About six months ago, I was talking to a “seasoned” lawyer about my solo practice. After hearing that I had no secretarial support, he commented that technology has enabled young lawyers to do things cheaply.

It’s true — those of us who are comfortable with the computer can put off hiring other employees. Lawyers who grew up in a world of dictation and typing pools are less able to function completely on their own. Younger lawyers, in most cases, can type for themselves, and can handle most of the formatting issues that accompany letter- or pleading-drafting.

Anything I can do to speed up my secretarial assignments is going give me more time to work. One such time saver is using a digital signature in Word documents. With a digital signature, you won’t have to print a document, sign it and then scan it back in so that your electronic file has a final copy. You can sign the document from your keyboard by pasting a signature directly into the Word document.

From there, you can print that document with the signature ready for mailing or you can save it as a PDF for your electronic file. This is particularly useful when you don’t need a hard copy — for example, if you are going to email the document, or send it out by electronic fax. Here’s how:

1. Sign your name on a blank piece of paper; scan it in and save it. It will probably be in PDF form, and you need to convert it to something else, like a JPEG or a PNG file. One way to do this is to open it up as a PDF and use the Snapshot tool to select the signature. Then, paste it into Microsoft Paint, and save that on your computer as a JPEG or PNG file.
2. On the Insert tab, click Picture.
3. Search for the location of the signature, select it and click Insert.
4. Resize the signature if necessary.
5. Right-click the signature, and select Size and Position.
6. On the Text Wrapping tab, select Behind Text (this way, only the signature itself will show up, and not the white space).
7. Move the signature to the desired location.

If you sign your name in a color other than black, and if you have a color scanner, it will appear in that color on your documents. Of course, it will print as black-and-white unless you use a color printer.

If you have a paperless office, digital signatures can be used in conjunction with the Print to PDF feature. Instead of printing out hard copies, just save the electronic version and store it on your server or in the cloud. For the occasional letter or pleading, this won’t save much time. Aggregated over the course of a week (I probably sign 30 letters/pleadings per week), it can really add up.

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When I was planning the journey that is a solo practice, I realized the problem that is inherent in plaintiffs’ personal injury law: the money comes really late. The average small automobile collision case will not settle for at least five months, and if a lawsuit needs to be filed, it could be nine or twelve months before a resolution. Serious auto collisions and medical malpractice cases take much, much longer.

Some attorneys manage to pay their bills by dabbling in other types of work, often criminal defense or family law, where the lawyer can charge hourly or flat rate fees. I knew that I didn’t want to do family or criminal work but I still wanted to find a way to at least break even in the first year and pay rent for my modest Timonium office. So I starting writing web and blog content for other personal injury lawyers.

For the medical malpractice webpages, I try to do some research on what other lawyers are writing about, both so I don’t miss anything and so I can figure out how to be different. The one thing that stands out, more than anything else, is which medical malpractice firms get to the top of my Google search results page.

Sometimes the firms’ sites are impressive and the amount of effort put into building the site is clear. In some cases, though, the web content is poorly written, contains very little information and was updated five or ten years ago. How do those firms get good Google results? Perhaps they are following some of the “black hat” practices that Google is working on weeding out. But for most of them, the age of their website matters. Google and the other search engines have a higher amount of respect for websites that have been around for a while.

You’ve heard the saying, “the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.” For lawyers or law students who want to get out in the world and start a practice, join a practice or who have no idea what to do, my recommendation is simple: start a website or two. They don’t need to be extravagant, they just need to have a domain name, some general content (with good keywords and phrases) about whatever practice area you think you are interested in, and an automatic contact form (for those who are licensed to practice).

If you’re not ready to take cases yet, you can refer them out. If your future law firm handles that type of law, you can use the cases you bring in to negotiate a higher salary. More importantly, if you go solo, you might have a ready-made revenue stream, or at least a website with some “stickiness,” when you make that move.

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The most valuable resource attorneys have is time. For most of our professional lives we are fighting the clock, filing documents at the 11^th hour, struggling to get calls returned and e-mails answered and managing our workload. Every job I ever had has been the same — some days it seems as though the only thing accomplished was the emergency de jure. Until I went solo.

This isn’t to say that there is nothing to do once you go solo. On the contrary, because the firm starts and ends with one person, there is more to do and longer hours. What most solos lack for in actual casework they must make up for in marketing and building the practice. In those early days, though, when days are more flexible and there are fewer court appearances, it is important to build up the firm’s automatic processes.

Those first few months I spent a great deal of time working on letterhead, standardizing my pleadings and form letters, making case checklists and creating forms for just about everything. I was fortunate enough to have a few good cases to work on right out of the gate, but I still needed to have things ready when I was truly busy.

Time management gurus encourage businesses to write out every step in the process of a typical service. For existing businesses, it can be useful to track the amount of time spent on each step. This will allow the business owner to identify duplication, to know where cases get bottlenecked and to make the process more efficient.

In my plaintiffs’ personal injury practice, I try to make good use of software to help with this automation. The best way to avoid recreating the wheel is to make one good set of templates that apply to most of the cases I accept. The biggest advantages are that I don’t have use samples from other cases that are obviously modified for that case and I can improve the templates in one place.

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I was in Philadelphia on Thursday (for a lovely event at the new Barnes location hosted by my firm’s Women’s Development Initiative, among other things) and happened to run into Sheri, the firm’s director of career development.

Of all things, we started talking about my blogging.

I was flattered to hear my blogging had been used as an example — thankfully a “how-to,” not a “how-not-to” example — during a presentation at the Professional Development Consortium’s Summer Conference that addressed how to develop a professional presence in the physical and virtual worlds.

We discussed the fact there are concerns social media is encouraging people, including young lawyers, to spend more time online and less time interacting face-to-face when it should be more properly used as a tool for “extension and enrichment of what happens when people are physically present.”

My personal theory on social media has always been that it is a powerful way to help others “get to know you” before you ever meet them.

In fact, I talked about just that at this year’s Maryland State Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.

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Sometimes I long for the days when I could walk into work, focus 95 percent of my energy on casework, and have few other job-related worries. That longing hits me fleetingly, once every month or so. Being a solo is the Best. Thing. Ever.

The solo lifestyle is much different that the associate’s lifestyle. (I was the associate for eight years and I’m well into my first year as the solo.) As the associate, I tried to take on as many other responsibilities as I could — administrative duties, supervisory roles, technological tasks, and anything else that could help the firm out.

At the end of the day, though, my primary job was moving the cases along: new case intakes, review medical records, file complaints, meet with experts, propound and respond to discovery, prepare for trial.

A solo’s primary job is, well, everything. I now appreciate all of those commercials for small business owners. One of my favorites is the Staples commercial with Dave and his schizophrenic-army of clone-employees:

Sometimes it is easy as a solo to know what you should be doing. That first day that you open your doors, and you have no cases, you easily know what your most important task is — business generation. Truth be told, the answer is just as easy on day 242 — business generation. Even if you have been successful and you have a whole host of cases, those cases will probably dry up. For those of us in the personal injury line of work, the lifespan of a case on the short side ranges from five months to 18 months. Even if you can pay the bills now, there is no guarantee about what’s going to happen in six to 19 months. So you need to bring in new cases.

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