The Top Ten in Tech
Technologies like e-filing have been hyped for a while, but not everyone knows all of the ways it can be used. And while handhelds are common tools in the legal field, new applications can make those devices more useful. Overall, the big trend we see is lawyers learning to use current technology to better communicate with clients, themselves and opposing counsel.
Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer who helps put together the ABA Legal Technology Show, thinks a lot of this is “client-driven.” By that he means clients will increasingly pressure lawyers and their firms to use technology to be more responsive.
“Lawyers aren’t always early adopters of technology, but increasingly you see clients demanding that their lawyers use technology that isn’t yet widespread in the legal environment,” he says. “The firms that can respond and use technology well will always stand out.”
Still, there are a few new things under the sun. Some fresh software, hardware and services can help make everything from rainmaking to brief-filing to billing a little easier, quicker, better. This is our look at the top 10 in technology for 2004.
Frustration Fighters
It might be hard to remember now, but not too long ago, the Internet was a great tool for business communication. Unfortunately, spam e-mail, spyware and pop-up ads sometimes have made using the Internet more of a nuisance than a convenience. The worst and most persistent problem has been spam. According to the research group IDC, spam e-mail accounts for 38 percent of the 31 billion e-mails sent each day in North America in 2004, up from 24 percent in 2002. Spam filters help, but don’t solve the problem. Worst of all, if they are poorly set up, filters can block legitimate e-mails from clients or friends.
Services like ZoE-mail are designed to fool spammers by disguising your e-mail address. Other services force anyone sending an e-mail to you to reply to a prompt in order for a message to be delivered. Blockers that sort out spam e-mails have become de rigueur. Unfortunately, there’s no magical antispam technology, so IT professionals recommend law firms simply teach their employees to be smart: Disguise e-mail posted to a public place and use long e-mail addresses. Pop-up ads can often be minimized with a simple download like the free Google toolbar. And keeping spyware off of your computer can usually be done by keeping firewall software up to date and by running regular virus scans.
“There’s no silver bullet when it come to things like spam and spyware,” says Ben Sherwood, a personal security adviser in Milwaukee. “But a lot of times, if people are careful and take a little time to keep their software current, they’d find out things run a lot smoother.”
The Virtual Client
Susan Keller, an attorney with Edwards & Angell in Providence, R.I., has some not-so-fond memories of her days as an associate. That’s because she’d often be flying around the country to weed through boxes of paper until the early hours of the morning. “I remember sitting in this factory in Skokie, Ill., for three nights until four in the morning, then going to the hotel for some sleep just to come back and start all over again two hours later,” she says.
That was the way lawyers in the financial world had to work: When a big deal went down, they and their clients typically wound up stuck in a conference room somewhere, hammering out details. In the past year, though, Keller’s firm has begun using software from a company called IntraLinks that puts millions of documents on a secure Web site. That allows lawyers and others involved in a deal to look at documents from their desks. “Now you can access any document you want online whenever you need to,” she says. “Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be up at four in the morning, but at least you can do it from your office or home.”
Increasingly, clients are expecting that their lawyers will be able to interact with them virtually. However, firms may find their clients are pushing them to use technology they are not always comfortable with.
For example, in the business world and the world at large, instant messaging has become a popular communications tool. “I’m going to have to say that we haven’t seen much IM use among lawyers,” says Charles Weeden, CEO of 17a-4, a New York City-based company that archives electronic information. “What I’ve heard is a general concern about issues like the security of IM.” (Unlike other electronic communications, instant messages are generally unprotected.)
Not only will clients pressure lawyers to use newer technology, but forward-thinking lawyers may find that virtual communications tools can be effective ways to court new clients. Social networking sites like Friendster and Meetup.com have become popular for things like networking or organizing political events. A few software makers, including Contact Network, Zero Degrees and Interface Software, have created next-step social networks professional versions that could connect lawyers with other lawyers or even potential clients.
Such systems, usually sold under the title of customer relationship management software, will even read and evaluate e-mails and calendar entries and make them searchable. By using software intelligently, lawyers can learn more about their clients and be more responsive to their needs.
