TechnoLawyer: Collaboration/Knowledge Management

I have some great news to share with you. As you can see below, we have changed the structure of our TechnoLawyer NewsWire articles to better serve our two audiences — those who want a quick overview of new products and those who want an in-depth analysis.

Specifically, the new In One Sentence section describes the product we're reporting on in one sentence, and the new Killer Feature section describes its most important feature. Readers who want more information will find a detailed discussion of the product’s Other Notable Features as well.

Please let me know what you think, and please sign up to receive TechnoLawyer NewsWire if you have not yet done so. We publish only a few select articles here in our blog. For example, this week's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire covers a hosted extranet for law firms, a Word add-on that enables you to manage defined terms in legal documents, and new PDF software for power users. We've placed one article below. The other two are available only to subscribers of the newsletter. — Neil J. Squillante, Publisher

Show Your Clients That You Care
By Peter R. Olson

Lawyers get in trouble when they focus on work at the expense of client communication — similar to doctors actually. While a clever cross examination or well drafted legal brief might impress your clients, they care more about the outcome and your hand-holding along the way. After all, the leading cause of disciplinary complaints is poor communication. But in this day and age, you need more than the bedside manner of Dr. Marcus Welby. You also need the technology of Dr. McCoy.

Attorney and Client ... in One Sentence
CLC Technology's Attorney and Client provides you and your clients with a collaborative online work space (extranet).

The Killer Feature
Using a Web browser, your clients can access the documents in their case file, review upcoming calendar items, and find contact information for everyone at your firm who works on their cases. Your assistant may like Attorney and Client even more than your clients do.

Other Notable Features
When you take on a new matter and enter it into Attorney and Client, your client receives a login via email (they can change the default password to make it more secure).

Attorney and Client features a dashboard that lists all recent activity. You can brand the dashboard and other pages with your logo.

A busy matter may involve dozens of documents — incoming mail and your work product. Attorney and Client enables you to upload multiple files simultaneously. You can also create and file documents into folders using drag and drop just as you would in Windows Explorer. There is no storage space limit.

In addition to the matter-specific calendar and case file, Attorney and Client also includes secure and searchable instant messaging and discussion threads. You can elect to use one or both or neither of these communication tools on a matter by matter basis.

To keep everyone in the loop, you can create email alerts for calendar items, documents, etc. For example, if a document changes, Attorney and Client can let everyone know. You can even use Attorney and Client to send bills to your clients, thus creating an archive automatically.

What Else Should You Know?
Attorney and Client costs $29.95 per month per attorney. You can try it for free for 30 days. It works in all modern Web browsers on Mac and PC. Learn more about Attorney and Client.

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.

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.

The American Bar Association (ABA) recently published Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell's book The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. Jordan Furlong, Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Bar Association's National Magazine, describes the book as "a thoughtful, comprehensive, strategic guide for 21st-century lawyers to understand and appreciate the significance of collaboration, and how it can be integrated into real-world legal practices." We also think it's terrific and a worthwhile investment. Thanks to the ABA and the authors, below you'll find a reprint of Chapter 17, which focuses on using Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration tool. If you like this excerpt, you'll love the book, which you can order from the ABA.

Coming July 15, 2008 to TechnoFeature: The American Bar Association (ABA) recently published Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell's book The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. Jordan Furlong, Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Bar Association's National Magazine, describes the book as "a thoughtful, comprehensive, strategic guide for 21st-century lawyers to understand and appreciate the significance of collaboration, and how it can be integrated into real-world legal practices." We also think it's terrific and a worthwhile investment. Thanks to the ABA and the authors, below you'll find a reprint of Chapter 17, which focuses on using Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration tool. If you like this excerpt, you'll love the book, which you can order from the ABA.

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.

Coming June 30, 2008 to Answers to Questions: Paul Easton reviews PaperPort and Nuance's technical support (plus shares his thoughts on paid support in general), and Philip Franckel reviews Canon's ScanFront 220P and LexisNexis CaseMap. 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.

Coming May 30, 2008 to Fat Friday: Harry Steinmetz responds to the continuing biglaw associate salary thread, John Pierce reviews eGroupware as an open source alternative for shared calendars, contacts, and more, Tom Rowe defends his position on legal cross-selling and upselling, Mary Brooksby reviews using Bluetooth headsets and Amicus Attorney with her Palm Treo 680, and Peter Pike suggests another rule for modern day email etiquette. 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.

Intervals, Wrike, and OnStage — Special Online Project Management Issue
By Neil J. Squillante

Choosing an online project management system is a lot like getting married. Realizing you made a terrible mistake carries a great cost. And unlike marriage, project management systems don't offer the safety net of a prenup.

While the companies behind these services may promise that you can extract your data, you'll probably need to hire someone to use what you extract. In other words, choose your project management system even more carefully than you choose your spouse.

Previously in this newsletter, we covered the two heavyweights in this nascent category — Basecamp (see What's a Matter? in the 02-09-05 issue) and CentralDesktop (see Report to Desktop Central in the 09-18-06 issue).

