Within seconds a person can make an almost permanent assessment of another individual based purely on their face, dress, and posture.  Although this impression is mostly superficial and sometimes unfair, it is one that is almost always made and almost impossible to change.  This same quick assessment of someone that is made by millions everyday is also made by millions of people who are looking at a site for the first time.

It is not uncommon for someone to spend as little as 8 seconds looking at and evaluating a site before deciding whether to stay or to hit the back arrow and view other options (your competitors).  This quick assessment requires companies to focus more on a site’s images, messages, colors, fonts, page layout, and other branding aspects.

A website has come to help establish or further enhance a business’ brand and how clients and potential clients view the company. Within those same 8 seconds that someone is evaluating your website, they are also deciding what your brand it (this needs to be easy for them) and whether or not they identify with it. We always have to remember that a brand can never be what YOU say it is, but is always what YOUR audience says it is.  A brand is identified by “the people” and is based on a gut feeling. There is no doubt that having a brand is important for businesses across all industries, but it is especially important for law firms for a number of reasons.

Potential clients are faced with too many choices with too little time. It is your job to get yourself seen, hopefully on the first to third search engine results pages, but once you are clicked on it is your brand and overall image that holds the viewers attention. It is also your brand that allows for a point of differentiation in the sea of choices potential clients are faced with. It is likely that your audience sees all law firms and attorneys in the same light and at most differentiates by type of attorney (criminal, divorce, tax, etc.). This tendency to see all law firm and attorney options as the same automatically makes “The Brand” an extremely useful tool for success. Finally, potential clients tend to base their buying choices on trust and it is “The Brand” that can establish this trust almost instantly. It is no surprise that within the legal industry establishing trust with your clients is of the utmost significance.

The importance of ‘the website’ and having a strong brand has resulted in the demand for outstanding website and blog content management system (CMS) platforms such as WordPress and Joomla.  These CMS platforms allow small businesses to easily create and adjust their websites without all the hassle of coding.  To make website creation and maintenance even more manageable, interfaces that are specific to certain industries exist within CMS platforms.  For example, WordPrESQ is an interface designed for solo practitioners and small law firms within the WordPress platform. CMS platforms and the interfaces such as WordPrESQ allow for increased user functionality, with the ability to easily change content without the need for a developer, or website coding knowledge.

The need for a strong website is magnified by the fact that it is the very same characteristics that make a website strong that allow for potential clients to view the company in the first place.  Google and other search engines don’t rank by experience, expertise, “best so and so”, or any other qualitative factors.  Instead, their rankings are completely automated, and depend upon website architecture, content, incoming links, and similar factors. It is up to the company, no matter how young, old, small, or large to optimize their site via appropriate content, keywords, links, and other manageable elements. The method of how a page is ranked completely levels the playing field and allow for companies to firmly grab hold of their potential success and visibility in the online space

Cloud computing should no longer be seen as just the “next big thing” in our ever-changing technological marketplace, but as a Movement that is reshaping how businesses function on a day-to-day basis. Although it is increasingly common to see law firms moving from the established ways of servers and pre-mandated IT departments to the ‘way of the cloud’, lawyers have still shown some hesitation when deciding whether to take the leap into The Cloud. In this article we will canvas the emerging world of “Cloud computing” and the top 5 reasons why law firms are practicing law in The Cloud.

1. Reduced Cost

Cloud technology is paid incrementally, making your technology costs a utility cost that you can budget for. There is no longer the need for entire IT departments and investments in servers that require hefty up-front costs, but solely the variable cost of a monthly subscription. Cloud technology also allows for the reduction or elimination of hardware and software costs.

2. Highly Automated

Along with the freedom of no longer needing servers and hardware comes the freedom of no longer needing to worry about constantly updating and troubshooting. SaaS platforms takes care of patches, updates and other administration. Software patches and updates are centrally managed by providers, with minimal and sometimes zero action required by the user. Law firms are now free to concentrate on innovation and offering differentiating business value to its clients.

3. Increased Mobility

Employees can access information wherever they are through a website on their browser. There is no longer the need to remain at a desk or to be connected to a specific wireless network. Increased mobility allows for increased productivity and satisfaction, as it allow laywers the ability to work from anywhere at any time.

4. Highly Collaborative

The ability to access all you need with just an internet connection and login allows for increased collaboration.  Applications available on various SaaS platforms are created purely for collaborative reasons and provide a venue for users to communicate and share ideas in the cloud.

