Certified Legal Nurse Consultants

You wouldn’t have a CLNC^® business without your attorney-clients. And once you gain an attorney-client, you want to keep that client for life. A single attorney can represent hundreds of thousands of revenue dollars to you as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. The CLNC^® Pros share 12 tips for retaining attorney-clients through good old-fashioned customer service. That’s right – simple customer service is always in vogue. Check in and grade yourself on how you’re applying these attorney-client retention strategies.

Track Your Cases

1. I track all my cases using what I call a “Priority Review Table.” As each case comes in, I quickly add it to the table including the type of project, due date and the assigned CLNC^® subcontractor. I also track the progress of the project from beginning to end. This table acts as a quick reference so that when an attorney-client emails a question or needs to reprioritize the case, I am able to respond promptly without taking time away from the project that is in front of me. It also helps me to focus and maintain my productivity levels.
   – Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

Respond Promptly to Requests

2. I respond to emails and phone calls from attorney-clients within 24 hours. Since I travel quite a bit, I rely heavily upon my Blackberry^®. If an email streams across that can wait until I return to my office later that day, I respond at that time. If not, I am able to acknowledge my client’s request quickly. This gives the attorney confidence that I’m on it.
   – Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

3. My attorney-clients know that I am available to them at any time. I tell them to call or email me with any questions or to bounce ideas off of me. The attorneys appreciate this. I also extend the same invitation to their paralegals.
   – Jane Hurst, RN, CLNC

Meet or Beat Deadlines

4. I always meet or beat deadlines. Although I make every effort to educate my attorney-clients that planning ahead helps me to help them, sometimes “rushes” are required. When I am able to accommodate the “rush” or even beat the deadline, it communicates accountability and reliability time and time again and keeps the relationship strong.
   – Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

5. Keep your time commitments. Always carefully consider deadlines when making commitments to your attorney-clients. Think about the work and other deadlines you already have, so you do not over commit and risk compromising your work product and reputation.
   – Linda Turner, RN, MSN, NNP-BC, CLNC

Practice Quality Improvement

6. Working with employees, subcontractors and various vendors makes quality improvement paramount to the success and reliability of my CLNC^® business practices. I have regular conversations not only with my attorney-clients, but with their paralegals, legal assistants and secretaries to obtain feedback, receive suggestions, discuss concerns and welcome compliments!
   – Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

Stay in Touch

7. While a case is active, I stay in close contact with the attorney. I don’t call or email them for every little thing, but I do make a point of letting the attorney know when I discover new and important information in the case. I keep the attorney informed about my progress and create an atmosphere of joint collaboration.
   – Dale Barnes, RN, MSN, CLNC

Leave Your Other Cases at the Door

8. Let your attorney-clients believe that they and their cases are the only things on your mind when you are dealing with them. There is no reason for them to know you are juggling 10 cases at one time!
   – Margaret Gallagher, RN, BSN, MSN, CLNC

Give a Little Extra

9. I anticipate the attorney’s needs and always give a little more than requested. For example when I am screening a case, I add a few relevant research studies. On the invoice, I indicate this “free gift” by writing no charge – professional courtesy.
   – Dorene Goldstein, RNC, CLNC

10. I always give my clients more than they expect. In addition to the agreed-upon reports and services, I always try to do a little something extra, like a chart, some deposition questions or articles. I want them to know that they always get their money’s worth.
    – Jane Hurst, RN, CLNC

11. Always inform the attorney of other CLNC^® services you can provide as they relate to the case you are working on.
    – Mildred Mannion, RN, BSN, CNOR, CLNC

Live the Golden Rule

12. Treat your attorney-client exactly the way you want to be treated. When you provide first-class service, you usually get first-class response in return.

    – Lawrence H. Frace, RN, CLNC

Thanks to all the CLNC^® Pros for sharing their attorney-client retention strategies.

Success Is Inside!

One of my favorite quotes by Shinichi Suzuki states: “What we’re doing here is so important, we’d better not take it too seriously!” I think CLNC^® consultants excel at this in part because of our background in nursing. As nurses, we deal in serious subjects: death, disease and dismemberment – just to name the fun parts of the job. Then there are the short staffing and floating issues, arrogant doctors and administrators who are out of touch.

In order to handle all the stress, nurses have to develop a sense of humor which outsiders might find strange to say the least. Nurses can find the humor in just about any situation. And nurses even have a sense of humor about their own health crises. Recently I rode an ambulance with a good friend (also a nurse) who was being transported. In the E.D. she said “Vickie, please don’t tag me on Facebook in that ambulance photo.” I promise I didn’t even take a photo, but her sense of humor reassured me that she was at least stable.

