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.

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.

Some cool videos to celebrate America’s 236th birthday:

I was thinking about a tip for today and it hit me with the sparkling commotion of a roman candle – digital ways to celebrate America’s 236th birthday! So here are a collection of apps and links to help you celebrate the 4th of July with high-tech panache:

1. Sousa Marches – not just any Sousa recordings, but original wax cylinder recordings ranging from 1895 to 1916. Fascinating, especially to hear the original tempos. Not surprising some of these recordings are pretty scratchy, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into American musical history by the King of Marches. Click here.
2. UCSB Cylinder Recording Preservation Project - in the same vein, I’m fascinated by the idea of LISTENING to American history. The University of California-Santa Barbara has been engaged in a musical preservation project involving the digitization of the earliest audio recordings – mostly from Edison wax cylinders, with later recordings in 78 rpm format, made available here. The collection is large, growing and impressive – with a deep selection of early recordings not just from the U.S. but from across the globe, organized by nation of origin and type of recording. My favorite section is called “Home Recordings” – you can actually listen to common sounds of the day – parents, children, their pets and farm animals, oh my! Seriously, be careful with this – it’s easy to fritter away an entire otherwise billable day listening.
3. Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks App (iPad) – a far cry from being there, but it was fun to watch last year.
4. The American Revolution: Interactive (iPad) – I spent over an hour digging through this interactive story of the War for Independence. After all, it’s easy to lose site of the basis for the holiday merry-makings tomorrow – brave and resolute people fought to create our nation all those years ago, long before Weber grilled burgers hit the scene.
5. The Declaration of Independence App (iPad) – I think that every parent should read the entire Declaration of Independence to their children every 4th. It’s stirring, dramatic, dangerous, bold, principled, eloquent and ultimately, told off the most powerful man in the Western world at the time – King George III. I get goosebumps every time I read it (and seeing the signatures of all those brave Patriots who risked life and limb for their beliefs)
6. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops – Stars and Stripes Forever – stirring. A must download. Crank it up!

Happy 236th Birthday America! Have a safe holiday everyone and teach your children about where our nation came from. If it takes an iPad to get their attention, so be it.

Warning – at first this might seem like a gag tip – I can assure you that it’s not only real, but really useful!

Here’s the scenario: It’s Friday before a weekend that, for some lucky stiffs, is a holiday weekend, given the 4th happening mid-week. Inevitably, to escape the heat scorching much of the U.S., you might decide to hit the local cinema for some air-conditioned visual entertainment.

But here’s the thing. In the era of sodas pushing the 32 ounce range (except for New York City), this poses a serious problem. Let’s not beat about the bush here – Murphy’s Law dictates that you’ll need to hit the restroom at the worst possible time, missing key scenes.

As with so much in life today, there’s an app for that.  RunPee, available for free for both for iPad and Android, bills itself as an answer to the fact that movie theaters don’t give you a “pause” button when mother nature calls.

So here’s what it does. You run the app and tell it what movie you’re watching. According to them, here’s what happens:

“The RunPee app is primarily here to help you enjoy your movie going experience by telling you the best times to Run and Pee without missing anything important. The RunPee family – Dan, Mom and Sis – see each wide release movie that comes out on opening day. We watch for 3-5 minute spans in the movie where nothing really exciting, or funny, or important happens. ( Obviously this can be next to impossible for really good movies but we do our best. )

We start looking for peetimes about 30 minutes into the movie and we stop when there’s only 20-30 minutes left in the movie. For short movies of about 90 minutes there may only be one peetime. But for movies over 2 hours there may be 2-3 peetimes.

Each peetime has a synopses of what happens. So if you do need to run and pee then you’ll be able to come back to the theater knowing exactly what happened while you were taking care of business.

We also give you a lot more:

• Notes from the person who took the peetimes to let you know which one we would suggest using and which ones to use only in case of emergency.
• If you need to stay after the end credits for any extra scenes.
• A synopsis of the first 3 minutes of a movie just in case you are running late.
• A grade and short review for each movie.
• Screens that show information about your selected movie from RottenTomatoes.com and IMDb.com
• Quick links to the soundtrack, if any.”

It’s not often you encounter an app that at first blush, makes you giggle and think “that’s utterly silly” but that proves itself to be so useful. So maximize your movie dollars this weekend and beyond with RunPee. I’m serious – I use this and its terrific! In fact, I plan on using it tonight when I go to see “Moonrise Kingdom.”

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.

