Lately, the MicroLaw team has been very busy helping law practices of all shapes and sizes with projects like:

• Helping many firms achieve their own iteration of our Paper LESS Office process
• Helping select and deploy the Worldox document/email management system
• Helping select and deploy practice and financial management systems including Tabs 3 and Tabs PracticeMaster, among others
• Providing better usage-focused legal-specific training on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint
• Training on Adobe Acrobat and PDFing in their practices as part of our “PDF First” approach
• Helping firms with security and protection of confidential client information via security audits and deployment of Metadata Assistant
• Helping firms portabilize and remotely access their practice info via iPads, Android tablets, iPhones and Android phones – securely, and yes, with Macs as well
• Evaluating their overall use of technology and finding ways to be more profitable and more productive
• Making sure your practice is protected by multiple layer backup systems that actually work
• Helping firms find their way into the “cloud,” often by building their private, secure cloud
• Providing internal CLE for practices on tech and practice management topics
• Teaching law school courses around the country on legal technology for 2Ls and 3Ls
• And as always, traveling the country educating legal professionals in live CLE programs on tech and practice management topics
• Building virtual practices that extend your client reach across state and even international borders without the cost of office space

We’re happy to help your practice as well – just email me and I’ll be happy to chat about it to see if we’re the right folks to assist. MicroLaw has been caring for the tech and practice management needs of law practices and legal organizations for more than 28 years – we’re the originals and we’re ready to help you best help your own practice. It starts with a call to 414-540-9433 or an email to rkodner@microlaw.com – it’s that simple. And it’s far more cost effective than you might imagine.

This entire situation seems ridiculous. Apparently the previous policy allowed people to work at home full-time and NEVER come into the office. It would seem that some kind of middle ground makes much more sense.

So just after indoctrinating us that Chromebooks were to be inexpensive little laptops intended to be a window into a purely cloudy world, the skies become even cloudier and, arguably, more interesting. With Acer’s $199 C7  Chromebook on one end of the total-cloud spectrum, Google itself has released the Pixel, offered initially at $1299 up to $1499 on the far other end of the range.

Sold by Google at the Play store and apparently soon at Best Buy too, this  machine is obviously intended to be a direct competitor to the Apple MacBook Pro series. A 3.5ish lb. technical powerhouse with an Intel Core i5, the highest resolution display ever to be offered on a laptop (yes, higher than the Apple Retina displays) which also happens to be a 13″ touchscreen, either a 32Gb or 64Gb SSD (small because, remember, your stuff is supposed to be in the cloud, not local), 1 TB of Google Drive space, and interestingly, 12 free GoGoInflight sessions – jumpstarting your always online from anyplace, any time experience. It’s carved out of aluminum, as is de rigeur among premium systems.

Lots of initial looks are online and it’s for sale right now and shipping now from the Google store.

What does it mean? Certainly that Google intends to be taken seriously as a hardware provider, throwing a high-end gauntlet in the face of Apple. Could this end up, interestingly, being a pro-Microsoft move for those early fans of Microsoft Office 365 and Skydrive?

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this. It seems a bit pricey for me, given the small SSD, but I guess that’s the whole idea. And it is a touchscreen while no MacBook model offers that capability. And perhaps the price point argument is that if it’s not similar to a MacBook Pro, it couldn’t be seen as a legitimate peer.

But if you’ve got ideas, email me here and let me know what you make of this.

In case you don’t get the ABA LPM e-zine, “Law Practice Today,” here’s my article from the February 2013 issue (also online here):

Title: Buying Smart: The Right Technology Makes More Than it Costs

Are you “buying smart” when it comes to tech in your practice, or just “saving a buck?”

There’s nothing more expensive than buying the wrong technology for your practice. Except, perhaps, buying the “right stuff” and implementing it poorly. Sometimes, the lowest-cost technology over the long haul isn’t necessarily the least expensive to purchase. Unfortunately, the old proverb “penny wise and pound foolish” traps even tech-savvy lawyers and dooms them to ineffective technology, or worse, more chaos with new tools than they experienced previously with the “obsolete” stuff.

Buying smart and buying right can turn even a single technology addition, such as a desktop scanner or new document management system, into a profit center – generating more profit in many situations than a new leveraged billable person.

Here’s an example, based on feedback from one of my clients. A 65-year-old small-firm lawyer was concerned that he was forgetting to enter many small time entries; he said he remembered the half-day blocks for contract drafting or a client meeting, but that he routinely forgot to enter the myriad 1/10 or 2/10 of an hour timeslips for things like responding to emails or taking a phone call. He estimated that on an average day he forgot two or three 1/10 hour time entries.

I asked him, “so how much do you think forgetting those little time entries every single day costs you?” He said, “I don’t even want to think about it.” I suggested we do some basic legal business math and asked for a legal pad. We took his average net hourly rate of $200 and for the sake of math simplicity, we presumed he failed to record 15 minutes per day (he shook his head at this point and said “And a lot more on some days . . . “). Here’s the calculation:

• .25 hours X $200/hour = $50 X 5 days per week = $250 X 50 working weeks per year = $12,500

$12,500.

That’s real money, and it shocked him to see that the little 1/10 or 2/10 timeslips he was losing daily, which seemed like a “cost of doing business” as he described it, added up over time. He reminded me that it was actually probably double that because he was underestimating the lost time.

So keep that number in your mind – $12,500 (he was thinking “more like $20,000 in reality”).

My advice was to implement his firm’s first fully integrated financial and practice management system. In his case, it was Tabs 3 and Tabs PracticeMaster Premier, the venerable and widely-used system from Software Technology, Inc. (www.tabs3.com). We also recommended he integrate these systems with the Worldox legal document/email management system and Microsoft Outlook. Together, the four systems tightly connect to form a unified law practice management system.

