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dtSearch Review; Worldox Review; Compaq Presario Review; DBAN Review; SpiritWorks Review; Much More

By Sara Skiff | Friday, May 18, 2007

Coming May 24, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Gray Strickland reviews dtSearch and explains how to use it in conjunction with a document management system, Christel Burris reviews Worldox, Susan Billeaud reviews her new Compaq Presario laptop, Adam Drennen offers some suggestions for securely erasing a hard drive, and Dan Whittle reviews SpiritWorks Software's Activity & Expense Tracker for expert witness billing. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Business Productivity/Word Processing | Coming Attractions | Document Management | Laptops/Smartphones/Tablets | Privacy/Security | TL Answers

Still Using Version 1.0? What's New in Current Versions of Time-Billing Software

By Sara Skiff | Friday, May 18, 2007

Coming May 22, 2007 to TechnoFeature: Since the first client hired the first attorney, law practices have needed to create bills — a fact that has not changed in hundreds of years. What has changed is how firms create those bills. In this article, technology consultant David Moon discusses the many new features that have evolved in legal billing software as the needs of today's law firm have changed and expanded. These new features not only make billing faster and easier, but provide important financial information needed for business decisions. Whether you still create bills with a typewriter or consider yourself a billing software expert, don't miss this article.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Coming Attractions | TechnoFeature

Amicus Is from Mars. Time Matters Is from Venus; QuickBooks Trust Accounting; Web Hosting Tips; Monitors and Online Forums; Concordance Review

By Sara Skiff | Friday, May 11, 2007

Coming May 17, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Doug Jacobs compares Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, and AbacusLaw, Anthony Vrsecky shares how his firm uses QuickBooks Pro for trust accounting, Jeff Lisson offers some advice for choosing a Web hosting service (having learned the hard way), Yvonne Renfrew discusses multiple monitors, pivot monitors, and online forum etiquette, and Steven Loble reviews Concordance for discovery documents. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Coming Attractions | Litigation/Discovery/Trials | Monitors | Online/Cloud | Practice Management/Calendars | TL Answers

Easy Trust: Read Our Exclusive Report

By Sara Skiff | Wednesday, May 2, 2007

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers software for managing client trust and escrow accounts, online sticky notes, and a free service for sending files too large to email. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

Stop Losing Sleep Over Client Trust Accounting
By Dennis Kennedy

A surprisingly large percentage of disbarments and disciplinary actions against lawyers arise out of the mishandling of client trust funds. The rules for handling trust funds can seem arcane — especially for bookkeepers and accountants not experienced with law office trust accounting and ethical rules. To make matters worse, many general business accounting programs either do not handle trust accounting or provide only rudimentary or limited options.

Easy Soft's Easy Trust software enables you to take charge of your firm's trust and escrow accounting needs, and comply with the applicable rules in your jurisdiction. Easy Trust can track and reconcile receipts and disbursements for each of your clients separately while providing tight controls and an audit trail.

Thanks to a "simple, elegant interface," you can easily set up client ledger cards and enter transactions. You can create as many bank accounts or client ledger cards you need. Most importantly, Easy Trust prevents common trust accounting mistakes from occurring. For example, by default it guards against client ledgers having a negative balance.

Easy Trust also provides security and control. You can set up an account for each user with its own set of permissions limiting what that person can do in the program (e.g., transaction "entry only" permission without the ability to "print checks" or perform "bank reconciliation"). Other helpful features include overdraft alerts, bank reconciliation, and three-way reconciliation.

Easy Trust generates a variety of useful reports designed to simplify the audit and review process. For example, you can view the prior month's reconciliation reports, enabling you to easily match the reports with the corresponding bank statements. Various bank and client ledger reports can be produced with a single click. Also, users of Easy Soft's Easy HUD RESPA program can import settlement transactions directly from HUD-1 forms.

