Your Number One New Year's Resolution: Earn More Money in 2010

How do you make more money in 2010? As a nurse, you first get yourself certified as a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant (PLNC) and then you use cost-effective marketing tools to get yourself noticed and hired.

You don't need to spend a fortune to get your nurse expert witness certification. Take the Jurex PLNC Certification Course in 2 days (Four ways: Live Course, Audio Course, Video Course or E-Course) and you're already on your way. Next, included in any of the Jurex certification courses is your one year listing on the Jurex Expert Directory. Create your profile and you're ready. It's that simple to getting started.

Now, if you want to do more marketing of your PLNC services, you can get business cards, letterhead, envelopes and brochures customized for you in the Jurex Marketing Pack. Want extra help? Then, register for Mentoring. Would prefer to have everything you need in one package - then get the Get Certified & Go! Package.

Most importantly, get going on the road to success. Even a little effort should yield results. Your resolution is to earn more money in 2010 and that's fully attainable. Start now!

Time to Testify: Tidbits of the Trade

Testifying -- what do you think of? Sounds daunting, but testifying can be quite straightforward if you're prepared. Now, think of testifying as an expert witness. You probably feel a bit calmer because you'd be testifying about facts which already occurred.

Testifying Tidbits for Legal Nurse Consultants:
Nothing can substitute for being prepared. Reread the medical record you last looked at over a year ago. Read every entry because you don't know which entries you may be asked about. You're thinking, I'm the nursing expert not the medical expert so I'll skim over the physician's notes. Think again. While you may not be asked about the medical standard of care, you're expected to have reviewed the entire record.

Reread your notes. Sure, you put your notes into a final report, but if you still have your notes, you should reread them. Remember, you may be asked to produce your notes but these notes might help support your opinion.

Remain calm. Don't loose your cool. Remember, you're the expert. You didn't create the facts, you're just testifying about them.

Testify and move on. Just be sure to put yourself in the best position by doing your prep work first.

Thanksgiving - Time To Use Our Nursing Skills

Thanksgiving. This is time of the year when we give thanks for all that we have. As nurses, we have skills we can use in so many ways. How do we simply use these skills to help others as well as ourselves? We're probably good at helping others, it's the "ourselves" part that we probably need to work on.

The Thanksgiving List:

1. Make a list of five of your most unique nursing skills.
2. Make a list of five dreams, or goals, you have for your professional life.
3. Combine #1 and #2 above and see if they can somehow fit together.

Now, be determined to put your unique nursing skills to work so you can become more fulfilled. After all, the majority of your waking hours are spent working. So, you might as well be happy doing something(s) you enjoy doing. If not, it's time to broaden your horizons. Check out www.nursinglink.com for ideas to expand the nursing side of yourself.

Make the Most of Client Meetings

As a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant (PLNC), you may have to meet with clients for any number of reasons. Perhaps you are helping answer discovery or you are sitting in with the attorney on the initial consultation. Regardless of the reason, there are a number of ways you can make these meetings productive:

1. Plan ahead. Go into the meeting knowing its purpose. Make a list of questions you will ask the client. Bring pen and paper.

2. Eliminate distractions. Make it clear that you are not taking calls or visitors during the meeting.

3. Take good notes. In order to get something out of the meeting, you must take good notes. Plus, taking notes gives off the impression that you are smart.

4. Review your notes immediately after the meeting. By doing so, you can get a handle on the information you learned and decide what to do with it.

Meetings can be time-wasters if you don't use the time wisely. Remember, make the most of a few key meetings.

No Such Thing As Cold Calling: Handling the Phone Call

We all get a little unsettled when thinking about the possibility of "cold calling". In your Professional Legal Nurse Consulting practice, think about the different ways you could approach telephoning an attorney for medical records to review.

First, get organized. Try using a spreadsheet. Whether you use Excel or some other spreadsheet format, or write it out by hand, have a contact document organized as follows:
Column 1: Name (Attorney's name or law firm)
Column 2: Address
Column 3: Telephone number
Column 4: Description - make it brief
Column 5: Email address

Second, do a search about the attorney or law firm before you pick up the telephone. Go online and type in the name of the law firm or attorney in the search engine toolbar and see what you get. Cut and paste into your spreadsheet. Or, go to the library and look through an attorney directory.

Third, make the call. There's no time like the present, as it has been said. Now, the next time you make a phone call, think of it as warm calling instead of cold calling and soon it'll turn into hot calling. It gets easier and easier.

Put Your Invoices to Work

What is the role of an invoice? Of course, it is meant to show how much is owed for a product or service. To get the most out of your invoices, consider including the following:

• Your name and your business name
• Client name and case name or identification number (if it applies)
• Date of invoice
• Tax ID number
• Invoice number for tracking purposes
• Amount owed - where it can be clearly read
• An itemization of your time for the case
• Payment due date

Each of these items seems obvious, however, many invoices do not contain all of this information. Make the most of your invoices, also by:

• Turning in invoices consistently on the same day each week or month
• Billing in small increments when possible - large invoices can slow payment time
• Submit invoices to the correct person or department
• Track and follow up on outstanding invoices at regular intervals

The 12 Essential PLNC Business Tools CD contains an Invoice designed especially for your PLNC business. You don't need to recreate the wheel when it's right here for you.

