Get Out, Get Known and Cut Overhead to the Bone is a great post from Chuck Newton at Spare Room Tycoon.

Law.com has an article today called “When to Go VoIP? That Is The Question” As always, it seems some of the “mainstream” legal publications are behind the eight ball on advances in law firm technology.

Some of us have been discussing VoIP for law firms now for some time. Some of those bloggers include:

Bankruptcy Practice Pro

FutureLawyer

Kansas Business Lawyer

Third Wave – Chuck Newton

Greatest American lawyer

I know I have missed some. My point is this. Solos are in a position to try new technology before “big law” is. How much easier it is for the “partnership committee” of a solo firm to make a change and adopt new things. How much easier is it for the solo “technology committee” to adapt to new technology. We are the committee. I remember recently I received an email from Richard Georges of the FutureLawyer describing how he was having a partnership committee meeting on his way to his office. The meeting involved himself. No senior partners to contend with and no other committee to deal with. Topic brought up, discussion ensued, and decision made. How great is that.

For all of you law students who read this blog, and I thank you, don’t overlook a solo practice. One of the best things about it, is you will be the firm and you can do things the way you want. You can pick the type of law you want to practice. You can pick the technology you want to use. Which will be Mac of course!!! And you are the one who makes the decisions that affect you and the future of your firm. You and no one else. There is a sense of freedom in that. And I know, there is a sense of fear too. The great thing about it for you law students is that you are not going at it alone. There is a ton of information and help out there and I have only mentioned a small part of it. If you don’t read Build a Solo Practice, LLC and My Shingle, shame on you. They should both be required reading at law school.

I have actually been voicing my opinion about this for sometime now. And it seems I may have been right.

Yesterday’s Apple press event saw the unveiling of new iMacs and major updates to the company’s iLife and iWork software suites. But it also provided further insight into the cosy relationship developing between Apple and Google, with greater integration between the two companies’ product lines.

What’s new? iMovie ‘08 adds the ability to upload video direct to YouTube, and iWeb (Apple’s web page creation software) now integrates with Google Maps and YouTube, along with support for Adsense.

Combine these efforts with the existing iPhone tie-ins — Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail — along with AppleTV’s recently added support for YouTube, and we can see how the Apple/Google alliance is strengthening.

And don’t forget there is a Google person on the board at Apple. So what more could we see?

With iWorks ‘08 adding a user-friendly spreadsheet application, in addition to word processing, Google Docs integration could be a possibility. Google’s also thought to be developing its own web-based presentation software, so the same might apply to Apple’s Keynote software too. Along these lines we could also see Google Docs support coming to the iPhone, and were that to happen, then in many ways the much talked about GPhone would already exist, except it would be spelt with an “i”.

I look for more good stuff to come. Especially when one considers the possible web based applications one can use on the iPhone and where Google is going with that. And if you consider that the iPhone will most likely move from the EDGE network to 3g sometime, speed for web based applications will not be a problem.

There are just too many possibilities this relationship could bring to the user.

Source for Post: last100