TechnoLawyer: Online/Cloud

TechnoLawyer member and law firm business coach extraordinaire Ed Poll has published not one, not two, but three new books.

Like any business, law firms need capital to grow, but law firms cannot sell equity so they often seek loans instead. In The Banker Lawyer Relationship, Poll explains how to develop a winning relationship with a commercial bank. Learn more.

Everyone likes a secret as long as they're among those in the know. In More Secrets of the Business of Law, Poll covers everything from raising your rates to exceeding your clients' expectations — and much more. Learn more.

Today, we all suffer from a shortening attention span. Well, either that or we're devoting more of our attention to silly videos on YouTube. Whatever the cause, Poll meets you halfway with Business Competency for Lawyers, a 30-minute read free of technical jargon that covers everything you need to know about running a law firm. Learn more.

Finally, TechnoLawyer member and legal technology uber-consultant (God?) Ross Kodner has launched a startup company called Factum, which will provide online legal technology CLE programs. In his press release, Ross promises that Factum's "programs are radically different from the mainstream put-you-to-sleep, raw-presenter-staring-at-a-camera typical online CLE presentations." Factum launches next month.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a discount online store for inkjet cartridges and laser toner among other supplies, a utility that runs Windows on your Mac, and presentation software for your iPod. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Alternative Fuels for Your Inkjet and Laser Printers
By Dennis Kennedy
Ink and toner are as essential for the operation of today's law firms as gasoline is for running our cars. Unfortunately, the prices of inkjet cartridges and laser toner cartridges can give us the same sense of sticker shock as seeing $3/gallon gasoline at the pump.

Databazaar.com is one of the industry leaders in providing inkjet cartridges, laser toner cartridges, copier and fax supplies, paper, and projector bulbs at discount prices. You'll also find cables and printers at Databazaar.com.

Inc. magazine recently mentioned Databazaar.com in an article on "business bargains." Databazaar.com carries cartridges for almost every brand or make of printer, including HP, Brother, Canon, Epsom, Dell, Imation, Lexmark, Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, and Xerox/Tektronix.

Databazaar.com sells genuine new inkjet and toner cartridges as well as compatible cartridges in factory-fresh retail boxes — the same ones sold by manufacturers and big box retailers — at deeply discounted prices. Plus you get free shipping on all orders. All orders ship within 24 hours, except on weekends and holidays.

Databazaar.com offers a comprehensive, well-organized Web site. You can check and compare prices. Even better, the site offers RSS feeds for you to stay apprised of new products and special offers without visiting the site. Learn more about Databazaar.com.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a mobile billing solution for solos and small firms, a Web-based tool for tracking vacations and other time off, and a new multifunction inkjet copier/fax/printer/scanner. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Mobile Billing for Small Firms
By Dennis Kennedy
Time sheets are the bane of existence for most lawyers, especially for lawyers on the move during the day. Solos and small firm lawyers are among the most mobile in the legal profession because they usually spend more time in court and with clients. Often, these lawyers don't have a timesheet handy to record activities. During a hectic day, they may forget about activities that add up to a significant amount of time.

The all-too-common result is that lawyers "lose" billable time because they forget to record it or underestimate what time they spent on projects.

AIRTIME-Manager's AIRTIME-Professional helps lawyers contemporaneously capture time entries wherever they are by using their BlackBerrys, Treos, and Windows Mobile devices.

Originally available as AIRTIME-Enterprise for larger firms, AIRTIME-Professional is a new version designed for solos and small law firms.

AIRTIME-Professional enables you to record time entries immediately after you finish an e-mail or phone call by popping up a reminder entry screen on your mobile device so you can enter time for the activity. You can also enter time no matter where use a mobile device. Thus, on-the-go lawyers can capture time that is often forgotten or underestimated when they return to the office and get to a traditional timesheet.

AIRTIME-Professional also "remembers" and aggregates small amounts of time spent on e-mail and phone calls. When these small amounts reach a pre-determined threshold, say fifteen minutes, you will be notified and can make a decision about whether to bill that time rather than "lose" those small amounts.

AIRTIME-Professional has some nifty features designed specifically for solos and small firms. For example, it integrates with most time-billing software. Thus, lawyers can synchronize their client/matter numbers as well as their billing codes. And of course, they can export the time captured by AIRTIME-Professional into these programs for final processing.