Other items you can include on your invoices include referral incentives, especially if you are at the end of a project for a firm. You can also include a small discount on your overall fee for projects that went better than expected or in conjunction with a holiday.

It is easy to see your invoices as single function items. However, they can be put to use to make you seem professional, fair and to help you get additional assignments.

Time Management for Every Legal Nurse Consultant

As a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant running your own business, you will find that time often gets away from you. This being the case, you may be tempted to buy a fancy planner and start rigidly scheduling your time. This is not a good idea.

Here are our interpretations of some thoughts from Steve Pavlina, http://www.stevepavlina.com/. He believes that our concept of time is similar to our concept of money. We have a specific amount and we spend it. But that this concept is mistaken. Rather, time is independent of what we do. Whether we work or play, are asleep or awake, time keeps moving. You can spend the next ten years doing nothing and that ten years will still have passed. In other words, you cannot control time, but only how you use time. And the only time you have is this very moment.

Time is not a commodity but rather is a tool. Something to use to benefit yourself and others. So, how does this apply to your Professional Legal Nurse Consulting business? That’s easy. You have to ‘wear many hats’ as a business owner and in order to do so successfully, you must optimize your use of time. So, how?

Everyone will manage their time differently based on their personal and work needs. If you only need to work part-time, then you will have different time management needs than someone who works full-time.

So, begin simply by figuring out how much time you have to devote to your business per day, per week and per month. If you don’t know, keep a time diary for one week. As you begin and end an activity, note the time and the nature of the activity – eat, sleep, commute, phone call with mother, etc. At the end of the week, break down your days by type of activity and figure out how much time you are using on each. It might surprise you to learn that you are watching eight hours of television a week when you thought you only watched one or two.

After you have grouped the activities, look at them and find any places you can change what you do or how long it takes. This is particularly handy if you are trying to ‘make’ time for a new activity or increase time spent on an existing one. This may well mean giving up a favorite television program, or recording it to watch on the weekend.

Now, figure out where in your day your business activities can or will fall. Pencil in that information onto your calendar. Don’t worry right now if you don’t know exactly what you will do during that time. As your business grows, that time will fill up more quickly than you can even imagine.

Overcome Your Doubts: Hear This New Legal Nurse Consultants

Starting a new career can be scary. If you've worked as a nurse for a long time, the concept of starting a business and being your own boss can seem overwhelming. This is true for any entrepreneur. We all have fears and doubts we must deal with when we try something for the first time.

In your mind, do you ever hear the following (or similar):

Who do you think you are?
I can't do this.
What was I thinking?
This is impossible.

If you don't hear such things in your mind, you are one of the lucky ones. Most of us have these negative thoughts sometimes. Some of us have them a majority of the time. But these thoughts are dangerous and need to be stopped. Such thoughts:

Undermine our efforts.
Stifle our creativity.
Lower our self-esteem.
And, most dangerously, become self-fulfilling prophecies.

How can you stop negative thinking? You need to do two things.

1. You need to interrupt the negative thought. You can do this by mentally shouting "Stop it!" or by creating a physical interruption. For instance, you could make yourself do the chicken dance every time you hold onto one of these negative thoughts. This might be sufficiently embarrassing to help you stop. Just imagine doing the chicken dance in an important meeting! Or, you can choose something less obvious to others, but just as effective. In the book, The One Minute Millionaire, the authors suggest that you wear a heavy duty rubber band around your wrist and pop yourself enough to sting every time you catch yourself thinking these dangerous thoughts. How you choose to interrupt these thoughts is up to you, but you must do it every single time.

2. You need to replace the negative thought with a positive one. Simply replace the thought with its opposite. "I can't do this." becomes "I can do this." Nothing fancy. No memorizing. Just a replacement of a part that does not work for you with one that does.

Try this for the next month.

Organizing Yourself and Your Legal Nurse Consulting Business

What is organization? Most people think of a pristine, clean space with a place for everything and everything in its place. This is not necessarily a true definition. Rather, organization is being able to find what you need when you need it, easily and quickly. Several methods of organizing are commonly found in books and on websites. Let’s review the two most common:

Out of sight.

If you are this type of organizer, you work best if items are stored out of sight. You prefer filing cabinets with files neatly hidden inside, lots of drawers and other spaces to keep most items out of sight. Only what you need to work on is out and visible. The benefit of this organizing method is that you are less distracted by other items that need your attention and can focus strictly on the task at hand. Also, to outsiders, your workspace may look more ‘organized’ (tidy).

The disadvantage to this method is that something important might get tucked away in a file or folder and forgotten about. So, to effectively use this method, it is important to have some sort of tickler or reminder system in place to keep track of what is being done and what needs doing. We will discuss tickler systems in a later post.

Out in the open.