Edwards & Angell has learned that using the Net can make the firm even more responsive to clients without having to spend more time to meet them in person. “Once people see that you can get more work done and do more without locking junior associates in a conference room for days, it becomes an easy sell,” Keller says.
Wireless Lawyers
In the past year or two, there was something of a wireless revolution as workers discovered wireless networking could let them stay plugged in while out of the office and even at the neighborhood coffee shop. That change came largely as a result of the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi wireless technology.
But that revolution largely skipped the legal world. According to the most recent ABA Legal Technology Survey, only 7 percent of respondents in the legal profession reported using any kind of wireless network.
Wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, is a type of network that lets anyone with a properly configured laptop connect to the Internet through a wireless signal.
Wi-Fi “hot spots” can connect anyone within 300 feet. And the technology may be on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Philadelphia and Cook County, Ill. (Chicago), have announced that they are considering plans to turn their entire areas into Wi-Fi hot spots, while several smaller cities are already under “city clouds.”
When it comes to Wi-Fi, security is still a concern, although those who properly configure their hot spots or secure their mobile computers can mitigate the risks. And the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the main computer networking standards-making body, is working on security measures to shore up any of Wi-Fi’s weaknesses.
For lawyers who travel a lot, Wi-Fi ought to be a useful tool. “To me, when it comes to mobile technology, the big issue is Wi-Fi and the effect it will have on the Blackberry,” says Kennedy, a solo practitioner in St. Louis. “With a Wi-Fi card for $50 or less, you can have the equivalent of a complete desktop computer with broadband Internet access wherever you go.”
Though lawyers have been slow to take to Wi-Fi, there are already a handful of even newer wireless standards in the works right now, though it is not clear which one or ones have a chance to become an accepted standard. One that’s gotten the most attention is Wi-Max, which will provide network connectivity up to 30 miles in any direction, so it will likely be an ideal technology for connecting office networks at a low cost. The spread of Wi-Fi and similar technologies may finally become too great for lawyers to ignore.
Whither The Blackberry?
After reading the last entry on the list, it might make you wonder why anyone needs handhelds anymore. Why not just carry an ultralight titanium laptop with a Wi-Fi wireless connection and have the equivalent of a desktop PC wherever you go? But many lawyers seem to prefer handheld devices like the RIM Blackberry.
“We’ve seen a dropoff in people wanting laptops with the onset of the Blackberry,” says Ryan McEnroe, director of systems technology with Reed Smith in Pittsburgh. “If you’re a road warrior and you need to work on documents, you might need a laptop, but most of our lawyers want the handheld.”
Like many law firms, Reed Smith has made a commitment to its clients to respond to e-mails within a set amount of time, and handhelds make that possible. With the release of RIM’s newest software, the devices will soon be able to handle faxed documents, PDFs and other common formats for legal documents.
Voicemails will be delivered to the handheld, and lawyers can even download LexisNexis and Westlaw legal information. And small companies like Onset Technology are writing legal software for handhelds that will allow lawyers to do things like enter their time, no matter where they are.
Legal software companies are creating similar programs for Blackberry competitors Good Technology and Microsoft Pocket PCs. Some of the new built-in features found in mobile phones, like FM radios or thermometers, might not blow your socks off, while other functions like digital music players might be cool but not exactly essential to a law practice.
But new standards like Bluetooth have made it possible for short-range wireless connection that lets handhelds (and computers and other devices) connect and share information.
Rendezvous from Apple Computer or ZeroConf (Zero Configuration Networking) are emerging technologies that will allow a device to automatically recognize and connect with other devices on the network.
That means you can download a court filing on a handheld device, point it at a printer and print the document.
New Web browsers like Apple’s Sherlock or Sun Microsystems’ Watson, along with Microsoft’s Digital Dashboard, will make it possible to get more information on ever-smaller devices.
“As a law firm, we’ve made a commitment to be as responsive as possible to our clients,” McEnroe says. “If you want to be as responsive as possible, I think the Blackberry is still the perfect tool.”