AIRTIME-Professional has two components — the client software on your mobile device and a Web-based component for managing your time entries and synchronizing with your time-billing software.

AIRTIME-Professional costs $25/month for solos or $100/month for five lawyers. Other configurations also exist. No contract is required, but if you sign up for a year you receive two months for free.  Learn more about AIRTIME-Professional.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a network appliance that makes short work of electronic discovery tasks, an online service that enables you to create multimedia presentations, and a handheld document scanner. Don't miss the next issue.

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

E-Discovery for the Rest of Us
By Dennis Kennedy
Electronic discovery can seem like a daunting world of software, services, and outside vendors, all combined with arcane technology issues. But what if you just want to work with a limited amount of e-mail and other electronic data?

Cricket Legal Technologies' Cricket Box may hold the answer. The Cricket Box is a dedicated electronic discovery appliance designed for law firms and litigation support consultants. It gives you a dedicated, turn-key solution with no software to install or configure. Just turn it on, follow the on-screen wizards, and start working.

A simple interface enables you to handle most of the standard tasks in today's world of electronic discovery. Just drag and drop your documents, and then use Cricket Box to filter, de-duplicate, and bates stamp your documents before exporting them to other litigation tools. Cricket Box can handle images, text, and metadata in many file formats.

The company claims that Cricket Box is easy to operate and can be used without IT support. It features a variety of powerful search and other electronic discovery tools. You can run Boolean, fuzzy, stem and other searches often used in electronic discovery.

Cricket Box uses a SQL Server database, which means it's fast. It can pull data from just about any source, including CD-ROM, DVD, flash memory, hard drives, etc. If you run into password-protected files, Cricket Box can probably crack them for you. The company claims that all these smarts mean you'll never miss a valid document, resulting in more accurate work product than competitive offerings.

When you're ready to export data, you'll find that Cricket Box integrates with Concordance, CT Summation, Ringtail, iConect, iPro, and other popular tools. Cricket Box is sold on a subscription basis. For a limited time, a one year subscription sells for $10,000.

Learn more about Cricket Box.

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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an electronic signature service and repository geared at corporate counsel, a comprehensive suite of e-discovery tools, and a service that digitally certifies transcripts. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Electronic Agreements Deserve Electronic Signatures
By Dennis Kennedy
Going in-house was supposed to improve your quality of life, but thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley era in which we now live, your compliance workflow has kicked into overdrive.

For example, you need your worldwide salesforce to sign a compensation agreement with your new commission structure — and track who signed it and when. Similarly, you need to have your technical staff execute assignments of invention, again with archiving and tracking not to mention approval by their counsel. Many other headaches, er examples, abound, including the deployment of nondisclosure agreements by non-legal staff.

If only you could manage this workflow electronically. For several years now, electronic signature laws have permitted the use of electronic signatures, but the adoption of electronic signatures has not occurred because no one bothered to build a suite of tools to make it easier than using paper.

EchoSign's eponymous service may finally help usher in the revolution. EchoSign is a secure Web site for sending, signing, tracking, and storing documents — everything from retainers to nondisclosure agreements to assignments of inventions to deal documents. Instead of e-mailing a file, you just upload it to EchoSign.

To start, you set up a secure EchoSign account using any browser. There is nothing to install and no downloads. Even better, EchoSign's signature service is free.

EchoSign converts Word and other document formats to PDF, and then delivers the file to recipients with signature instructions. Recipients can either electronically sign the document or print and sign it the old-fashioned way. Even when they sign it on paper, the document remains within EchoSign thanks to a special fax number to which recipients return signed documents. No need to wait for these executed documents to arrive in the mail.

When you use EchoSign for signatures, you automatically create a repository of all of your signed documents. You can annotate, search for, review, share, and print them at anytime. With EchoSign, everyone on your team will know which documents were signed and when.

EchoSign's free signature service includes storage for your last 20 documents. To store more documents, you can choose from two plans — $12.95 per month for up to 1,000 documents (Pro) or $20 per user per month for unlimited documents (Enterprise). The Enterprise plan also includes a branded site and other extranet-like features.

Learn more about EchoSign.

