The Legal Pad

"Say Good Night, Gracie."

This is our last post. Yep. It really is. Over three years ago, we began our little project -- The Legal Pad -- a blog primarily for support staff -- those folks who work "on the front lines" in the office and for all intents and purposes -- we think we've had a successful run!

We think we brought you some pretty good articles -- dealing with lots of different things. We've given you some good resource information, talked about customer service, talked about taking care of yourself, how to deal with office gossip, how to be stealthy with a thumb drive, how to deal with cranky people, how to save some money in a tough economy, and gave you some tips on how to unclutter your office.

We also wrote about some rather unusual (some would say "strange") topics -- that we thought might entertain you -- like chickens, holidays, headaches, Queen Bees, messages in bottles, toilet paper, licorice, and groundhogs!

Now, The Missouri Bar is moving forward. The Bar is in the middle of developing a brand-new website and we're excited about that. It'll be ready to go "live" real soon! You can follow The Missouri Bar at their Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#!/mobarnews and The Missouri Bar's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/missouribar

A hearty "Thank You!" to all our readers -- support staff professionals, attorneys, co-workers, friends, and family members. Your comments and emails were welcomed, appreciated, and did not go unnoticed. We're glad you took the time to let us know when something spoke to you or helped you along the way. We wish you well in all you do!

Just as George Burns and Gracie Allen signed off  --- so do we.

"Say good night, Gracie." 

"Good night."

Jack & Suzanne

How Did The Legal Pad Begin?

I get some very interesting telephone calls from all sorts of people in all sorts of situations. My job is never boring -- always entertaining. Every day is different -- depending upon the phone calls that come in.

My name is Suzanne Creech. I'm the Coordinator of The Missouri Bar Lawyer Referral Service. I'll be doing a lot of the writing for this blog. Occasionally, Jack Wax will also be doing some of the writing -- he's the bar's Media Relations Director and the supervisor of the bar's Lawyer Referral Service.

I answer the phone for the referral service, referring potential clients to lawyers. I try to treat the client as if I were the customer on the other end of the line. When you've been on both sides of the customer service fence, you realize that you can have either a positive or negative impact on people.

I've always been curious about how solo and small firm practitioners handle their own phone calls. Do they screen all their calls? Who does this? How many calls do they get a day? How do they handle irate callers? What do they do when they can't help someone?

We decided the best way to find out would be -- to ask. We began this project with a survey of solo and small firm attorneys to get information about how they handle their calls and customers. Then we sent a letter to a random number of lawyers and asked them to pass a web address on to their support staff where they could go on-line, take a survey, and tell us what they thought and how they do business.

There was an option on the survey where, if interested, support staff who completed our survey could sign up for a quarterly e-newsletter. After much discussion about the kinds of things we could publish in the e-newsletter, we decided to broaden the scope of our new "mission" from an e-newsletter to a blog.

Lots of searching through blog directories revealed a noticable lack of blogs that directly related to clerks, receptionists, administrative assistants, secretaries and office professionals who work in law firms.

This was an unexpected surprise! So...we decided to develop a new and unique blog community -- a resource for all those folks who work "on the front lines" in the office -- a place where office professionals can read and comment about the work they do and the things they care about.

Welcome to our little place on the web -- The Legal Pad!