An intriguing question came up on the ABA Solosez list today. The question, paraphrased, was “I have a criminal defense practice and wonder why I should have a practice management system. It seems like a lot of work retrofitting what I’m doing now with several separate pieces of software, into what some practice management software would want me to do. Don’t know if it’s worth it – tell me why it would be.”

As I said, an intriguing question – whether asked back in the day or today in 2012 when we have such a rich range of practice management approaches. I’m buried today and hesitate to jump in on this but here’s a quick response from someone who has been living deep  inside the practice management industry since the mid-80′s (the days when WordPerfect Office Notebooks were proto-managers):

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.

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.

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 the flurry of ultrabook announcements, I’m reminded that what I really want in a laptop just doesn’t exist . . . still. And why the heck not? It shoudn’t be that tough. It’s kind of like what I’d been saying for years about automotive design: “why don’t automakers build luxurious SMALL cars?” It always seemed that if you wanted luxury, you got a landyacht. If you wanted small, you got an econobox. Well, automakers worldwide have finally gotten the message and whether American, European or Asian brands, we’re seeing a complete rethink of the auto luxury-size issue – plenty of well-equipped, near-luxury smaller cars.

So with laptops, why is it one extreme or the other? A 5 or 6 pound mega-performer or a 3 pound Ultrabook without the equipment level heavy-duty business users like me (and you too, I suspect) want. So as much as I think ultrabooks/Airs are utterly deliciously svelte and sexy, I want my current workhorse -a Thinkpad T420-to have some of the same characteristics. To be specific, here’s what I want in my mid-weight black-clad, red pointing-stick-equipped workhorse:

• No change in its existing specs – Core i7, 8 Gb RAM, 500 Gb 7200 RPM drive, great 14″ display, etc.
• I want a small SSD that has Windows 7 loaded on it to that I can get instant-on, super-fast bootups and shutdowns – probably just a 64 Gb SSD is fine and then the 500 Gb “traditional” hard drive would be for storage
• I want to able to remove the “ultrabay” DVD-writer and slip in a cover plate – cutting out a few ounces and not using any power, since I pretty much never use it

That’s it! Why is that so much to ask for. Do you hear me Lenovo? Dell? HP? Sony? Asus? Acer? Even Apple? I don’t want a super-svelte machine (at least not until they can match my workhorse specs). And no, “store it in the cloud” isn’t a perfect answer since I’m often working offline like normal people get stuck doing regularly. I just want the instant-on/instant-off capability of an ultrabook and common-sense load-lightening that shouldn’t be terribly difficult to provide for me.

C’mon laptop makers – are you listening? Hello? Class? Class? Buehler? Buehler?

I had an idea yesterday morning. I want to see the readership here on our technology/law practice management blog, Ross Ipsa Loquitur, to hit 2000 subscribers. We’re about halfway there at the moment. Aside from trying to write really useful, practical content (and there’s been a flurry of new posts in the last two weeks).

Also, the blog is irritation free – that means you can subscribe on the site to get the feed via the Feedblitz system using any email address with no contact information required. And there are NO ads on the site to distract your attention.

My idea is this – my family has been affected greatly by cancer – perhaps yours has too. My mother was taken by ovarian cancer at 57. My business partner Renee is a long-term breast cancer survivor (9 years this year). I’m a long-term Hodgkins lymphoma survivor (13 years this year). Like you, I’ve lost far too many friends and relatives to various forms of cancer.

For every new Ross Ipsa Loquitur subscriber this year (starting yesterday), I will personally donate $5 to the American Cancer Society.

The blog is at http://rossipsa.com (duh, you’re reading this already, but just in case . . . ) and you can’t miss the “Subscribe Here” column on the right which says: “FeedBlitz: Enter your Email” – enter it,click subscribe, and you’ll get a Feedblitz subscription screen with ”Email” as the preselected distribution option (or all sorts of other options like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to receive the blog posts - choose your poison and then you’ll get a verification email which you can then click on to confirm. I timed it – it takes under 2 minutes.

So if you’re reading the blog and haven’t subscribed, subscribe! And spread the word to others – I want to write a big, fat check to the American Cancer Society next week – so we can all do some good!

Everyone wins – we get more subscribers, the American Cancer Society gets a donation to help wipe out this damned collection of diseases and you getperiodic useful legal tech tips, ideas and content with no compromise of your privacy.

I’ll keep subscribers posted when I send in donations to the ACS.

That’s it. Time to do some good gang.

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!

This question comes up constantly on various listserves I frequent: “How/Why would I use Styles in Word?”

