Law Office Technology

Here we go again!!!

Looks like Baton Rouge will take a direct hit.  Everyone is pretty calm but the traffic is horrible and the lines for gas are around the corner. 

I have been in Baton Rouge this week except for a brief trip to Monroe to speak for the Louisiana State Bar Association.  I went to the LSU game on Saturday which was at 10am.  It was hot, but I would say the stadium was 70% full.  I am not going to make any statements like I pretty much hurricane proofed the house, because the last two trees in my yard would probably crash into it.  I purchased a wireless card from AT&T on Friday so I should have Internet even if we lose power. 

I am very happy that I moved the office to hosted exchange and sharepoint.  I don't have to worry about backups or the system going down. 

Will keep you posted!!!

Life in the Cloud

Law Office Technology has begun the move to the Cloud.  This does not mean that I have lost my mind although I know several people who will disagree.  The servers at our office will be permanently shut down this weekend.  We are not going out of business but making the next technology jump which is dumping the servers and moving to a hosted or cloud environment.  I have run into a couple early adaptor law firms that already work this way and they can run heads and tails around a typical brick and mortars firm with much lower overhead.   

Basically the ideal is that instead of buying a server, you rent the server from a hosting company.  So, instead of a capital outlay of $5000 to install a server and paying a local company for support, you just pay $125.00 a month and get a guarantee 99.9% uptime.

I have started using Hosted Exchange 2007 and Hosted SharePoint.  All of our company documents are in SharePoint and all our email is in Exchange.   The company we use has 4 redundant data centers spread across the country which means I no longer have to worry about backups.  I will post updates on how this is going.

Microsoft Across America CLE

On August 1st, Law Office Technology along with Tom O' Conner from the Gulf Coast Technology Center, Digital Legal, and the Louisiana State Bar Association put on a seminar on how Law Firms could use Microsoft products in their practice.  Law Office Technology was able to get Microsoft to send down the Microsoft Across America Truck which was full of Microsoft Technology.  Attendees listened to three presentations and received CLE credit.  The first presentation dealt with Essential Technology a new firm would need to purchase.  The second, which in my opinion stole the show, was attorney Hector Lopez who described how his firm used Microsoft Hosted SharePoint and Hosted Exchange, along with a VOIP system to create a virtual office with none of the  limitations of a traditional brick and mortars Law Firm.  In my opinion, this is the future, today.  The last presentation, by me, described how Outlook with Business Contact Manager could be turned into a Case Management System. 

 

The Microsoft truck was filled with Smartphones, Servers, Tablet PCs, Projectors, Conferencing equipment, and an Xbox with Halo.  After each presentation Attorneys were able to file into the truck and see the technology in action.  With the success of this event, we hope to have the truck back in the spring.