The Mac Lawyer

Guest Post :: Online Legal Practice Management Software Predictions for 2009

What a year for web-based legal practice management!  After so many years of the same desktop-based options, in 2008 the field was broken wide open by Rocket Matter and other new online, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for law firms.

Looking back at 2008, it's clear that law firms were in need for a solution like ours.  For years, SaaS has been successfully applied to sales force automation, HR and payroll, project management, and other mission critical businesses.  The legal industry, traditionally slow to adopt technology, was ready.

2008 was a year of getting started, dipping the toes, and commencing a dialog about online practice management.  But as 2009 draws near, the concept of web-based legal practice management will no longer be brand new.  So what's in store for the coming year?  Here are some of my thoughts:

1) Expect more features.

What you'll most likely see over the course of the next year is increased feature parity among the online legal practice management and time and billing providers.  As the online apps begin to approach the functionality of their desktop counterparts, watch for a trend towards standard features, such as documents and increased integration with standard apps.  You will also see web-only features gain prominence, such as integration with other online applications (i.e. Google Maps) and client portals.

Guest Post :: Daylite Is Like Origami

Today, I am pleased to present the following Guest Post from Marnï "The MacAngel" Melrose, which she discusses Marketcircle's outstanding productivity suite, Daylite:

I’ve been teaching Lawyers and their staff how to use Daylite for seven years, and it just keeps getting better and better. I teach my clients to make Daylite their steel trap. Everything goes into Daylite, including their own personal lives, and their entire business is coordinated and conducted out of Daylite.

I really don't know of anything out there that can tie in everything like Daylite does in a multi-user environment at Daylite's price point on the Mac platform. Trust me, I have looked; I suffer from NGA (next greatest app disease) myself. And of course, Apple's App store in iTunes isn't helping me any with that. But as hard as I've searched, I still haven't found anything that can compete with Daylite. I've even found a way to follow David Allen's GTD "Getting Things Done" in Daylite. 

Daylite is like origami. 

What I do know is that Daylite is daunting for some folks, and I completely understand. Think of a blank piece of paper. What do you do with it? Well, it depends who you give it to. If you give it to most people they won't know what to do with it, they will "draw a blank". If you give it to someone who makes Origami, you are going to get a beautiful piece of art back. It's the same sheet of paper. You just have to know where to make the folds. Daylite is a lot like that. If you give it to me or another Daylite Partner, we know where to put the data so that you can get it out again in a useful manner. 

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that I am completely biased. In addition to teaching people how to use Daylite, I've actually been using Daylite in my own business for seven years. It is because of Daylite that my business has changed to what it is today. I used to go out and do general Mac tech support onsite with clients. Daylite helped me to see where most of my income was coming from and so in January of last year I started to shift my business focus to nothing but Daylite. 

Ross Kodner Gets Taken to Task for Anti-Mac Article

Last week, Ross Kodner published an article on the TechnoLawyer Blog which cautioned against using Macs in your law practice.  As you might imagine, Mr. Kodner's post generated a good bit of discussion in the Macs In Law Offices forum, and I am pleased to present the following response from MILO member Brian Sajdak:

In his recent SmallLaw post entitled "Why Macs Don't Make Sense Once You Look Past the Cool Factor", Ross Kodner concludes that Macs are just not cut-out for the legal marketplace.  I, and thousands of other Mac-using attorneys, couldn't disagree more.  I will respond to the various points Mr. Kodner makes in a moment, but first, a little background.

 

My computing experience started in the mid-1980s with an Apple ][c.  I was in grade school and was the first kid on the block to whose family had a personal computer at home. That was followed quickly by am IBM clone runing Windows, and by 1990 I was well-entrenched into the anti-Mac crowd. I went through high school, college, and law school completely on Windows machines.  

Then in 2002 I started to hear about this new device call an iPod.  After playing with and drooling over my computer-geek brother-in-law's iPod and iBook, I was hooked. I was struck by the way that they just simply worked together, and I would purchase my first iBook in 2004. I write this now on MacBook, my third Apple computer.

