Business Planning for a VLO

I started out my own business plan by finding some templates online and adapting portions of some of them into a format that I thought was helpful to me. Then I took the first session in Rachel Rodgers' VLO class and completely changed my approach. The content that I put together previously is still valid and helpful, but I thought I should follow Rachel's advice and start from the desired impact of my virtual law office's on my personal life. If you're a regular reader, you know that in my first post on Rachel's class, I talked about liking the idea of a Life Plan as an element of a business plan. On Monday this week I promised some more business plan content and my reflections on doing my own life plan. You can find all that good stuff after the jump.

Day Two of "The 21st Century Lawyer: Lifestyle Design with a Virtual Law Office"

Last Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of attending the second of four sessions in Rachel Rodgers' class, 21st Century Lawyer: Lifestyle Design with a Virtual Law Office. If the first session was a little too touchy-feely for my tastes, this session made up for it with the sheer volume of information on the class handout. Class 2 was titled: Get Your Finances in Line with Your Dream; you can guess what our focus was. Rachel broke the class up into three sections: Startup Costs, Surviving the Startup Phase, and Managing Education Debt. Read on after the jump for some specifics and my reaction.

What's Coming Next

Well, I took a week off from the blog, but not a week off from the project. My last post was based on my preliminary research into VLO service providers. Since then, I have signed up for an initial demo version of DirectLaw. I haven't delved very deeply into that system, but I did play with the document-generation aspect of it for about an hour. The interactive questionnaires are robust, but some of the questions I ran into were more than the average consumer could answer. More than likely, attorney guidance would be necessary for the more technical or complex documents. That's not an indictment of the software. On the contrary, I think direct attorney involvement is prudent for many of the documents generated by DirectLaw's software. More on that later. Last week I also had the privilege of attending the second session in Rachel Rodgers's class, Lifestyle Design with a VLO. We disucussed the financial side of starting a VLO, and I'll post my thoughts here tomorrow. Speaking of Rachel Rodgers, I did some stream-of-consciousness lifeplan work last week. I also took some time to talk about our lifeplan with my wife. It was enlightening and has resulted in some changes in our lifestyle, starting today. I'll give you more on that on Thursday, along with more of my business plan. I took some time last week to review the EULA of Total Attorneys' VLO Tech. I looked into DirectLaw's EULA as well, but was apparently on the wrong page, because what I found was not what I was looking for. Never fear, though; I will not be dissuaded. Come back Friday for a brief summary on what I found and some of the more important language in those EULAs. Other things that I'm working on include researching local and DIY web development, embedded logins for client portals, and a more involved research project about physical-address rules and how they affect VLOs. I'm hoping to line up an interview with Jack Newton of Clio sometime soon as well. Lots of good stuff in the works; stay tuned!

VLO Software Providers: Intro

Yesterday I promised you a post about my initial findings regarding the VLO technology that's available out there. This is that post. For starters, lets lay some ground rules. First, this is not going to be a comprehensive list of software providers that specifically target the legal industry (Stephanie Kimbro has a great list on the companion site to her book). In fact, I'm not even going to do a comprehensive list of law practice management suites. What I will do is give you some input on a couple of cloud-based LPM systems and then discuss the two VLO platforms that are currently available.

My method for choosing which systems to cover was simple: find the ones with client portals. I chose to start there because the prevailing definition of VLO (and my working definition of VLO) say that a virtual law office is one that utilizes a client portal to facilitate attorney-client communications. Check out the list and my initial reactions after the jump.

Day One of "The 21st Century Lawyer: Lifestyle Design with a Virtual Law Office"

This is my first of a five-part series on Rachel Rodgers' teleclass, "The 21st Century Lawyer: Lifestyle Design with a Virtual Law Office." I hope to post brief responses to the four individual classes within an hour or two after the class ends. The last post of the series will be an overall review (and recommendation, I'm sure!) of the class as a whole and a response to the information I glean from it. Part one, after the jump.

Quick Check-in

Happy Hump Day to all of you who follow this blog! It's been a few days since I've posted, and for that I apologize. Rest assured that my time has not been spent in vain. Life = including my law practice - rolls on.

I wanted to quickly check in today to let you know about an opportunity that I have to attend an online class regarding virtual law offices: The 21st Century Lawyer: Lifestyle Design with a Virtual Law Office. The class is being taught by Ms. Rachel Rodgers, a self-proclaimed legal rebel and a consultant for solos looking to build their careers around their desired lifestyle. You can find her websites here and here.

Rachel's 'syllabus' looks like we should be covering some really helpful information over the next few weeks. I'll be honest, though: the first class sounds a bit like a motivational speaker presentation. I have no problem with that, but I'll be interested to see how Rachel approaches the subject of Discover[ing] Your Ideal Life.

Rachel contacted me last week to see if I would be willing to review her class on this blog. I'll do her one better, and review each class. I'll try to summarize some of the salient points (without giving anything away - don't worry Rachel!) in an effort to show the value the class is providing. The investment wasn't all that tremendous (less than $150, as I recall), so I expect I'll see a pretty good return.

Stay tuned for another post this evening with my first impressions.