practicehacker

It’s not often that I’m impressed, but I recently came across a SaaS product that had all the usual bells and whistles, as well as something different. ActionStep has what I expect in a practice management app, but instead of focusing on features it organizes everything around goals, objectives, and tasks. This means I can focus on doing my part while everyone else involved in that project is automatically kept informed of my progress and prompted to stay on the same page. Here’s how it works:

1. Choose one of the templates or create your own
2. Designate tasks, decide who should perform them
3. Specify the conditions that will call up those tasks

ActionStep is now ready to spring into action. In addition to launching tasks when the specified condition comes to pass, the program can notify team members of each other’s progress automatically. My favorite feature is the way ActionStep coordinates the whole process by letting me make tasks mandatory or optional, then making them dependent on the completion of prior milestones.  So I define the steps to be followed,  stay informed of everyone’s progress, and prevent anyone from getting around the rules.

For example:

ActionStep’s document automation features let me customize standard intake forms to include the type of matter and prospect contact information.

Once I indicate that the document is finished, my paralegal is prompted automatically to call or e-mail the prospect. ActionStep even auto-generates the e-mail message.

The calendar feature pings me to attend the meeting. Once I indicate the meeting is over, ActionStep automatically bills the time and sends any notes or uploaded documents to my paralegal so she can take the next step.

So far so good. But here’s the real difference between ActionStep and existing systems:

If I indicate the meeting resulted in a hire, then ActionStep adds tasks like creation of physical and electronic files, customization and enclosure of a Retention Letter, and creation and enclosure of an e-mail to the new client.

If I indicate that the meeting did not result in a hiring decision, ActionStep can prompt me to follow up in time or send out a “No Hire” letter.

The system is competitively priced on a subscription basis and you can click here for a free 30 day trial.

P.S. If you try it out, post your impressions in the comments , share them by e-mail, ping me on Twitter, or post on my Facebook wall. I’d like to know what you think. Cheers.

This recent piece in ComputerWorld highlights the growing interest in hosted Microsoft Exchange. No surprise; but why now? And if you use Hotmail or Gmail, you may even ask why hosted Exchange is worthwhile at all. If so, consider this:

First, hosted Exchange offers full-featured contacts, calendaring, and e-mail in tight integration, just like the Outlook on your desk. Meanwhile, it spares users the typical pain in the ass features of a self-hosted Microsoft product: compatibility issues, upgrades, backup problems, disaster-recovery, smartphone support, spam filtering, patching, etc. In effect, with hosted Exchange you get your own “virtual e-mail server” in a secure, faraway datacenter, but only pay for what you use, usually on a monthly basis. Microsoft has been using this deployment model for some time in the educational market and it has worked.

Second, whereas Microsoft takes a top down approach to security, Google generally works from the bottom up. For instance, Google generally starts with consumer-facing products and scale them upwards until they can work in an enterprise environment. Thus Gmail, Google Calendar, GTalk, and a host of Google consumer toys has been integrated and reborn as Google Apps. Microsoft on the other hand usually starts with enterprise products, makes an obscene amount of money via licensing, and scales down to smaller business and consumers. This was the genesis of Outlook.

Third, consider that the gap between Google Apps and Microsoft Office is getting narrower all the time. And with its Office 365 product Microsoft is blurring the line between it and Google even further. Office 365 retains the look and feel of MS Office, while saving the organization tons of money and virtually eliminating the need for beefed-up IT departments (sorry IT guys).

As with all technology, lawyers are the last to know. Once the cat is out of the bag though, news spreads fast. Your opponents are going to take every advantage they can, so you should too. Ultimately hosted applications such as Exchange and web-based applications like Office 365 and Google Apps are the future. And why not: law firms are about serving clients, not endlessly fiddling with their IT infrastructure.

Check out the video at Google Apps for Business

Hey Microsoft, stick this in your hard drive! Google Apps for Business, already fast gaining ground with both Fortune 500 and SMB customers with its dead simple suite of cloud-driven, maintenance-free business applications, just brought the smack down, introducing over 60 new applications (all Google properties) to every account for the bargain price of $0/month.  Game, set, match.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

(... still more) Predictions ...

I was going to write something clever here but … screw it. This is what I think is going to happen in 2010.

1. Big law firms lose clients due to high overhead and lack of value
2. Small law firms pick up the clients and their profitability jumps
3. Unemployed grads go solo en masse depressing all lawyer wages
4. Home and flex offices, telecommuting, and telepresence catch on
5. Inefficient lawyers lose while those with social media savvy win
6. Walled gardens like Facebook thrive at the expense of open ones
7. Lawyers will use Twitter and Facebook at last, but still suck at it
8. Lawyers.com beats Avvo by selectively going public on some level
9. Blogs v. Twitter: Kevin O’Keefe and Rex Gradeless fight to the death
10. Real-time search and social media change legal research forever

Bonus: I finally stop making stupid predictions about the future of legal tech.

Feel free to share your thoughts about the coming year in the comments section below. See you in the new year.

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies:
Smart Ways to Work Together

“Law practice is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process”
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle

Summary: The Lawyer’s Guide offers a solid list of resources for lawyers seeking to collaborate. It is practically jargon-free as well, and frames its discussions with a look at the past before discussing more modern modes of collaboration. The book is also a great introduction to technology for lawyers of a certain age (i.e. Baby Boomers), although younger lawyers may find it to be a little too basic.

The Good: The authors of The Lawyer’s Guide display sensitivity to attorneys who came of age before the Internet was pervasive, and they do it without over-explaining or being too didactic.

The Bad: The authors do their best to treat the products attorneys have been using for decades, such as Microsoft Office programs, as collaboration tools. By today’s standards these programs are more likely to obstruct collaboration than to enable it. In the age of Twitter, Wikis, Zoho, SaaS, and Google Wave, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Ugly: As I read The Lawyer’s Guide I kept asking myself why the authors didn’t treat technology-enabled collaboration as a smart way to business instead of like the Rubic’s Cube of law practice (perplexing, complex, exasperating). It really isn’t that hard.

Evaluation: Keeping in mind what the books sets out to do, I give The Lawyer’s Guide a hearty endorsement and 4 hacks out of 5. In places it is a bit too basic but overall you can’t go wrong giving this book a read – either because you are a lawyer of a certain age or because you work for one.

Just got my invitation to Google Wave. Should be called Google Crack. I’ve been online for 5 hours and still want to experiment but I’m about to pass out. To put it in perspective, I heard about the invitation at 8:30 Friday night. It is now 6:40 Saturday morning. I’ve been tooling around with Wave since 2:45 AM (didn’t sleep last night, okay?).

Turns out that Wave isn’t that complex (despite appearances). The most apt description I’ve heard yet was offered on Bwana.tv where the host referred to it as an open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communication …. that just happens to draw on nearly all Google’s media properties – e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), games, pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), documents (Google Docs), real-time online collaboration (Google Docs again), etc.

The  point is his tool could really, really change the way we communicate with each other and with clients. It’s that useful. I’ll keep my readers up to date. So far so good.

P.S. In true Internet, word-of-mouth, hacker fashion I got my invitation through a longtime online contact I originally met blogging, who got it from a contact of his, and so on.  You could say we scarcely know one another but he helped me become part of the 100,000 who got Wave invites. Thanks for that bro!

Wave is Google’s open-sourced real-time multimedia platform for communications, combining e-mail (gmail), video (YouTube), pictures (Picasa), IM (gTalk), social networking (Orkut), and real-time online collaboration (Google Docs).