 

However, even though I a Mac for personal use at home, my life in a relatively large law firm meant that I was using a PC at work. My house is still home to two Windows machines (although both have been relegated to nothing more than file servers). In June of this year, I swiched to a small firm where my computing choices were not made for me -- and I've made the switch to a Mac-based pratice. The bottom line is that I know the pluses and minuses to both systems.

 

Back to Mr. Kodner's conclusion that Macs don't make sense for the law office.  Aside from the fact that this conclusion is directly contrary his his prior opinion on the subject (see his earlier article, "The Legal Mac: A Practical Option for All Lawyers"), it is clear that this post was nothing more than an attempt to get people talking about him.  (There is no such thing as negative publicity, right?)  

Guest Post :: The Benefits of a Mac-Driven Practice

The following Guest Post is from noted Nashville trial attorney, Eddie Davidson, in which he explains his thoughts on a some of the benefits of having a Mac-driven practice – especially the flexibility of his MacBook Pro.

MY PRACTICE

I handle catastrophic injury cases. My case volume is low, but each case demands a lot of attention and detail work. Every deposition I take is a video deposition. Video depos are an indispensible tool throughout the litigation process as I am continually re-framing my case in anticipation of trial. I am fortunate to have an outstanding videographer, Lisa Williams, who works with me. She is Mac-based. About five years ago she inspired me to take the leap from PC to Mac, and I am forever grateful. I am now all Mac all the time.

I offer here a specific instance in which the MacBook Pro (MBP) helped turn a difficult case into a complete success. But before I get to the details of that case, I should point out that in my pre-Mac days, I would hire local video studios to edit my video depos – and it cost me a FORTUNE!!! I paid out tens of thousands of dollars over the years for others to do what I can now do – from start to finish – on my MBP. I am a Mac evangelist.

CASE SPECIFICS

The case involved a tragic intersection collision in which my client, a 17-year passenger in a Honda Civic, incurred fatal injuries upon being ejected from the Civic when it collided with a Heavy Duty GMC truck owned by a regional corporation and driven by an entrusted employee. The young plaintiff never went home. He died in his hospital bed 31 days after the wreck. The accident report placed all blame on the driver of the Civic – who had minimal coverage limits.

I was retained several months after the collision. I looked at the photos, the news clip and talked to a police officer that worked the scene. The accident report notwithstanding, my review of the photos convinced me that the GMC truck was traveling at an excessive speed – far above the posted 45 mph limit. I brought in a top-notch PE PhD engineering expert – one that I have trusted many times before – who concurred. I filed suit and requested the EDR. Click here and you will see for yourself whether our hunch was correct.

THE ROLE OF THE MBP

The MBP played a huge role in this case. As always, I used it to edit the many video depos. I also used Garage Band to record a few witness statements. But hands down, the most effective use of the MBP was using Photo Booth to take video statements of witnesses. In the video clip you will see two Photo Booth generated excerpts, one of a retired judge (he was in no way associated with the instant case) and the other of an on-site witness. They both contradicted the defendant driver of the GMC. Their video statements literally turned the case around.

Guest Post :: Should You Employ Technology at Trial?

I am pleased to present the following Guest Post from Blake Boyd, who is one of the premier Trial Technologists and Legal Presentation Specialists in America:

Since the advent and rise in popularity of the internet, the general public has changed the way we all gather our news, research and general information.  This electronic age has trickled it's way into the courtroom.  Many major cities in the United States are adding courtroom A/V expenses into their budgets.  Newly constructed courthouses are almost guaranteed to at least include a projector, screen, and sometimes individual monitors for the Judge and Jury to view.  Have you found yourself wondering how you can take advantage of these visual tools?

As the technology has become more popular so has the usage of Trial Technologists.  When I started helping present evidence in trial 8 years ago, the major fear of most attorneys was they would look "too flashy".  Other attorneys in the courtroom would joke saying, "Are you going to show us movies?  Do we get to watch you play games?  What is all of this for?"  I would sit back and smile as they didn't understand how powerful it is to explain the issues of a case visually to the Jury.  Now those same attorneys are trying their hardest to incorporate audio visual presentations into their case.  