When we become Certified Legal Nurse Consultants and start working with attorneys, the game changes: or does it? Suddenly instead of seeing patients who recover, we see a higher percentage of catastrophic injuries and plaintiffs seeking redress and compensation, often with no hope of recovery. It can depress us if we let it. When this game changer occurs, do you change your game or do you approach your legal nurse consulting business with the same sense of humor as you did your nursing practice? I’d recommend keeping your sense of humor.

What we do as CLNC^® consultants is serious, but if you catch yourself taking yourself too seriously step back and remember what Suzuki said; “What you’re doing is so important you’d better not take it, or yourself, too seriously!” Take some time today to have a laugh with an attorney-client. It’s good for the relationship as well as your soul.

Success Is Inside!

The longer Certified Legal Nurse Consultants work in a Windows^® world, the more problems they’ll run into. One of my least favorite Windows-related problems is trying to delete a file, only to have Windows tell you that it won’t because it’s in use by another program. Let’s say you finish a report for your legal nurse consulting business and decide to do a Save As and file it under a different name. Then you go back to delete the original draft report. You know you’ve closed that particular Word document and you’re darn sure ready to delete it. You select the file, hit the delete button or right-click on the file name and select delete from the pop-up menu. Windows thinks for a minute and suddenly this box appears.

Now what? For no reason whatsoever, Windows has a deathgrip on your file and won’t let go of it. You have three choices. You can forget about deleting it and just leave it forever. You can close Word (or whatever program you were using to access that document or file), get a mug of healthy green tea, wait about 10 minutes for the program to completely shut down and let go of that document, and then try and delete it again (this may or may not work). Or, the best but most cumbersome solution, reboot your system and then go back, locate and delete the document. Rebooting will usually force Windows to let go of any files because the program that thought it was accessing the file is forced to let go by the reboot.

Now my CLNC^® amigos you have a solution for deleting the undeletable.

Keep on techin’ (safely),

Tom

Lorraine Perrit, RN, MSN, OCN, CLNC shares how she became involved as a CLNC^® consultant in class action litigation against the tobacco industry through her involvement on a case with an attorney. These tobacco cases are now taking up most of her time as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant.  Take a moment to view Lorraine’s CLNC^® Success Story and the benefits she has since enjoyed!

Congratulations Lorraine!

Success Is Inside!

Gina D’Angelo, RN, BSN, MBA, NHA, CLNC shares how, after getting in front of 60 attorneys at a medical-malpractice conference, her CLNC^® business has grown so much she’s now using CLNC^® subcontractors to keep up!

Watch and learn her secrets to CLNC^® success.

Congratulations, Gina!

Success Is Inside!

Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have long known that one of the issues with laptops is that you must occasionally close them. When you do, the screen collects dust and worse, marks develop from the pressing of the screen against the keys. The longer you run it while it’s docked and shut, the more dust it seems to collect – kind of like little techie dust bunnies. When you finally open your laptop up in an attorney’s office, on an airplane or in the hot tub (just kidding), the screen will be marked and dirty. Kleenex^® doesn’t cut it for cleaning (you really need microfiber cloth) and if you use it (even it’s clean) you’ll end up working in a haze or fog.

I’ve long wished for a solution and I’ve finally found something for my CLNC^® amigos that does triple duty, working to protect the screen from marks and at the same time functioning as a mousepad and a screen cleaner. It’s called the 3-in-1 mousepad from HumanToolz.

Vickie and I each have one and not only do they do a great job of protecting the screen, they’ve mysteriously decreased the number of those annoying dust bunnies. As a bonus, each time I open my laptop I can wipe the screen and get straight to work. Buy one for every laptop you use in your legal nurse consulting business. They come in a variety of sizes and colors and you can easily find them on Amazon.com by searching for “HumanToolz mousepad.” In the words of Jimmy Cliff, “I can see clearly now…”

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I was negotiating a contract with my publisher, Wiley Publishing Company, to update and revise my book Inside Every Woman. They sent me the first draft of their contract as a PDF, which for most people is an un-editable document format. This is actually a pretty good strategy when negotiating a contract as most recipients will simply sign and return it. It can also serve as an intimidating, take-it-or-leave-it message.

But if you know me, you know that’s not the way I roll. In this situation, I had two choices: ask the publisher for the original document in its native word-processing format and rewrite it with track changes (which I did), or use my Adobe^® Acrobat^® Professional editor to rework the PDF document (which I also did on the final copies). Yes, there is software that allows you to edit PDF documents, so no document is edit-proof unless its security settings are locked down tight.

