The Connected Lawyer

I have a case in which opposing counsel is sending me approximately 1,000 pages of nonconfidential pages of discovery. He asked if he could send them to me electronically (note, these are from a third party and, for a variety of reasons, edicsovery is not a concern). He currently has the files in PDF and he asked his assistant to email them to me.

Not surprisingly, somewhere along the way, something ate the PDF attachment. I talked with him yesterday and asked him to burn a CD for me and I would have someone pick it up. His response was that he would have his assistant put in a request to create the CD, but he could not promise when it would be completed because his assistant had to follow the proper channels.

Is this normal? I am unusual in having simply grabbed a blank CD yesterday and burned some documents to it before mailing it off (ironically enough, to the same attorney).

I guess that I am just curious about how most firms typically do these types of things. Please note that opposing counsel does not work for a large firm.

Last week I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Larry Port from Rocket Matter. Rocket Matter is a web based practice management and time and billing solution. In the interview, Larry tells us about Rocket Matter and a little about how it works.

If you are thinking of trying a web based practice management solution, you may want to take a look at Rocket Matter.

What is Rocket Matter?

Rocket Matter is an easy-to-use web-based legal practice management and time and billing solution. It’s designed from the ground up to facilitate the practice of law in small and solo firms. Rocket Matter is also referred to as Software as a Service, or SaaS, since it is a web-based, hosted application.

Specifically, Rocket Matter allows law firms to manage calendars, to-do lists, contacts, matters, and time and billing in one integrated and simple solution. We created a technology we call “Bill as you Work”, which traps billable time as lawyers and paralegals go about their day. The net result is a product that allows firms to operate more efficiently and reduces the amount of time that gets lost for invoicing.

Since we host Rocket Matter on our servers and it’s accessed via the Internet, users have ubiquitous access to their information while never having to spend money or time on software installations or upgrades.

Tell me more about Bill as you Work. How does it work? What does it capture?

The whole idea behind “Bill as you Work” is to capture time as you go about your day to day activities, so that at the end of the month when it comes time to bill you don’t end up losing all of your precious hours. For example, when you schedule a deposition in your calendar, you can choose to bill for the time spent when you create the appointment. Likewise, your to-do items can be instantly converted from simple reminders into billable items that can end up on your invoice. The application also contains its own stopwatch, so you can time any activity you work on and funnel that directly into billing.

As time goes on, we will look to incorporate “Bill as you Work” into new features as well.

The rest of the interview continues below the break

Continue Reading »

Chuck Newton addresses our fear of getting rid of paper. Chuck has some great thoughts here and it is a post that anyone who is moving to a paperless practice should read. Chuck describes this fear as:

So fear fits.  You want to scan and destroy the document, but you cannot because of lingering doubts that something bad is going to happen because of it.  But, we have to remember that FEAR is just an acrostic which means False Impressions Appearing Real.

Despite knowing this, I understand this fear.  I have experienced it myself.

Chuck concludes, however:

I have just decided to live with the guilt and any small risk that might exist and to destroy the paper. I scan it and maintain it on my computer, on a DVD and/or on Basecamp after the file is closed. I still make sure I do not take or give original documents back that the client provides to me, with the exception of those, like fee agreements, which I draft and the signatures on which I maintain.  Of these I  scan and then destroy the originals of these documents.  To do otherwise, would be to seriously defeat the purpose of that I am trying to achieve.

Chuck raises some great points in his post. If you are looking to reduce the paper in your office, you should check out his entire post here.

Recently Solo in Chicago questioned whether he should list his practice areas on his business cards. After reading his post, I remembered an encounter that I had with a client of mine. I had previously represented her in a matter. The matter was an area of law that comprises approximately 10% of my practice.

About a year after we had resolved the previous matter, she called me again. She started her conversation, “I know this isn’t the type of law that you do, but . . . .” She then proceeded to ask me a question that fell squarely into the type of law the comprises the majority of my practice.

She had taken the single matter I had represented her on, and had extrapolated it to my entire practice. In fact, however, that was a small portion of my practice. I am just glad that she called me on the next question she had, even though she did not think I practiced in that area.

Recently, I was again reminded of this story and Peter’s post when I read about a customer experience survey on the Good Experience Blog. The post explains:

A friend of mine runs a company whose site sells a wide range of products, all sharing a particular attribute. For the sake of example, let’s say his site sells organic fruit only - bananas, pears, oranges, apples, and so on - all healthy and extra-tasty.

