Technology seems to be the apple cider of business – everywhere you look you see new claims for its curative abilities. Sometimes though, it really can save your bacon. James Careless talks to a few lawyers who felt the uncomfortable sizzle.

There’s more to building a referral network than handing out your card and crossing your fingers. Carolynne Burkholder-James offers readers some advice for building the kind of relationships that bring many happy returns.

Research is part of a lawyer’s job, but when you don’t have a room full of paralegals or articling students to do it for you, it can take valuable time away from the other parts of the job. That’s where the growing field of legal analytics can come in, says James Careless.

Let’s face it, people don’t go into law because they’re good accountants. And we all know that small firms just don’t have the resources for their own accounting departments. So what’s a sole practitioner to do? James Careless has some advice on finding advice.

Big city, big firm; small town small practice. And never that twain shall meet. Except … sometimes it can make sense to unite the resources and expertise of the big firm with the smaller firm’s access to and knowledge of particular communities into a beautiful marriage of convenience. We look at how it might be done.

When you’re paying yourself, it’s easy to feel like any time of the working day not spent actively making money is time spent robbing your own wallet. That can be good motivation but also a vicious cycle, if start trying to save billable hours by cutting non-paying activities you actually need to do. We have some tips for finding balance.

The family that plays together stays together, they say. But what about the family that works together? That’s more complicated. Success depends a lot on the job family members do relative to each other, and their working dynamic.

Just as there are a number of reasons for people to appear in court without legal representation, there are a number of ways to deal with the self-represented litigant to protect your client’s interests – and your own. Carolynne Burkholder-James has more.

When stripped away to the bare business essentials, law firms are surprisingly like the corner store: they have to at least try to give clients what they want at a decent price, or those clients will go elsewhere. The problem is that most people don’t go into law because they have great business sense. James Careless reviews some fundamentals of business for lawyers.

Debt is a fact of life for solo and small firms which, like any small business, sometimes need somebody else’s money to help pay the bills. Too much debt, however, can outstrip a firm’s ability to pay, and put it out of business. The challenge is finding the right balance.