5. Level Playing Field

No longer are the days of needing huge upfront capital to start a successful law firm. Smaller firms are becoming increasing popular and successful largely due to the power of technology. Cloud technology further enables law firms of all sizes to be extremely profitable by providing a unique competitive advantage. This advantage allows smaller firms the ability to play with the big guys and larger firms to cut unnecessary costs.

Everyday more and more law firms are making the transition into the cloud and becoming part of a Movement that is reshaping how business is run around the world.

Since the advent of email, our lives and the way we communicate with all our clients and business associates have changed. Our inboxes and PDAs, are bombarded with emails that sometimes get ignored simply because we don’t have time to shift through each and every one of them.

This impacts our ability to communicate with the client when we need to provide them with crucial information leading to client dissatisfaction. This is not just an issue with a client but also our peers and associates.

Big corporations embraced the concept of internal web portals or intranets to address effective collaboration with peers and associates. Then came client and partner portals to have just as efficient and effective collaboration with clients and outside personnel.

That same concept is now accessible to small businesses and lawyers through technologies like NetDocuments client portal, AdvologixPM customer portal and Google Apps where you have the power to share critical information and documents.

Imagine a scenario where you require a client to review a document that is emailed on Monday. The document needs to be filed with the court on Wednesday. Client sends the document back to you on Tuesday but you missed the email and it is sitting in your inbox. Wednesday deadline passes and on Friday, you discover you have completely missed the boat. Possibility of Sanctions?

Now imagine the scenario with a client portal. You place the document on the portal which notifies the client automatically that a document needs their attention. A task is added to your assistant’s calendar to follow up. The client reviews it and either approves it or suggests changes. After relevant exchange of instructions, the assistant has the approved document ready to be filed on Wednesday and you don’t have to carry that burden on your shoulders.

How incredibly valuable is that? You have a satisfied client who is going to brag about the efficiency and superior level of customer service your firm provided giving you the opportunity to bring in new business via word of mouth. Get the same level of satisfaction with your peers and outside counsel.

Differentiate yourself from the attorney next door with a new and innovative way of communicating with your clients. Go beyond email for client collaboration.

I found these instructions online on how to convert a Word Perfect document to a Word Document.

1. Start Microsoft Word.

2. Click Open on the File menu or click the Open button on the Standard toolbar.

3. When the Open dialog box opens, check the Files of type list to ensure it is set to All Files (*.*). If necessary, click the Files of type list arrow and then select All Files (*.*) in the list.

4. Use the Look in list or double-click to browse through folders to locate and select the Word Perfect file you want to convert.

5. Click the Word Perfect file name and then click the Open button. Word will convert the document and open it in Word.

6. Next, you should save the file in Word document format. To do so, click Save As on the File menu. When the Save As dialog box opens, check the Save as type list to ensure it is set to Word Document (*.doc). Word automatically will rename the file to use a .doc extension, not a .wpd extension.

After you convert the .wpd file to .doc, you may need to reformat some parts of the document (for example, formatting like page breaks and columns may not convert cleanly). After you’ve made these formatting changes, simply save the document again (remember: it’s now a Word document and will save, by default, as a Word document). Voila! In a few simple steps, you’ve converted your old Word Perfect document to a brand-new Word document.

Is it really that simple? Yes and No.

These simple instructions will let you save a Word Perfect document to Word format but these instructions do not accommodate the time you will spend to reformat the document to clean up the mess left behind from the conversion.

Just like any other software program out there both Word Perfect and Word use “markup language” to design the document which is written behind the scenes that the end user does not see. When you try to write a conversion utility, there is only so much that can be factored in for a proper conversion and that is why a lot of the formatting and placing of objects in Word gets messed up.

The key to a successful conversion is training, defining standardized styles and standardized templates . Setting up styles in Word is not hard if you understand how styles work. Styles in Word are like rubber stamps. A rubber stamp has a particular design, width and height. When you use a stamp, the imprint is consistent every time. Styles do the same for formatting a document and allows the end user to format documents in less time.

A lot of Word Perfect users are used to modifying documents using revel codes because the codes are visible. It is real easy to reformat a document but that also leaves the whole document with individual formatting for each sentence and paragraph. The advantage with styles is that if you decide to change the format of a paragraph, you can change the style and all the paragraphs that have the applied style will change all at once. This is where the power of styles can be harnessed.