Seriously, that’s like asking “why would I breathe?” or “should I go to the bathroom when I wake up in the morning?” That basic, that fundamental. If you’re among the vast miserable majority NOT using Styles in Word to format your documents, you’re absolutely word processing the hardest possible way. In fact, as my Solosez pal and WordPerfect Wizard Mike Koenecke says “one can use Styles in WordPerfect every bit as effectively and comprehensively as in Word, if that is the way you prefer to work. There are character styles, paragraph styles, document styles aplenty. If you prefer that approach, there is no reason to “change font codes a paragraph at a time through a long document.” In fact, there is no reason to do that in WordPerfect at all.” Essentially a very polite version of “duh.”

So why don’t most Word users we encounter in our client’s offices use Styles? I think the answer has always been the same:

1. We were brought up in a WordPerfect world and never learned what styles were and didn’t need them. So there.
2. We taught ourselves Word. So, we learned how to do everything “unofficially.”

So it’s time to break out of that cycle of document generation despair and get onboard with Styles in Word (and WordPerfect if you still use it). Styles are nothing more than a  way to apply a single smart “macro” (a concept familiar to the legion of WordPerfect-ingrained among us), that affects all the text in a document or a paragraph within a document. It couldn’t be simpler to use – you don’t even need to highlight and mark text as you used to do in WordPerfect in the “good old days.” Just be in the paragraph or document where you want to have the appearance changed and click the Style you wish to choose from your Word 2007 or 2010 Home ribbon Styles choices. Et voila! Multiple appearance changes applied in a single click.

You can create new Styles on the fly by formatting a block of text you wish to look like the Style you want to create. Then highlight the formatted text and right click, then select the option to create a QuickStyle from the highlighted text. Fill in the box that appears, naming your style, click to okay it and you now have a brand new Style you can reuse over and over. There are also ways to share these with other users.

AND, as we’ve advised clients for years (many of whom still don’t seem to listen, such is the power of old habits and their unwillingness to die in the face of logic and reason :-)), discuss the Styles you’d want to use as standards for document layout and appearance in your practice, create them, wipe out all the extraneous default Styles you’d never use (and which clutter the Styles “windowblind” in Word 2007/2010) and then actually use the abbreviated, streamlined “official” firm set you’ve created for body text, headings, pleadings, etc.

So it’s NOT mysterious. It’s NOT obtuse. It’s NOT byzantine. Styles are massive timesavers and professionalism boosters since all your firm’s documents will have the “official” look and feel, as opposed to a collection of inconsistent looking content that just screams (“we can’t get our act together!”).

Abe at MicroLaw, as some of you know, and others perhaps not, offers superb remote (and live when practical) Word 2007 and 2010 training for all MicroLaw clients – he has for years. Contact me here to find out about it – one hour of online training time can change your word processing life for the better forever. He can also show you how to create “firm styles” and make them available to all your users on your systems and networks. And if you mention the phrase “Obviously Styles” in your email, I’d be happy to give you a 15% courtesy professional services discount on any MicroLaw Word or MS Office training your practice decides to get (yes, we do Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel training for law practices as well). We’ve been training on MS Office for almost 20 years and have custom training reference materials that have gotten rave reviews from clients.

The other thing to think about is purely economic. How much time do you and your staff waste every single day formatting the hard way in Word? I’m guessing that if you’re relatively typical, the answer is TONS of time – and if you happen to be working on a flat fee or contingent fee billing arrangement, that wasted time manually formatting, unformatting, reformatting, all eats directly into your profit margin. On hourly matters, you’re probably still eating a ton of time that you just can’t bill for all the subsidization of your own inefficiency. For the sake of mathematical/fiscal argument, if you waste just 15 minutes a day of lawyer time at $200/hour monkeying around with the manual formatting of a Word document, that’s $50/day, $250/week, $1000/month and $12,000 per year of your otherwise billable and productive time. Not to mention the psychological toll of all the accumulated frustration and angst that flows from struggling with software.

As a reference, you could buy my techno.pal Ben Schorr’s latest ABA LPM book on Word here – I think it’s a must-have. And if you’re still a Word 2003 hanger-on, the Payne Consulting book on Word 2003 for Lawyers is now only $10 – a steal if you need it still.

