Originally published on July 21, 2008 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.
Last week TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante suggested mobile lawyering as a topic for my piece this month. Mobile lawyering? Did he mean turning your RV into a law office? Well, not exactly.
Microsoft recently announced plans to offer Exchange and SharePoint on a hosted basis. These two server-based applications have become mainstays of large firms, but despite being offered on a hosted basis today by many service providers they have not been embraced to the same degree by small firms. With Microsoft itself getting into the hosting game and with devices like the iPhone 3G and Treo 800 supporting Microsoft's ActiveSync technology, the situation could change.
That sounded interesting ...
But hardly novel. In fact mobile lawyering was the original legal technology buzzword and as far as I was concerned it still conjures visions of smart-ass first-year law students with sport coats and 24 pound laptops. Now that's mobile! In short, when mobile lawyering was hatched as an idea in the late 90's untethering your practice was not just impractical, it was hazardous to your chiropractic health.
Then a weird thing happened. Al Gore (with a little help from Netscape) invented the Internet.
Suddenly lawyers at large firms began buying into the promise of this wunder medium to enable them to work remotely without lugging around their whole office. And the Internet did not disappoint us for once, delivering innovations such as portals, storage and hosting, ubiquitous access to information, and of course email. The developing online scene for legal professionals was enhanced further by the advent of blogs, RSS, and wikis a couple of years later. And today the stage is set for mobile lawyering right?
Wrong.
Despite having all these resources at our disposal, we lawyers are only slightly more mobile than we were two decades ago. Don't believe me? How comfortable are you working on a brief or pleading away from the office? How often do you work that way anyway? Is it about the technology or the attitude?
Which got me thinking ... what good would affordable, hosted versions of Exchange or SharePoint do if lawyers didn't use them?
My answer? I think lawyers will use them. It may take a while of course. But sooner or later enough of us will need access to client files, other member of our teams, and the latest research and information, and we will want it all in the same place. That's when tools like Exchange and SharePoint seem indispensable.
So maybe what Neil meant was that hosted Exchange and SharePoint will enable lawyers (whether large firm veterans, medium firm visionaries or small firm pioneers) to collaborate more effectively and take fuller advantage of the galaxy of tools already available by mashing up the familiar interfaces and paradigms of Microsoft Office with dynamic information to create unique project and case files.
After all, Exchange is about communication among members of the office or team while SharePoint is about folding information from outside the team into their environment. Together these tools could radically alter the collaboration landscape. Hell, maybe they will.
Written by Mazyar M. Hedayat of M. Hedayat & Associates, P.C.
How to Receive SmallLaw
Small firm, big dreams. Published first via email newsletter and later here on our blog, SmallLaw provides you with a mix of practical advice that you can use today, and insight about what it will take for small law firms like yours to thrive in the future. The SmallLaw newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.