This type of organizer prefers to be able to see everything at a glance. If you organize this way, you may have files scattered about and piles of papers. What appears to others to be chaos is actually your system. For you, if something is out of sight, it is also out of mind. The strength of this system is that everything is where you can see it, so items don’t get hidden away and forgotten. Don’t forget, though, that you, too, can benefit from the tickler systems we will cover later.

A drawback of this method is that it can be highly distracting to have numerous projects vying for your attention at once. This type of setup does not pose a problem for everyone, however. And if you work better being able to see everything at a glance, you can very well make this system work for you.

However, an out in the open system does not have to be messy. If you would like to be both neat and organized, you can do so, even with a visual filing system. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have open filing cabinets. Some of these look like milk crates, but are made to hold hanging file folders. Keeping one of these on or close to your desk for current and high priority projects can help you keep on top of your assignments. For completed projects or those with a much longer deadline, consider using banker’s boxes and label them colorfully, so they catch your eye. This way, you not only have a system that keeps you organized, you also have built in storage if you later need to keep old files off-site.

The key thing to remember is that “organized” and “neat” do not always go together. Rather, it is important to find a system that works for you, allowing you to get the work done well and on time. If others perceive it as messy, that is their problem. If you feel your system needs some work, and that it could be tidier, we will discuss ways to tackle that issue soon.

Setting Your Business Goals

As a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant, you wear many hats, including that of business owner and developer. So, it is your responsibility to keep your business moving forward toward the goals that you wish to reach.

What goals, you ask? You DO have business goals, don’t you?

If not, how will you know where you are going? How will you know if you get there?

If you want to go and to grow, you need goals. Setting them can seem daunting, so let’s break it down into manageable steps. In this post, we’ll cover the basic guidelines and the first two major steps.
While this is geared toward setting goals for your business, keep in mind that the rules can be applied universally to set goals in any area of your life.

Let’s begin:

First, we’ll cover a few goal-setting guidelines.

1. Remember that this is about the journey, not the destination. This may seem counterintuitive to the whole goal setting process, but goals are only milestones along the way. Think about the mile marker signs on a highway. These are how goals work. They act as a marker to let you know where you are in relation to where you began.

2. Still using the mile marker signs as an example, like them, your goals need to be measurable. You want to have a way to know if you have reached that marker. If the goal does not lend itself to measurement, give it a 1-10 rating and set the level you want to reach on that scale. Are you at a 2 but wish to be at an 8? Then you have work to do. But you also have a way to gauge your progress.

3. Finally, your goals should be written down. Committing goals, dreams and ideas to paper has a certain magic about it. No, not witchcraft type magic, but the magic of making them more real, more concrete. And if you look at them every day, you will internalize these goals, which will in turn make reaching them easier.

So, now to the FUN part of the process.

Let’s start big. How do you want to be remembered? Answer this question not only in regard to your business, but to the other important areas of your life. Do you want to be remembered as a workaholic who never had time for family and friends? Or would you like to be remembered as a successful businessperson and human being? Write down what you hope people will say about you after you are gone.

Now, think about what success means to you. People have different ideas of success. While we may want some basic things the same, such as financial security (if it exists), the specific definitions of such terms vary with the individual. Do you want to be wealthy? What does that mean? A millionaire? A billionaire? All of your debts paid off and plenty of money to make ends meet? Or does it refer to your personal and business relationships and their depth? Write this down, also. Define success for yourself. Not what you think it should be because of what popular culture or your upbringing tells you, but what you feel deep in your gut. Take all the time and space you need to get this definition right for you. No one has to see this but you.

Time to Invest in Yourself

It's already February. Do one of two things for yourself:

1. Become a Professional Legal Nurse Consultant (PLNC) or
2. If you're already a PLNC, take your PLNC practice to the next level.

How, you ask, can I do this. It's simple.

1. Get your PLNC certification: Commit to only 2 days at a PLNC live course or take the PLNC Video Course, Audio Course or E-Course at your own pace. Don't wait any longer. Now's the time to invest in yourself and make lots more money.

2. If you're already a PLNC, you need two items to help you. First, get busines forms designed especially for PLNC practice and second, get marketing help that has worked for PLNCs.

No more excuses. You can do it. Now's the time to achieve the success and personal happiness you want. It's in your hands.

Write it Right: Rules for Legal Nurse Consultants

As a PLNC, you will often have to put your thoughts and findings into writing. This intimidates a lot of individuals. Why? Because many of us hear our elementary and high school English teachers in our heads as we sit down to write:

• Your writing needs work.
• Use proper grammar.
• Work on your spelling.

These are just a few of the admonishments we heard in school. But you are no longer in school and no one is grading you. That said, your written materials do need to do their job. The better you write, the better you will serve your attorney. Scared? Don't be. Writing doesn't have to be chore. And it doesn't have to read like a textbook.

Make your writing easier in three simple steps:

• Brainstorm
• Freewrite
• Revise

That's all there is to it. Once you do those three steps, you have a report you can confidently share.

Another way to approach writing is to write the way you talk. If you have trouble with this, try recording yourself as you give the report as you would if the attorney was sitting in front of you. Then, you can transcribe the recording, make small revisions and you're ready to go.