Productivity :: Alabama Consumer Law Blog

Motivation - Never Give Up!

While not what we normally post about on here - this post by David Ward is excellent and should be read by everyone who ever thinks of giving in or giving up. This post gives a short summary of the trials and discouragements that many great historical figures faced - including Lincoln, Churchill, Einstein, Babe Ruth, etc. Very encouraging to read!

The ending message of David's post should make you want to read the entire post:

The message? Don't ever give up. Don't let anyone stop you from achieving success. Keep going, don't lose faith, and don't ever quit.

Well said.

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Posted In: Productivity

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Productivity - Why We Use Box.net

We made a decision to scan all of our documents in which left us with the question of where do we scan the documents to? We experimented with server options but ultimately decided to fully embrace keeping information on the web. Box.net is a simple site that organizes documents the same way you would organize them on your hard drive. You can have a "Client" folder, and then each client has sub-folders, etc. It is simple to use. We've never had it down and we can give opposing counsel access to certain folders which makes producing discovery responses very nice - some of our cases (particularly FCRA cases) have thousands of documents which we can produce instantly by sending the defense counsel the link and password to a client folder that is marked "Produced to Defendants on ______".

If you would like an online storage place give a look at box.net and let us know what you think. Its been very helpful to us and we plan on keeping it.

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Productivity - Why We Use Gmail

As lawyers representing Alabama consumers most of our cases are in federal court. After filing the case everything happens electronically with all orders and motions, etc. being sent by email. Most of the lawyers on the other side communicate mainly by email. Most of our new clients (that aren't referred by existing clients or lawyers) come through our website. So, we deal with a lot of email. Using Outlook just wasn't cutting it anymore with crashing issues, accessibility issues, etc. So we switched to Gmail.

Some of the advantages of using Gmail are:

1. Massive storage;
2. Related emails are grouped together in a "conversation" that puts your email and all replies to it together to make it easier to read;
3. Searchable - while not as good as we would expect from a google product it still is very good;
4. Accessible anywhere. We have this on our blackberries - all our Gmail messages are accessible through our blackberries and any changes made on our blackberries are made on the Gmail accounts.

We both resisted changing to a "web based" email but having been exclusively on Gmail for a year or so neither one of us would go back.

Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.

John Watts

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Join Us On Linkedin

Linkedin is a service that Stan Herring and I have started to use to connect to people all over the country. We have just started using it so we are definitely just "playing" with it right now but we invite you to check out our profiles and "link in" with us. It is pretty neat to be able to send a message to everyone in your network and then they can pass that on to their network. Its a quick way to get answers from all sorts of people - fellow lawyers, experts, people you go to church or school, etc. and then all of the people that they know.

Here are the links to our public profiles:

John Watts
Stan Herring

Play around with it and let us know what you think.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you.

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Posted In: Productivity

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Follow Us On Twitter

We have just started using Twitter and we are still figuring out what it all means... :) I heard someone describe it as "stalking" but let's put a positive spin on it - its a way to put up blog posts, short updates on what is happening, and to ask quick questions. There is not much room to type but that's part of the charm of Twitter. I have now exhausted my knowledge of Twitter. ;)

Here is my twitter profile - http://twitter.com/JohnGWatts.

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Productivity Posts For Lawyers And Others

We will start posting some ideas and experiences we have with productivity tools, software, and websites. We have learned better ways of doing things over the last several years of having our own firms and we want to share those with you.

We need to always be ahead of our competition as the lawyers representing debt buyers, credit reporting agencies, and collection agencies are usually large firms with a lot of staff so technology and productivity tools allow us to concentrate on lawyering and not getting bogged down in the logistics.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

Posted by John G. Watts & M. Stan Herring | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Productivity

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