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John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC, (www.olmsteadassoc.com) is a past chair and member of the ISBA Standing Committee on Law Office Management and…

John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC, (www.olmsteadassoc.com) is a past chair and member of the ISBA Standing Committee on Law Office Management and Economics and author of The Lawyers Guide to Succession Planning published by the ABA. For more information on law office management please direct questions to the ISBA listserver, which John and other committee members review, or view archived copies of The Bottom Line Newsletters. Contact John at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com.

Law Firm Operations Management Exception Report

July 29, 2026

Question:

I am the owner of a five-lawyer estate planning/administration firm in Fresno, California. The other four lawyers are associates in the firm with estate planning and administration experience ranging from one year to ten years. We have three paralegals, a office manager/bookkeeper, and a receptionist. We are using state of the art cloud-based practice management software for billing, accounting, calendaring, document storage and management, and lead tracking. We use MS 365 products for e-mail and word processing. We use specialized cloud-based software for estate planning document drafting and preparation. While most of our estate planning work is billed on…

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