Templates are predesigned forms that you use to start your new document. A well designed template with standardized styles will enhance your document production as all you have to do is add needed language to finish the document. Everyone needs to get content from another document and the best way to bring that content into your current document is to do a copy and paste special as unformatted text. This will place the text without the formatting from the source document and apply the formatting for the new document depending on where your cursor is placed. If the formatting is not correct all you have to do is place your cursor in the paragraph and apply the right style to it. If you paste text with tabs or numbers, you will have to manually remove those and then apply correct styles.

I cannot emphasize enough on the importance of training, not only to understand how to use word but, on how to use the styles that are developed. A Word Perfect user is going to get frustrated without the revel codes feature. But, when that same user understands how styles are applied, they will accelerate at document production. Most firms skimp on training due to the costs. They are helping their users form bad habits which will cost them a lot more in the end. One thing that every user does is take previous document and save it as a new file. This is a bad idea both for Word Perfect and Word. When you keep saving a file over and over again even if you are doing save as, both programs are storing and forwarding code from previous documents and over time the documents get corrupted to the point where the document is non recoverable.

In short users who learn how to use Word properly, including styles, will be far more efficient with their document production process.

Lexis Nexis introduced user defined record type in version 9 of Time Matters. There are multiple uses of user defined record types. These are just a few examples that come to mind:

• Parties associated with a case
• Asset form to capture individual asset information for a client for an estate planning practice
• Percentage allocation model for a particular asset
• Budget allocation

We are going to look at parties associated with a case. We defined a Name type user defined record type and called it parties.

We then customized the form to link to the contact record and grab all the pertinent information. The memo/notes area gives the user the ability to make very specific notes for that party as relate to that specific case.

Here is a screen shot of what a list of all the parties associated with the case looks like. Note how the roles of the parties are segregated into the sub tabs on the parties sub list. This gives you the flexibility of Time Matters sub lists to sort on any of the fields and search on any of the fields that are in the parties form.

The other benefit of using user defined record types is you can have access to the normal add and list buttons on the main toolbar that will show you a full list of all the parties records.

On the parties list, it is easy to view how many different cases a particular person has been associated with.

Have you just started your law practice and wondering how am I going to manage my caseload? What kind of applications do I need to run my law practice? Is Outlook and QuickBooks enough for running my practice efficiently? I don’t have the money to spend on hardware and software, what do I do and how do I get my practice going? I need to collaborate with my clients and other attorneys, how do I make that work?

We get these questions from a lot of our clients and lawyers who are just starting out. We have a cost effective solution for them.

Introduction

AdvologixPM is a SaaS based solution built on SalesForce.com platform. Salesforce.com is the most successful cloud-based application. It’s the gold standard. The company, Salesforce.com, has a market capitalization of $8.23 billion and revenue of $1.24 billion. It has over 67,900 customers. The company claims that 200,000+ developers have created over 135,000 custom applications with over 1,000 applications and service listings on its AppExchange. The benefit here is there is no need to prove stability, or establish security, or prove scalability. AdvologixPM has the power of the “Force.com” behind it.

AdvologixPM is licensed for $70.00 per user per month which includes complete practice management, document automation and management, account management and billing, mobile access, workflow customization, web intake forms, mobile access to contacts, tasks and events and synchronization with Outlook. You can also add third party applications including NetDocuments and QuickBooks synchronization.

Product Highlights

AdvologixPM primary records are Accounts, Contacts and Matters. The secondary record types include events, tasks, calls, messages, notes and attachments, emails and alerts, issues, and research, billings and invoices.

Accounts are your main client record that you are going to bill to. Matters are linked to an Account and Contacts are linked to multiple Accounts and multiple Matters.

When you log in, the reminders window shows reminders for all scheduled activity that is due today and past. The Home Page shows the calendar with all your events and tasks. The past due tasks will be in red. On the calendar you will be able to see the event details when you move your cursor over the client name or the description.

The system has a customizable tab navigation which makes it easy to look at all your matters, contacts, billings, invoices, payments and the system has robust reports. When you open the matter record, you will see a quick view of all the record types and the number of records in each type. When you hover over the record type, you will see a quick view of all the records in that list. You can open an existing record or add a new record right from this view mode.

Every record type is customizable giving the developer the flexibility to customize the interface to a particular law practice area allowing the lawyer to capture information to their specific need.