One of the key characteristics of the Tabs PracticeMaster practice management system, as some others do as well, is to allow many entries in the system that would normally be made in the course of a normal workday, to be turned into time entries without having to remember to separately create a time-entry. Examples include electronically jotting down the notes from a phone call with co-counsel, or posting a time for a call with the court in the calendaring system, or saving a document to a client’s electronic matter file.

So the idea is simple – you get off the phone with co-counsel on a case (or during the call if you’re using a microphone or headset) and you jot down your notes and save them to the matter’s file in the practice management system. Now in the old world my client once lived in, he had to then remember to find his PAPER multi-part timesheet (I’m serious – and this was in 2011) and write down the timeslip, hopefully remembering the right codes. More often than not, he told himself “I’ll remember to enter that at the end of the day because I have to take this call that’s waiting for me.” As 5 PM rolled around and he struggled to recall all his “little” time entries (while trying to dash out the door to pick up his wife for dinner), his mind inevitably went blank and the entries disappeared forever into the “financial ether.”

But now, Tabs PracticeMaster pops up and pre-fills a timeslip for him for a pre-determined amount of time (decided during the pre-implementation setup process for the program) – 2/10 of an hour in his case. All he has to do is click to “OK” it, and he has a time entry recorded, where one would have otherwise been lost.

Tabs 3 (the billing module) and Tabs PracticeMaster Premier (the practice management module) cost his firm around $2000 fully implemented for four people, including software costs, training and professional services. After the first 12 months of use I asked him how it was going and he said, “This program you put in front of me made me an extra $21,000 this year!” I reminded him that it wasn’t, in fact, “extra,” but had been his money all along; it just wasn’t being captured.

So about $2000 of initial expense, plus a couple of hundred dollars per year for ongoing software maintenance works out as follows:

• Cost per year – first year = $2000 startup cost including first year of software maintenance. Subsequent years = approximately $300 in software maintenance. Five-year cost = $2000 + $1200 = $3200
• Return on $3200 = $21,000 per year in “extra” captured time X 5 years = $105,000
• Net return after costs = $105,000 – $3200 = $101,800 more top-line revenue

That was a clear example of buying smart – the right software, implemented properly, measured well and generating a proportionately enormous return on the dollars spent.

So the essence of buying smart really has little to do with “getting the best deal,” whatever that might actually mean. A lawyer who proudly and perhaps smugly suggests that the DIY Excel spreadsheet she created 15 years earlier to track all her time and boasts that it “cost me nothing and works great” is deluding herself. If she’s not capturing the three of four 1/10 of an hour entries she admitted to forgetting, and her technology tools don’t help her to remember or act as a financial safety net to help her capture that time somehow, the cost is enormous. Here’s what I explained to her, again, asking for a yellow pad to do the legal business math neither she (nor I) had learned in law school:

• Cost of not entering three 1/10 hour time entries at her net realized hourly rate of $175/hour = $52.50 per day X 5 days per week = $262.50 X 50 working weeks per year = $13,125
• $13,125 per year is the cost of not spending about $1500 for a fully implemented financial/practice management system to help automate the capture of that time.

The “bargain” Excel spreadsheet was put out to pasture the following week and she wondered why she hadn’t done this years ago.

So what are some ways you can “buy smart” in your practice? The following tips will help ensure that you spend just the right amount – not too much, not too little – and generate a provable, measurable profit on the money you spend on your technology:

• Look for areas where you waste otherwise billable time. Examples include time spent looking for information you can only find in a paper file, or being honest with yourself about how many “little” time entries you forget to enter on a typical day, or how often you “reinvent the wheel” and redraft language in a flat-fee matter (like estate planning) that you know you wrote before and could’ve leveraged, if only you had been able to find it.
• Assign amounts of time you spend subsidizing those activities.
• Take out a legal pad and do the “legal business math” – multiply the amount of otherwise billable time wasted by your approximate average hourly or realized hourly rate.
• That figure is your RRT (Revenue Recapture Target) – in other words, what you can expect to additionally bill if you can find a way to recapture that time,
• Then whether you decided to represent yourself pro se on your tech matters, seek out the advice of your state bar’s practice management advisor, or retain a professional legal technology consultant, find the technology tools that will specifically address each area of waste. Perhaps a financial/practice management system that automates timeslip entry or a tool like Chrometa (www.chrometa.com) that captures all your time spent on your computer systems to be imported into your billing system, or a desktop scanner such as the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap in its latest ix500 iteration (www.scansnap.com), and document manager like Worldox GX3 (www.worldox.com) or NetDocuments (www.netdocuments.com) that turns physical paper into electronic paper – in real-time as soon as it hits your desk, and then makes it all instantly searchable so the wheel never has to be reinvented again. In other words, plug the gaps and recapture YOUR otherwise wasted time and get it billed out and collected. Or use an iPad or Android tablet (or iPhone or Android smartphone) with Chrometa to capture time when it’s not convenient to fire up your Windows or Mac laptop, and then review the time captured, import it and bill it (http://www.chrometa.com/mobile.html).
• Of course, spending as little as possible is still smart business. For commodity tech items like printers, scanners, mainstream software like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office, use internet pricing engines like Pricegrabber.com or Google Product Search (www.google.com/products) to get the very best pricing.

Then, mostly importantly, always work to “spot the issues” – something we lawyers all were taught to do by every law school. Work to root out the areas where otherwise billable or productive time is wasted, and then assume the answer to the question “is there technology that can put an end to that and turn most or all of it into billable time” is going to be some version of “yes.”

Well by now everyone is well aware of the leveraged buyout of Dell Computer by a group led by founder and Chairman Michael Dell, along with a consortium of venture partners include Silver Lake Investors and Microsoft. I’ll leave the financial analysis and LBO breakdown to the quantitative numbers wonks out there. What I’m more interested in is what this means for the legions of law practice consumers of Dell computers and support services.

