I always start my day with a plan and usually before 9:00am I am busting that plan. Over the years I know I’ve wrecked more than a few of my executives’ days because my management style is dynamic and priorities change unexpectedly. I believe my job is similar to an emergency nurse – to triage company priorities every second of the day.
You’ve QA’d your legal nurse consulting business, but have you QR’d it? QR, or quick response, codes are all the rage in the advertising world. These are the small images or blocks of computer code you see in magazine ads, boarding passes and newspapers. When you see a QR code, you simply need to focus your smartphone’s camera on it (and have the right app) and it will take you to a webpage selected by the QR code’s author.
CLNC® consultants often ask me, “Tom, should I buy a laptop or desktop for my legal nurse consulting business?” As always, my answer is firm and definite: “Well, my CLNC® amigo, it depends.” I love my laptop, but then again, I’m a mobile user shifting between the home office, the office office, the airplane office and the road office. On any given day I can be working from my lap in some mobile location. I’ll be logged into the Institute’s network through my Verizon wireless card from a conference room, camped out on the couch in our hotel room and once (well, maybe twice) in the backseat of a hotel’s airport shuttle van crunching away on a deadline.
Attorneys appreciate honesty and objectivity, but more importantly they need honesty and objectivity with their medical-related cases. That’s why it’s important for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to never hold back their opinions. The attorney is investing time, money and sweat into every case and must understand the good, the bad and the ugly. This is the only way the attorney can make intelligent decisions about whether to take a case or reject it and whether to settle or to go to trial. It doesn’t help for you to sit on the fence about an issue or to suck up to the attorney, only giving information that agrees with the attorney’s own opinion, especially if it’s a case that he’s convinced himself is a winner.
Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who are Microsoft® Word users have long taken advantage of the built-in Track Changes function as well as some of Word’s other innate abilities, such as counting words in a document, inserting or overwriting and more. But one of the issues I’ve run into with Track Changes is that I can forget that it’s enabled, especially if I’m in Final display mode and may be inadvertently tracking what I’m doing… Not good if I forward my completed Word document to another who may then peer into the meta-data and see my changes and revisions.
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.
That’s actually a trick question. The real question is whether or not you should use a password on the smartphone or tablet you use in your CLNC® business. What’s that you say? Passwords are too cumbersome and time-consuming? Well, let me ask you, what do you think would be more time-consuming: taking two seconds to type in a 4-digit passcode each time you reach for your device, or untangling your life after someone has stolen your banking information, all of your contacts, possibly your identity, has read and forwarded your email and just wrought havoc with your life because you’ve lost your smartphone and it has fallen into the hands of some villain?
I’m writing this at the CLNC® Certification Seminar in Atlanta after I just came off one of the most hectic weeks of my life. First I had the official launch of my new book Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman. If you haven’t been following me on Facebook or Twitter, Wicked Success hit #1 on Amazon.com, #3 on the USA Today business bestseller list and, if you can believe this, it was not only #3 on the Wall Street Journal’s bestselling business book list but also #8 on the WSJ’s bestselling nonfiction book list in the same week! And my publisher just told me Wicked Success will be #6 on the New York Times bestseller list on Sunday October 9th! Thank you all for supporting the book and sharing it with all the women you love. Being a New York Times bestselling author is every writer’s dream and you helped to make that dream come true.
I’ve been training and mentoring nurses to start legal nurse consulting businesses for more than 29 years. In all that time, I’ve never met a successful CLNC® consultant who said “I wish I had waited to start my CLNC® business.” What I always hear Certified Legal Nurse Consultants say is “I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.”
One thing I stress to CLNC® consultants is that it’s not how new or how fast your computer is, it’s whether or not you’re using it correctly. Using a computer correctly goes far beyond having the proper software necessary for your legal nurse consulting business, such as Microsoft® Word, Excel and Outlook and even goes beyond running Windows® 7 or XP or, heaven forbid, a Mac®.
*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.
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