Practice Management and Technology
Practice management questions focus on systems that prevent missed deadlines, lost files, and confidentiality breaches. Maintain one authoritative docket and a backup tickler system; calculate deadlines from the applicable rules, not memory, and confirm whether weekends, holidays, mail service, or e-filing change the count. Use a conflicts database at intake and update it as parties and issues emerge. Organize matters with consistent naming, access controls, retention schedules, and secure destruction. Trust accounting requires segregation, reconciliation, and no commingling. Billing entries should be contemporaneous, specific, and defensible. Technology competence is an ethical duty: use encryption, multi-factor authentication, patched software, and secure cloud services; train staff on phishing. Preserve metadata when required and scrub it when appropriate; issue litigation holds early and suspend auto-deletion. Traps: relying on a court clerk's oral extension; calendaring only the final deadline; using personal email for client documents; assuming cloud storage is automatically secure; and treating e-discovery as paper discovery. Worked example: a rule allows 21 days after service, and service by mail adds 3 days. Count from the day after service, exclude the trigger day, include weekends unless the rule says otherwise, then add the mail days and roll forward if the last day falls on a weekend or holiday. Rule of thumb: one docket, two reminders, verify local rules, and document the calculation.