The Big Questions You’re Undoubtedly Wondering About:

1. Are you SOL in the wake of the privatization efforts that seem to be focused on turning off the public light of scrutiny on the remaking of Dell, a la IBM post-shedding its PC division to Lenovo, into an IBM-like service-focused profit machine?
2. What will happen to that shiny new Dell PowerEdge Server you just installed next month, next year, or three years from now?
3. Should we continue to purchase Dell computer products at all?

The answers to these three big questions is yet to be determined. The ink on the deal isn’t really dry yet – there are hurdles still to be jumped apparently. But presuming the deal is done, this is likely going to be a positive change for Dell product consumers. With the ability to avoid the criticism of shareholders, the company can clean house any way it sees fit. That is likely to lead to an improvement in the range of, and quality of services. After all, one of the prime motivators behind this acquisition is the ability to pull down a curtain so we don’t have to see all the dirty work that goes from shifting the company’s core emphasis from being a hardware purveyor into a powerhouse services shop. Getting services right is bound to be part of the equation.

Will Dell peddle its PC business, the same way IBM did? Perhaps. It IS a massive business unit, responsible for billions of dollars in sales every year, even in a shrinking PC market. Lenovo has made a significant success out of IBM’s former PC business, although admittedly under the lessened regulatory environment known as China.

Will we stop recommending Dell systems in favor of HP or Lenovo or Apple? No. Dell systems, particularly their servers, still offer a very sound value and are likely to continue to power our clients’ practices for years to come. If Dell does spin off the PC business, in all likelihood, it will translate to better service, continued low pricing and more product variety under the stewardship of a new owner whose focus isn’t diluted like Dell’s is now.

So . . . I think this is near term good news for small law practices who either recently acquired or were planning on purchasing Dell’s systems. And if you happen to have been a Dell shareholder, you just got yourself about a 37% premium on your share value – not a bad day’s work.

First, what’s “SSSS?” It’s MicroLaw’s Summer Sale on Software and Services – something we’ve done every year. But this year, there’s more to celebrate than just long warm days here in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s also MicroLaw’s 27th anniversary which we’re celebrating this month (yep, we started helping lawyers with technology way back in ’85) *AND* we’re celebrating the opening of our new Madison, Wisconsin office.

So what does mean for you? Simple. Saving a ton of money on your summer tech and practice management projects. This applies to all new projects (including those currently proposed but not yet closed) from June 27th to July 31st. Here’s what you get:

• 5% off of some software that’s never otherwise discounted: Autobahn PDF searchable conversion tool and of course, Worldox GX3 (and ask about possible discounts on our other recommended software products for billing and practice management). Software discounts are only available with related MicroLaw professional services, just to be clear.
• 20% off of our MicroLaw Legal SmartMacros for Word. We’ve been automating Word for clients for years with these indispensable layout and formatting tools.
• 25% off of all professional services – technology audits/reviews (our MicroLaw CARES review – “Computer and Resources Evaluation & Study – checking the health of your system and processes), training, tech support, review of existing locally-provided proposals before you pull the trigger, how to fit iPads and Android tablets into your practice, moving to Macs and more.
• 25% off all live or online in-house CLE programming for your lawyers.  Over 30 tech and practice management sessions to choose from – ranging from just one hour to full day programs (and 50% off if you happen to be a law school!)
• 35% off of all technology audits for existing MicroLaw clients as updates to your original audit – if 3-4 years have passed, a lot changes including all the impact of cloud technology, so it’s time to take a look and save a bundle while in process.

Our new office is located at 6601 Grand Teton Plaza, Suite 8 in Madison, WI. I’m personally staffing that office while Renee and Abe hold down the company headquarters back in Milwaukee.

GRAND OPENING SPECIAL! Just for greater Dane County area clients, take an extra 5% off all professional services until July 31st!

Ask Ross here about any questions and/or to talk about your firm’s, legal department or Bar association’s needs. We’re ready to help and also help you save!

Back by popular request, any client interested in new MicroLaw professional services (including those already quoted) of $4000 or more in value on a project will receive a 10% discount if booked between June 1st and June 30th! (or 5% for new professional services up to $3999, or 15% for new professional services over $10,000). Just ask Ross for details – every little bit helps, right?

Folks, presumably most of us have Linkedin profiles. There are widespread reports of a possible security breach at Linkedin involving user passwords being compromised. See this SF Gate article, and also this BusinessInsider blurb (which came to me as a Linkedin newsfeed item),  but you can Google others. Reportedly, around 11:20AM EDT, Linkedin alerted some users – I say “some” because I didn’t receive anything and probably would’ve presumed it was a phishing attack anyway. Prudence dictates immediately changing your Linkedin passwords – I just did.

I think it doesn’t take a Krugman-level economist to have predicted that with the rush of new companies into the SaaS practice management space, consolidation would be inevitable. While there would seem to be plenty of room for growth in the legal cloud practice management space, the rush to market inevitably means some companies with lesser funding, ideas not as well thought out, inadequately executed marketing, and a message that isn’t distinctively compelling will fail. And it’s happened.

Read Evan Koblentz‘s article on Law.com entitled: “Livia Legal Defunct After Strong Start,” here.  This is a reminder that this is still a relatively young market.

Clients are regularly asking us to take out a crystal ball and advise them on which SaaS providers – whether practice management companies, billing providers, or generically horizontal companies like backup, storage or e-faxing – will actually survive. I tell them that crystal ball is extremely murky and that anyone who takes a definitive stance at this point is a gambler, plain and simple. That’s not to say we’re not recommending services like Clio, Netdocuments, Dropbox, Metrofax and others. But they recommendations always come with an overt caveat about prospective company longevity: “we just don’t know.” While the odds favor some of these companies v. others, the long-term jury is still out.