AdvologixPM uses DDP (Dynamic Document Processing) for document automation. The data stored in the system is integrated into word document templates that are then converted to PDFs. Templates can be setup for mail merge and these documents can then be stored as attachments to matters. DDPS can output to PDF or the original document format (.doc, .xls, etc.) In this examples yellow fields are merged from the matter record and pink fields are merged from the related contact records.

AdvologixPM is tightly integrated with NetDocuments giving the end user the full capabilities of a fully functional document management system. NetDocuments will allow firms to take their document and data sharing at a much higher level giving the firms the power to share their information with their clients.

AdvologixPM integrates seamlessly with Outlook with AdvologixPM Connect Toolbar for Outlook 2007.

This tool bar gives the user the ability to sync their data with outlook. The user can download contacts, events, tasks, and also bill from Outlook while browsing emails and sending out emails as well.

StopLoss Billing View allows the user to capture time that they have not billed for yet. This view shows unbilled events and tasks, making it easy to look at all unbilled items and create billing items for them.

On the matter tab the user can see all the billings by viewing the billing tab, all the expenses and invoice activity.

AdvologixPM has a very comprehensive reporting package with 100s of reports to analyze information from different perspectives due to the ability to filter and sort on multiple criteria.

Conclusion

AdvologixPM is a comprehensive and powerful, extremely configurable practice management system giving you a wealth of information. The views of the records are clear and easy to navigate. There is comprehensive security, offline backup of the entire database is available, and there is import and export capability. AdvologixPM offers an offline client which allows a user to access major practice management functions without being connected to the internet. The offline client syncs with the main system when the user reconnects. The system syncs with Outlook and integrates with other web based applications like NetDocuments. MobileLite for AdvologixPM is a full featured application for Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile. AdvologixPM on force.com platform is for the new breed of “Virtual Law Offices” who seek freedom.

The goal of this article is to help you put some of your fears to rest about choosing the right cloud computing application to run your business over traditional software. There are so many debates going on about the security of hosted applications and much as some of the arguments might be valid, do they all apply to every business entity? Are you really making the right business decision for your mission critical applications by listening to chatter that may not apply to you?

Technology has been evolving in the last 100 years at a pace that has always caused fear and anxiety for mass adaptation. Do you remember when cell phones first came out and people were very cautious and reluctant to buy cell phones and use them. They could not imagine getting away from the big traditional phone sitting in the office or living room. Today there are a lot of businesses that do not have traditional land lines and run their entire business on a cell phone. How secure if your information if you lose your cell phone and every person we know cannot spend a minute without their cell phone.

Choosing the right platform for your mission critical applications requires simple common sense. The problems manifest when you don’t know or have the right questions to ask. I recently had a discussion with a client and she said “you don’t know how to ask what you don’t know”. I hope this helps you ask the right questions you need to ask yourself and the vendors you are evaluating.

Let’s talk about some of the concerns.

• I have lost control of my data. I can’t get my data if it is residing on someone else’s server.

When you are evaluating vendors, ask them how easy do they make it for you to walk away with your data should you choose to terminate the service at any time. Are they going to charge you any penalties? What format is your data going to be in? Do they give you complete control to backup your data on demand (instantly)?

• I can’t access my information if I am not on the internet.

As true as this statement is, how often are you really not connected to the internet? Mobile devices all have internet connections, allowing you to browse any web site at any time. You can go to an internet café in the absolute worst case scenario. In reality you are more at a risk with the server that you have in the office going down. Alternative access with cloud computing solution is going to be far less expensive than waiting for a computer technician to arrive and fix the problem for you. The biggest value of cloud computing is access anywhere, anytime to your valuable business data. A lot of the SaaS vendors synchronize with offline calendar systems. You can also export your key data such as contacts and calendars.

Ask your vendor if they provide an offline application that will allow you to perform your most important tasks while disconnected from the internet and automatically synchronizes the changes that you made offline when you reconnect to the internet.

• I am risking client confidentiality with data residing on another vendor’s servers.

Ask the vendor what security certifications the vendor has. The right choice in a cloud computing vendor will have certifications meeting many government, banking and other regulatory requirements. A cloud computing practice management company is no different than the computer technician you have supporting your systems today. They, ethically, are allowed to work on your behalf with confidential data, as referenced in the ABA’s ethics opinion 08-451, as an example. Ask where your data is being stored to ensure the jurisdiction does not present any jeopardy to any of your client data obligations. Plus a lot of the firms now store backups offsite with accredited backup vendors. Are you breaching client confidentiality with your data being stored offsite?

