The National Creditors Bar Association Law Practice Management Blog

Remember  that old Twilight Zone episode ?  ( It’s a cookbook! )   Well, this time, it’s  not hungry aliens  that are coming for us: it’s your server, and what it really wants is your wallet.   If you haven’t fully adopted cloud software, you’re likely storing your documents and email on a server.  But, there are a lot of associated costs for maintaining physical servers, like: the space they require, their need to be cooled, the electricity they suck up, the requirement to manage your own data backup and the frequent replacement cost.   But, when you are entirely cloud-based, you’re essentially renting server space from another entity (probably Amazon or Google, even if you’re using another vendor), and all those affiliated costs go away.  And, since  the cloud is essentially eternal (at least so far as your lifespan is concerned)  the replacement cost never accrues.  Instead, you pay monthly o r  annual fees for ...

Quick: What are  the  two things that lawyers do the most ?   If you answered: respond to email and create documents, you’d be right.  Yet, even as lawyers spend more time creating documents (pushing electronic paper) than anyone else, they’re still using antiquated methods for building documents from templates.   Attorneys are very good at creating specific documents for clients from existing templates.  But, when they run through that process, they’re often using antiquated tools, like ‘find and replace’ ,  or making edits by hand.  That’s one of the reasons that legal services are so expensive, is that lawyers’ old school methods make it that way.   The average solo lawyer would pay less than $100 per month for document automation software; and still, most law firms don’t implement  it .  Think, however, about the advantages of doing so.  What if you could finalize an estate planning package in 1/4 of the time.  Imagine t...