The potential for legal matters to take a negative turn for a dental practice is relatively small, but the fact that the risk exists means no dentist or their dental practice can leave themselves exposed legally. Whilst professionalism and stellar service are prerequisites, even they cannot prevent a patient from taking it upon themselves to take legal action, and if you are the dentist in the firing line, or your dental practice is, that can cause untold amounts of stress and upheaval.

In addition, apart from the angst of defending yourself in court should you be required to, if you lose a legal case it can do extreme damage, not only to your dental practice’s finances, but more seriously it can damage the practice’s and your reputation. These could arguably be regarded as even more serious given that they can lead to patients deciding to leave and no new patients willing to replace them.

Before we send you into a panic worrying about the ifs and buts of legal action being taken against you or your dental practice, you should know that they are rare events. Further, and the even better news is, in most instances, having the correct legal advice and representation can prevent any risk of you having to spend time defending yourself in a court case.

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When we ask family lawyers what are some of the hardest tasks they have to undertake as part of their law practice, several answers will relate to certain types of cases and preparing for cases to be heard in the Family Court, however, there is a common answer that has nothing to do with courts, judges, and legislation, and that is client acquisition.

Most people would not immediately associate selling as part of the work that a family lawyer does, but they often do, or at least, the law practice they own has to. The reason is that, unless a family law business has new clients, once all their current clients’ cases are completed the revenue generation that keeps that family law business viable starts to diminish, to the point that it all but dries up.

The question, therefore, is what can family lawyers do to attract and acquire the new clients that they patently need? Thankfully, there are several answers to that question, and to be the ever-helpful people that we are, we are going to outline four of these which have been proven to work and work repeatedly for family lawyers seeking new clients.

Reward Referrals

Most family lawyers will have read about and probably understand the importance of referrals, but few take any proactive action towards securing more referrals than they currently receive, and more importantly what their competitors can acquire.

A simple way to reverse that and see referrals levels rocket is to incentivise current clients to refer your family lawyers’ practice to their family and friends. You could offer a $100 voucher for Amazon or a local store, or simply subtract $100 from their legal fees as an incentive. Surely, $100 is a price worth you paying for a client whose fees might be thousands of dollars.

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One of the key decisions that a court has to make when someone has been convicted of a drug-related offence is whether that person should serve time in prison, or should be ordered to enter a drug rehab program. To many outsiders, the two options might seem to be at opposite ends of the punishment spectrum, with prison seen as the correct means of dealing with a drug offender, and drug rehab considered a lenient option, neither of which view is entirely correct.

In effect, what a court will be determining is whether the drug offender would be better served by being punished or treated, and many factors need to be considered concerning each one of these. This is not a straightforward ‘lock them up’ or ‘let them off’ decision, and whilst drug crime can never be condoned nor pardoned, simply putting someone in jail for a length of time may not serve either the offender or society as a whole.

We say that not to be harshly critical of prison, but given that the person offending may be addicted to drugs, placing them in an environment, where, with the best of wills, drugs will still be able to be obtained, simply defers many of the problems of drugs use rather than deals with them.

Alternatively, a strong case can be made that were that person ordered to enter a drug rehab facility and receive the treatment, therapy, and support which will have the best chance of breaking their drug dependency, then there are several winners including the individual, their family, and the community at large.

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If you have a blog as part of your digital marketing campaign, then you are already ahead of the majority of other lawyers. Despite their work requiring a great deal of written material to be created, such as depositions and witness statements, many lawyers seem unwilling to write blog content.

This is a huge mistake as having a blog with excellent content posted regularly can create a boost to your online marketing efforts. First, Google loves content and a blog is an excellent way of giving them it, and then seeing your rankings increase. A great blog also provides a way to engage with your website visitors and provide them with great content to grow trust and authority.

For any lawyer contemplating starting a blog, or wishing to improve one, here are 10 simple, yet highly effective tips that can help to boost the benefits your blog generates towards you having a successful digital marketing campaign.

#1 – Focus On Your Audience: At the heart of everything you do on your blog should be your target audience. Write for them, not yourself, and you will greatly enhance your blog’s chances of being successful.

#2 – Ensure Your Posts Are Keyword Optimised: Before writing anything you must carry out keyword research. This allows you to create titles, sub-headings, and content which helps Google establish what your blog is about and thus rank it accordingly.

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If you have ever been party to legal proceedings or even simply watched a legal drama on television or at the cinema, you are bound to have heard the term affidavit. Affidavits are something which divorce lawyers are often required to draw up on behalf of their clients and they can sometimes form a crucial part in cases that are heard by the Family Court, including, of course, divorces.

That being said, affidavits can be a part of many types of court cases, and not just ones that relate to family law. Commercial court cases, and criminal court cases are just two examples where affidavits might be submitted by lawyers, required by the judge, or a compulsory document that is necessary under the legislation and rules of a particular legal process.

