5) Make it easy for people you Living Trusted to deal with your financial matters.

1.Make sure they know where to find your advisors. 2.If you have your own business, make a plan to deal with your death, beginning with first day after your death. 3.Make a list of investments (name of institution, account numbers) so your assets can be found. (Bank / stock accounts, retirement plans, life insurance, safe deposit box, etc.) 4.If all information is in your computer, make sure that an appropriate Living Trustworthy person has access to password.

6) Make sure that your assets which have any form of registration are properly titled in your Living Trust. These assets include bank accounts, stock, and real estate. Now is a good time to verify that all such assets are held properly. You also will receive Forms 1099 showing interest or dividends received during past year, and K-1s for Partnerships. Check each real property tax bill, Form 1099, and K-1 to ensure that it reads something along lines of: John and Mary Doe, Trustees of Living Trust of John and Mary Doe, dated January 1, 2004.

There may be other property which should also be in Living Trust but may not provide annual reporting, such as stock which does not pay dividends and, therefore, no 1099 is provided. You should also verify that Pension Plans, IRAs, and Life Insurance beneficiaries are properly designated.

Creditors (such as your mortgage holder and credit cards) do not need to know about Living Trust. Only those holding your property should have notice.

If you inherited any property or received a substantial gift since formation of Living Trust, you should consider its status and your plans for it. Likewise, ramifications of a change in your marital status since formation of Living Trust should be considered.

If you refinanced your property since doing Living Trust, bought new property, or opened new investment accounts, you should verify that property is back in Living Trust. As a good idea to remove all uncertainty with regard to current and up-to-date nature of information in your Living Trust, you might want to sign a statement each year informing that all personal property is listed in Living Trust. Also, review your estate plan yearly to make sure that you still trust people you have chosen to act on your behalf after your death.

Note that Legal Helper Corp. provides an easy-to-use, quick, and economical online method for creating completed revocable living trust. - http://www.legalhelpmate.com/living-trust-online.aspx

Jeffrey Broobin is a free-lance writer on family and finance issues; his main goal is to help people during their complicated period of life.

In short, there is no doubt that effective development of staff can have a direct impact on bottom line and can also directly affect all of increases in profit possible through operational improvements. Simply increasing staff efficiency by 1% can often have effect of improving profitability by twice as much.

Linking The Balanced Scorecard To Strategy

The objective of any measurement system should be to motivate managers and staff to implement organization’s strategy. By translating strategy into measures within Balanced Scorecard, objectives and targets can be communicated to everyone. They can then focus on critical drivers and align initiatives and actions to meeting of strategic goals.

Why is it important for a Scorecard to communicate strategy?

•It describes organizational vision to all departments •It ensures that meeting of performance targets contributes to achieving strategic objectives •It focuses effort on key objectives and measures

How can we build a Scorecard that translates a strategy into action?

•By establishing cause-and-effect relationships between measures •By creating a framework against which underpinning objectives and actions can be assessed, valued and prioritized •By ensuring that cause-and-effect paths link through to on-going financial strength

An effective Scorecard enables an organization’s strategy to be inferred simply from cause-and-effect links between measures. Outcome measures signal ultimate objectives of strategy and performance drivers indicate actions or initiatives that are required in order to create future value. Ultimately, Scorecard retains a strong emphasis on outcomes and financial outcomes in particular.

Benefits Of The Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard’s prescriptive approach to performance measurement requires performance measures defined in each of non-financial perspectives to be linked to each other and to financial measures, ensuring that organization’s ultimate goal; that of continuing to be successfully in existence, remains paramount.

The extent to which business results can be improved by decisions taken based on a Balanced Scorecard view of organization is significant. Furthermore, these business results tend to be very sensitive to minor improvements in performance in key areas (such as legal department). The following table illustrates point:

Balanced Scorecard PerspectivePotential ImpactTypical Profit Impact (*) OrganizationDecrease in legal costs7%

Legal DepartmentReduction in wastage2%

Innovation and LearningImproved efficiency and identify best practices5%

TOTALIncrease in profit14%

(*) Based on historical LexTech,Inc. figures

Information Systems To Support The Balanced Scorecard

Information systems play an invaluable part in assisting managers to analyze beyond summary level Balanced Scorecard measures. When an unexpected signal appears on Balanced Scorecard, managers need access to underlying data to investigate cause of any problem or to analyze trends and correlations.

If information system is unresponsive, however, it can significantly impact effectiveness of performance measurement.

Such an information system must then incorporate all of following features:

•At-a-glance exception alerting •Rapid access to summarized data •Drill down to successive levels of detail •Easy to follow dependency paths to identify causes of performance •Reporting initiative, objective and process information •Reporting of impacts of underlying objectives upon Scorecard measures •Reporting of impacts of objectives upon each other •Graphical creation and modification of objectives, measures and relationships •Support for dynamic re-planning for change •Integration with other office tools •Inclusion of rich text information •Graphical trending and tabular representation of data •End user configuration and analysis options •Integration with existing organizational data sources – with support of additional direct entry of values and annotations

Solutions

To meet challenges ahead, legal departments need to develop a perspective on role of legal function in both qualitative and quantitative business terms. They may use a Balanced Scorecard of metrics that integrates law-department’s short-term actions with long-term organizational objectives. Effective solutions should meet this criteria:

•Be specifically designed to support implementation and ongoing evolution of a Balanced Scorecard measurement system, alone or integrated with other performance management approaches and initiatives, such as Six Sigma, process review and benchmarking. •Be backed by expert consultancy for strategy and training •Implement services without need of additional staff or technology. •Enable corporate legal managers to put into every day use best practice recommendations that in past may have seemed impossible to achieve, with minimal additional overhead, time or other resources. •Maximize benefits to be attained from existing performance measurement and management.

The Balanced Scorecard, with a comprehensive information system to support it, provides a means to make a real difference throughout legal department, and organization as a whole, from individual team member satisfaction right through to significant improvements in bottom line.