Starting A Bankruptcy Practice? Keep It Simple
As a consultant to law firms around the country who want to start their bankruptcy practice and as a speaker at several of NACBA’s conventions, I have a basic philosophy on managing your practice – ‘Don’t bite off more than you can chew!’ Everyone wants to go from 0 to 60 in 2.2 seconds and it takes time and drastic changes in how you approach your practice. I have found it much easier to change things slowly over time so that your staff and you have time to adjust to the changes you make.
This series of blogs is designed to help you start slowly and pick and choose the ideas that you want to take with you into your practice. For reference, my ofifce is paper’less’. We haven’t ever been able to do away with paper entirely, but I’ve reduced the amount we have sitting on my desk and in the file cabinet. I use a scanning system to get all of my written documents into electronic format. But that is a discussion for another time. For now, we’re focused on setting up your e-folders so you can do the scanning of documents. Your computer hard drive is nothing more than an electronic filing cabinet. That is the first change you will now make to your thinking. The nice thing about the electronic filing cabinet is that it offers way more flexibility than the typical lawyers standing file cabinet. On your computer, you probably have a file called ‘My Documents’. It is a good place to start as any. In the ‘My Documents’ folder, create another folder named ‘Bankruptcy‘. You can do this via right click on your mouse. Once you have created the folder, open the folder by double clicking the folder icon. Right click your mouse again and make another new folder, this one called ‘Clients’. Click your way into this folder and create 26 new folders named A through Z. Now you have created not only your filing cabinet, but have created the actual folders inside your file cabinet. The folder hierarchy should look something like this. - My Documents. - Bankruptcy – Clients - A – B – C – D etc. From here, you can now create a client folder by going to the appropriate letter, opening the file, and creating a new folder in the debtor’s name. The format is: Last name, first name. Don’t worry about the comma. You will still be able to create the file folder.
In the client’s actual folder, you can create subfolders! I have subfolders for correspondence, petition info, credit counseling, adversary proceedings, claims, 341 docs, etc. You can have as many or as few as you like. Use the same method to create the folders as you did to set up your file cabinet.This pays off when you have a volume level of clients. In our next installment, we’ll talk about scanning the info to those folders and naming conventions.
Kent, WA