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.

Earlier this year I proclaimed 2006 the year of mobile video. Well, uhm, I think was off by about five years. Maybe ten. Instead, I should have proclaimed it the year of YouTube, the site that finally delivered on the promise of online video — for both filmmakers and their audience. One aspect of my prediction has come to pass, however — lawyers using online video as a marketing tool. For example, Allison Margolin, a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles, created a 3:35 minute film about her work and uploaded it to YouTube. So far it has garnered 1,751 views.

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.

Coming July 20, 2006 to Answers to Questions: Lynda LaPan offers up an incredibly detailed Word v. WordPerfect Post rivaling D. Paul Dalton's from last week, Caren Schwartz reviews QuickBooks for law firm billing, Larry Lucht compares the Professional versus Legal editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Robert Browning reviews his experience with several HP LaserJet printers, including his new 1320s, and Bryan Sims directs CaseMap users to a helpful online resource for templates and tips. 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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a service that can prove the sending, receipt, and content of an e-mail message, an online backup and document management tool, and an e-mail add-on that can convert attachments into secure PDF files. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Proving You Sent that E-Mail Message
By Dennis Kennedy
"But I never got your e-mail!" "That's not what your e-mail said!" "You never gave me that advice!" With today's overly-aggressive spam filters — not to mention less than honest adversaries and even clients — you need a simple and secure way to confirm and archive legal advice and other information sent via e-mail.

In technical terms, law firms realize they may need to show proof of sending, proof of delivery, and even proof of content (it's easy to edit an e-mail message after receipt) for important e-mail messages to prevent disputes.

The Registered E-mail® System available from BlumbergExcelsior offers a solution to protect senders of email, and it works whether or not the recipient has enrolled in the System. The service generates and returns a "Registered Receipt™" to the sender. All information necessary to verify the Registered Receipt™ and to reconstruct its original content is embedded within the receipt itself.

Each receipt contains an audit trail of information, including recipients and their email addresses as well as their e-mail servers and client programs. Receipts also contain a "digital fingerprint" — the time delivered, received, and opened, a copy of the original message with any attachments, and other information about the transmittal. These Registered Receipts conform to statutory requirements and prove both delivery and content. The Registered E-mail® System does not store any e-mail with a third party, making it truly secure.

You buy the service on a per use basis (starting at 79 cents per use) with stamp-like package plans available in which you can pre-pay for a pack of Registered E-mail® units for use by anyone within your firm. A free trial enables you to send 10 e-mail messages at no charge.

Learn more about the Registered E-mail® System.

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 July 14, 2006 to Fat Friday: Danny Wash reviews Info Select for case management, Martin Dean shares his list of grievances with a recent TechnoFeature article about law firm technology outsourcing, and Brian Garves reviews his experience ordering books from Thomson West. 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.

In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers a low-cost online emporium for printer labels, a speakerphone for your PC, and and a USB 2 WiFi adapter. Don't miss the next issue.

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

Label This One a "Bargain"
By Dennis Kennedy
No matter how far we might have come on the road to the electronic office, the fact remains that law firms use a lot of labels — for mailing, shipping, filing and many other purposes. In fact, a trip to a law firm's supply room can give you an education in the many varieties of labels available today and a historical tour of the firm's past labels. The cost of all those labels add up to real dollars. And finding the labels you want at a big box office supply store can prove difficult.

Worldlabel.com enables you to shop online for the labels you need and save a lot of money and time in the process. Worldlabel.com is a label manufacturer that eliminates the middleman's mark-up and ships directly to the user. Bargains anyone? Its Web site claims savings ranging from 25% to 90% over the big box stores.

Worldlabel.com offers more than 50 sizes of labels for laser and inkjet printing, available in 18 different materials and several colors. Need Avery labels? Check Wordlabel.com's handy Avery cross reference chart. As a manufacturer, it can also make custom labels for you.

Law firms often want to use label templates. Worldlabel.com offers free downloads of label templates in Word and PDF formats. It also recently published a collection of label templates in the Opendocument format, which has obtained ISO approval and is gaining acceptance around the world.

Worldlabel.com also has a customer support team with experience in inkjet and laser printers to answer your specific questions. 

Learn more about Worldlabel.com.

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.