I talk to many attorneys that are having trouble justifying the added expense of hiring a Trial Technologist, and while I'm an strong advocate of the usage of technology in the courtroom, some cases do, and some don't, justify that expense.  When trying to help them answer this question I tell them to think about these different options, each has their pro's and con's:

Guest Post :: Getting the Most Out of Boot Camp

After reading last week's Guest Post by Todd Juneau, Paul Meyerson submitted a comment suggesting some additional ways to get the most out of Boot Camp.  I asked him to expand his thoughts into a Guest Post, which I am now pleased to share with you:

As a Mac consultant in New York City for Templeton & Associates, I have a number of clients around the city that occasionally require Mac-PC interactivity.  If at all possible, we try to keep our users on the Mac side, but occasionally there is an application or two that just need Windows.  For those clients, I had been recommending Parallels, as Todd mentioned, although VM Ware's newest offering, Fusion v. 2.0, has me seriously leaning towards that application.  I've found in personal use that VM Ware is MUCH faster to boot, takes less of the Mac's resources (Parallels can slow the Mac to a crawl while it's trying to load up), and is just more compatible than is Parallels on a wide range of Windows applications.  However, ultimately, both are emulation software, and as a result are much slower than even an entry level PC -- even if that PC was running the languid Vista!  

So, if you're a Mac user and need to run a PC on occasion like a true, fast, serious work PC, your solution should be Boot Camp.   To their credit, Macs are able to read and write PC disks generally "out-of-the-box".  Small devices like flash drives, CDs, and even hard drives less than 32 GB that are formatted for windows are readable -- and writable -- on the Mac natively.  Larger volumes, however, such as any modern hard drive will show up on the Mac desktop as read-only.  This is because on the PC side there are two basic ways to format a hard drive -- FAT32 and NTFS.  FAT32 is an old format, and maxes out at a 32 GB partition.  This was not a big deal when we were talking about Windows 95 and a few much smaller application.  However, when you start installing Windows XP, Service Packs, Office 2007, and all of the typical additions that you need for a viable, and useful, PC partition, 32 GB is downright puny.  

Enter NTFS, a much more modern hard drive format, and one that supports today's massive sized hard drives.  However, NTFS, as mentioned, is natively a read-only format when you're booted from the Mac side, and it's often really useful to be able to copy things between your Mac partition and your PC/Boot Camp partition.  For this, there is a highly useful application by Paragon Software called NTFS for OS X that installs as a simple system preference on the Mac side, and after a simple reboot, all of your previously read-only PC volumes are now read/write.  

What about when you're on the PC side and want to interact with your Mac files?  As Todd mentioned regarding sharing iTunes, there are ways around it, but they're sloppy and inefficient -- at worst copying all the same files to both volumes, and at best using some online substitute like Pandora or streaming radio.  However, with a lovely little application by Mediafour called MacDrive, your Mac volumes become completely read/write on the PC, and you can simply access your iTunes by setting up iTunes on the PC to just add your songs to the library, and not copy them to the PC drive.  One copy of your music and one copy of your data files -- multiple platforms on the same machine.

Stick with Mac if you can, but in a Windows world, these two pieces of software can make your forays onto "The Dark Side" almost seamless.

Paul Meyerson is a Senior Engineer at Templeton & Associates, a New York-based consulting firm that specializes in Macintosh solutions, including building networks, setting up servers, developing custom Filemaker solutions, integrating Macs into PC offices, and many other aspects of the Macintosh world. He has spent more than 10 years consulting to a major NY-based bankruptcy law firm, among many other clients, and helping keep them all ahead of the curve in the technology field by sticking with Macs.

Guest Post :: Using Windows on a Mac

The following guest post is from Todd Juneau, a registered patent attorney in Alexandria, Virginia:

I wanted to share a recent experience I had loading Windows on my Mac machines.  In summary, I am very pleased with my Mac/Windows setup.  A few years ago, I switched from Windows to Linux to Mac OS.  After a few years, I wanted to install a law office practice management suite.  Unfortunately, the ones I liked, ran on Windows.  After much research trying to find a “work-around”, I tried to load Windows on my various Mac machines.

I used Boot Camp to let me run Windows on my iMac.  It partitions the drive, lets you load Windows XP SP2 (or Vista), and gives you a way to switch OS’s by re-booting.  Which (rebooting) by the way is extremely fast.  Apparently, iMac’s are very happy running XP; my experience has been the same: fast.  I know that Parallels and other VM software lets you run both OS’s at the same time, with fast switching, but I avoided this approach due to concerns I had about having a slow machine.

