How To Be a Successful Jack-Of-All-Trades

Author: Thomson Reuters

“Clients expect 100% perfection from their lawyers and expect everything to be done yesterday.”1

With the complexity of today’s legal needs, today’s small law firm attorney needs to be a jack-of-all-trades. With constant access to ever-evolving technology, expectations to deliver fast and accurately are at an all-time high. While all firms navigate challenges on a daily basis, small law firms face one of the toughest balancing acts out there.

One of the biggest struggles of being a small firm attorney is constantly being asked to tackle new areas of law when you don’t have the time to thoroughly research and answer questions with accuracy. There needs to be a better way to get up to speed in less time so, as a small firm attorney, you can quickly respond to your client’s needs and spend more time doing what you do best. – practicing law.

Thomson Reuters has the answer. Practical Law condenses legal issues down to their essence, making it easy to quickly learn about new areas of law. Simply put, Practical Law makes a small firm attorney’s life easier when they’re catapulted into unfamiliar territory.

Practical Law expands your expertise by providing seasoned guidance in how to apply the law to your practice. Practical Law offers practice guidance in 13 key practice areas — designed for practitioners, by practitioners. Time is money – particularly as a solo or small law firm. Instead of having to take valuable time researching and dissecting information, you have immediate access to more than 260 attorneys who provide plain-English guidance within Practical Law.

Whatever broad topic you’re handling, Practical Law offers unparalleled tools and resources to help you address the most common challenges faced by small law firms today.

  • Practice Notes: These useful documents present concise overviews of particular areas of law or legal tasks, written in plain English. No legalese, no overly formal language — just the straightforward information you need to start tackling your project, designed to be quickly digested and easily understood.
  • Related Content: With your Practice Note, you’ll see a useful link called Related Content. This is a comprehensive list of everything you can find on Practical Law that pertains to your particular topic. The best part is, it’s not compiled through some random algorithm that thinks it knows what you might find useful. The list is compiled by the same attorney-editor who wrote the Practice Note, so it’s related content that you will actually find useful.
  • Standard Documents: Research can quickly turn into drafting. When that happens, Practical Law has your back. With thousands of up-to-date Standard Documents to help you out, which are gold standard templates for a range of policies, agreements, contracts, and other documents that often arise in legal work, complete with drafting notes from the expert who prepared them, explaining the drafting process and identifying assumptions, pitfalls, and other considerations.
  • Checklists: These are just what they sound like — lists of issues and items that you need to consider on a particular task or topic. When you think you’re done, compare your work to the checklist just to be sure. This is essentially a backstop for making sure there isn’t anything you forgot to consider.
  • Toolkits: A Practical Law Toolkit is your one-stop shop for a particular topic or task. All of the relevant resources mentioned above (and then some) are compiled into one place. From the Practice Notes down through the Checklist, the Toolkit for your given topic leaves no stone unturned when you need a comprehensive introduction to a topic in a short amount of time.

These are just the highlights of what Practical Law has to offer. Other useful resources include legal updates, market trend tools, state-specific guidance, and more. For the small law firm lawyer expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, there’s no more efficient way to get the knowledge you need.

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1 State of the US Small Law Firm Survey, Thomson Reuters, 2016.

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