This chart of accounts template helps you start healthy bookkeeping practices for your law firm by giving you a template for outlining the assets, liabilities, capital, revenue, and expense accounts you will track in your firm’s general ledger. The post Chart of Accounts Template appeared first on Lawyerist.com.
Chart of Accounts Template
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Doing the impossible
If Alexander Graham Bell had been a professional electrician, he would never have invented the telephone. He would have know that it was impossible. What aren’t you doing because you know it’s impossible? If you’ve ever wondered why lawyers with half your intelligence and charm and none of your good looks seem to get more clients, make more money, and lead a charmed life, it may be because they don’t know what you know. They’re able to charge forward, unburdened by the knowledge that what they’re doing isn’t supposed to work. Mark Twain said, “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.” So maybe you’re too smart for your own good. You can’t unlearn what you know. You can’t ignore what you know can go wrong. Or can you? Sometimes, I put what I know in a mental lock box and charge ahead in self-imposed ignorance. I don’t think, I just do. I don’t edit, I just…
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Negative Keywords Help Defeat Preliminary Injunction–DealDash v. ContextLogic
DealDash and Wish are e-commerce vendors. For a while, Wish offered a service called “Deal Dash” for time-limited bargains. Immediately after DealDash sued, Wish renamed its service “Bargain Blitz” and pulled the “DealDash” term from all advertising. DealDash still pressed for a preliminary injunction that restricted, among other things, using “DealDash” as keyword ad triggers in search engines and app stores. Wish submitted an affidavit that it had blocked “DealDash” or “Deal Dash” as negative keywords in AdWords. The court responds: defendant has offered unchallenged evidence showing not only that it has included “Deal Dash” and “DealDash” as “negative keywords,” but that its past use of the “Deal Dash” term “would have occurred only if Google’s own algorithm had included [it]…or if Google had suggested” the term to defendant; the…
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Seeking justice for Justice the horse
Washington Post: Can a neglected animal sue? – “Justice is an 8-year-old American quarter horse who used to be named Shadow. And when he was named Shadow, he suffered. At a veterinarian’s exam last year, he was 300 pounds underweight, his black coat lice-ridden, his skin scabbed and his genitals so frostbitten that they might still require amputation. The horse had been left outside and underfed by his previous owner, who last summer pleaded guilty to criminal neglect. And now Justice, who today resides with other rescued equines on a quiet wooded farm within view of Oregon’s Cascade mountains, is suing his former owner for negligence. In a lawsuit filed in his new name in a county court, the horse seeks at least $100,000 for veterinary care, as well as damages “for pain and suffering,” to fund a trust that would stay with him no matter who is his caretaker…”
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What percentage of people are part of each generation in each state?
Overflow Data – Visualization: What percentage of people are part of each generation in each state? Source: Tabulated from 2017 US Census Bureau Population Estimates Tool: Tableau Age Groups: Generation Z, 0 to 19 years Millennials, 20 to 39 years Generation X, 40 to 54 years Baby Boomers, 55 to 69 years Silent Generation, 70 years and older
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How Enslaved Chefs Helped Shape American Cuisine
Smithsonian – Black cooks created the feasts that gave the South its reputation for hospitality “…Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience. Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white…
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The Olmsted Papers You Didn’t Know You Needed
CityLab: “Frederick Law Olmsted might be best known for New York’s Central Park and Washington’s U.S. Capitol grounds, but his role in shaping modern America spans far more than a few famous sites, as the Library of Congress’ newly digitized collection of Olmsted’s writings and personal records makes abundantly clear. The materials, including drafts of his writings, family letters and journals, correspondences with colleagues, and project proposals, piece together a unique glimpse into the famed landscape architect’s creative process and fervor to create parks open to everyone. Barbara Bair, historian in the Library of Congress’ manuscript division, told CityLab that they’ve been working on digitizing the Olmsted papers for a long time. It just turns out the archive is ready before the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, so he can be celebrated in 2022 with partner organizations. Bair noted that the records not only shed light…
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The Weight of Numbers: Air Pollution and PM2.5
Undark: “Emanating from smokestacks, vehicle engines, construction projects, and fires large and small, airborne pollution – sometimes smaller than the width of a human hair, and very often the product of human activity – is not just contributing to climate change. It is a leading driver of heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory infections the world over. Exposure to such pollution, the most deadly of which scientists call PM2.5, is the sixth highest risk factor for death around the world, claiming more than 4 million lives annually, according to recent global morbidity data. Add in household pollutants from indoor cooking fires and other combustion sources, and the tally approaches 7 million lives lost each year. Undark and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting visited seven countries on five continents, rich and poor, north and south, to examine the impacts of this sort of air pollution on the lives of everyday people, and to uncover…
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The Cautious Path to Strategic Advantage: How Militaries Should Plan for AI