The company then ran a customer experience survey to gauge the usability of their site. The post then explained what the company learned:

But what he really learned surprised him. It was something much more basic, and much bigger, than any tactical improvement.

Here’s what he told me when I saw him after the labs:

“The customers didn’t even realize that we only sell organic! That’s the whole point of our site, and they missed it! It totally transformed how we’re thinking about our redesign.”

I don’t have an answer to this question, but I wonder how often our clients see our practices through the narrow lens of their matter and never realize the other services that we provide. Further, what can we do to change that?

One of the things that leveraging technology to practice law allows you to do is to practice law anywhere. Sometimes, this means that you are practicing law at home, with the kids around. If you have ever tried this before, you know how difficult this can be. Web Worker Daily has a post on how to work productively with kids at home. The list seems aimed at those who work at home a lot. However many of the tips work just as well for those who are working at home with the kids on a irregular basis.

Some of the best advice is for you to get up early or stay up later than the kids to get some work done. If you are a morning person, you can probably get some work done before the kids get up. Alternatively, if you are a night person, you can use the time after they have gone to bed to get some work done.

Another great tip is:

2. Team up with your spouse. It really helps to have a great, supportive spouse. My wife is a teacher, so she needs to do work herself, so we take turns working at the computer while the other keeps the kids at bay. Take the kids outside, or take them to a park, or read to them, while your spouse does some work. Then switch.

If you have a spouse that can help you with this, it is a great technique. It allows you to both get some work done and keeps the kids occupied.

Check out the entire post for the rest of the tips.

I saw this interesting story about a Florida woman (Marie Lupe Cooley) who thought that she was about to lose her job. She had concluded this because she “saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss’s phone number listed”

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

The twist to the news story, of course, was:

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

However,

 The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

I guess that is one way to ensure that you do lose your job.

Anyway, the moral to the story does not involve the allegedly felonious acts of the employee, instead, they apply to the employer. Your employees have access to all of your data. How able would you be to function if one of you disgruntled employees destroyed all of your data?

Given that almost everything is store electronically today,  I would guess that it would take quite some time to get your office back to normal. Also, it is likely that, in some ways you would never recover from the damage.

The quote in the story I found most interesting was:

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

Here the employer had to employ a data recovery service to try to salvage his information. If, however, he had employed a proper off site backup strategy, he likely would not have had to incur the cost of “an expensive data-recovery service.” Instead, he simply could have restored his information from his off site back up.

Obviously, there are only so many things we can do to ensure that our offices do not get hit by some sort of disaster, be it fire, flood, or disgruntled employee. However, there are simple steps we can take to make sure that, in the event of such a calamity, we can easily restore our data and get back to work.

If you are not sure what a good backup plan looks like, or how to implement one, you cannot find better suggestions and directions than this post from Ross Kodner

If you have thought about moving toward a paperless workflow but have not yet made the commitment, check out this excellant post from Ernie the Attorney at PDF for Lawyers.

I think his last paragraph hits the point dead on:

If you don’t start purging paper from your desk you’ll never realize the full benefits of scanning.  After a few weeks you’ll start to notice little things about how you used to deal with paper.  Mostly, you’ll learn that people hoard too much paper, keeping it close by in case they need to access information.  Soon you’ll notice that having too much paper around you makes it harder to find information, not easier.  The less paper you have around you the less stress you’ll feel, especially once you learn to trust the paperless system.

I think this is the point most people don’t understand. They think if that if they keep the paper close at hand they can find things more easily. Instead, however, they just end up sorting through more paper to try and find what they want.

Ernie also emphasized another point that I think most people miss, which is that the electronic version of the document, is probably more secure than the paper version. You can lose the paper, or it can be destroyed by fire (or hurricane for that matter). With the electronic version, however, it is easy to have multiple copies of the same document.

For example, on the cases that I am working on, a copy of everything sets on our server. Those copies are regularly backed up as a matter of course. Additionally, for all of my active files, I have a copy of them on my laptop hard drive. The likelihood that all copies of these documents would be destroyed is fairly remote, and certainly much less likely than just the paper version being destroyed.

Check out the rest of Ernie’s post and, if you have not started to make the move to a paperless system, there’s no time like the present to get started.