ThinkStewart has a unique understanding of the technology used and required in modern legal practice. Network infrastructure, electronic filing systems, electronic discovery, inner office policies and procedures that optimize technology to maximize billable time for attorneys and staff and many other strategies can streamline how a law office functions while reducing overhead. Remote access to a central server allows attorneys to work on documents from anywhere, billing time everywhere. Digital dictation systems would allow attorneys to dictate correspondence, pleadings and a variety of other documents cheaply and more reliably than old tapes, and save every recording to the file. Electronic discovery saves the firm, and their clients, loads of dough in paper and postage costs. Whether you’re producing an MSJ with 10 exhibits on a CD to 2 other attorneys or 10,000 pages of Bates labeled discovery response documents to 10 other attorneys on DVDs, the cost is minimal. The options are limitless and ThinkStewart has a solution to help your firm, and at the best price in town too.
Answers to questions in the money saving mind:
How effective is remote access, or remote desktop, and how easy is it to use?
Incredibly. Even a senior partner whose fresh off a typewriter can use it. We couldn’t even list all the benefits to remote desktop so we’ll keep it short. When people think of remote access they think of working from home. That’s one of the many advantages. An office pays for licenses for it’s productivity software (Microsoft Office, Professional version of Windows, access to your billing and filing databases), with remote desktop you’re just logging on and using the licenses you’ve already paid for. Not only do you have access to those files or databases you needed and not only do you have access to them from the comfort of your home, you have access to them from any beach side resort on your favorite tropical island.
Is digital dictation really easier to use, cheaper and safer than my handy tape recorder?
Yes, when people think of digital dictation recording, they usually think along the same lines of when they used a tape recorder. The rapid expanse in mobile technology has changed this though. Apps for iPhones and Android based phones are now available to turn your smart phone into a dictation machine, usually for free. The attorney can record it and email it directly from their phone to their staff for transcription. It gets better, if your staff is swamped, you have a one-man practice or just don’t want to hire another paralegal to cover the high times, there are outsourcing options where you can upload a file and have it professionally transcribed and emailed back to you, with 99% accuracy, for a fraction of what a paralegal would cost to hire. The cost can be passed on to the client as well, no skin off your back. Of course, for those who love their flip-phone and prefer their dictation to be done by someone they’ve known for 10 years, there are digital recording devices that offset the cost of tapes and lost hours of recording very quickly.
How much money could electronic discovery really save? Won’t I lose money I’ve invested in my copier by digitizing instead of copying?
Long gone are the days of paying someone to stand over a copier for 5 hours just to spend hundreds of dollars to ship all those documents to someone who could care less about the size of your clients bill. Now you can scan it once, put it on a CD/DVD, make as many copies as you want and it only costs $.44 to mail. Let opposing counsel bill their clients to print it all out, don’t make your client pay for it. The benefits are even greater for contingency cases by keeping the cost of each case as lower than ever possible by previous strategies. The profit center aspect of the copier isn’t lost either, the original scan can be billed per page to offset wear and tear on your scanning unit and flat rate DVD/CD copies can be billed. If 1000 pages have to be produced to 4 people, that’s $400 your client could be paying for your time, and 4000 pages of wear on your copier. Electronically the client pays $100 to scan and whatever price you set for each CD. They pay $275 less and you don’t have to make that $90/hr copier maintenance call. Your staff can work on real work too instead of copying all day. We won’t even go into the in house benefits like putting all that electronic discovery on your iPad to take to Florida instead of that old Ox box full of papers. The benefits are endless.
Are technology policies, procedures and official strategies really that important and do they really save that much money?
Absolutely and yes. The great thing about technology is it’s always changing, always improving and always growing more powerful. The investment in this technology is the first step. It’s human nature to resist change. We haven’t seen a company yet where every employee welcomed every change with open arms and abandoned their old ways with a gleeful wave. Offices are like machines, they have to be synchronized to function efficiently. You’re only as effective as the least effective person in the group. We recommend that every office have rigid technology policies. Trust us, you’ll end up with the one 20 year veteran who couldn’t get something to work one time and soon you find in them back room dusting off their typewriter and handwriting letters. We recommend that regular training be done to keep your staff sharp also. You may not be training your staff but the other firms are, which means their cases cost their office less money and they’re spending more time at home with their kids. If formal outside training is out of the questions, we’d like to encourage every business to seek out free online services that offer webcasts and other training for free. If you can’t find any, let us know and we’ll send some common resources we have found helpful at no charge. When you get your staff to all intermediate level users, you can call us back and we’ll make them pros.