EFF White Paper: “In June, Google executives announced that the company would be backing away from its provision of AI services to the U.S. military drone program, and would not continue that work after the Project Maven contract is completed. This was in response to a campaign from Google’s own employees, with thousands calling on the company to discontinue its new defense contracting work, and some even beginning to resign over the issue. The new AI ethics principles that Google adopted in response to the debate go beyond military questions, but they do potentially place important limits on whether the company would assist in command, control, or intelligence analysis for weapons systems or other military applications. The principles may well become a model for other major technology companies. But regardless of any actions taken by the big tech companies, the U.S. and other governments have plenty of their own resources to assemble machine learning initiatives.…
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So you want to comment on a regulation? Here’s how
How to effectively comment on regulations. August 2018. Adam Looney, Director, Center on Regulation and Markets, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution. “The Trump administration has made its deregulatory agenda clear since inauguration day. The administration’s actions have ranged from sweeping rollbacks of major rules that have garnered media attention, to smaller orders and guidance withdrawals instructing agencies to ignore previous rules. Brookings’ has been keeping track of these actions, big and small. While you may have heard of some, such as proposals to roll back the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, others have received relatively little attention despite having big impacts on regulation and the federal government’s role. These changes have been both lauded and criticized by relevant constituencies. Whether you support or oppose ongoing regulatory changes, Americans have the right to participate in the regulatory process and to comment on these…
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Browser plug-in organizes and contextualizes big news stories for readers
MIT newsroom: “The explosion of digital content has made it hard to navigate news today. This startup’s plug-in will cut down on time and browser tabs, while readers search for information. Acciyo’s name might draw from fiction, but the purpose of the search engine extension is firmly rooted in fact. “When I was first figuring out what we wanted to call it, I went through a list of Harry Potter spells,” said co-founder Anum Hussain, MBA ’18. “Acciyo was very fitting because what we’re doing is summoning information from across the web and making it easier for you, in a similar fashion to how that spell [in the book series, ‘accio’] works, to be able to summon anything you need. We’re just doing that in the context of news.” Acciyo, Hussain said, is a Google Chrome extension that appears to the right of a screen like a bookmark, and presents the user with an “interactive, movable timeline of articles…
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Revealing Data: Why We Need Humans to Curate Web Collections
Circulating Now – NIH – “In this Revealing Data series we explore data in historical medical collections, and how preserving this data helps to ensure that generations of researchers can reexamine it, reveal new stories, and make new discoveries. Future researchers will likely want to examine the data of the web archive collections, collected and preserved by libraries, archives, and others, using a wide range of approaches, to document unfolding events. Today Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Alexander Nwala (@acnwala), writing on his research using NLM web archive collections to compare different methods of selecting web content, and some of the difficulties encountered in generating seeds automatically.” I am a Computer Science PhD student and member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries research group at Old Dominion University, Norfolk Virginia. For the past three years, I have been researching generating collections for stories…
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Public archives: more relevant today than ever
Policy Opinions Politiques – Jennifer Anderson August 13, 2018. “Public archives represent a democratic vision where all are welcome, ideas circulate, and information is analyzed and diffused for educational purposes. There has been a lot of noise recently about information distortion and its effects on democracy. So what better time to raise the importance of historical literacy and public archives? In gathering and promoting primary source material, archives play an essential role in modelling literacy skills and critical thinking. In analyzing this material and producing modest, reasonable conclusions, researchers aim to understand complex issues and to engage the public in the discussion. These skills are crucial tools in a democracy. For too long archives have been hidden and archivists overlooked. All sorts of unflattering stories have circulated about archives, as if to keep the general public out. Witness the way popular culture has painted the picture:…
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Your Chronic Stress: It’s a Matter of Confidence, Not Competence
It is easy to blame chronic stress on deadlines, long hours and the high-stakes nature of lawyers’ work. But for many, the most intolerable stress is due to imposter syndrome — the belief that you are not competent enough in the work you do (or want to do), combined with a fear of being discovered as a fraud. Lawyers are trained skeptics, masters of issue-spotting and paragons of perfectionism. Unsurprisingly, they often direct these traits inward, distrusting their abilities and seeing gaps in their experience or expertise as liabilities, instead of opportunities to grow. I often hear this expressed in comments like these: “I feel intimidated by others in my field and believe they are better lawyers than me.” “When I get calls from prospective clients with questions in certain substantive areas, I feel so nervous that I quickly refer them to other attorneys at my firm.” “I keep applying to target jobs, but I never get them, so I…
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ILN Firm of the Month – LexCounsel Law Offices, India!
