Law Technology

Who Have We Been Helping? What?s MicroLaw Up To These Days?

By Ross

No posts for four months? Lots of emails from you wondering if I was okay? Good news on all fronts – everyone’s fine, just busy as all get out!

Demand for MicroLaw’s practice management and technology evaluation services has never been higher. In that vein, we’d like to welcome a number of new client firms nationwide who have undergone(or are in the process of undergoing) comprehensive practice management/technology reviews or for whom we’ve helped with some element of technology implementation:

• Chamberlain Hrdlicka – Houston/Atlanta/Philly/Denver
• Walker Wilcox Matousek – Chicago/Houston
• Taylor Duane – Boston / Providence
• Carruthers & Roth – Greenboro, NC
• Hawks Quindel – Madison
• DeWitt Ross & Stevens – Madison
• Weiss Berzowski & Brady – Milwaukee
• Ferris & Britton – San Diego
• Ray German, Ltd. – Grand Forks, ND
• Rockwell Automation – Milwaukee
• Law Offices of John C. Martin – Chicago
• Menn Law Firm – Appleton, WI

Among many others we’ve been helping. I thought it might be useful, since some of you regularly ask, to talk about exactly what I spend my time doing when I’m not writing articles or delivering CLE programming. In other words, what the MicroLaw team and I do on a daily basis helping our client law practices. Here’s a list of some of the recent and typical things we’ve been up to:

• Complete practice technology and “case flow” reviews, involving interviewing most of all people in a firm to determine how they are presently leveraging technology from both the front office/client-services perspective as well as overall underlying system technology and infrastructure issues. This leads to a comprehensive written review, recommendations for best moving ahead leveraging existing tools and identifying future systems, providing budgets, RFP process management – in other words, utterly comprehensive, no-pulls-punched practice technology roadmaps.
• Helping firms build complete, contiguous electronic case files – this includes document management usually involving the venerable and respected Worldox software, as well as practice and financial management systems, often including the widely-used and much lauded Tabs 3 and Tabs PracticeMaster systems, as well as more recently, the cloud-based CLIO system, among others including managing entire projects, migrations, proceduralizing usage for practices, developing and providing comprehensive on-site and remote training and support. This has been the core of MicroLaw’s in the trenches services for a quarter century.
• Becoming Paper LESS – finding ways for practices to reduce their dependence and reliance on paper, and effectively divorce themselves from the need to have physical paper files present in order to work on client files or on firm/dept. administrative matters. We’ve long helped firms with scanning approaches that work, paper and document management, maximizing the usefulness of PDF technology with Adobe Acrobat for all walks of practice, as well as helping firms protect client confidences via metadata remediation and establishing ethically responsible “PDF First” approaches.
• Getting more out of Microsoft Office – this has meant applying our previous WordPerfect background (and we DO still support it) to sensitively guide firms in better and smarter (and less aggravating) use of Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint in their practices – using our custom-developed training reference materials for all Word versions, we bring our 100% legal-focused background to bear in helping our clients become super-productive legal machines. We’ll review existing configurations for our clients, we’ll help customize their applications, we automate / standardize and consistent-ize document generation via our MicroLaw Legal SmartMacros for Word, do task-oriented training both live and remotely, as well as provide the needed tools to fill Office gaps: Metadata Assistant, Numbering Assistant, CrossEyes, Copy2Contact, as examples.
• We provide guidance in reviewing hardware and network platforms, and even provide complete turnkey systems nationwide to our smaller clients. We work with local IT people to manage projects to fruition, with our 25 years of legal operations and legal application software brains driving the process, as it always should. We help with everyone from lower-cost acquisition of hardware systems to guidance on smartphone and “pad/tablet” technologies, remote access approaches, data backup, security – in other words, a quarter century of institutionalized knowledge about system infrastructure to help clients ranging from solos to much larger practices and legal departments.
• We help with the cloud – moving to web-based apps where it makes sense functionally and economically – we’ve been critics of the concept as many of you know, so when we decided to make the move for some of our clients, it was with significant forethought and a sense of comfort about core issues having been adequately satisfied.
• Helping firms properly position technology in their practices, using our “Five B’s Approach: Best Practices, Better Profitability, Battling Malpractice, Brainy Ethics and a Blissful Life” – we’ve learned over so many years what it takes to get real technology acceptance in a practice so the dollars spent turn systems intro profit centers into expensive cost cesspools. We can help you with the change management issues and overcoming the inertia you face having done what you’ve done the way you’ve always done it for so long.

And lots more – really any technology or practice management / operations issue a firm or legal department could encounter – from both the independent and objective review perspective and evaluation / assessment / planning to actual in the trenches, roll up our sleeves and get dirty direct assistance, support, implementation guidance and training of lawyers and legal professionals worldwide, every single day.

So if you need to accomplish any of the above, we should really talk.

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Full post as published by Ross Ipsa Loquitur on October 20, 2010 (boomark / email).