison charts going back up to the top level of practice HQ we've got the button here for money and so this is going to talk a lot about time billing accounting you can see their trust accounting and productivity and reporting so under time billing and accounting we've already had a bit of this before but you see the same similar white papers that we've talked about previously regarding the basics of law office TBA managing client funds and then of course the checklist on reconciliation doing some year-end Accounting cleanup and then our respective comparison charts under trust accounting we've got a couple of very simple very straightforward papers one of which is just an explanation of client trust funds always good to refresh oneself on that and then under the checklist we've got a trust reconciliation summary so if you need some guidance on doing a trust account reconciliation that checklist will help you with that under productivity and reporting we talk about time versus value billing and then also a law office or law firm financial reporting so one of the things that you should absolutely consider either when evaluating new practice management and accounting software or if you get if you're going on your own something to think about for the first time would be what sort of reporting do you want to get out of the software so you're going to put a bunch of data in there as far as clients where you spend your time what kind of matters they are all that sort of stuff what sort of reports do you want to get out of that and before you commit yourself to a particular product make sure that that product is capable of producing the reports that you want to see as a person who owns or participates at a high level in a business and that's effectively what your law firm is similar themes under the management we've got leadership and process mapping leadership has a lot of the time-honored discussions about how one handles the leadership role in a law firm so the leadership conundrum is a great white paper on that and then under process mapping for those of you who've never done process mapping it sounds a little overwhelming but what it really is is essentially creating a recipe for each thing or each event that your firm or your practice does so this is particularly valuable for those of you who are as we started out talking about open and closing firms for those of you who are thinking of succession or selling a practice in order to make your practice more valuable one of the best things that you can do in in addition to just having a rolodex of contacts and clients is to have everything that you do document it and so that you can tell a new attorney who wants to buy your practice that when I go about creating a an estate plan for somebody here are the questions I ask here are the three meetings I have here is the strategy in structure that I use for preparing a will and the trust and so on down the line and so you can then sell with that practice not just your client list but also you cookbook your recipes of how you go about from point A to point B point B being a finished product for the client and then the comparison charts again just a quick button here takes you to the same place we were a little bit ago this gives you our main comparison charts and makes it quick and easy to access there and then finally and this is a barb benefit that's coming straight from your your bar association and that is the Learning Library so if we click on that that will give you access to a bunch of bar content produced by your friends at the New Jersey State Bar that is actually substantive law related so they've got podcasts here if you haven't taken up podcast listing I strongly encourage you to do so it's very great I I would listen to it all the time now instead of terrestrial radio so they've got the sidebar podcasts here they also have different guides for new attorneys and for solos and small firms and then they've linked to fast case community net and the New Jersey Institute for continuing legal education all great substantive law resources linked directly from practice HQ and then the last thing I'll mention here on the main practice HQ page is there at the bottom it is affinity University for New Jersey State Bar members and so this is an absolutely free part of the practice HQ as a member of the New Jersey State Bar you can go to affinity University and sign up for it you enter this code here NJ Bar member and that takes the price to zero and it gives you free access to all the great content at affinity University affinity University for those of you unfamiliar with it is a legal learning tool so it focuses on the software and services that legal organizations use such as everything from net documents to manage document management systems to Clio for solos my firm practice management all the way back to Microsoft Word for any sort of document drafting the the videos on this affinity University site range in length from about three minutes all the way up to about an hour and they are targeted videos so if you want to know for example how to insert a watermark in a document in Microsoft Word nice short two or three minute video on that not super hard if however you'd like a bit of a master's course in how to use a fundamental feature of Microsoft Word like styles which controls paragraph and font formatting that's videos takes a little bit longer it's about an hour so videos in length again from about three to four minutes up to an hour on discreet topics that legal professionals like encounter with their software on a daily basis I hope you all enjoy the new practice HQ portal on the UH New Jersey State Bar Association website and again like I said at the beginning of the tumorous valuable features we found with other Bar Association's are the email hotline and the remote consultations and puts you right in touch with experts at affinity and it is absolutely free for you so if you've got questions about legal technology or law office management reach out to us we'd be happy to help