The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, LexCounsel Law Offices, India! LexCounsel is a New Delhi, India based corporate, commercial and litigation law firm. Each Partner has more than a decade of experience handling complex legal transactions and issues in India, and has consistently been nominated as a Leading Lawyer in his/her respective area of practice, particularly in IT, telecommunications and media; venture capital and private equity; and labour and employment. The members of the firm have experience, and the firm is recognized as one of the leading Indian law firms, in the following areas of practice: Corporate and Commercial Infrastructure, Energy and Water Project and Corporate Finance Education Construction and Real Estate Taxation Banking, Finance and Capital Markets Private Equity and Venture Capital Telecommunications and IT Labour and Employment Licensing, Franchising and Trading Intellectual Property Life Sciences and Healthcare…
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Announcing An eDiscovery Challenge: Can It Be Done Within Microsoft Office 365?
[Editor’s note: This is a guest post by veteran e-discovery consultants Tom O’Connor, director of the Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center, and Don Swanson, president of Five Star Legal.] Nine years is a long time for technology. In 2009, eDiscovery expert Craig D. Ball issued his EDna Challenge, asking eDiscovery lawyers and forensic technologists how they would handle a hypothetical small eDiscovery project on a limited budget. Two years later, Tom O’Connor followed that with his Ernie Challenge, a hypothetical based on a “tweener” case — one bigger than the EDna hypothetical but not a mega-case suitable for the name-brand products that dominate eDiscovery technology. Both challenges garnered significant public exposure and comment. Today we pose a new hypothetical challenge with a twist: the matter in question still has a budget restriction but all relevant data now resides within Microsoft Office 365. Are Office…
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Are you afraid of your clients?
I heard an interview with an expert on international affairs. He was asked why Europe was the way it was. (I’ll let you fill in the blank about what that means.) He said, “They’re afraid of their people.” Europe has a history of revolutions and uprisings. Monarchs have been dethroned (and beheaded), corrupt leaders have been convicted and jailed, and the current heads of state are simply fearful of a similar fate. Interesting. Explains why they outlawed guns, doesn’t it? Anyway, my question for you is, “Are you afraid of your people?” Do you operate out of fear of what your clients may say or do? If they ask for something, do you give it to them even if they don’t deserve it or you can’t “afford” it, because you’re afraid of losing them or offending them or being accused of something untoward? If you do, stop it. Person up. (That’s how they say toughen up in Europe, y’all.) Your job isn’t…
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Visual Literacy for the Legal Profession
Sherwin, Richard K., Visual Literacy for the Legal Profession (January 15, 2018). Journal of Legal Education, Forthcoming . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3212819 “Digital technology has transformed the way we communicate in society. Swept along on a digital tide, words, sounds, and images easily, and often, flow together. This state of affairs has radically affected not only our commercial and political practices in society, but also the way we practice law. Unfortunately, legal education and legal theory have not kept up. Inconsistencies and unpredictability in the way courts ascertain the admissibility of various kinds of visual evidence and visual argumentation, lapses in the cross examination of visual evidence at trial, and inadequately theorized notions of visual meaning and the epistemology of affect tell us that the status quo in legal education is untenable. Law teachers today have an obligation to provide their students with the rudiments of…
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What’s Holding You Back? Building Your Book of Business Through Imperfect Action
We all have desires for our lives and careers — sometimes spoken, oftentimes suppressed. Every year many of us resolve to make changes, personally and professionally, so we can achieve our goals. We want to eat better, write more, exercise consistently, develop more business, spend quality time with family, learn new skills. Those are all noble objectives, but inevitably another year passes without the results we desire and we are back to square one. As we approach the home stretch of 2018, you may be feeling unfulfilled because the vision you cast for your professional year seems like a distant reality. If you’re like most lawyers, you’re probably frustrated by your seeming inability to develop a consistent, profitable book of business. The lawyers I know desperately want to engage with more clients because they rightly perceive a healthy book of business as a path to more personal and professional autonomy. Without one, a lawyer is beholden to the whims of…
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Build Your Own Brand to Become a “Go To” Lawyer
You are looking to make a change. Your law firm has a brand. Maybe the senior lawyer you work for has a brand, but do you have a brand? I wouldn’t ask the question that way. Instead, I might ask: What makes you different (and better) than the dozens or hundreds of lawyer in your practice area? Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi is a book I have recommended to lawyers for many years. In chapter 23, Ferrazzi talks about building your brand. He argues that perception drives reality. He further suggests that good personal brands do three highly significant things for your network of contacts: They provide a credible, distinctive, and trustworthy identity. They project a compelling message. They attract more and more people to you and your cause, as you’ll stand out in an increasing cluttered world.” Then, Ferrazzi says: “in terms of branding, then the bottom line for everyone comes down to a choice:…
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