Once XP SP2 is loaded (you can buy XP SP2 at Best Buy), then you can run all your favorite Windows programs natively.  Of course, you’ll need to do all the XP updates (SP3 works well on my iMac) and you’ll need to get some antivirus software -- I used ClamWin since it is free and a fast download.  I didn’t want my XP exposed to the internet without it – since Windows “announces” itself to networks, viruses can infect exposed machines within minutes, or less.

I’d recommend looking into getting the Mac Mini if you already have a flat screen and keyboard/mouse devices,  Get the bigger one (the bigger Mini), with more memory and better combo-drive.  Then, use your own flat screen, and a wireless keyboard/mouse set up –- check out Logitech EX110 –- it’s about $40.  That way, you’ll have a “Windows” keyboard, which works well on the Mac OS side, instead of a “Mac” keyboard that is missing some of the special Windows functions –- sound, shortcuts, etc.  It’s all so very compact.

Guest Post :: Lawyer Uses His Mac to Create Online Video To Get New Clients

The following guest post is from Gerry Oginski, a Mac-using medical malpractice & personal injury trial lawyer in Great Neck, New York:

As the internet has taken hold and more lawyers have recognized the benefits of marketing online, one marketing tool is defining the standard of advertising on the web. Online videos. It is the newest, hottest tool available for lawyers to communicate their message on the web. Admittedly, attorney videos are one-way communication, but they offer significant advantages over every other advertising medium.

Most attorneys have failed to understand the true value of video and how it can improve their chances of a potential client calling them over their competitor. Legal marketing experts agree that the sooner you start to see the value of video marketing, the sooner you’ll see the results. Legal marketing expert Larry Bodine recently commented that putting video on your website is “...a great opportunity to present how you look, how you talk, what you're like, and make yourself more attractive to clients. It's a great business-getting technique.” The key to encouraging a website visitor to call you, is with video. Static websites and fancy graphics just do not cut it any more, and fail to distinguish yourself from your competitor. Tom Foster, CEO of Foster Web Marketing says “If you get in early by putting video on your website, you can take advantage of good search placement on the video search engines.”

If you thought that internet video was for the MTV crowd, you'd be wrong. If you thought that video for your website was only for geeky techno-lawyers, you'd be wrong too. If you thought that putting a video of yourself online was useless, you'd definitely be wrong. In fact, Google thinks you're so wrong that they recently paid one billion dollars to buy a video sharing site called YouTube. To give you an idea about the reach that internet video has, consider a ten minute video clip by comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham: his video has been viewed over 60 million times. Most attorney videos are viewed in the hundreds of times, but it shows the potential that video has. Plus, if done correctly, does not cost you anything more if it is watched 100 times or 100,000 times.

Guest Post :: A Primer for Viewing Medical Images on a Mac

The following Guest Post is from William A. Jackson, M.D., a Radiologist with Beaufort Medical Imaging at Beaufort Memorial Hospital:

Why is a physician writing on an attorney’s blog?  First, I have been a Mac user for fourteen years, and this blog is about Mac use.  The inspiration for this particular post came from a discussion with a fellow physician who is currently involved in a medical malpractice case.  He was asked for the medical images involved in the case, which he provided on a CD.  The requesting attorney was unfamiliar with the viewing software on the CD, and he did not realize all of the images were there but needed to be scrolled through.  Accusations were then made that information was deliberately withheld, which had its own set of hearings and unnecessarily increased the cost, time and stress for all involved.  As an impartial party, I saw an opportunity to contribute information that could have prevented this misunderstanding and offer an advantage to fellow Mac users.

Modern digital medical images are stored in DICOM format.  DICOM (Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine) is a standardized format based on a lossless JPEG format that can carry additional medical data about the images.  The data identifies the type of study, patient name and date, much like the metadata tags that people are now applying to their digital photos.  In order to view the DICOM images, you must have a DICOM viewer.  At the hospital (or office) that took the images, they will have PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System).  These systems can stores thousands of images and allow for viewing of the images at multiple locations.  The images can be printed on conventional film or burned onto a CD or DVD.  Due to cost savings and convenience, the CD/DVD format is preferred.  Most CD/DVD’s will include a copy of a free DICOM viewer; however, most assume that a Windows PC will be used and that Internet Explorer will be the default browser, often with ActiveX turned on.

