From CNN authored by Jacqueline Howard:
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Avoid the Burn: 4 Types of Burnouts for Solo and Small-Firm Lawyers
Contribution from our SPONSOR ZipBooks authored by Sarah Bennion. Sarah is a writer and marketer at ZipBooks.
Small-firm and solo lawyer burnout (n): A state of debility that occurs when a solo lawyer or lawyer in a small firm becomes emotionally exhausted from a mixture of chronic stress, demanding conditions, and (occasionally) excessive caffeine.
Thankfully, this occupational combustion is not inevitable. Recognizing the different kinds of burnouts can help you avoid professional demise. Here are four types of burnout to look out for:
- Burnout by perfectionism.
Gayle Victor, a consumer debt attorney for 30 years, noted, “In the Johns Hopkins study, optimism outperformed pessimism—except in the legal profession, because lawyers are hired to always look out for what can go wrong.”
A healthy dose of pessimism and meticulousness can greatly benefit a solo or small firm lawyer. But being constantly immersed in cynicism can create feelings of self-loathing and anxiety that lead to burnout.
Antidote: Participate in stress management activities. Find something that relaxes you, whether it be meditation, exercise, reading a novel, or watching an hour or two of Netflix. Stepping away from work and spending time doing something you enjoy will help alleviate the weight of professional perfectionism.
- Burnout by workaholism.
Do you regularly skip meals? Have you pulled an all-nighter at some point in the last few weeks? Have you missed family functions to spend more time in the office? If so, you just might be a workaholic. For solo and small-firm lawyers, who have more responsibilities than lawyers in a major firm, even 40 to 50 hour weeks can seem insufficient.
Antidote: Don’t sacrifice healthy habits! Skipping meals, working through the night, and isolating yourself from friends and family will catch up to you eventually. Seek out mentors who have been able to balance work and home life. Remember, it is worth it to climb the professional ladder a little slower and avoid burnout than to have a short-lived career.
- Burnout by compassion.
Because of their regular exposure to traumatic reports and graphic evidence, attorneys are particularly susceptible to vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue. This is particularly a problem for attorneys practicing family, juvenile, and criminal law.
Antidote: Get support! Talk regularly with family, friends, or even another practitioner. It is also wise to seek help from a professional. Recognize that counseling is not a sign of weakness; these specialists are trained to assist those with compassion fatigue and help slow or even stop burnout.
- Burnout by the mundane.
Constant administrative duties, like bookkeeping, paperwork, attending networking events, and marketing the business, can make creating and sustaining a practice an exhausting process for small-firm and solo lawyers.
Antidote: Use technology to reduce the administrative burden. Powerful online software, like ZipBooks, can alleviate some of the mundane managerial pressures on small businesses. Or, add a professional bookkeeper (10% off forever for Girl Attorney members) and completely eliminate the painful sources of burnout that bookkeeping, reconciling, and tax preparation can be.
Want a few more ideas? Here’s a great article from Girl Attorney on preventing burnout and debilitating anxiety.
If you want a hand in keeping your bookkeeping up-to-date, let us know. We’re happy to add a personal bookkeeper to your team — or just answer your questions. ZipBooks fully supports Girl Attorney, so check out our Girl Attorney special and get 10% off bookkeeping forever.
How We’ll Win – The Visionaries
There is such a thing as waking up on the wrong side of the bed, according to sc
From Business Insider authored by Peter Dockrill:
“Nobody likes getting up on the wrong side of bed, but it turns out the way you feel in the morning is much more than just an emotional haze.
New research reveals that people who wake up expecting to have a stressful day can actually impact their own cognitive functioning throughout the day — with the simple act of anticipating future stress putting a measurable bottleneck on our brainpower.
In a sense, the only thing to fear seems to be fear itself — because the researchers say even if the stressful experiences you’re dreading never occur, just by internally forecasting them you’re diverting precious, limited resources from your powers of memory.
“Humans can think about and anticipate things before they happen, which can help us prepare for and even prevent certain events,” explains one of the researchers, cognitive psychologist Jinshil Hyun from Pennsylvania State University.”
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The Power of Positive People
From The New York Times authored by Tara Parker-Pope:
“Are you spending time with the right people for your health and happiness?