Easy Trust costs $499. Licenses for additional computers cost $199 each. Learn more about Easy Trust.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Business Productivity/Word Processing | Online/Cloud | TL NewsWire

VXI Tuffset Review; Time Matters Support; Outlook Rule Limits; Dell Support; Upgrade Dilemma

By Sara Skiff | Friday, April 20, 2007

Coming April 27, 2007 to Fat Friday: Paul Lepine reviews his VXI Tuffset telephone switch box for telephone and dictation (an update on a Post from three years ago), Wells Anderson clarifies Time Matters' current support policy and points to some free Time Matters resources on the Web, Ben Schorr explains why Outlook has a size limit on Rules and how this limit has changed in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Stephen Adams reviews his experience with Dell tech support and laptop repair services, and Julia Gordon responds to a recent TechnoFeature article about hardware and software upgrades. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | CLE/News/References | Coming Attractions | Computer Accessories | Dictation/OCR/Speech Recognition | Email/Messaging/Telephony | Fat Friday | Practice Management/Calendars | Technology Industry/Legal Profession

QuickBooks Trust Accounts Tip; PDF to Word; Rotating Monitors; Mac OS X Versus Vista; Amicus Attorney and PCLaw Review

By Sara Skiff | Friday, April 20, 2007

Coming April 26, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Tony Fama provides detailed instructions for entering deposits into trust accounts in QuickBooks, Roy Greenberg discusses the various solutions he has found for editing PDFs, Richard Schafer explains how to switch your monitor from landscape to portrait, Jason Havens discusses the positive impact Vista may have on Microsoft's competitors, and George Ripplinger reviews Amicus Attorney and PCLaw. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Business Productivity/Word Processing | Coming Attractions | Monitors | Networking/Operating Systems | TL Answers

Fast User Switching; DiskBench Review; Homegrown Document Management; GBC Binding Machines; PaperPort Review

By Sara Skiff | Friday, April 13, 2007

Coming April 19,2007 to Answers to Questions: Andy Satori discusses the security risks involved with the Fast User Switching feature in Windows XP, Matt Baker shares how his firm has tried to speed up the network performance of PCLaw, Kerry Hubick reviews Microsoft Access and KnowledgeTree for document management, Samuel Mandel reviews his law firm's GBC binding machine, and Michael Winkelman reviews how he uses PaperPort for managing scanned documents. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Business Productivity/Word Processing | Coming Attractions | Document Management | Gadgets/Shredders/Office Gear | Networking/Operating Systems | Privacy/Security | TL Answers

WiFi (In)Security; IntelliPDF BATES Stamp Review; PracticeMaster Tip; Time Matters 8 Review

By Sara Skiff | Friday, March 30, 2007

Coming April 5, 2007 to Answers to Questions: Adam Drennen suggests two more ways to secure your wireless network (but also discusses their vulnerabilities), James Boatman reviews IntelliPDF BATES Stamp and provides some tips no matter which utility you use, David Bernier provides some PracticeMaster tips, Debbie Westwood shares how she made the jump from paralegal to litigation support specialist and how others can do the same, and Christopher Largay reviews his firm's upgrade to Time Matters 8.0. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published Thursdays, Answers to Questions is a weekly newsletter in which TechnoLawyer members answer legal technology and practice management questions submitted by their peers (including you if you join TechnoLawyer). Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Coming Attractions | Law Office Management | Litigation/Discovery/Trials | Networking/Operating Systems | Practice Management/Calendars | Privacy/Security | Technology Industry/Legal Profession | TL Answers

ISYS 8: Read Our Exclusive Report

By Sara Skiff | Wednesday, March 28, 2007

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an email archiving appliance, a Web-based time-billing solution, and a powerful desktop search tool. Don't miss the next issue.

Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:

The Renaissance Man of Desktop Search Tools
By Dennis Kennedy

Lawyers spend an increasing amount of time searching. While cynics might quip that lawyers spend much of that time looking for misplaced files (both electronic and paper), even the most organized lawyers need to search their hard drives and networks as well as discovery documents — and the free desktop search tools often fall short.