Expect other failures to follow as the range of companies matures and Darwinism takes hold, with the fittest surviving and thriving. Who will survive? Who will fail? We’ll see. But the one certainly in the legal SaaS marketplace is that more shaking out is ahead.

Interested proposed federal legislation today related to limiting employer and school access to social media accounts. Here’s the scoop from MSNBC today:

“A New York Congressman has introduced federal legislation nicknamed “SNOPA” that would make it illegal for employers and educational institutions to require a potential or current employee, or a potential or current student, to divulge personal online information as part of the hiring, enrollment or discipline process.

The bill, with a full name of the Social Networking Online Protection Act, was introduced Friday by Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.).

. . .

The legislation would ban employers from requiring that employees or job candidates share social networking passwords or “other means of accessing a private account”; it would also ban post-secondary schools from disciplining students for failing to provide such access, or from discriminating against applicants who refuse to provide such access. Local educational agencies would also be banned from requiring login credentials.”

——————–

Not surprising – something like this was expected soon. I’ll be talking about this very topic at the ABA GP|Solo Spring Meeting in Charleston, S.C. on May 18th at 8AM (info is here) along with technopal Alan Klevan.  I’m sure we’ll see a flood of discussion on this – some variation of it seems necessary to avoid some potentially outrageous privacy and personal digital security issues. Here’s ZDNet’s early take on SNOPA.

And this bill with the acronym SNOPA is not to be confused with this organization, SNOPA.org or this term as defined in the Urban Dictionary.

Why “DocuLaw?” Hold that thought until the end of this post . . .

Every so often I feel the need to answer the questions I get from lawyers everywhere who email me asking questions like, “We really enjoy your CLEs and your blog posts, but how do you actually make a living?” That probably tells me that my company has a branding issue, but . . . the answer is really simple and here it is. For the last almost 27 years since I founded the company, MicroLaw has exclusively focused on a mission of guiding legal entities – law firms of all sizes, corporate and governmental legal departments, government agencies and Bar associations / Law Societies – in the most effective use of technology and how it integrates into the flow of their practices and businesses.

We embody the “Five B’s Approach” that I talk about in some recent CLEs: Best Practices, Being More Profitable, Battling Malpractice, Being Ethically Compliant and Better Quality of Life. We see these five goals as being the right reasons for a smarter law practice management and legal technology approach for any type of law practice, public or private.  Technology for technology’s sake can be a lot of fun as a hobby and it’s great to be enthusiastic about legal tech, but we’ve never thought of it as an end in itself – that just isn’t a sound business strategy.

We’ve always been fiercely independent in terms of any products we recommend – this makes us very different in an age where most “consultants” are really “vendors.” We objectively evaluate our clients’ needs and make recommendations. Sometimes we recommend that nothing new be bought, but rather, existing tools be better used. If we do recommend products, we certainly have our favorites and benchmarks, but we often recommend products that, for implementation, we may need to refer out to a qualified expert rathering than being able to handle it ourselves. This is important – we exist to analyze and advise and manage projects, first and foremost.

Wow – some of that sounds awfully formal, so here’s the informal version. We help with every technology that involves something that plugs in for power or runs on batteries (in a legal practice environment – stop that snickering :-)). That means everything from:

• Law practice management and technology audits – how are you doing? what can you do better? what’s your next set of steps? This includes a detailed review and audit of your network, hardware, security, remote access, mobility plans and backup infrastructure, including reviewing IT upgrade proposals and even VOIP and IP phone system proposals. Oh, and we also speak Mac in case you were wondering.
• Cloud strategies – we help our clients figure out what elements of cloud technology make sense for them and help them select and implement the services that make sense. From practice management to document management, financial management, secure data storage, online backup and fax technologies and more.
• Document streamlining – this means document, email and paper management – that can mean a version of our Paper LESS Office approach tailored to a practice, document/email management with leading tools like Worldox GX3 or NetDocuments or even the DM functions within some practice managers. It can also mean developing scanning approaches and helping practices figure out what to do with their existing and to-be-accumulated paper.
• Financial systems – helping get your money straight and your billings/collections maximized – we’ve worked with many legal financial systems over the years and particularly like the venerable Tabs 3 system for many of our clients, but also systems like Rippe-Kingston, Omega, and others. We also help practices migrate from one system to another.
• Practice management systems – the core of our existence, focusing on our long-espoused belief that it’s all about “building complete electronic cases files.” PM systems are the beating information heart of a practice and we help either select a system and help with the best way to implement it, to migrating from one system to another. We recommend both “terrestrial” and “cloud” systems based on what makes the most sense for any given client – and then we help make sure that PM, document management and financial management work together as one integrated system, accessible from anywhere, anytime, from any device. So whether it’s Tabs PracticeMaster or CLIO, JustWare or anything else, we can help
• Microsoft Office – we help with legal-focused selection, configuration on all aspects of Microsoft Office – Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint. our custom-created training reference materials have drawn raves from our clients as have our CLEs on these subjects – and of course, how they integrate with document management and practice management systems.
• Adobe Acrobat and PDFing – we help educate our clients about everything legal professionals need to know and understand about living in a PDF-centric world, and how to securely use Acrobat to their best advantage – with tools like Bates Stamping, Secure Redaction, Electronic 3-Ring Binders, Typewriter, Security, Editing, Comment and Markup, PDF File Comparisons, Creating Forms and more.
• Remote Access and Mobility – we help clients figure out the best and most secure “work away” capabilities include Windows RDP, Citrix, Logmein and then extension of practice information to smartphones, iPads and Android tablets.
• Litigation technology and forensics – we have a network of the top professionals to help with every aspect of trial practice automation and with forensic examinations.
• IT – yes, we’ve been hardcore geeks having been in the trenches since before some of our clients were born, starting in the DOS and Novell days through modern cloud structures and the bridging of the Mac and Windows gaps. We can help design hardware and network systems from 1-100 users and help our clients get the best pricing on right components, review local IT proposals to make sure they make sense and are fairly priced, manage projects literally anywhere in the world and even provide actual turnkey systems to our smaller clients – shipping them and ourselves to set them up if there is no competent local IT support available.