Tying It Together
There are two kinds of trends in technology: the kind that happens naturally when people find a new technology that works for them, or one that the industry tries to foist on the consumer. Software integration is one of those trends the industry has been trying to foster, but that does not mean it can’t be useful to lawyers.
Over the past few years, legal giants LexisNexis and West Group have been buying all kinds of different software systems, such as back-end billing, and other products not related to legal research. And they’ve been working to integrate these systems into legal research programs. Smaller legal software companies have been making a concerted effort to make sure their systems can connect to systems made by other vendors. It’s not a surprising development it’s been going on within the rest of the software industry for a while. But as more legal software systems can communicate and share data, integrated systems mean law firms can do new things. The first thing these digital firms are hoping to promote is knowledge management, a system that can find information across different systems within a law firm.
“Right now, knowledge management is different from practice area to practice area or to different offices,” says Mike Wilens, president and CEO of West Group. “Most of the time it means [you] blast out an e-mail asking if anyone has the information you need, and you wait for someone to get back to you.”
Software makers believe lawyers and paralegals should be able to start work in the morning and not care about which system they’re using to do their work. For example, the time spent doing legal research or working on a document for a client could be noted automatically by the time-and-billing system. And basic functions within a law firm can become much more sophisticated. For example, Wilens thinks things like conflict checks will take one simple search that polls all of the systems within a firm to find out who has worked on which projects in the past. Right now, such an effort could take months and involve manual labor.
From a practical standpoint, it does not make sense for one practice area to have separate systems from another practice area within a firm. Once a law firm has all of its software speaking the same language, a firm can be run more like a business, with detailed business intelligence something few firms have today.
The E-Detective
Over the past few years, lawyers have probably heard countless dire warnings about how they needed to learn about e-discovery or risk getting into trouble in court. More than a few have even earned recent CLE credits on the topic. But for the most part, e-discovery was something most litigators could safely ignore.
But within the last year, the courts have had their say in many jurisdictions, making explicit exactly what is expected and what is proper behavior regarding the discovery of electronic evidence. A series of rulings in the Southern District of New York in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, No. 02 Civ. 1243 (SAS), laid out an influential set of rules for handling e-discovery. The fifth ruling, on July 20, ordered sanctions against a company for deleting e-mails relevant to a discovery request. The next day, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered tobacco giant Philip Morris to pay $2.75 million in sanctions for e-discovery violations, including the deletion of relevant e-mails. U.S. v. Philip Morris, No. 99-2496.
Observers say lawyers can’t claim ignorance of e-discovery issues anymore. “In 2004, e-discovery went mainstream. It was no longer, ‘Yeah, yeah, I heard someone in another jurisdiction had to deal with that. I just hope it won’t be me,’ ” says Virginia Llewellyn, an attorney and director of industry relations for LexisNexis’ e-discovery service. “The courts sanctioned a few lawyers and have come around to say, ‘Here’s what we expect from lawyers.’ ”
E-discovery is still largely confined to big litigation cases and is too complex for firms to do in-house. According to Attenex, a litigation support company in Seattle, a small e-discovery job for them involves about 500 gigabytes of data. (One gigabyte is equal to between 50,000 and 100,000 printed pages, depending on the kind of computer files being searched.) Some cases now involve one terabyte of information, which, if printed to paper, would fill the nation’s tallest building, Chicago’s Sears Tower, four times. But lawyers used to discovery rules in the paper world don’t need to be put off by e-discovery. In fact, the prevailing court rulings have created standards close to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in most regards. And federal guidelines in the works are closely mirroring the rules being developed in court.
Not only is the law around this issue becoming settled, but the technology is also getting more and more sophisticated. Systems can eliminate redundant copies, and more sophisticated searches make it possible to find more needles in haystacks. “I really don’t think there’s a reason for lawyers to be afraid of e-discovery anymore,” Llewellyn says.
