Disability Law

Part 4: Small Law Firm Technology I Use In My Douglas County, GA Personal Injury & Workers' Compensation Practice

By Jack E. Clay

My Law Firm?s Hardware & Software

I prefer to use a simple networked computer system and digital dictation. Currently, I have a paralegal and legal assistant employed in my firm. Our system works well. We also use McAfee business anti-virus and internet firewall software. I have used several other systems in the past, including AVG. It is all a matter of what will work for you and your computer system. I have found that McAfee has some good features, especially in their business software line-up.

For tracking time and keeping costs, I use a software system called TimeSlips. Because I do not handle very many hourly cases, TimeSlips is mainly a system I use for tracking expenses on cases. At the end of the case, it is very nice to present the client with a professional and detailed costs ledger.

I also have a copy of the full version of Adobe that I use for editing, combining, and separating PDF documents. Although the Adobe program is somewhat expensive (retailing for about $400.00), I found it is very useful and gives me an edge in my paperless system. When I dealt with paper files, I had a habit of using a lot of ?sticky? notes and flags for different documents. I found that Adobe allows me to do the same thing, just on my computer screen. Also, if I have to print the documents for court or a deposition, I can choose to either include my notes and flags or to print the documents without my annotations.

I use other software in my law practice as well to a lesser extent. For investigative purposes, I use a service from Lois Law which can be found at www.loislaw.com. I have also used Accurint in the past (www.accurint.com). These databases allow me to search and find individuals, particularly, defendants and witnesses that I need to track down in cases.

I have also evaluated a software system called CaseMap which is made by Lexis-Nexis. CaseMap forces you to view issues and cases in a categorical and organized fashion. Basically, if you have ten issues in a particular case, it enables you to merge facts, which can be drawn from countless sources, to each relevant issue. This is especially helpful on large cases. While I have not used CaseMap extensively, I try to accomplish the same thing using Amicus Attorney.

In Amicus, I have fields for writing notes regarding different topics for various cases. For example, my workers? compensation custom fields are extensive and provide me a place where I can always look for a quick and useful synopsis of my case. I have a special note section for items that come up in workers? compensation cases such as Average Weekly Wage, current medical treatment notes, past medical history of my clients, etc. For my personal injury cases (which are mostly auto accidents), I have sections for items such as past and future special damages, liens and subrogation issues, degree of disability resulting from the incident in question, lost wage information, litigation time frames, and discovery deadlines, etc.

Full post as published by Georgia Law Blog on October 03, 2007 (boomark / email).