Tag: law

I went to Hawaii for Two Weeks (and the Law Firm Survived)

The last time I went to Hawaii was in 2008, and I was on my honeymoon. I had just started work at a Big(ish) Nashville Law Firm, and I was nervous about taking a full week off, only six weeks in. (I was sort of worried that they’d deny my request to take a vacation.)

Fast-forward to this summer, 17 years later. Five years ago, I started my own law firm, and, as we planned another trip to Hawaii (with a 14 and 12 year old in tow), I began to worry about being away for two weeks and all the possible things that can come up.

Spoiler-alert: It was pretty easy.

My old law firm was run by folks in their late 60s and early 70s, and things like remote practice and cutting edge technology was never a priority (though our leather bound Martindale Hubbell collection was pristine).

When I started my own firm, I saw the rapid advances in technology made during the COVID pandemic and incorporated as much as I could.

The technology and systems that I use every day made the vacation so much easier than the one I took in 2008. For this trip, I leaned heavily on a few core tools:

  • Cloud-Based Practice Management: My firm uses Clio. All case files, deadlines, and client communications are accessible online. My firm bills via Clio, and, on the 12 hour flight, I was able to get all of my May 2025 bills generated, approved, and delivered to clients…from the airplane.
  • Microsoft Office: We are a Microsoft Office law firm. Microsoft is slowly pushing users to use the very secure online portal for Outlook, Word, and all the other applications. This is useful for remote work, obviously. I was able to access my entire law firm, easily, using a Microsoft Surface tablet.
  • Zoom & Microsoft Teams: Client meetings ran as usual. Other than the random and exotic bird noises they could hear.
  • NetDocuments with secure access: I use NetDocuments, an online document management system, so every document I needed was instantly available, but also secure. My paralegal could draft documents that I could easily access and respond to.
  • VOIP Phone System: I use Dialpad (but am not a huge fan). Regardless, when a client called my office, they got me (in Hawaii) or my staff (not on vacation with me).
  • E-Filing and Online Dockets: Lawyers violently oppose most technological advances, but the e-filing of pleadings (and new lawsuits) is so useful that even the most stubborn lawyers don’t fight this. In a pinch, I prepared and filed a lawsuit from a beach chair, and coordinated service of process via Proof Process Servers.
  • Calendar & Time Zone Discipline: Hawaii is 5–6 hours behind most of my clients and courts. That meant early mornings — I typically started work at 4:30 or 5:00 AM Hawaii time to stay in sync with the mainland. This worked pretty well; instead of emails “trickling” in during the morning, I had a full plate of emails to power through with coffee, and I’d check in again at lunch by the beach (when my banker clients had gone home for the day).

What I Learned

  1. Time zone planning is everything: Build your schedule around your clients’ time zones, not your own. Having said that, to keep my family happy, I had to close the laptop by 8am in Hawaii…which was 1pm Nashville time. The time difference actually worked in my favor, as I had ample time to work, and then have guilt and distraction free days at the beach.
  2. A tight schedule keeps you focused: Being away from the day-to-day distractions of the office actually helped me focus. With a solid daily routine (coffee, sunrise, email triage), I found my time blocks more productive.
  3. Clients don’t care where you are, as long as you’re responsive: Big law firms cling too tightly to the old vestiges of tradition — fancy offices; suits and ties; strict hierarchies. For me, no clients cared that I was working remotely, because every call and email was answered promptly.

Final Thoughts

There are different mindsets when talking about running a law firm remotely. Some lawyers (the ones that may not have school age children) have the flexibility to run a truly remote firm, working in a new and exciting city and without being bound to a single location or your law partners’ judgey faces.

For me, I just needed to have a reliable tech-stack that would allow me to service my clients effectively while I was away. I had spent months preparing, blocking my calendar during that time, and warning clients about my limited availability.

It’s never easy to take a long vacation, especially if you are a busy solo lawyer, but it can be done–and fairly easily.

Law Firms: To avoid Malpractice Claims, Remember that Tennessee Judgments Expire in Ten Years

Tennessee judgments expire after ten years.

As a creditor lawyer, one of my greatest fears is that one of the many judgments that I’ve taken over the past 10 years is set to expire and I have forgotten about it.

It is so easy to renew judgments under Tenn. R. Civ. P. 69.04, but it’s also easy to forget about those old files. If a law firm forgets, it could get sued for malpractice. It’s a big deal.

Earlier this week, the Tennessee Court of Appeals touched on this issue. See John Doe Corp. v. Kennerly, Montgomery & Finley, P.C., E2023-00236-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. May 28, 2024).

In the case, after the 10 year period expired on an old judgment, the judgment creditor client sued its former lawyers, alleging that the law firm “had failed to inform Plaintiff that the judgment would expire after ten years or that it needed to seek to extend the judgment prior to its expiration.”

The trial court dismissed the claims against the law firm, because the client failed to have filed the lawsuit within the one-year attorney malpractice statute of limitations. The opinion doesn’t really focus on the renewal issue; the real analysis is on issues of recusal and the different standards under Tenn. R. Civ. P. 59.04 and 60.02.

But, back to creditor rights. Is this is victory for the law firm? Not really, because lawyers don’t like being sued for malpractice in the first place.

Since starting my firm nearly 4 years ago, I’ve opened 639 new cases. Before that, I handled a similarly busy caseload at my old firm. In the past 10 years, I’ve taken 100s of judgments.

It would be a cold comfort to me to know that, if my client sues me for malpractice, I could possibly defend the case on a technicality.

Having said that, how can lawyers mitigate that risk? The answer is in a Court of Appeals decision I wrote about in 2019. There, the malpractice claims turned on whether the law firm warned the client, at any point, that the judgment needed to be renewed in ten years. Because the law firm had previously warned the client about the 10 year expiration, the client had knowledge of the possible malpractice claims that accrued at the time of non-renewal (and not a later date).

Look at the text of the John Doe case: the client alleged that the law firm “had failed to inform Plaintiff that the judgment would expire after ten years or that it needed to seek to extend the judgment prior to its expiration.”

If you’re like me, a busy lawyer with many judgments, remember my advice from 2019: “A good practice is to make sure that the client understands that it has a responsibility in ten years to notify you that it wants you to take this action.”

In a perfect world, my advice is to calendar judgments and simply avoid this issue altogether.

A separate safeguard could be, in that initial congratulatory email, sending a copy of the judgment to the client, to always include text that clearly discusses the validity and expiration of the Judgment in terms that the client can understand.