Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners, Technology

The Best Tech Upgrades You Can Get for Your Firm

Some of the most impactful things you can do for cheap for your practice, according to tech columnist Jeff Bennion.

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two computer monitors screensLegal technology is not about sweeping changes to your practice as much as it is about small things that can be big time savers or help you work more efficiently. You don’t need to move into a new office with a built-in server vault or anything if you want to get more tech-savvy in your practice. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference.

Clearly, if you have a huge technology budget, you should buy everything on your wish list, but here are some of the most impactful things you can do for cheap for your practice.

Email and Domain

You simply need to have something other than your @aol.com email address if you want to be taken seriously as a professional. It is so easy to get a domain name nowadays that it really shows a lack of respect for yourself if you still have that old email address on your business cards. In fact, if someone gave me a professionally printed business card that had an @aol.com email address on it and someone else gave me a mustard-stained napkin with their contact info on it, including a real email address with a real domain, and I didn’t know either attorney, I don’t know which one I would hire. Think about what that old email address conveys to others. They are thinking: “This person is a dinosaur.” “This person can’t afford the $12 a year for a domain name?” “This person is probably not very computer-savvy, so is he/she going to take a long time on my project and bill me more than someone who works efficiently?”

Getting a domain is easy. A lot of providers sell them. Go to godaddy.com and type in a domain name that you like and buy [yourlastname]lawgroup.com or whatever you want it to be. In the checkout options, there is an option to also get an email address with that purchase. So, you can get john@doelawfirm.com for just about a dollar a month.

Second Monitor

You can get a decent monitor for about $100 – $150. Once you go double-monitor, it’s hard to go back. Imagine working with paper and you have a TV-tray-sized desk to spread out your papers, so instead of spreading your papers out, you just shuffle them in a stack in front of you. Now, if you double your desk size, you can get more done. I use double monitors when I am responding to discovery – I have the discovery on one screen and my answers on the other. If you are doing anything where you need to look at two things at the same time, it is so much more efficient when you have multiple monitors. It’s a must for doc review.

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Don’t get confused by the specs and the IPS viewing angle and the dynamic contrast ratio. Get a 1080p flat-screen monitor with an HDMI input and everything else will only be noticeable when you are playing 3D first-person shooters. The contrast ratio is the number of shades of grey the monitor has. The more shades of grey, the crisper the picture is. You don’t need a million shades of grey if you are typing a black and white document in Word. Probably just about any 1080p flat-screen monitor should be sufficient for law firm use. A screen size of 17” – 19” should be big enough.

PDF Handling Software

I have had brief periods in my practice where I did not have a PDF editing program on my computer. I use Adobe Acrobat DC Pro, but there are other programs out there as well. They don’t have all of the bells and whistles, but you can read and annotate and comment in PDFs. Acrobat lets you do a number of things, such as convert a scanned image into searchable text, annotate a document with highlights and comments, as well as redact and add Bates stamps and convert other files into PDFs. The free version of Acrobat, Acrobat Reader DC, allows you to comment and highlight, but you can’t do a lot of the helpful features. There are a lot of free training videos on YouTube if you need to start from scratch.

Good Computer

If your computer still has a 3.5” floppy drive or runs Windows Vista, you should probably replace it. I have about three or four computers in my office and I replace them about every two years or so at the most. You’ll get faster performance, booting your computer will take less time, and everything will just run more smoothly when you have a good computer. Just as with the monitor, you don’t need anything too fancy. About $400 for a laptop or $350 for a desktop computer should have the specs necessary to work efficiently.

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Conclusion

If you are averse to change or simply don’t have a very big technology budget, this should be where you start. You can slowly build up your tool chest of hardware and software, but these should be your first purchases.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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