A Digital Warehouse
Since the collapse of tech companies like WorldCom encouraged fire-sale prices for Internet service, law firms now pay a fraction of what they did three or four years ago. And advances in technology have made storage equipment dirt cheap. Taken separately, some law firms might assume those two developments simply mean their tech costs are going down. But firms that can combine cheap storage costs and cheap bandwidth might also find some unexpected new ways to improve their practice.
Bandwidth and storage are so cheap that law firms are now able to solve two problems simultaneously find a place to store millions of digital documents and make those documents more accessible to more people within a firm. Consequently, a firm really has no excuse if a disaster were to take down a whole office.
Until recently, most firms backed up things like accounting, timekeeping, Web collaboration, human resources and document management systems data only in the office where they were created. But when a firm backs up its data in a data center, anyone who can get online can still access their workload. The idea is to both prevent downtime and to make any information owned by the firm accessible in one convenient place. And with improvements in scanning technology, cheap storage media, and cheap bandwidth, law firms could easily become almost all digital. They should never need a warehouse or physical storage space again.
But one thing is keeping law firms from moving their data into off-site locations: fears about security. According to Wilens of West Group, law firms are reticent about letting outside technology companies touch their documents. “We do knowledge management for the Big Four accounting firms,” he says. “But the big law firms don’t want us to do it for them. I don’t know if it’s culture or what, but there’s no real difference in what they do from the accounting firms, so I think this fear is misplaced.”
Wired Justice
In the past couple of years, more courts have quietly begun rolling out something they’ve been threatening to for year’s electronic court filing. Like e-discovery, e-filing has finally reached a point where many lawyers can’t ignore it. In some places, it’s an option; in others, it’s become the mandatory way to file all court documents.
According to Gary Bockweg, project manager for the Electronic Case Files system at the U.S. Courts Administrative Office, 35 percent of documents in federal courts are now filed electronically. He says that figure is closer to 60 percent to 70 percent in bankruptcy courts where the high volume of files involved has led courts to embrace the technology.
All a lawyer needs to be able to e-file is a computer, high-speed Internet access and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF writer software, which costs around $120.
But depending on how sophisticated an e-filing system is, lawyers can use it to do more than just file briefs; they can gain an advantage over opposing counsel.
The federal court system keeps records of who looked at what documents and when. That means lawyers who know their way around the system can quickly see what documents their opponents have been researching. The system notifies lawyers via e-mail when a document is filed, so a lawyer who keeps on top of e-mail has the latest information. And if law firms can tie their document management system to the court docketing system, the firm can stay ahead of all filings and know everything that comes down from the court as soon as it is posted. More interesting, in some jurisdictions it is possible to serve opposing counsel electronically, which means no more chasing down people and verifying that documents have been received by the other side.
With effective e-filing, firms suddenly have an entire electronic case file. “Fully functional e-filing goes way beyond just filing documents,” says Tobias Hartmann, vice president of market planning with LexisNexis’ File & Serve. “For lawyers and the firm, it means more control over delivery and more information management you can have in a case.”
Really Special Stuff
RSS Really Simple Syndication feeds are available from most major legal Web sites like law.com, major news services like CNN and The New York Times, the White House press office, and most Web logs. All it takes is a free RSS reader like NewzCrawler or AmphetaDesk, then a click on a link or button on a Web site that says “XML,” and the software will begin feeding you articles on topics you request.
RSS is a great tool for lawyers who want to stay on top of news and events in their legal field, but some law firms could find it useful as a way to impress clients or as a marketing tool.
For example, a law firm can create special RSS feeds to announce seminars, services or news from the firm to its clients. Within a firm, RSS feeds can be set up to distribute documents, presentations or announcements of upcoming events. And RSS makes it harder for anyone to fall out of the loop, because messages aren’t bounced by spam filters the way e-mail may be.
But what’s more important, law firms that persuade their clients to set up an RSS feed can make clients feel important as they receive free news and updates from their lawyers. And as a marketing tool, law firms who make information on their Web sites available to RSS feeds know that anyone who subscribes is interested enough to actively seek to read your feed, something e-mail can’t promise.