• Cloud Computing practice management companies are not reliable. Will the company still be in business next week?

These are very broad statements and I believe these statements apply just as much with traditional software vendors. The reality is: traditional software vendors get bought out or are sold to other vendors, the new management makes decisions that are right for them and sometimes software is sunset not really keeping your interest in mind. We see it happen all the time. Since cloud computing is a new concept still in adoption stage, the anxiety is heightened when the same level of anxiety applies even more to the high end traditional software vendors.

• Cloud computing practice management systems are not secure.

The reality is, more than 95% of all law firms would NEVER be able to afford or deploy the level of security in their own computer systems that are provided by choosing the RIGHT cloud computing practice management system. Find out where the data is stored. Is your data encrypted? Can your cloud computing vendor access your data at all, without you providing access? Also, KNOW that your cloud computing vendor can support auditing your data. Can your vendor support requests for investigative discovery? What are their audit levels? How can you control these? Ask any and all questions that you can think of that would be a future liability. If the vendor cannot address that, then you need to look for another vendor.

• It’s safer for me to do backups to prepare for disaster?

Ask the law firms in the Gulf Coast region, who have been victims of catastrophic storms the past few years, if they think they having their server on site is more than just a “feel good” level of physical security of their data….. ALL their data. Those in this region with cloud computing systems, continued business while others scrambled to recover for months.

Are your backups truly tested or do you assume that because backup complete and you are now safe? Have you run a test restore to see if your backups work? Do you store the data offsite at an accredited data storage facility? If you really do all of this…. how much is that costing you? The almost certainty is that most firms never employ the same level of disaster recovery and data protection that is provided by the RIGHT cloud computing practice management system.

• The ultimate question is: Can you confidently answer positively to every potential risk mentioned above with your traditional in-house practice management system?

Let us know what you think…

Most Law Firms that work on contingency cases or flat fee services believe that they do not need to track how much time an employee is spending on a particular task. The hourly fee firms track time for billing purposes only. A lot of time firms will track time just so that they can produce a statement for the courts. Is it really true that Law Firms do not need to track employee performance?

That is not true. Any firm that is in business needs to track employee performance as it impacts their bottom line. Here is a simple example. Let’s say it takes an employee an hour to produce a document when it should normally take half an hour. If you don’t track that time, how are you going to know that you just lost half an hour of your employee’s time which could have been utilized for a different task? You will also have no idea that this employee is struggling with that task or needs more training to do their job better.

Obviously, you do not want to micro manage your employees. So why not setup a system where you capture all the time the employee spends working on different tasks and then at the end of the day evaluate what was done with reports.

This leads into conformance issues. Office managers tell us that the employees don’t have time to capture how much time they have put in on a task and some employees won’t put their time in as they are an attorney. Are attorney’s exempt for performance evaluations? The bottom line is no. A law practice is just like a traditional business where lack of performance becomes a huge overhead that is not recoverable and affects the bottom profit line for each and every law practice. It surely cuts into the partner’s profits.

So how do you get employee conformance? By simply designing an incentive plan, that has points for conformance and negative points for non-conformance. Employee performance evaluations and raises can be based on those points or even design bonus plans based on that.

Have you ever sat down and evaluated what is your true employee overhead? Something to think about…

How prepared are you to get your business up and running in the least amount of time, if you mission critical systems go down? Have you designed a plan to address this? Is doing daily backups of your data enough?

Recently we turned our server off for maintenance and upon reboot the server failed to start. It sat there during boot process with Windows error – corrupt file – system32\drivers\pci.sys repair file by starting windows setup using the original setup CD-Rom

Right off the bet I went looking for the original CDs and could not remember what we had used. Once I found the CD we put it into the server and reloaded all the drivers in boot mode. Turn on the machine again and now we can log into the machine but we started getting all sorts of windows errors. So then we had to decide if the hard drive was bad or was it a windows issue.

We purchased new hard drives and load the image and still no go. We finally realized after about 48 hours that the image itself had gone bad. The hard drive crashed which corrupted the windows image and left us in a very bad state. The next thing we discover is that the server itself was having issues and so now we have a double whammy.

We finally decided to use my laptop to install the most essential applications and transfer the database including client files and get my business up and running while we figure out how to address both the server and hard drive issues.

Moral of the story is: Just backing up of your data is not enough. Every business needs to do a thorough dry run of their disaster recovery plan in the event that you do go completely down. You have no idea if the plan is truly working unless you have tested it out when you are up and running.