Why “DocuLaw” then? Because so much of what we help with is wrapped up in the understanding, streamlining and management of documents for our clients. Whether paper, electronic or both. Whether texts or Facebook postings. Whether blog posts or Tweets. They’re all documents and we help our clients find ways to build complete electronic case files so they can feel confident, when working a case or a project, that they’re seeing everything that a responsible legal professional should see before advising a client or taking a position on their behalf.

So . . . does that help? That’s what MicroLaw has been, continues to be, and will always be about.

Oh, and did I mention we do it incredibly affordably – so much so that many solo practitioners have been, and are our clients. If you have a practice or a business, we’ll find a way we can help you in a way you can afford, big or small, in the U.S. or around the world, in any time-zone. And be sure to look at our Spring into Spring MicroLaw CARES (Computer and Resource Evaluation & Study) discounts here.

Ready to chat about how we can help? Email me here.

Aderant has a voracious appetite for legal software companies. After having munched down RainMaker last year, the Atlanta-based publisher of the AMLaw 200-focused Aderant Expert financial system, has polished off venerable Omegal Legal as well. Now with two mid-market financial/practice management sessions in the corporate fold, one has to wonder if there’s any real competition left in the middle market. Rippe-Kingston remains strong, Orion is still out there and Lexis-Nexis has Juris and the Tabs 3 people continue to move upwards in their suitable customer size. But consolidation seems to be the trend just as strongly in the days when the company f/k/a West and LexisNexis were rampaging through the market on their acquistion warpaths.

What does this mean for customers and prospects of Omega’s capable financial and practice management systems? Who knows. Aderant has had Rainmaker in the family for more than a year – a competitor of Omega’s. Is consolidation of the products in the cards? Will one be phased out and its customers migrated to one or the other, or a unified hybrid of the two? Or will Aderant engagement in GM-style brand management, keeping the Rainmaker and Omega brands both alive? Hard to say (but think “Pontiac, Saturn and Oldsmobile”).  I had the pleasure of sitting down with Aderant CEO Chris Giglio and VP Jim Hammond (formerly head of RainMaker) at New York LegalTech in early February and walked away thinking “these are two seriously focused guys” who can pull off building a legal technology empire for medium-sized to larger law practices.

Related mention – congratulations to Don Gall, founder of Omega – a giant of a figure for decades in the legal financial and practice management world.

And as always, our legal technology product market remains endlessly fascinating. What’s better? More choices or fewer product choices? What do you think – go ahead and chime in by commenting.

Reporting live from ABA TECHSHOW 2012, here’s my broad impressions on the unofficial theme for this year’s conference, based largely on what the marketplace is doing. Based on the buzz and activity in the exhibit hall, there are three things:

1) Cloud everything – whether practice management, document storage, collaboration, discovery, financial and document systems, what gets the crowd excited are any kind of cloud initiative.

2) Mac v. Windows – it doesn’t matter anymore with lawyers able to use both interchangeably when drive by use of cloud apps and services – these serve as the great equalizer rendering one’s hardware platform choice more a matter of preference than anything else.

3) Push harder – in other words, get more out of the software and services you’ve already been using – time to stop fumbling with Word and trying to use it as a glorified, post-WordPerfect typewriter. Stop glossing over the deep range of capabilities within programs like Microsoft Outlook and Adobe Acrobat. Stop being a digital slob with electronic snippets of info all over the place and unify it with tools like Microsoft OneNote or Evernote. Stop accumulating and start really USING the products and services you’ve bought and paid for. A sound message I’ve been preaching for decades. And a message ideally suited to challenging times for legal economics.

These themes shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – but thanks to ABA TECHSHOW and Chair Reid Trautz and his planning team,  as always for being smart enough, sharp enough and sensitive enough to current and emerging legal technology trends to provide a CLE curriculum that is focused on absolute practicality – information attendees can take back to their practices and immediately put to use.

Credit should be given when due. Hardware vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. often take heat for what inevitably are normal, isolated poor service incidents. It’s rare that people take the time to write about the most positive service responses, so . . . I will.

At MicroLaw we were recently the victim of a building break-in. Thieves stole a new Dell server that was in its box waiting to be configured and prepared for a client. We were beside ourselves because we needed to deliver the server in the next few days for a client and realized we faced a typical two week build/ship time on new orders. It would have been a nightmare to try and reschedule the entire network upgrade project and adjust the timing for multiple lawyers and staff at our client’s office.

Enter Jeremy Webb, a Dell corporate sales rep who has services our account for years. Jeremy’s always been responsive, getting us great pricing on Dell services, desktops and laptops for our clients. But this time, Jeremy went above and beyond – he rescued us and our clients. We explained the situation we were in and the wall we were up against. Jeremy expedited the order, even lowering our price for the server to help us wash out the effect of the insurance deductible we had to absorb and we got the replacement server literally in a matter of days, rather than the usual two weeks – he even absorbed the overnight shipping charges.

In short, Jeremy made his employer, Dell Computers look very, very good. To Michael Dell – KEEP THIS EMPLOYEE, GIVE HIM A RAISE AND  A BIG PAT ON THE BACK FOR GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND! (Caps emphasis very intentional!). Thank you Jeremy and thank you Dell for rescuing our client project.

We’ve had a lot of interest from clients recently about moving their email services to the cloud.  This is in the context of most of our clients using a recent vintage of Outlook (most often integrated with their practice, financial and document management  systems). Of course, the gold standard for email data system management is Microsoft Exchange.