Today, we cover three new contenders — Intervals, OnStage, and Wrike. What do they have that their predecessors lack? Find out in this special edition of TechnoLawyer NewsWire.

INTERVALS: MEDIUM WEIGHT ONLINE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Intervals attempts to fill a void between lightweight project management applications that don't contain any analytical tools and complex applications that use Gantt charts and the like. With Intervals, you can enter predictions for the time and cost of a project, track both of these metrics, and then analyze how well your predictions fared when you complete the project.

Of importance to lawyers, the time tracking tool features timers, weekly timesheet submissions and approvals, reminders (nags) for those who do not submit their timesheets, and reports that present information in charts. You can also use Intervals to create and track bills. Intervals can even email clients automatically about overdue bills.

Intervals can track your tasks in addition to your time. You can receive email alerts every day listing what's due. If you assign tasks to someone else, you can receive an email alert when a status changes.

Most projects at law firms involve documents. Intervals offers document storage and sharing within projects. You can even associate a document with a task. Intervals supports versioning for revisions of the same document. You can share other file types as well such as photos and videos.

Intervals provides a number of useful reports that you can export in .csv format. For example, you can compare billable versus unbillable time, analyze employee productivity, compare actual hours billed versus your goals, and more.

Intervals offers four different plans that range in price from $20 to $175 per month. The difference among the plans concerns the number of projects and the amount of storage space — plus the two higher-priced plans offer encryption. A free plan also exists that limits you to one project and provides no storage space. Learn more about Intervals.

WRIKE: EMAIL'S LITTLE HELPER

According to Wrike, the world revolves around email. So rather than try to teach old dogs (you) new tricks, it has created an online project management system that integrates with plain old email.

For example, to create a task, you don't have to login. Instead, you can email Wrike directly or if you're assigning the task to someone you can email that person and cc Wrike. Wrike automatically creates a task. If you include a due date in your email message, Wrike can send a reminder to the person responsible for the task as the deadline approaches. At any time, you can log into your Wrike dashboard to see and manage all tasks.

In addition to creating tasks, Wrike transforms email messages about a topic into a Gantt timeline. It also stores your email messages so that you can easily find and search them. Wrike's "Flexible Structures" doesn't force you into the project paradigm. While you can group tasks by project, you can also group them by people, process, or any other system of your choosing — and you can apply multiple types.

Within Wrike itself, you can track time, share files, engage in threaded discussions, and view reports. The reports enable you to drill down to specific data points like a time entry.

Wrike works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari and includes free email support. Wrike costs $3.99 per user per month if you commit to the annual plan. The monthly plan costs $4.99 per user per month. Learn more about Wrike.

ONSTAGE: IT'S THE CALENDAR, STUPID

Chmura believes that project management requires a shared calendar. As a result, its OnStage online project management offering features a calendar at its heart. On the main calendar, you can create and view events, milestones, and tasks for all projects. When you enter a project, you see only the items related to that project.

In addition to the calendar, OnStage offers two other ways to view information — dashboards and reports. And within a project, you can share files, exchange messages, and create and manage contacts and tasks. File sharing includes versioning. You can assign tasks and create email alerts when the status changes. You receive messages via email, but they also remain in OnStage grouped in threads and fully searchable.

OnStage works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. The five different plans range in price from $10 to $135 per month. All of them provide SSL encryption so they differ only with regard to the number of projects and storage. A free ad-supported plan provides as many projects (20) and storage (750 MB) as the $20/month plan. Learn more about OnStage.

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.

Coming April 21, 2008 to Answers to Questions: Ernest (Ernie the Attorney) Svenson reviews the Freedom Chair and Pocket Desk from Design Within Reach plus he issues a warning about desks with a CPU compartment, Dixon Robertson reviews Microsoft SharePoint for law office collaboration and knowledge management, David Bernier reviews PracticeMaster for case management, Hope McNeil shares her experience with both Word and WordPerfect, and Kurt Schoettler explains how to easily switch display options on a laptop. 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.

Coming April 7, 2008 to Answers to Questions: John Starkweather reviews several online calendaring and project management solutions, James Keuning reviews RoboForm and suggests a clever (and free) way to create strong passwords, Bruce Brightwell explains why lawyers shouldn't worry about legal research service adhesion contracts, David Herdman discusses the benefits of learning both Word and WordPerfect, and Harry Dreier shares his LexisNexis search results for "out of title" cases. 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.

Coming April 10, 2008 to Answers to Questions: Bill Baldwin suggests several different ways to archive Web page information on any budget, Steven J. Best explains why using QuickBooks can get you disbarred, Rob Howard reviews the StartStop Universal Transcription System with Olympus DS-4000, David Hudgens reviews PCLaw and ponders its future integration with Time Matters (and LexisNexis responds), and Jack Futoran weighs in on the Word versus WordPerfect debate from a technical perspective. 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.