But is sending un-editable contracts to attorneys for your legal nurse consulting business a good idea? My short answer is that it depends on the condition of your contracts or letter agreements. If you have a well-written, fair contract or letter agreement (like those available from the Institute) that you’ve used successfully in the past with other attorney-clients, then go for it. Especially if you’re using a simple letter agreement, this makes total sense and will speed the negotiation process.

When working with attorneys, it’s always best to make things as easy as possible. After all, if an attorney receives a contract in an editable format, they’re likely to do just that – edit it. This will guarantee that you get back an edited document that may not meet your approval or worse, require that you hire an attorney to review the changes before you sign it. If you send your prospective attorney-client a PDF of a contract that’s been well-received in the past, the odds are high that you’ll get back an executed copy.

Eight drafts and several negotiations later, my publisher and I reached an agreement on a contract version that was beneficial to both of us. When they sent me the final executable contract, they did so in PDF format. While I was reviewing it, I found a couple of typos and corrected them using Adobe Acrobat. Needless to say they were surprised, but not shocked. Now that I’ve got a contract, I can get started writing. It’s due to the publisher on June 15th and will be published in September 2011. Wish me luck!

Success Is Inside!

Organization is an essential part of every organization. Paper files are easy for me to organize – I simply stick them in a manila folder and hide them in a file cabinet and my desk is as clear as my conscience.

Computer files are more difficult to organize because they proliferate so quickly. Today we’ll talk about simple steps Certified Legal Nurse Consultants can take to organize the documents they store on their computers. The first step toward organizing your documents, files and folders is to open your My Documents folder. If you want to practice this, single click the My Documents folder (so that it displays the contents of that folder) and then drag any photos, legal nurse consulting reports, videos or other files you want to keep into their proper folders.

What, you haven’t created the proper folders? Let’s do that next. You can create new folders and even folders within folders all by clicking File, New and selecting Folder and then naming it what you choose. If you’re in a folder such as Downloads, this will create the new folder within that folder. If you’re in My Documents, it will create it there.

Windows^® makes some of this easy with pre-created folders such as My Music, My Pictures, My Videos. But what about the documents you create for your legal nurse consulting business? It’s your choice where you put them. I like to keep all my Word documents in one folder to help keep my My Documents clean. It’s called My WordStuff and has several subfolders. Once you create your own “master folder,” it becomes a great place to locate and organize all your legal nurse consulting reports, correspondence with your attorney-clients and other documents in subfolders. Remember to create your subfolders logically (letterhead, forms, by case names, by attorney-names or type of documents, etc.). Your opportunities for organization are limited only by your organizational abilities.

Next, set your copy of Microsoft^® Word to open to that master folder by going to Word Options then Save to set that file as your Default File Location. If you don’t know how to do this, open Word’s help function and type in “default file location” (using quotation marks) in the search box and you’ll find instructions on how to do just that (after a little bit of searching).

Now, my CLNC^® amigos, go forth and organize!

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Vickie,

I just completed a $39,000 case and sent the invoice to the defense law firm. My attorney-client notified me that he would have to submit my bill for approval to the insurance company since it exceeds $25,000. The attorney also told me there will now be a delay in the processing of the invoice. Is this common practice and what can I do next time to expedite the payment process?

Carolyn, RN, CLNC

Hi Carolyn,

Congratulations on working on such a large project. A defense law firm must ultimately be accountable to the insurance company for expenses incurred on cases. A common practice to address accountability in these situations is to have all bills that exceed a designated amount be submitted for approval by the defense law firm. This procedure is guaranteed to delay the processing of an invoice payment, which is exactly what happened in your situation.

So what is a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant to do? First, always get a retainer up front. If you know in advance that the case is large, as is here, ask for a sizeable retainer such as $5,000-10,000. Also, bill the law firm in increments of a similar amount as you continue to progress on the case. This will keep the cash flow coming and also ensures that you and your attorney-client stay in strong communication regarding what is required to produce a quality work product. Again congratulations on such a successful venture!

Success Is Inside!

Carol Ann McLawhorn, RN, BSN, CLNC shares a story about an unorthodox interviewing style she accidentally used with an attorney-prospect. While this is definitely NOT one of the interview styles we teach at Vickie Milazzo Institute, she did land a new attorney-client.

Watch Carol Ann as she bares all in this unrated video:

Congratulations, Carol Ann!

Success Is Inside!