In the Australian legal system, there are a number of documents that are filed with courts, and in the case of an affidavit, it is a sworn written statement by an individual and is the equivalent of swearing under oath in a courtroom, but in this case, it is evidence given in the written form, rather than giving the evidence orally.

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If you’re a new law firm owner, you must build a new website. If you’re an existing law firm owner, then chances are that you need to perform some overdue maintenance on your existing website.

Unfortunately, SEO Perth Experts advise us that many law-related websites have significant problems on the SEO front. These problems can impact things like SEO scores and search engine rankings but can also negatively impact the user experience. Ultimately, you must do everything possible to avoid common SEO mistakes when building and maintaining your website.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled three of the most common SEO mistakes lawyers make. They include:

1. Ignoring meta descriptions and page titles

It’s essential to include as much information as possible on every single page of your website. Search engine crawler bots analyse Every bit of information you have when they’re looking at your website and then determine your search engine ranking. If your page titles and meta descriptions are missing, there will be much less information for the bots to analyse, and your search engine ranking will almost certainly be lower.

Changing your meta descriptions and page titles is very easy. Most content management systems let you do this while creating content. Although most small business owners overlook these options and leave the fields blank, filling them in a few extra minutes is essential.

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One of the fundamental principles of family law in Australia is that when parents get divorced the parental responsibility for their children is shared equally unless there is an extremely compelling reason why that should not be the case. Many clients, especially mothers, are somewhat surprised when their family lawyer from www.lawyerslist.com.au, tells them that regardless of how poor a parent their ex is, they will still share parental responsibility.

The assumption of many people that mothers will have full custody and the sole right to have the responsibility of their children still exists, even though it was way back in 1975 that the introduction of the Family Law Act made shared parental responsibility the default legal position.

The only way that this default position will not exist is when it can be shown that one of the parents is incapable of sharing or unfit to share parental responsibility for their child or children. Examples of this might be where a parent is a heavy drug user, has a history of domestic violence, or is completely absent and unable to be traced.

However, even in these circumstances, and given that the court has an obligation to consider what is in the best interests of the child,  family law still stipulates that, where possible, there should at least be some contact between a child and each of their parents. This means that although they may not be given a share of the responsibility for their child, a parent may still be granted visitation rights.

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Although many people will go into a blind panic if the police arrest them for the first time, any of the best criminal lawyers will tell you that if you know your rights in advance, it should not be too scary.

Incidentally, we write this with no thought whatsoever as to anyone’s guilt or innocence, so whether you did or did not commit the crime, the process and your rights regarding arrest are precisely the same.

We’ll start by outlining under what circumstances the police have the right to arrest you. They 1) reasonably suspect that you have committed or are about to commit a crime, 2) They have a warrant for your arrest, and 3) They believe you to be a risk to a family member.

When they arrest you, you must not refuse to go with the police officer. That means if you try to resist, even if you are innocent of the crime they suspect you of, you are now committing an offence. Bear in mind the police can use reasonable force if you resist arrest.

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In Australia, employer rights are comprehensive and are designed to protect employers from a wide range of situations. One of these is when employees are taking advantage of their situation and working at a sub-par level.

Unfortunately, this is something that happens on an all to frequent basis. And it can be extremely frustrating to pay someone for a job that they’re not doing right. Because of this, we decided to put together the following list of actions you can take if you feel like employees are taking advantage of their situation and not performing at an acceptable level.

After all, Australian employers have the right to expect reasonable work performance from all staff.

1. Speak With the Employee in Question

The first thing you should do is sit down and speak with the employee in question. Let them know that you’re not satisfied with their performance, and tell them that they need to lift their game if they don’t want to face legal action.

Now, this step is actually extremely important. If an employee is dismissed because of performance issues that they didn’t have a chance to rectify, they may be able to make an unfair dismissal claim. Taking the initiative, speaking with them, and telling them what they need to improve will ensure you’re protected.

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Creating your first estate plan can be a difficult process, especially if you don’t have any sort of legal or academic background. However, estate planning is definitely something that you should consider, especially if you have a lot of assets or personal wealth.

Luckily, there are a range of estate planning professionals or experienced family lawyers available to help you put together your own estate plan. These people range from lawyers to accountants and qualified financial planners, and I’d definitely recommend speaking to one about your estate plan.

My top 5 reasons to use an estate planning specialist include:

1. It’s just easier

Although some will tell you that you can’t create your own estate plan, this simply isn’t true. It’s more than possible to put an estate plan together on your own, but it’s not always easy.

For me, this is probably the main reason to use a qualified estate planning expert. Since they will know exactly what they’re doing, they should be able to help you put your estate plan together in a lot faster and with a lot less stress than if you tried to do it yourself.

2. They will help you save money

In the end, the main goal of an estate plan is to maximise your tax benefits and financial gains, which means that anyone who can help you save money will be worth their weight in gold.

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