If you prefer a more impersonal “show me fast” approach, here are some video links on how to use styles in Word 2007 and 2010 (I’m not showing you how to do this in Word 2003, for goodness sake – get CURRENT already, would  ’ya???):

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/video-apply-styles-in-word-2010-VA101820568.aspx
• http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1365077/word_2007_demo_adding_styles/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-kb32j3-nY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq_dr69xjTw
• http://blogs.office.com/b/office_casual/archive/2011/02/15/using-quick-styles-in-word.aspx http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-word/archive/2011/06/21/word-of-the-week-formatting-vs-styles.aspx
• http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styles/applyastyle.html

Thought you had an “unlimited’ data plan for your smartphone? Like me, paying for unlimited plans for yourself and your family? Think again. Apparently unlimited doesn’t actually mean . . . er . . . um . . . “unlimited.” It’s more like “unlimited’ with a footnote. Read this article in the NYT – have you been a victim of this blatant telco deception. How is it possible the FCC and FTC allow these kinds of lying, cheating scumbag companies to get away with this? My kids are on Virgin Mobile – I signed up for the unlimited data plans. Then two months later, I get an “oh by the way, unlimited means 2.5 Gb per month then we’ll slow down your connection, but no, we won’t lower your fees.”

Seriously, WTF! Sorry for the Friday rant but if there were ever a need for Federal intervention into telco regulation, wouldn’t this be it? Consumer fraud, plain and simple, on a grand scale.

Be sure to take this kind of situation into consideration when you arm your squad of lawyers with iPads or Android tablets and then try and stay connected to your practice systems with “unlimited’ cell data plans . . . it might work until the the third week of your billing period and then . . . watch out.

In his November 20, 2011 article, “What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering,” David Segal understates his core issue. When I attended law school in the mid 1980’s (Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, WI), we didn’t have a single course that taught us anything whatsoever about how to run a law practice as a business.

Since becoming an attorney in 1986, I have devoted my entire career to being a law practice management and legal technology consultant. I chose that career path, in large part, because of what I perceived as a serious need to fill the educational and preparatory gaps created by an American legal educational system that has been focused almost exclusively on teaching “the law,” to the nearly complete exclusion of teaching students how to actually practice law.

My experience, after 26 years in the field educating and guiding lawyers in the better operation of their practices, is that the majority of attorneys I encounter are woefully under-prepared or entirely unprepared to successfully manage the business operations of their practices, to manage their professional and non-legal staff, nor even in many cases, be prepared to generate enough business to weather ordinary, if not unusually difficult economic times.

Like me, most lawyers I encounter came from liberal arts undergraduate backgrounds. My classmates nearly 30 years ago were English majors, Political Science majors, History majors and even one Philosophy major. I was an Economics major; about as far removed from the realities of the business demands of running a business as one could imagine. So if lawyers today are ill-prepared to be business people, I would say it’s fair that they come by that lack of background honestly.

However, I have long railed against what I view borders on utter neglect on the part of the American legal education system. The legal educational systems all too often falls back on the outmoded and backward tradition in failing to prepare lawyers to deal with the realities of the modern legal marketplace. While a graduate of a law school might be able to perform a mean footnote check reviewing a brief, and have an enviable level of mastery of using online legal research services, how many know anything whatsoever about how to manage anyone. Or how to negotiate a commercial lease. Or how to make sound decisions about the technology systems to drive their practices forward. Or anything about quality control systems to yield a “best practices” approach to serving clients. Or how to read a profit and loss statement or even what dual-entry accounting is all about. Or how to calculate their return on investment for a new multifunction device. Or that “customer service” isn’t something that professional organizations are except from. Or even to understand the essentials of electronic security in order to comply with the universal legal ethical requirement to protect confidential client information. In my quarter century of direct field experience, perhaps less than 20% of the lawyers I encounter are in any way prepared to make the right decisions related to the operation of their law practices as a business.

To be sure, some law schools make an attempt by offering what is usually an elective third year course on law practice management. But it’s not enough – law schools from the top tier Ivys on down – should feel a sense of obligation not only to their customers (a/k/a students) to prepare them to earn a living, but to the general public – to prepare them not to step into early malpractice traps because they just don’t know what the heck they’re doing in terms of the logistics or mechanics of modern law practice. Larger firms need associates to be a profitable leverage source quickly – there is little time to invest in training and the pressure to pay for their salaries is greater than ever.

In an economy where many law graduates have limited or no early employment prospects, to prepare them to survive – so at a minimum, they can work in a law practice capacity to start paying back their student loans. That’s not likely to happen if they’re stuck wearing a barista’s apron because they don’t have the practical skills to open a business and make it work in a tough economy.

It’s time for the American legal system to wake up and smell the coffee – elevating law practice business and management education to the level it requires – as important as taking courses in constitutional law or contracts. And to do it before their graduates are making lattés for a living and defaulting on their student loans.