ISYS Search Software's ISYS 8 moves law firms well beyond the realm of free desktop search tools into powerful and versatile search technology. ISYS 8 offers a wide array of tools that enable you to find the information you need fast whether it resides on your PC, a file server, or elsewhere on your local or wide area network.

ISYS 8 works with your unstructured data as it finds it, including email. In fact, it can index and search data in more than 200 file formats (including Office 2007) in 60 languages, and each index can accommodate up to 64 million documents. You do not have to prepare your data before indexing it. You can, however, select from a number of indexing options, and automate indexing with a scheduler. For example, you could have ISYS index your email and attachments every hour.

ISYS 8 gives you a wide range of search options from the familiar standard keyword search to Boolean operators to useful options like "Starts with" and "Sounds like." ISYS 8's "Intelligent Agent" can even automatically perform searches for you and notify you of new results. ISYS also uses "fuzzy logic" to help you find "mis-shaped" words from OCR scans and "Synonym Rings" enables you to engage in "concept searching" — finding documents that contain terms related to your search terms (e.g., nicknames, synonyms, etc.). For email and other structured files, you can search by fields such as TO, CC, and BCC.

In addition to fast and powerful search, ISYS enables you to navigate and work with your results in many helpful ways. You can search within your initial results, filter or automatically categorize results, highlight, group, or cluster hits, set views or previews, and hide results that do not matter to you. ISYS 8 has a "Did You Mean?" feature to suggest alternative search terms for you. You can annotate your results, print or extract them to a file, and even search metadata.

ISYS 8 boasts a number of new features that should prove quite helpful with many legal tasks. Regarding electronic discovery, the "Entities" feature can identify people, organizations, email addresses, and similar information in your search results and group the documents you find accordingly. For knowledge management, ISYS 8's new "Best Bets" feature enables you to designate model documents for certain search terms. And for large firms, "ISYS Federator" can synchronize indexes across the network and even across the globe so that everyone in the firm obtains the same search results.

ISYS 8 costs $1,000 for a network license plus $100 per seat with volume discounts available. Learn more about ISYS 8.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Wednesdays, TechnoLawyer NewsWire is a weekly newsletter that enables you to learn about new technology products and services of interest to legal professionals. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Business Productivity/Word Processing | Document Management | Email/Messaging/Telephony | Online/Cloud | TL NewsWire

Legal Technology: Is 2007 the Year Everything Changes?

By Neil J. Squillante | Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Given that I'm the publisher of TechnoLawyer, I probably shouldn't say this, but sometimes it seems like the same legal technology predictions make an appearance every year, but nothing really changes. In fact, you could probably whip out a predictions article from 2004, change the date to 2007, and republish it. Ha!

For example, legal technology prognosticators have long predicted that corporate counsel would demand that their outside counsel become more technologically adept. These soothsayers have also issued advisories about e-discovery.

Cliches? Up until this year, maybe. But in 2007, these predictions might actually come to pass — according to a Law.com article entitled Legal Departments Tell Firms: Get on the Tech Train.

The article discusses the gaining momentum of electronic billing whereby law firms must buy and maintain a billing system that can deliver electronic invoices to their corporate clients in a standardized format.

The article also discusses the very real problem of managing email and other potentially discoverable electronic data.

These trends certainly exist. I met with both e-billing vendors and e-discovery vendors at LegalTech earlier this year. They're all growing like gangbusters.

But in the aggregate, do these trends represent a tsunami, a trickle, or something in between?

Please discuss your own adoption rate of e-billing, e-discovery, and other technologies as well as your thoughts on the legal profession as a whole.

(A tip of the blog to Dennis Kennedy for the article link.)

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Topics: Accounting/Billing/Time Capture | Litigation/Discovery/Trials | Technology Industry/Legal Profession | TL Editorial
 
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