Flash Bulletin: Lawyers Are Tech First-Adopters

Technology columnist Sean Doherty identifies notable updates from leading legal tech companies.

When I think of core legal technology, my first thought is practice management (PM) applications. Managing matters, documents, calendars, tasks and billing is critical to running a business to provide efficient legal services. It’s important to keep up with practice management technology to continually improve business and legal processes, regardless of whether you install and use PM software on-premise or consume it as a service in the cloud.

Contrary to modern lore, lawyers are first-adopters in their own way. They often stick to the proprietary technology they first adopt. This is largely the result of vendor offerings with good on-boarding techniques but few options for lawyers to discontinue services and take their data elsewhere. How do you keep up with PM technology provided by one vendor?

You can trust the vendor to reinvest some of its licensing revenue to software development or you can look around at what other attorneys use. When you see desirable features in other cloud-based PM offerings, make your vendor aware of its shortcomings. Most providers are quick to keep up with competitors.

Here are some notable updates from LexisNexis and Themis Solutions, Inc. And keep an eye on HoudiniEsq, which is on the cusp of releasing version 2. And remember HoudiniEsq is free for solo practitioners.

LEXISNEXIS

LexisNexis Legal and Professional, a content and technology provider to business and legal professionals and maker of Firm Manager practice management as a service, recently released updates to bring Firm Manager up to speed. A new export tool enables legal professionals to export data, such as financial data and contact information, and back up cloud data.

Besides the new export tool, Firm Manager recently added new email integration and privacy controls for calendar events. The new email integration gives Firm Manager the capability to automatically save emails and attachments to a client case in the matter management application. When an attorney emails a document to a client, a unique ID number is used to associate the email record with the appropriate matter file.

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Attorneys and staff now have the ability in Firm Manager to mark confidential meetings and events as “private” in a shared law firm calendar. In effect, other staff and attorneys can see blocked out time on your calendar but not the details of the event unless you assign them sufficient permissions.

CLIO

The International Legal Technology Association’s latest technology survey showed more than 90 percent of attorneys use tablet computers and, within that, 90 percent of the tablets are iPads. It follows that vendors like Themis Solutions developed a dedicated iPad app for Clio, the Canadian company’s online PM software.

With Clio’s iPad app, users can manage case files and client data, control schedules, and track time and expenses. The app automatically synchronizes mobile data with Clio and supports one-tap functions to create time slips, event notifications, tasks and notes for matters.

Mobile apps on tablets make lawyers most productive outside the office. If you use an iPad and it is not functional with your practice management system, find out where in the mobile space your provider is and see if its road map includes iOS. If there is no crossroad, it may be time for you to change direction. And making a beeline to the office to engage work when it could be done outside the office is inefficient and often impractical.

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Themis Solutions also connects to more than 25 Internet services to add functionality and features to Clio. The Clio Marketplace includes Chrometa time trackers, Box and Dropbox file sharing, Google Apps for Business, Fastcase legal research, Gmail, Lexicata’s cloud-based customer resource management (CRM) and client intake system, Quickbooks Online and Xero Accounting. And if you are a do-it-yourself person, you can use Zapier to connect Clio’s application programming interface (API) to preferred apps. Check out how family lawyer Jennifer Reynolds uses Zapier and Clio for client intake.

A Clio integration with NetDocuments is of particular interest to me. NetDocuments is embedded into Clio’s interface; users employ Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel or PowerPoint to create and save documents directly to NetDocuments and associate the documents to matters in Clio. That’s slick. I would add NetDocuments Email Management Service (read: Decisiv Email) into the mix.

Like the Clio-NetDocuments integration, I would look forward to PM software providers linking to document stores in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. There I can securely manage document stores and pick and chose PM providers and other cloud services without transferring data, which is akin to moving a graveyard.


Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.

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