While many of us focus primarily on diet and exercise to achieve better health, science suggests that our well-being also is influenced by the company we keep. Researchers have found that certain health behaviors appear to be contagious and that our social networks — in person and online — can influence obesity, anxiety and overall happiness. A recent report found that a person’s exercise routine was strongly influenced by his or her social network.”
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Self-Confidence: How To Find It, How To Keep It
From Forbes authored by Jill Griffin:
“Self-confidence. Everybody wants it, but how to get it and keep it is something of a mystery. In fact, the topic has been widely researched with an equally wide range of conclusions. It seems like almost every week there’s a new theory that promises the magic elixir for projecting self-confidence. But alas, many of us find ourselves lacking it when we need to tackle big roles and big issues in our personal and professional lives.
This seems particularly true for women leaders.
I remember reading a study about the first women admitted to Harvard Business School in the 60’s. The study set out to decipher what trait these stellar women most commonly shared. The study’s conclusion: a close relationship with their fathers. Reading this study soon after its release, I thought, “Darn it!” Could it be that my career ambitions would somehow be slowed or stopped altogether because my father died early? No offense to Harvard, but that turned out to not be true for me at all. Thankfully.”
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Which Financial Reports can Help you Grow Your Practice?
Contribution from our SPONSOR ZipBooks authored by Freedom Ahn. Freedom is a writer and marketer at ZipBooks, whose writing has also appeared in global publications including The Independent (UK), Huffington Post (USA), The Telegraph (UK), The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Jerusalem Post, and more.
Effectively utilizing a financial dashboard in your practice is complex. You want an easy way to get a pulse on your practice, monitor what’s most important, and leverage it to grow and improve. You might even have budgets and financial plans in place, and you want to know how to quickly determine if you’re still on the right track.
A trusted set of reports will help keep you ahead. Here are five reports you should be generating on a regular basis:
Billable Hours
A billable hours report helps you note meaningful variances and discrepancies over time, across projects, and among clients. You should generate this report often, and analyze it to keep track of your productivity and efficiency. You’ll want to break it out by lawyer and client. Even better, if you can include projected billable hours to check against expectations, you’ll be able to improve your work over time.
Quarterly, you can review cumulative billable hours to check your profitability. Combine it with a client activity report to identify clients (or lawyers) that operate as “loss leaders.” It can help you decide to invest more time into client relationships or even scale back your relationship with certain clients.
Income Statement
The income statement shows your profitability and where you’re spending your money. This report should be generated monthly as both a month-by-month and a YTD report. Compare your income statement to the month prior and to the corresponding month for the preceding year to highlight how your business is changing. Are you earning more now than you were at this time last year? Are your profits margins increasing, or are you spending too much on items that aren’t helping grow your practice?
Accounts Receivable
Keeping an Accounts Receivable report current and accurate helps you ensure you’re getting paid in full and on time. Generate the accounts receivable report at least monthly; include the total outstanding balances for each client, the aged balances, and any disbursements due. Use the report to know who owes you money and how much, and to keep track of your cash flow projections.
Client Activity
The client activity report gives you a snapshot of billed and unbilled services for your clients. It should be generated at least bi-weekly, for each client, and should include:
- Fees billed and effective hourly rate;
- Fees collected;
- Accounts receivable (both outstanding and aged) and written off accounts;
- Trust balances;
- Work-in-process and unbilled disbursements added during the month;
- Write-up and write-down separated by client, lawyer, and invoice.
This report is a powerful tool for identifying future workload, accounts that are in arrears, and where cash flow can become bottlenecked.
Dashboard
Finally, this may be one report, but a live dashboard can make things simpler and easier to digest.
Your dashboard report should include:
- Month-to-date income and monthly income comparisons
- Accounts receivable by clients and total sales by clients
- Cash-flow analysis to show the firm’s cash-in/ cash-out status. This can help you get a firm understanding of your practice’s ability to maintain payroll and overhead short-term;
- And a healthy dose of your expenses – either by vendor or accounting category
Generating accurate reports in a timely and consistent manner is important to any business, but when it comes to growing your legal practice it’s your critical first step. You’ll need to act on the information in these reports. Inaccurate or late information can mean your firm is playing catch-up before the race even starts.