While most of our clients with five or more users have traditionally owned their own Exchange server or used the Windows Small Business Server network operating system which comes with Exchange at no extra cost, they are used  hosting their own email.  Exchange hosting with services like GoDaddy and Rackspace has been generating a lot of interest with our smaller firm clients because it has all the advantages of using Microsoft Exchange (i.e. shared calendars, tasks, contacts, even email and someone else to run it/back it up, update it, etc.). But for many firms, Exchange hosting, once you crossed the 10+ user range, could get pretty pricey. Recently, however, Microsoft has been pushing to become very active in the cloud services field and has turned Exchange hosting on its ear.

How does $4/user per month with 25 Gb mailboxes sound to you? It’s pretty much blown us away – compared to the more typical $8-$10/month with 2-4 Gb per mailbox that competitors offer.

You should definitely take a hard look at Microsoft’s newest Exchange hosting offering – we can help you go through the options.  For $4 per month per user, each user gets a 25 GB mailbox, and is able to send  huge attachments – up to 25 MB each (of course, it still depends on the maximum attachment size that can be received on the other end).  ActiveSync (for real-time wireless syncing to iPhone, Android and Windows phones) and Outlook Web Access (browser-based access to Outlook)  is also included for mobile users, and Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (anti-malware / anti-spam)  is included at no charge as well.  It’s a pretty nice package – for 60 mailboxes, that works out to $240 per month for a combined 1.5 terabytes of cloud-based email storage.  They also provide a 99.9% up-time commitment with a Service Level Agreement (terms to protect your info and confidences by contract) and 24/7 live phone support.

Of course, to users, they see NO difference whatsoever using hosted v. local Exchange Server – they just use Outlook as they’ve always been (but with LOTS more storage and no one badgering them to delete old email every week).

All considered, this is quickly becoming our primary recommendation to clients looking to move to Hosted Exchange (or ANY Exchange-based system – so if your current physical Exchange Server is getting a little long in the tooth, we can help you make the transition to a hosted system instead of buying a new “box”).  If you’d like us to assess what it will take to move your existing mailboxes into the cloud, let us know by contacting us here – this is an option that makes sense for everyone from solos to firms with hundreds of users.

So . . . crying about your failed bracketology attempts over this past March Madness weekend? My two teams – the UW Badgers and the Marquette Golden Eagles have both made it to the Sweet 16 – very exciting! Fingers crossed. I do have to confess though that when I was at Marquette Law School in the mid-80′s, they were still the Warriors and it’s hard to think of them as anything else :-).

My latest CLE materials are up and online at MicroLaw’s CLE downloads page here. These include four session sets from my guest lecture engagement at the Charleston School of Law this past week, as well as my PDFing materials from the Tennessee Bar’s law technology day last month. As always, the materials are free, searchable PDFs – feel free to share them with anyone who you think might benefit from the knowledge they’ll gain.

The latest materials are:

• Social Media Isn’t a Fad: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and YouTube and How to Use Them Responsibly and Ethically in Your New Practice
• The 2012 New Lawyer’s Low-Budget / No-Budget Technology Survival Guide
• Technology for Tightwads: 10+ Tips for Free and Low-Cost Law Practice Management and Tech Tools, Gadgets, Apps and Websites
• How NOT to Commit Malpractice With Your Computer (or Smartphone and iPad)
• The Secret Tech Weapon You Didn’t Know You Had: Acrobat and PDFing Tools, Tips, Techniques to Use Daily
• Increasing Cloudiness in Your Practice – Hardcore Realities of Web-Based Systems and Ethical Issues

Hope you find them useful. As always, if these materials look like they have applicability to your practice (hard not to :-)), feel free to contact me here to chat about it.

Seriously, I just spent the week teaching legal technology and law practice management classes at the Charleston School of Law – in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve done this at a number of law schools around the country over the years, but I have to say, this school stands out for me for many reasons – it was the single most positive experience I’ve ever had with any law school anywhere, including all three years at my alma mater, Marquette University Law School way back in the 80′s.

If you’re interested in viewing my course materials for my classes which included:

• Social Media Isn’t Just a Fad: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and YouTube and How to Use Them Responsibly and Ethically in Your New Practice
• The 2012 New Lawyer’s Low-Budget / No-Budget Technology Survival Guide
• Technology for Tightwads: 10+ Tips for Free and Low-Cost Law Practice Management and Tech Tools, Gadgets, Apps and Websites
• How NOT to Commit Malpractice With Your Computer (or iPad or Smartphone)

You can download the PDFs of the materials, along with all my other recent CLE materials here - feel free to share them with those whom you feel might benefit.

And it’s not just because they invited me to my favorite city in all of North America :-) (although that didn’t hurt). The reasons I was so impressed with the Charleston School of Law, in no particular order are:

• The intangibles – the sense of community between faculty, the administration and the students – not three distinct groups as I’ve normally experienced at law schools, but rather a genuine community of people who actually like each other and have a real sense of camaraderie. What better way to instill a future sense of law practice collegiality than to plant the seeds in law school.
• Genuinely, some of the warmest, nicest people I’ve seen in any academic environment – the administration takes very good care of their students. For goodness sake, they feed them pizza and lunch – that didn’t happen when I was in law school. I heard that in a typical year, the school spends into the five figures just feeding their busy students.
• An attitude of open-mindedness and willingness to experiment with new, progressive and practical ways to educate their students – something I’ve seen in short supply in most law schools who lean towards traditionalism. In a traditional city like Charleston, there’s an educational revolution happening here, especially with what appears to be a sorely needed and growing commitment to including practical aspects of law practice life – legal technology and law practice management – into the curriculum.
• The students I met and had the privilege of teaching were engaged, appreciative and seem thrilled to be learning not just about substantive law, but the practical side of what it will be like to actually practice law – and they seemed appreciative of their school’s willingness to make such classroom focus available to them. These students showed an intense passion and interest for absorbing information about the practical elements of law practice – clearly the initiatives taken by Dean Saunders and Judge Kosko – teaching lawyering skills and law practice management courses – are paying off – these students will be more ready than any I’ve seen to jump into firms and even their own practices after graduation and be functional, responsible and contributing members of the legal communities wherever they end up residing – very impressive “kids” (most did seem young enough to be my children, but there were plenty of second-career folks too).
• The administrators I met – Associate Dean Abby Saunders, Assistant Dean Mark Moore, Assistant Dean Jennifer Summers, Brett Barker, Roland Jones, Assistant Dean Jennifer Summers, Betsy Marchant and  especially Judge George Kosko, one of the founders of the school and a member of its board of advisors – were delightfully hospitable, engaging and fascinating conversation partners talking about progressive legal education and showed a touching level of affection and concern for the academic and personal well-being of their students.
• Being smack dab in the heart of Charleston’s famed Historic District certainly doesn’t hurt – with facilities ranging from restored, renovated and reclaimed historic structures like the city’s old railroad depot (transformed into an architecturally impressive law library and student center – a place I would’ve killed to be able to study in in my academic days), a wonderful art deco theater on vibrant King Street, among others. It’s hard to imagine students coming here and ever wanting to leave.

If any of my children wanted to pursue a legal career, it would be a privilege – and my first choice – to send them to the Charleston School of Law. I hope that I have the opportunity to help them in the future with further educational offerings for their students. If it seems like I’m completely enamored with this school, it’s because I am!

Special note of thanks to my dear friend and colleague, Courtney Kennaday, Practice Management Advisor for the South Carolina Bar. Courtney’s syllabus has served as the original base for the school’s efforts in injecting these elements of practicality into the curriculum and was instrumental in making the connections that yielded the invitation for me to be able to contribute. I think that the legal community in South Carolina is truly fortunate to have her as a law practice management resource.

As I reminded all the students I met, if any of you have any questions at all about the courses I taught, please don’t hesitate to contact me here.

Thank you to all my new friends and if it’s not too presumptuous to say, colleagues, at the Charleston School of Law for a rewarding experience. I just hope that your student body benefited as much from my classes as I benefited from the entire experience.

Oh, and if you haven’t been to Charleston, South Carolina, what’s wrong with you?! A magnificently preserved historic district, a city dripping with history from the Spanish colonial era through the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Civil Rights to its present day mix of spectacular and world class dining, wonderful weather (okay, it gets steamy in the summer), a seafood lover’s paradise, with beaches that delight children and the young at heart, it’s a perfect place for a family vacation, a romantic weekend, or a history buff’s adventure trip. Just go – trust me on this – I’ve been to the city more than 20 times and can’t wait to come back. Oh, and if you go, be sure to get reservations well in advance for Husk, voted Bon Appétit Magazine’s best new restaurant in the U.S. in 2011 – trust me on that one too. Or Grill 225 – truly the best I’ve had of a lifetime of steaks (no hyperbole or overstatement intended – it’s just fact – better than Peter Luger’s, better than Manny’s in Minneapolis, better than all the steakhouse chains – better than the classic “5 O’Clock House” in Milwaukee, my hometown) and . . . well, I could go on and on about the great dining, great sites, and all the reasons why a Charleston stay should be on your travel bucket list.

With clients scatttered across the globe, we like many consultancies, find it efficient and highly cost-effective to conduct legal technology training sessions remotely, via webconference. We use GoToMeeting and Join.me, others use these and also WebEx, to allow our client attendees to sit at their desks or around a projected system in one of their conference rooms to be trained on everything from legal billing systems to Acrobat to legal use of Word and Outlook, new practice and document management systems and more.

Advantages for training remotely include:

• Lower cost – no travel expenses
• Better for the environment – no travel-related pollution
• Immediacy – you could literally be trained five minutes from now if it was convenient for everyone
• Less coordination – since all your people can literally be at their computers / tablets anywhere – no need to corral folks into a conference room

It’s a pretty compelling case for remote training. But are there advantages to  ”old school” live training sessions that may be compelling? I think they are, and I’d summarize them as follows:

• Human interaction – still a very good thing where connections are made that maximize the learning experience for attendees – it’s a live human whose hand you can shake and who can smile at you when you say something brilliant – I think we are craving that more and more in the “Facebook Era” of human disconnection
• Effectiveness – when we train remotely, we can’t see that you look puzzled and need us to reinforce a key point, or that you look like you just had a great idea you could share with the group
• Instant “hand-holding” – after the session when you go back to your desk, maybe you want us to follow you to reinforce a point you just put into practice

So the bottom-line is this – we generally recommend that if it is at all affordable, that the first round of training on key systems such as financial, document management and practice management systems, and even for an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010, it makes sense to do those first sessions live – human to human – old school. Then think about remote sessions for subsequent follow-up sessions.

Don’t underestimate the value of the human interaction and connections that are made – the goal is to maximize the knowledge your people gain so you can achieve the usage results from new or upgraded systems that drove you to acquire them in the first place. Don’t be penny-wise and pound foolish when it comes to training on how to use those systems. Sometimes “live” is the least expensive approach in the long-run.

MicroLaw has been very busy helping firms continent-wide in cleaning up their practice technology. With Spring just around the corner, more or less at least weatherwise (hey it’s going to be 68 in the “Frozen Tundra” of Wisconsin here early next week . . . we’ll take this kind of “late Winter” weather!), but definitely calendar-wise, it’s the perfect time to clean your practice technology house as we march towards the warmer months. Your practice’s profits can bloom and blossom along with the flora and fauna!

To make this process easier – and less expensive, we’ve got a proposal for you. MicroLaw can conduct its detailed practice technology and practice management review for a flat rate based on the size of your practice. The objective? To critique your present technology use and the state of your systems and processes and then provide a highly detailed, yet plain English short-term and long-term plan on how to squeeze the most out of your current (and future) technology systems.

