MyShingle.com 2018: A Year In Review
Earlier this month, MyShingle.com celebrated our Sixteenth Anniversary , making us one of the longest-running blogs on solo and small firm practice, as well as one of the few woman-owned law blogs. Though we’re midway through our teenage years, the site remains strong with plenty of content and always new and original ideas. Here’s a round-up of some of the highlights of 2018:
Profiles, Profiles and More Profiles!
This past year, we’ve gotten better about profiling solo and small firm lawyers doing interesting things, whether it’s starting tech companies, juggling parenthood and practice or pioneering practice areas that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Check out our 2018 Lawyer to Legal Tech profiles, Mom Owned Law Firm profiles and New Law Profiles.
Tools For Solo and Small Firms
We continue to serve as the premier resource for free and low-cost tools for lawyers starting a practice. This year, we’ve experimented with different ways to provide resources, including straight-up blog posts, resource lists, recorded webinars, downloadable lists and most recently, an assessment test. Plus, we don’t require you to give up your email every time you want something at our site. This year’s resource included:
- 16 Downloadable Marketing Cheat Sheets from everything from using Facebook to market to cold calls and influencer marketing;
- Three recorded webinars on 41 Practice Areas That Didn’t Exist 15 Years Ago, 7-Figure Ebook and Make 2019 the Year You Start Your Law Practice ;
- A Resource List of 150 Free Tools to Start and Grow A Law Practice;
- A list of a dozen online self-scheduling options; and a twenty questions Website Evaluation Tool to assess whether your website functions as a conversion machine.
Supporting Women Owned Solos and Smalls
MyShingle continues to recognize the accomplishments of women solo and small firm lawyers. In addition to our mom-owned profiles mentioned above, we cheered the dozen black women solo lawyers elected to judgeships in Harris County, Texas and in our newsletter, introduced eight products, services and programs for lawyers by accomplished women lawyers.
Ethics
There’s been lots of talk of changing ethics rules, and I posted on the disappointingly minor revisions to ABA advertising rules, criticized regulators’ efforts to oversee for-fee referrals and warned about ethics issues of buying followings on social media. But I also decide to not just complain about legal ethics, but to be the change, and to that end, I asked the Maryland State Bar Association to rescind its opinion prohibiting markups on contract attorney fees.
More of the Basics
MyShingle is best known for sharing innovative ideas and inspiring solo and small lawyers, and we continued to do that through good old-fashioned blog posts. We continued our Make Money Monday series with 18 new practice ideas. Some of our most popular for the past year were Alexa, Please Hire Me a Lawyer (about how AI assistants will change how clients use lawyers), Six New Business Models for Practice, and Stop Playing It Safe: Just Screw It And Start Your Own Law Firm.
That’s just a sampling of what we put out this year for you. And now it’s your turn – what do you want to see at MyShingle? What will help you in your practice and career? Would you like to write a column or be profiled? Drop us an email at elefant@myshingle.com and let us hear your thoughts. Or post in the comment section below.
Happy Holidays and New Year’s to all. I’ll be taking the next two weeks off, so I’ll see you on the other side.