You might think it will be easy to handle all this yourself. Afterall, attorneys and accountants are both INTJ careers, and lawyers usually make exceptional accountants. The only problem is that you rarely have the time to handle your own books, manage your clients, and grow your firm.
Growth is difficult without a solid foundation. When you don’t need to worry about your financial reporting you can concentrate on what you love to do; and that’s the best, most effective way to grow your practice.
If you want a hand in keeping your bookkeeping up-to-date, let us know. We’re happy to add a personal bookkeeper to your team — or just answer your questions. ZipBooks fully supports Girl Attorney, so check out our Girl Attorney special and get 10% off bookkeeping forever.
Psychology Explains Why Blunt People Make The Best Friends
From Kiddy authored by Kiddy First:
“Ten minutes with a genuine friend is better than years spent with anyone less.” – Crystal Woods
“We all know that one person who just tells it like it is – the friend that is brutally honest with us and gives us the tough love we need to make it through the day. Blunt, according to the dictionary, means “uncompromisingly forthright”. We all know someone just like that. Why is it that everyone seems to have that one blunt friend? Well, according to sociology, people who are blunt actually make the best kinds of friends. Here are some of the reasons that blunt people make better friends than those who are less forthright.”
HERE ARE 5 REASONS WHY BLUNT PEOPLE MAKE THE BEST FRIENDS
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IF YOU GIVE SOMEONE A JOB: WHAT MY FAVORITE CHILDHOOD BOOK TAUGHT ME ABOUT LEADERSHIP
From Women 2.0 authored by Laura Velasquez:
I knew a frog and a toad couldn’t talk to me about life (because, as we all know, frogs and toads cannot talk.)
But, at the same time, some books could be so captivating that they became a staple in our bedtime routine. Whenever my dad traveled, we would recite the lines from one of our favorites.
We practiced for weeks while he was home. Every night when he was away, he would call to say goodnight and wait anxiously to see if I was ready. Then, finally, one night, I started.
“I’ll love you forever,” I said.
“I’ll like you for always,” he replied
I said, “As long as I’m living.”
He said, “My baby you’ll be.”
Then, we’d do the whole thing in reverse. But I’d end with, “My daddy you’ll be.”
To this day, this story still sticks with me. And if I called my dad and said, “I’ll love you forever,” I have no doubt he’d respond with, “I’ll like you for always.” Twenty-five years later, we’d pick right back up—like no time had passed at all.
That’s because books from our childhood have such a huge impact on the rest of our lives.
These stories shape and mold us into the people we become. In many cases, we take on the traits that we learn from reading (although, hopefully not the bad ones).
The book that always stuck out to me the most was Laura Numeroff’s, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
You’ve probably read it before, but this story is cute. In the book, the mouse is given a cookie and then asks for a glass of milk. After getting the milk to go with the cookie, it asks for a straw, a mirror, scissors, and a broom.
Each request prompts another, until it comes full circle with the mouse getting another cookie and asking for another glass of milk.
Perhaps this was an odd book for me to gravitate toward. (Heck—I’m an odd bird.)
I think most people just view it as a story about an annoying and needy mouse. You give the mouse something nice and it just asks for more.
But, it always struck me as something bigger. The lesson always seemed to be about action and reaction—about our responsibility to other people.”
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Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse
From The New York Times authored by Nellie Bowles:
“The people who called into the help hotlines and domestic violence shelters said they felt as if they were going crazy.
One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there.
Their stories are part of a new pattern of behavior in domestic abuse cases tied to the rise of smart home technology. Internet-connected locks, speakers, thermostats, lights and cameras that have been marketed as the newest conveniences are now also being used as a means for harassment, monitoring, revenge and control.
In more than 30 interviews with The New York Times, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers and emergency responders described how the technology was becoming an alarming new tool. Abusers — using apps on their smartphones, which are connected to the internet-enabled devices — would remotely control everyday objects in the home, sometimes to watch and listen, other times to scare or show power. Even after a partner had left the home, the devices often stayed and continued to be used to intimidate and confuse.
For victims and emergency responders, the experiences were often aggravated by a lack of knowledge about how smart technology works, how much power the other person had over the devices, how to legally deal with the behavior and how to make it stop.”
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