How Lawyers Work: Greg Siskind, Immigration Lawyer and Bike Nerd

In this week’s edition of How Lawyers Work, we talked to Greg Siskind, founding partner of Siskind Susser, PC, an immigration law firm. In 1994, he created the first immigration law website in the world. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

You can follow Greg on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What apps or tools are essential to your daily workflow?

I use a combination of apps each day that help me keep things together. Here’s a quick list of the most important:

1. Dropbox is my central repository for documents, photos, etc.
2. Evernote for all my notes, scans, business cards
3. Office365 for email, word processing, Teams (for interoffice texting)
4. Lastpass password manager
5. BlueDot (immigration law case management system)
6. Worldox (repository for work and client documents)
7. Sharefile for a secure document sharing portal for clients
8. NeotaLogic for building apps for internal practice management and client services
9. Just started using Notes Plus on my iPad with an Apple Pencil to take meeting notes.
10. Constant Contact for much of our mass communications
11. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn of course

What does your workspace look like?

• Two computers – Dell XPS with Windows 10 and an iMac – two monitors and shared keyboard and shared mouse (each toggle between computers).
• Brother HL-2270 printer
• Fujitsu Scansnap S510
• Ringcentral phone system with Plantronics phone and wireless headset

How do you keep track of your calendars/deadlines?

Outlook 365 calendaring + Wunderlist. My firm uses BlueDot, an immigration case management system, for client deadline management.

What’s your coffee service setup? (Other beverages are fine, of course, but you should really be serving coffee!)

Coffee is our #1 retention tool ! We have a Douwe Egbert C-60 Coffee Machine, a very high-end product that I found many years ago in a Delta Skyclub and decided that something like that would make life happier for me and for everyone else.

What is one thing that you listen to/read/watch that everyone should?

I listen to a lot of podcasts on my bike commute each day. Tops are the Kennedy Mighell Report, Lawyerist, the Bugle, Stuff You Missed in History Class, This American Life. I do podcasts in the morning and audio books on my way home.

As for reading, the ABA’s Law Practice Magazine is excellent.

What’s your favorite local place to network or work solo?

I have a wonderful little coffee place called the Kitchenette that is in the middle of Shelby Farms in Memphis, one of the country’s top urban parks (though it’s 4500 acres so it’s more like a state park that happens to be in the middle of a major city). The place is on my bike route to work so I’ll often stop there and work before or after I’m in the real office.

What are three things you do without fail every day?

Exercise (almost always biking, but swimming, running and indoor workouts for rainy days). Here’s a graphic that sums up (literally) my cycling for the last six years.

Try to meditate most days. From a work perspective, I try and do some writing every day. I’ve had a couple of book projects over the last few years have been completed and now am working on something new. I also will write articles and shorter posts for social media on most days when I’m not doing longer form writing.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Patrick Fuller at Neota Logic.

How Lawyers Work: Greg Siskind, Immigration Lawyer and Bike Nerd was originally published on Lawyerist.com.