technolese

Carolyn Elefant has a great follow-up on Jordan Furlong’s The 21st–century solo. Here’s my attempt to keep the conversation going on this topic which, like Carolyn and Jordan, I think is extremely important for us solos as the practice of law continues to evolve.

Jordan sees specialization, sophistication, collaboration and innovation as the four characteristics of a successful sole practitioner for the 21st century; and Carolyn provides specific examples of how we solos are doing some of that already.

But they both make two points separately which I’d like to tie together because I think they present a real challenge to most of us solos on a daily basis. Jordan’s point is essentially a warning that we solos should not become complacent in thinking that we may be exempt from “the recent revolution in the legal profession.” Carolyn’s is the observation that law schools are now, essentially, teaching/touching on the global structure of big firms/big structures while solo courses are just teaching the nuts and bolts of running a law firm—essentially just teaching solos to be “technicians,” to borrow from Michael Gerber’s concepts (this is my characterization of such courses, not Carolyn’s).

I think that we solos do run the risk of being left behind (or playing catch-up), not because of complacency so much as because many of us are so busy trying to “keep the lights on” as Carolyn discusses on the subject of innovation. Many of us fail to see the practice as a business, and leave setting aside time to consider ways to integrate ourselves into this revolution. Many of us were never taught “the business of law;” and apparently the new batches of JDs, would-be solos, are still not being taught that from any meaningful standpoint.

Because some of us are busy keeping the light on we often fail to see that:

• we do have to specialize;
• we do have to become more sophisticated all around in terms of our specialized area, becoming more sophisticated not only in terms of the subject-matter but also technology, marketing and management;
• we do have to take time to collaborate as we notice trends in our own now-specialized area(s); and
• we must make the time to innovate across the above three areas.

More than anything, it is a mind-set that will keep us at the forefront of the legal profession and our own practice to ensure that we not only just keep the lights on, but that we actually enjoy and thrive doing so. No doubts it is a lot of work, but usually only in the beginning since we have so many resources at our disposal.

Maybe this is too obvious a point from those two blog posts, or just “preaching to the choir” kind of thing; I don’t know. I do know from personal experience that these things work, and that it has made a difference for me in terms of dreading Mondays or actually looking forward to stepping into the office.

If you write a post in response to any of this, please consider inserting a link in the comment here so that I can follow the discussion.

Yesterday, March 12th, the DCBA Young Lawyers Section held their softball tournament at Tropical Park. Local law firms, such as Fowler White, Kubicki Draper, Lydecker Diaz, and Weiss Serota, had teams competing with UM law students, and us; in all 16 teams met at Tropical Park. And the weather couldn’t have been better: clear blue skies and NO humidity, thank God!

Since Sept 2010, when our team was first formed, we have been playing every Friday night. We are not sponsored by any one firm—and our team name, Got Balls, reflects the fact that we don’t have a sponsor (yet!). (I don’t know how we ended up with that name, lol).

Our original intention was just to have fun, and we certainly accomplished that. But, even more, we realized how much we have grown as a team and individually. We learned that we are getting better the longer we play together; like most things, practice makes perfect, I guess. I personally have learned that I can throw, catch and hit; but I am worthless when it comes to running! I guess that should be an incentive to continue with my fitness plan du jour…no food, lots of exercise.

Our team pic (I’m second from right, front row):

Our Team at the DCBA TLS Softball Tournament

Along the way, we managed to surprise ourselves by actually not being eliminated early in the day. We were able to beat three other teams before being done in by the Sandbar Club…the Sandbar Club! They are sponsored by a local bar, the Sandbar of course…they had a great team! (Just goes to show you that booze will do you in every time, lol) We’re all looking forward to next year’s tournament.

In the last post, I talked about a system to create and manage documents which are then stored in the hard drive, essentially creating a paperless office. But all of that will not help us if we keep everything in the hard drive because at any moment those documents can be lost for any number of reasons.

Backing up a hard drive is the easiest way to avoid losing documents or anything else that matters to you. The good news is that there are now plenty of companies that provide automatic hard drive backup for pennies a day, doing away with the tedious and cumbersome chore of scheduling backups onto compact discs. And they do it over internet connections.

I chose Carbonite for my backups because it is simple to set up and costs about $55 per year. It performs constant backups of my hard drive. I have yet to try restoring it because I have been lucky enough not to have any drive crashes or other incidents that cause loss of data.

Besides Carbonite, there is also Mozy and a lot of other, perhaps less well known, companies. Mozy and Carbonite are the only ones I considered. Mozy provides a home or business program. The business program charges per GB of storage. I prefer an annual payment with unlimited storage, which is what Carbonite gave me when I signed up.

But price isn’t the only thing to consider, of course. Ease of use when restoring a drive is important; as is, of course, the safety of your data. It is worth paying a little more if those things will also be addressed by your backup provider.

As always, the thing is to have something in place…

I am a fan of keeping everything as simple as possible; otherwise, it’s not worth it for me because all I am doing by complicating things is creating more headaches for myself. This applies, of course, to managing the documents I create daily and later storing them. Some one asked me to expand on the previous post on this topic. So, here is my simple system.

To begin with, the client signs off right on the retainer agreement that the file will be destroyed within 60 days of the case ending, and all I will keep will be digital copies. They have the option of picking up the file, which never contains original documents as I only request (and make sure I get) copies of documents needed for production or disclosure. If they don’t pick it up the file is shredded.

Once I open the physical file, I also create its equivalent in the hard drive. When I draft a pleading or correspondence, for example, the final, signed version is scanned and saved as a pdf with a format containing the date and name of the document; that pdf is then stored in the appropriate computer file for that client.

Pleadings and correspondence received from opposing counsel are scanned, turned into pdfs, and emailed to the client; the same thing happens with orders and notices received from the court. In many instances, when it comes to pleadings, etc., from an opposing counsel, I don’t even have to do this since they usually also fax it…straight into my web fax, where it already becomes a pdf–because I use a web-based fax service which turns the documents received into pdfs, I only have to download the file into the appropriate client file on the drive.

I don’t need the best system to manage documents. I only need a system that works for me, and the one I describe above is doing fine. Obviously there are many other structures out there, perhaps more complicated, that work for others. But again, the point is to have something in place…as you work it, you can work the bugs out of it until you get something that works consistently.

The benefit of having a paperless office in this manner is that I never have to spend time and money storing hard-copies anywhere. The storage is created as I work on the file.

Next post I’ll talk about how I make sure my digital storehouse is never destroyed.

How about you? What use do you get out of your scanner? How paperless is your office?