And just like cleaning your home, office or garage in the springtime, it makes sense to schedule a check-up for your practice every couple of years.

• We’ll spot weaknesses and gaps in your hardware and software mix and recommend how to fix them – this can include transitioning wholly or partly to Macs, but also reviewing local quotes for hardware/network upgrades and/or designing the next generation of your systems and figuring out the best way to get it done cost-effectively
• We’ll explore the best way to integrate iPads and tablets into your practice – for everything from staying connected to litigating cases
• We’ll look for areas where you’re losing otherwise billable time because of inefficient technology tools and procedures that could be better tuned (or where procedures don’t really exist at all!) – including using time-capture tools like Chrometa to capture EVERYTHING
• We’ll help you figure out the best way for your specific practice to build complete electronic case files and get to a single point of entry for client and case information – we can help using a variety of practice management and financial systems, such as the legendary Tabs 3 and Tabs PracticeMaster, as well as the Worldox GX3 document/email manager, among others
• We’ll help you become Paper LESS in a way that works for you
• Better use what you already have – stop under-using Word, Outlook and Acrobat, as well as your practice manager and financial systems
• We’ll check to make sure your practice information is secure and you’re protecting client confidences in an ethically-compliant way
• We can help you determine if you’re taking a “green” approach to your office’s operations and technology use
• We’ll help you sort out your smartphone issues and how to get more out of your phones with the right apps
• We’ll examine your social media efforts to make sure you’re using services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ and others in an ethically responsible and effective manner
• We’ll help you figure out if web-based and/or cloud hosting of your data and applications makes sense including using services like CLIO, RocketMatter, MyCase, Advologix, DropBox, Exchange Hosting, online backup and more
• We’ll help you chart out a path consistent with our “Five B’s” approach: using technology intelligently to achieve Best Practices, Battle Malpractice Risk, Be Ethically Compliant, Better Profitability and achieve a more Balanced/Blissful Life – seriously, if these aren’t your real objectives, what’s the point of continually buying new technology?

Our MicroLaw CARES review (CARES = Computer and Resources Evaluation and Study – clever, huh?) includes:

• Step One – Learning About You – Ross will conduct either live or conference-call interviews of everyone you feel has something to offer related to your present technology and how you use it / don’t use it
• Step Two – We Recommend – Ross will draft a detailed, yet highly understandable (our clients tell us that!) set of recommendations and plans for both technology and procedural improvement and how to best use your existing and future tech tools. We’ll leave no stone unturned in recommending software, hardware, services, support and how to get from where you are to where you want/need to be – with all costs very specifically projected and including a leasing analysis.
• Step Three – Let’s Do Lunch! We’ll meet remotely (or live – your choice) to talk through our recommendations and help you develop a specific set of phased action plan steps ready to act on.

While it’s always better to take a big picture approach and look at your entire practice to be able to give the best advice (see below), you can also buy blocks of Ross’ time just to talk about your situation and bounce ideas off of him (or have him comment on a locally-acquired proposal) – the MicroLaw CARES rates for this are discounted from Ross’ regular $245/hour to $185/hour (but you have to mention the “MicroLaw CARES “Spring into Spring” promotion – that’s the only catch!). OR, if you already happen to have programs like Tabs 3, Tabs PracticeMaster and Worldox, Renee from MicroLaw can help hourly as well – she’s normally $185/hour but the “Spring into Spring” discounted rate is $165/hour – every little bit helps! Abe’s tech and Microsoft Office wizardry is normally $150/hour – his “Spring into Spring” rate for MicroLaw CARES work is $145/hour.

So that’s what we can do for you this Spring and into the Summer – as we’ve done for so many firms. And as we did this last Fall – which was wildly popular, we’re offering a MicroLaw CARES discounted flat rate plan as follows:

• 1 person in your practice = Flat CARE rate –  Normally $1750, Fall Sale = $1500
• 2-5 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $2000, Fall Sale = $1750
• 6-10 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $2750, Fall Sale = $2500
• 11-20 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $3500, Fall Sale = $3200
• 21-30 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $5000, Fall Sale = $4600
• 31-50 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $6000, Fall Sale = $5600
• 51-75 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $8000, Fall Sale = $7500
• 76-100 people in your practice = Flat CARE rate: Normally $11,000, Fall Sale = $9995
• 101+ people in your practice – ask Ross about it!  We’ve helped firms with hundreds of people chart their technology paths

The bottom-line is this – the most expensive business decision for any law practice is usually sticking with the status quo – and not being as profitable and client-service-centered as you can. So talk to Ross today and get your Spring/Summer MicroLaw CARES process scheduled before there are no slots left!

I’m not even sure how or why I stumbled across this . . . the vagaries and mysteries of the web I guess. But here’s a link to a 2000 article by my old friend Daryl Teshima, famed for being the original editor of the late and much lamented Law Office Computing magazine. I remember reading this article when it came out a dozen years ago and just re-read it tonight while looking for information about the best practices approaches to legal technology training. Thanks Daryl for a timeless piece and perennially useful advice.

Here’s a salient excerpt that parallels the identical advice I’ve given to my clients over the years, eschewing traditionally ineffective technology training that focuses on rote memorization of features and functions, in favor of task-based training. In other words, training people to use their new software systems to do the daily tasks they face – opening new matters, calendaring court scheduling orders, performing conflict searches, etc.:

“Another successful training approach is to use task-based training. Organize each training session around the tasks that users perform. For example, when training users on the latest version of Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, show the steps needed to create documents that the user creates every day.”

Well put Daryl – advice that has weathered well under the test of time and is every bit as applicable today as in Y2K when it was written. And especially important in this new era of cloud computing when people seem to be under the utterly mistaken belief that no training is needed on SaaS apps. All I have to say to that is . . . HUH?