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Meetings Meet Productivity
Many lawyers find meetings unproductive and dread them as a necessary evil. You could fill a bookshelf or three with books written about how to improve meetings. Advice ranges from removing chairs from conference rooms to assigning a meeting leader to keep people from veering off track. These methods haven't resulted in any major breakthroughs so perhaps we should outsource this challenge to technology as we have with so many others. What if a technology could automate meeting best practices to ensure the optimal use of your valuable time? One company recently unveiled such a solution.
Lucid Meetings … in One Sentence
Lucid Meetings is an online meeting service with built-in productivity tools.
The Killer Feature
Unlike typical online meeting services, Lucid Meetings offers permanent meeting rooms and has baked a number of productivity tools into its service. For example, Lucid Meetings includes a realtime, multi-user note-taking tool. Thus, instead of one designated person hopefully taking notes during the meeting, you can see the notes being taken as the meeting progresses. If you see an omission, you can jump in and add the missing item.
Notes remain connected to the meeting room so that you can add to and search them in future meetings. You can export the notes at anytime in HTML or Word format for distribution. In addition to these group meetings, you can also have your own private room in which you keep confidential notes.
The note-taking tool is not just a word processor. You can create action items and highlight decisions within notes. The Smart Lists feature enables you to quickly find and view all action items and decisions from all meetings to date, and update them as needed. You can even create meeting minutes that automatically list everyone in attendance.
Other Notable Features
When you schedule meetings, you can send participants an email invitation that enables them to add the meeting to their calendar. You can also create an agenda listing the topics, presenters, and their allotted time (the company provides several Agenda templates so you need not start from scratch). Agendas can contain attachments such as documents to discuss during the meeting. Your dashboard enables you to track who can and cannot attend.
Lucid Meetings works in all major web browsers. It doesn't require any plug-ins such as Flash or Java. During a meeting, you can display a document or your screen for a presentation. You can also give this ability to other attendees. The Transcript tool can record your meetings at your option. There's also an accompanying conference call service, including the option to offer a toll-free number and record the meeting.
Seemingly designed specifically for lawyers, Lucid Meetings displays the elapsed time. It can even display the elapsed time for each presenter to keep your agenda on track.
Privacy settings enable you to share a meeting room and its notes, recordings, etc. with only those who attended or with others such as colleagues and clients connected to the matter discussed.
What Else Should You Know?
Lucid Meetings prices its service based on the number of rooms you need. Plans include Individual (one room; $24.95 per month), Small (10 rooms; $199 per month), and Medium (25 rooms, $399 per month). If you need more rooms, Lucid Meetings can create an Enterprise plan for your firm. Learn more about Lucid Meetings.
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