Wisconsin Lawyer
Vol. 79, No. 4, April 2006

The Three-legged Stool

by George C. Brown,
State Bar executive director

So, you're sitting in your office and the computer has crashed again and you're thinking it's about time to replace the ol' Apple IIe.

Or, as a regular reader of this magazine, you know that new trust account rules will soon be in place and you are wondering whether your current software program will help you comply with the new rules, and, if not, which programs do.

Or, you've heard of trust accounts, but don't quite know what that means for you when you open your own office in a few weeks.

Or, you've just been appointed to succeed a long-serving and venerated municipal attorney and you have no idea how to better organize the office and what files you need to retain or can destroy, but you know you can't work the way your predecessor did.

Until now, you probably would have turned to a friend from law school for advice or paid a consultant or just taken a shot at dealing with these problems alone.

Now, you can turn to the State Bar and its new Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP). Under development for the last two years by a committee of lawyers from various practice settings, including private practice, public practice, and in-house counsel, chaired by Byll Hess, a former Board of Governors chair, and working closely with the Law Practice Management Section, the committee has designed a program that will be able to assist lawyers in most if not all practice settings.

The LOMAP Practice Management Advisor, Nerino Petro, began working at the Bar Center in January and has been carefully implementing the program plan developed by the committee. Petro practiced as a sole practitioner for about 15 years and has managed a law technology consulting service for the last 10 years. Since he joined the State Bar staff, he has taken phone calls, held meetings with attorneys to demonstrate software, spoken at various local and specialty bar associations, and developed practice tips and white papers on file retention, destruction, and naming, and on various computer file shortcuts and techniques. (Please see Petro's article, "Retaining Client Files," elsewhere in this issue.)

LOMAP joins the two other longstanding State Bar programs designed to help you deal with issues facing you in your practice: the Ethics Hotline program and the Wisconsin Lawyers Assistance Program (WisLAP).

Many of you have sought ethics guidance from Tim Pierce, the State Bar's ethics counsel. Pierce has provided informal ethics guidance full-time though the Ethics Hotline since joining the State Bar staff in late 2004. He also speaks regularly to local bar associations and at State Bar ethics CLE programs.

The Wisconsin Lawyers Assistance Program (WisLAP) was formed 10 years ago by merging the Committee on Assistance for Lawyers and the Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers programs. WisLAP provides meaningful assistance to lawyers, judges, their colleagues, and their families in coping with drug and alcohol dependency, depression, acute anxiety, and other problems that develop due to the stress found in the practice of law. WisLAP coordinator Shell Goar was joined recently by Sarah Coyle to provide full time assistance to our members in need.

These three programs, then, provide a three-legged stool of law practice support: ethics, office, and personal well-being. They each provide you a confidential service as you face the many challenges of your practice.

Wisconsin Lawyer