Law Firm Management

What are the implications of having child pornography on the premises? In businesses, child pornography generally is discovered by IT personnel. Or, if a corporation undergoes an unrelated internal investigation in which all computers, hard drives, e-mail servers, etc. are frozen and searched for responsive material, such a search can to lead to the discovery of child pornography stored on the corporation's server or on an individual's hard drive. What can/must/should be done as a result?

One of the virtues of e-commerce has always been its low barrier to entry. For little investment of time or money, anyone can set up shop online, whether selling advice or widgets. But can something so easily accomplished really be a business? Will an entrepreneur run something out of her spare bedroom the same way as if she had venture capitalists peering over her shoulders, demanding a business plan, financial statements, budgets, marketing plans and everything that a bricks-and-mortar retailer has (except the expense of leasing space)? If not, she may treat it as just another hobby, something to handle in her free time.

President Obama signed into law the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act (SBJC) of 2010 on Sept. 27. More than $12 billion in tax incentives and relief provisions that are contained in the Act will directly or indirectly affect law firms, partners, their staffs and their clients.

There are good reasons to believe that social media represents the next frontier in effective legal marketing, and many competitors have already hit the ground running. What do you need to know?

In Jan. 30, 2007, the Microsoft Office Asynchronous Binary era, with its shrouded commands, cascading menus and copious toolbars, ended with Office 2003 giving way to Office 2007. With trepidation, those of us who had a personal 18-year business relationship with it knew what was coming. We had a choice; we needed to either acclimatize to this new environment or fall behind technically like those who clung to Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect 5.1.

Ensuring longer-term and continuous improvements in providing greater value, and therefore sustaining higher levels of client satisfaction, requires addressing areas that have received little attention in the whole value discussion — the recruiting and development of associates.

The regulatory frenzy swirling about health care and employer plan accounting, coupled with our aging population and demographic shifts has created a perfect storm. We are besieged with commentary that Medicare is bankrupt, and the new accounting standards for employers require transparency to market and present value calculations of long-term liabilities, which creates havoc for employers for tax-planning and compliance purposes.

This article briefly summarizes tax provisions of the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 that the author believes will be of most interest to law firms.