“RSS gives the clients what they want: easy access to information from their lawyers,” Kennedy says. “And the firm suddenly gets an online knowledge base for anyone to draw on.”
Safety Zone
This is the item most law firms wish would disappear from the list. Hackers and viruses cost firms millions of dollars per year, and the problem seems to be getting worse. And as more lawyers log onto wireless networks, firms need to make sure they have proper security in place.
For a profession priding itself on confidentiality, law practice is relatively lax in its security precautions. According to the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey, just over half of lawyers report knowing whether they even have firewall software on their firm’s systems. A firewall doesn’t require someone to flip on a switch. But if lawyers don’t know such protection is there, can they be using it properly?
“A lot of firms just don’t have the resources to do security well,” Sherwood says. “Solos with two or three people on staff are often the people who get burned.”
But security doesn’t have to be a major burden or expense. The most important things lawyers need to do are to find out where their data is stored and how it’s vulnerable, and then put a firewall in place to protect it. Good firewalls can be had for a couple hundred dollars.
And once in place, someone needs to make sure those firewalls are kept current with the latest virus protection information.
“It doesn’t really take expensive software to secure your computers,” Sherwood says. “Security is a process: making sure the software you have is set up right and having the proper policies and practices in place.” Jason Krause is a legal affairs writer for the ABA Journal. His e-mail address is [email protected].
Sidebar
The MP3 Revolution
Note: The following has nothing to do with improving your law practice, but it may lead you to a kickin’ new sound system at home.
For many people, MP3 players like the iPod have changed the way they listen to music. People are throwing out CDs in favor of downloaded music from the Internet, or burning all their music discs onto little handheld players. But the MP3 isn’t just an alternative to portable CD players. Apple and other manufacturers are working to turn handheld music into the heart of everyone’s multimedia system.
Apple is positioning its little device to work with just about any stereo or computer system in your home, car or office. For example, with the Apple AirPort Extreme wireless network base station ($199), it is possible to have your MP3s beamed to any players in the house. Plug an iPod into the AirPort base station, then plug the AirPort Express ($129), a device about the size of a deck of playing cards, into an electrical outlet. Now plug your stereo system into the AirPort Express, and your stereo can receive and play music beamed from the AirPort base station.
Alternatively, Apple offers the Altec Lansing InMotion iM3 audio system ($179) to dock your iPod, turning it into a ministereo. With TEN Technology’s naviPod remote control ($50), you can control the iPod from across the room once it’s plugged into a PC or stereo system. The $190 iPod2car adapter is a box the size of a cigarette pack that lets almost any car stereo control an iPod, so that the car-stereo controls for changing tracks on CDs will allow you to skip through MP3 playlists.
And the iPod isn’t just for play anymore it can be used as a storage device or backup system. Migo Personal for iPod ($100) makes it possible to store e-mail, calendar and contacts on an iPod. Just plug it into a PC and download computer files alongside music files.
Apple’s not alone in this effort. Microsoft has been working on its new multimedia software, Windows XP Media Center, to integrate MP3 players into the PC like never before. This year, Dell, Gateway, HP and other firms such as Linksys have introduced companion devices, including MP3 players and personal digital assistants, for Media Center-equipped PCs. These Media Center-compatible devices can stream content stored on PCs to other devices like stereos or even a television using wireless or wired networking.
All of which means MP3 players can be integrated into your life the way portable players never could have been in the past. It means that after singing along with an iPod in the shower, the same music can be beamed to a stereo receiver in the kitchen or PC in the den. Then grab the iPod on the way out the door, and your MP3 playlist follows you for the whole day.
Of course, Apple isn’t the only player in the business. Virgin Electronics offers the $249 Virgin Player, a digital audio player with a 5GB hard disk. Archos has a handheld player for $250 and has a 20GB hard drive. Called the Gmini XS200, it is about the same size and price as an iPod mini, but has five times the storage capacity. And Dell offers the Pocket DJ 5, which sells for $199 and offers 5GB of storage, and a 20GB Dell DJ priced at $249.
– Jason Krause
