Transcript with Timestamps
00:00
Hey there, Adam here. Today I wanted to do a video on how I use Obsidian in my daily practice as a personal injury lawyer. I ran a poll not too long ago. I asked, what do people want to watch? Three of the five people that voted. They wanted more cerebral videos on how I use Obsidian in my work and life. So that’s where we’re at today. We’re going to talk about how I use Obsidian in my daily work. It’s not going to be a terribly long video because honestly, most videos are about twice as long as they need to be. Let me just jump back into Obsidian a week and go through what I do. As a personal injury lawyer, I mostly spend my time on the phone and answering emails. A lot of my work does not work directly inside of Obsidian, which, again, not terribly surprising.
00:57
We also use a program called Needles Neos, which is called a practice management software, and that’s where all the client sensitive, client specific data goes. I do take notes on clients inside of this program, but before I make these videos, I have to go through and basically move it all into my other software, clean it out because you can’t see it. That’s sort of how it works. It’s all attorney client privilege, so I have to be very careful about what I show. As a result, nothing specifically related to clients lives inside of my Obsidian long term, for client security reasons. I do use it daily with clients. The primary use that I get with clients or inside of Obsidian is using it for phone calls. Anytime someone calls me, if it’s a client or calling about a specific case, I use Templator, and I have a phone template, so I will just pull it up like this.
02:02
You see? It’s a phone template. Let’s just say client’s name and then hit okay. I’ll put Tcw for telephone call with client’s name or witness or et cetera, whatever, and then the content of the phone call. At the end of the phone call, it’ll live right here. At the end of the day, at the end of the week, what I will do is I will just copy and paste each one of these notes that has client specific information. I will save it directly into our practice management software, where obviously you can save any amount of information in there that you want to. It gets moved out of Obsidian, gets moved directly into my practice management software so that I can be searched by everyone within my organization, because obviously, Obsidian is not designed for organizational level data sharing. This is probably my largest use of it, is just to save phone calls.
03:02
I may take 1520 calls in a day. That’s a normal day for me while answering 100 emails. I will collect a bunch of these. This is so much faster and easier to just control ALTP and make a new one. I just can save them all right here. I can go organize later rather than going into my practice management software, which may be seven or eight clicks to open up a new note. And it’s just slow. So this is instantaneous, it’s backed up. I save it all in the cloud and then it just sits until I can go back and organize it later. Another way I use it is if I have conversations on specific top like a practice or business related topics. For example, this is advanced client costs. This was a discussion with an accountant about how to label a cost moving forward to make sure we do things correctly from a tax perspective.
04:04
If I’m having discussions with people about things that are not client related, I will often take notes inside of here and save it for future use. Another big one that I use this for is Saving CLE. Continuing legal education is what that stands for. So I will save CLE materials. I have the Yaml metadata and then you’ll see there was information given to me while I was taking the class and I can embed it as a PDF. If for whatever reason I want to come back to mass communication in the law, I’ve got the PDF saved here and this is the transcript of the presentation. Those are perhaps the biggest ones and then these are the biggest ones and then one of the other big ones I use it for is I have a list of blog posts, just a few. This is my list of marketing stuff to do for my law firm.
05:21
As I come across topics, it’s not all from this website. As I come across topics that seem like it would be useful in my practice area, I just add them to this list and whenever I finish them, I just delete it off the list. I do use Obsidian for these longer term projects such as blogging, such as how to do stuff from a business perspective. There’s a lot of other things in here that are pseudo related that don’t directly fit underneath this mulro’s law bucket. For example, like this 100 million dollar offer. This is a business book and it specifically relates to the law firm and how we run the firm, but it doesn’t go in that folder because it relates to everything. Rocket Fuel is the same way. Another business book, some of my favorite notes from it. That’s the way I use it.
06:22
It’s a short term repository for me because I need my data to be accessible by our entire team. It’s very useful for these just quick notes and write it down. If I have to have another phone call in five minutes, I’m not scrambling, trying to save things in their correct folders in the cloud. I can just leave it here until I need it and until I have time to organize. I have a to do list here, I’m sure that’s got client names so I can’t click on it. Hopefully this was interesting, helpful, useful, whatever you want to call it. I know that people wanted some more cerebral information, and I think it’s interesting to see how different professions use it. I wouldn’t say I’m getting like best and best use out of it, but then again, I don’t think that there’s any requirement or necessity to be perfectly efficient.
07:17
I think there’s some pretty significant diminishing returns when it comes to programs and quote unquote, efficiency. I think that you want to find the way that the program works for you without going overboard on trying to optimize the software if the optimization is taking you far more mental energy. You’re essentially just procrastinating at that point, which all of us are procrastinate a good bit, but I try to cut it back as much as possible. So I hope this was interesting. I know this is of a different topic and maybe a face reveal. I’m not sure if I’ve done a video with my face on it on this channel. I have a couple of other YouTube channels that I have, so hopefully this was interesting. Hopefully you guessed out of it. If you have some more questions about how I use Obsidian in a more cerebral or life way, let me know.
08:13
I may at some point make a video just about some of the other use cases, but this covers what I do with it on a daily basis for my nine to five job. Well, I wish it was nine to five. It’s a little more than nine to five, but you get the point. All right, thanks. Bye.