So what are Mac users to do?  Of course, they can opt to use Boot camp, virtualization or a spare PC, but they can still have problems based on the assumptions already mentioned.  The best option for Mac users is OsiriX.  OsiriX is an open source DICOM viewer for Mac OS X.  It can open CD’s and DVD’s that contain DICOM images.  This allows you to view the images just as a radiologist or other physician would view them on a PACS.  The settings can be adjusted and areas of interest measured if desired.  OsiriX has the capability if working as a 3-D work station which is likely well above the needs of most attorneys.  The most important aspect, I feel, is the ability to view the images in a familiar format.  If you rely on the software included on the CD/DVD, each will have its own user interface.  This means that you must learn multiple ways of doing the same thing, often with contradictory results for the same action on different viewers.  This consistent user interface will make you more efficient at handling the images and less likely to over look some of the images.

OsiriX can allow you to store a copy of the images so you will still have them if the CD/DVD is damaged or lost.  You can make your own discs to distribute to your colleagues or witnesses.  You can store the images on a hard drive, locally or networked.  You can then export the images in a variety of formats.  You can burn CD’s or DVD’s.  You can also export to other drives or iPods.  They can be upload to web servers or iDisks.  Images can be exported in standard JPEG for incorporation into presentations.

As a radiologist, I find OsiriX useful even though I work at a hospital with a good PACS.  OsiriX is better at finding the DICOM images than our PACS, although some of that is due to protective settings on the PACS.  OsiriX opens nearly every disc that comes in.  There is one office that formats the disc in such a way that I have to manually find and load the images, which is fortunately the rare exception.  In fact OsiriX is so powerful, that there have even been a couple of times when it saved the day.  A referring physician wanted the outside images loaded onto our PACS and even with a $150,000 imaging work station designed to import images,  I had to extract the images from the disc, burn a new one using OsiriX, and then we could load the images onto PACS through the work station.  Not bad for free software!

William A. Jackson, M.D.
Beaufort Medical Imaging
Beaufort Memorial Hospital

Guest Post :: Four Reasons for Archiving Email Correspondence

The following Guest Post is from Jesmond Darmanin, a Web Marketer with GFI Software, and it explains the "Four Reasons for Archiving Email Correspondence":

Email is a primary source of documentation for many organizations and it has taken on an increasingly critical role in corporate court proceedings, regulatory compliance and legal discovery. Companies are realizing the importance of archiving their email correspondence, since being in a position to retrieve an old email could save them thousands of dollars in legal fees and fines, as well as their credibility.

The following are four legal reasons why companies need to archive their email correspondence:

1. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the ‘1934 Act’) :: requires various entities to maintain records for five years and more. Failure to do so can result in severe fines.
2. The Commodity Futures Training Commission (CFTC) :: requires futures commission merchants to keep records for five years. Failure to comply can result in hefty fines.
3. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (‘Sarbanes Oxley’) :: accountants must keep all audit or review workpapers for a minimum of five years. Violation of this rule can lead to a fine and imprisonment.
4. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) (formerly the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD)) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) :: members are required to preserve records for no less than six years or they can be imposed with a civil fine.

Email archiving can help companies to abide by all four requirements mentioned above, because emails are archived at server level, so no matter if a copy is deleted by the end-user from his/her computer terminal, once an archive exists with all correspondence entered into by the company then the emails are searchable and retrievable and can be presented in court or as requested.  Moreover, one is also able to offer the assurance that the email was not tampered with or altered in any way, thus making it a legal and binding document that could save a company or organization a lot of money in a legal situation. Companies that are unable to provide email documentation that is requested by the courts or other legal body could be subject to hefty fines, as they would be in breach of legal requirements.

A more in depth article on e-mail archiving can be found HERE.

Jesmond Darmanin  ::  Web Marketer  ::  GFI Software

GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. With award-winning technology and a strong focus on small-to-medium sized businesses, GFI is able to satisfy the need for business continuity and productivity encountered by organizations on a global scale.