For any lawyer starting to dabble in the world of online legal marketing and blogging,  Google Alerts is an invaluable tool for keeping up with online legal chatter.

Basically, this program allows Google to “alert” you any time a particular word or phrase is mentioned on the web or in the blogosphere.

I’m going to explain how to set this up in a minute, but first lets discuss some useful and practical ways to utilize Google Alerts for your law practice.

First and foremost, Google Alerts is great  reputation management tool. Law firms should always set up an alert with their company name and name of each attorney to monitor what people are saying online regarding your business or or personal brand.

Google Alerts is also a great way to keep up on breaking news within your particular practice area. For example, a products liability lawyer may set up an alert on the words “FDA recall” for an instant notification the minute a recall hits the web.

And obviously, the quicker a lawyer knows about these breaking stories, the quicker they can start “quick strike” campaigns to grab some of the clients that may have been affected by the recalled product.

Finally, Google Alerts are great way to find relevent blog topics.  For example, an estate planning attorney may set up an alert on “lost assets” or “poor legal planning” to find stories across the web of people that may have faired differently with proper estate planning or some of your services.

So now that we’ve discussed some of the ways to properly use Google Alerts, the following is a brief tutorial on how to get  set up.

Step 1: Log into your Google Account. Do this by going to http://www.google.comand signing in at the top right hand side of the page. If you don’t have a Google account, you will need to create one to sign up for Google Alerts.

Step 2:Once you login, click on “Alerts” under “My Products” on the main dashboard.

Step 3:Enter your desired term in the “search term” box. Then choose how often you want to receive the notifications (once a day, as it happens, etc) and make sure the alert will be delivered to the proper gmail address. *Note: use quotation marks on your alerts to keep specific words together– such as “medical malpractice” in the image shown below

Step 4: Hit “create alert” and you’re all done! Now just sit back and wait for the notifications to start hitting your inbox!

Online Business Manager and law firm marketing expert, Laura Lee Sparks, is one of the most authoritative and well respected voices on attorney outsourcing, legal marketing and being a virtual assistant for lawyers on the web.  Her advice and legal marketing campaigns have helped lawyers reach and surpass the million-dollar mark in their businesses numerous times thanks to her straight-forward advice and ability to make legal marketing principles easy to understand and implement.  For further information on lawyer outsourcing programs or to contact Laura Lee directly, please email help@legalmarketingmaven.com

One of the challenges of running an online team with legal virtual assistants is making sure everyone has access to the same, up-to-date administrative files.

It’s also nice to have access to document revisions at every step of the way– just in case a mistake was made and saved over the correct draft.

Fortunately, such a program now exists thanks to Dropbox.

Dropbox is an amazing application that allows you to store 2 GB of files , which can then be accessed using any authorized computer from the web or local desktop.

Yet the desktop function is probably the most unique aspect of this program, as you can drop a file from your local computer directly into a dropbox file and it will automatically synch the information to your online storage account.

So basically, if you are working on a project with your team, you can save the file on your local computer and it will automatically update online for everyone else to view/edit if necessary.

The program also allows you to go back through every revision of a document incase you need to reverse a mistake that’s been made along the way (which again is nice when managing virtual staff).

Furthermore, you never have to worry about deleting or losing a document, as all files can be restored via the web application.

But the best part for anyone working virutually is that Dropbox’s interface is compatible with mobile browsing, thus allowing you to access your files or documents from an iphone or similar device at anytime of day or night.

So if you’re interested in using Dropbox for your business, there are two versions to choose from—the free version (which gives 2 GB of storage) or the $99 dollar a year version for 50 GB of storage.

I’m actually an affiliate,  so if you sign up for either account from this link you’ll get extra space with your registration.

And if you’re already a dropbox user, please leave your thoughts on the program in the comment section below.  I’d love to hear your take on this wonderful productivity tool.

Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons Artist Guierrmo Esteves

Online Business Manager and law firm marketing expert, Laura Lee Sparks, is one of the most authoritative and well respected voices on attorney outsourcing, legal marketing and being a virtual assistant for lawyers on the web.  Her advice and legal marketing campaigns have helped lawyers reach and surpass the million-dollar mark in their businesses numerous times thanks to her straight-forward advice and ability to make legal marketing principles easy to understand and implement.  For further information on lawyer outsourcing programs or to contact Laura Lee directly, please email help@legalmarketingmaven.com