I’ve officially decided to campaign against the word “email.” No, I haven’t lost my marbles (at least on this particular point) – there’s method in this apparent madness. When we talk about email in law practice, we’ve long-described a form of digital data segregation that confounds our ability to see complete and contiguous client files. And that inability inevitably leads to unnecessary and avoidable stress, anxiety and at worst, outright malpractice risk.

More specifically, most people keep all their inbound and outbound email in their preferred email systems – whether some flavor of Outlook, perhaps Thunderbird (for the open-source-inclined contrarians among us) or some type of webmail. And of course, this includes all the attachments to those sent and received emails.  Think about the mass of substantive content – critical case-related and firm administration-related content – buried in the bottomless, black hellpit-holes otherwise known as our inboxes and sent items folders. Buried. More likely than not, not shareable or accessible by anyone else. Rarely organized. Segregated from all the other documents we maintain for our cases and for the administration of our practices as businesses.

And why do most of us exercise this cavernous gap in law practice common sense?

Because it’s called “email.” Which seemingly implies that it must be stored in an “email system,” in “email folders.”

It’s really not email at all! What is it? IT’S CORRESPONDENCE! Any why then wouldn’t we want all our correspondence (and the enclosures, A/K/A attachments) where all the rest of the documents are for all our files – in the electronic document folders where every other document is located on any given case / matter / project / subject!

Can we all utter a collective “duh?”

It’s obvious. Brain-dead level of obvious. Yet, why do we persist in segregating such a high percentage of the substantive, case-critical content in our case files and relegate it to the digital gulag, as if it had been purged in some type of digital ethnic cleansing campaign to be as far from our sight as possible.

So just stop it. It’s not email – it’s correspondence. And it should be stored and organized where all correspondence should be – in our document files where all the rest of the documents for any given case or project are located, allowing us to take a big step forward in building, and being able to universally – access complete and contiguous (and remotely accessible) files.

And please, don’t even think of getting me started on the idea of building complete and contiguous files in paper form – yes, I’ve seen firms print every email and attachment and then waste scads of otherwise billable/useful time tracking down the paper file to store them for later inability to ever find them again. Another degree of delusion . . .

Ideally, use a document manager like Worldox or Autonomy iManage/Worksite to integrate with Outlook to organize inbound/outbound email and attachments and make them part of the electronic correspondence file – in as few steps as humanly possible. Do this now. Seriously. As my 15 year old daughter is so fond of saying, “Dad, I’m not even kidding.” This is an intrinsic element of our widely-adopted Paper LESS Office process – with the ultimate focus of consolidating all information in client and firm files to bring common sense back to practice information management.

Email doesn’t exist. Electronic correspondence does. Store it rationally and find it, see it, read it, share it when you need to. Start today. If you want/need help, ask me.

As any of us, like yours truly, approach the half-century mark, time seems like anything BUT a friend.  It has always inexorably marched on and likely always will (unless as daughter Hayley uberhip-ly observes, it’s “4D Dad” – I have no idea what that means, but I suspect time MIGHT stop marching on in that 4D corner of her 9th grade universe).

But time feels like my friend right now – I was reminded of this this past week when I had occasion to meet with my longest-running client, the firm of Kravit, Hovel & Krawczyk in Milwaukee. The firm’s principal, Steve Kravit, one of the nation’s truly great litigators (and truly nice guys) placed his confidence in me way back in 1986, hiring me and my fledgling company, MicroLaw, to help his two year old law practice automate better. 24 years ago. Steve was 36 then and I was 24. A lifetime ago. And this week we met to talk yet about a new generation of technology and practice management upgrades for his practice – the latest in a series of forward-looking practice developments for his national litigation practice.

And Steve, as always in his self-deprecating way, reminded me he doesn’t know much “about this stuff.” BS Steve, you do too – you always did, because you were always a good businessperson who recognized that technology is about business success and successfully representing clients first, and about gadgets and hardware and software distantly second. Steve’s had the right attitude about technology in law practice for decades.

I guess my point here is that careers can be much more about relationships than anything else. Perhaps the single most rewarding element of my 25+ years as a legal technologist/law practice management consultant is getting to work – and grow up with – clients like Steve Kravit.

Yep, these are the things that matter.

P.S. And by the way, if you need Wisconsin/Upper Midwest  regional co-counsel in a commercial litigation situation, you’d be nuts not to talk to Steve and the team at Kravit, Hovel & Krawczyk – especially the version of the firm powered by the new generation of technology they’re talking about having us help them with.