Virtual Law Office — Legal Practice Pro

Being A Virtual Lawyer Is All Mindset, Not Technology

July 20, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Being A Virtual Lawyer Is All Mindset, Not Technology What did it take for me to become a virtual lawyer? I was sitting on the terrace, looking out over the beach in Acapulco. It was 85 degrees and sunny, yet the breeze coming off the water kept me cool.

My vacation was hard-fought, and well-deserved after the sprint leading up to the change in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in October 2005. I took a sip of my morning coffee and pondered whether I’d have lunch in the hotel or at a little taco place my wife and I had discovered the day before.

My laptop chirped at me, and I snapped on my headset. It was time for a consultation appointment. Virtual bankruptcy lawyer springs to action, leaving the coffee behind!

There was a time when the notion of a virtual law office was unheard of. A law firm operating without books, without desks, and without a physical location was unprofessional and extremely unorthodox.

No longer is that the case. Companies such as VLOTech and DirectLaw will help you get your virtual on. Free and low-cost applications help shuttle you to the cloud, where a world of wonder awaits you. Work from the beach, across the world, or just from your home with the dog by your side.

Lovely, no?

But here’s the problem – and it’s a real one. The VLO model is largely an online document and communication repository for lawyers. But a VLO does not help you become a profitable virtual lawyer, or to transform your law office into a virtual one.

My firm has a physical location, but I’m not enamored of going there. I’ve got a totally different mindset. The mindset of a virtual lawyer, not one of a land-based attorney.

Take, for example, the story I told you at the beginning of this piece. You may be amazed, entranced or just shocked that I could work from the beach in Acapulco. But when you break it down, it’s not amazing whatsoever.

The Virtual Lawyer’s Tools Are Not Amazing

I don’t use any of the VLO platforms mentioned above; they’re excellent, but not what’s in my bag. I relied, and continue to rely, upon a few basic sets of tools:

Phone: Skype, a computer-based application, allows me to make and receive phone calls to a regular U.S.-based telephone number using only a computer with Internet access. Costs me under $100 per year for a local number. But if I didn’t want to go that route, I could simply use my cell phone with global roaming on it.

Internet-Based Faxing: People use faxes, much to my chagrin. I use MaxEMail, but there are a number of excellent providers out there. Here’s how it works: someone puts a piece of paper into their fax machine, dials a local (or toll-free) number, and faxes it to you. Instead of the page coming through a fax machine, it shows up in your email box as a PDF. Once again, it costs me under $100 per year to keep this going.

Case Management: I currently use RocketMatter, but have used Basecamp in the past. It gives me the freedom to access client information on the go, and it’s reliable so long as I’ve got an Internet connection. Basecamp allows me to give clients access to their documents, RocketMatter does not. But there’s a solution.

Client File Access: I use Dropbox, which allows me to synchronize files among computers and backs up to the cloud. Using Dropbox you can share a specific folder with any other Dropbox user; all they need is an account, which they can get for no cost. Tell your client to get a free Dropbox account, and then share their file with them. When the matter is closed, revoke the sharing privileges.

My File Access: Once again, I use Dropbox. There are other solutions out there, but I like Dropbox because it’s got tons of features and is accessible from my Android device (they’ve got an iPhone and iPad app as well). To get files from paper into my computer I either scan them using my ScanSnap scanner or, ideally, have clients fax them to me (remember, those faxes come through as email attachments in PDF format).

Staff Communications: We use Google Talk to communicate. Nuff said.

Calendaring and Appointment Setting: We use Google Calendar for our calendars in the office, and a web application called AppointmentQuest to allow people to set up appointments to speak with us. Appointment Quest is not the only system out there, but it does allow us to block off times when we’re not available and move stuff around.

Email: Google Apps. Free, web-based, accessible using our phones, and lots of storage.

The Virtual Lawyer’s Mindset Makes the Difference

Nothing outlined above is earth-shattering, nor is it custom-made. It does, however, reflect the reality that we can work anywhere, any time. Our clients need not be technologically advanced, either; the only thing they need is a telephone – everything else is on our side. So it makes no sense to me when a lawyer tells me that they don’t go virtual because their clients aren’t tech-savvy. That’s an excuse, not a real reason.

If you want to be a virtual lawyer, all you need to do is take a step outside. Then another. And then another. Repeat until you’re in a comfortable location, and then open your laptop. Keep the cell phone charged, maintain connectivity to the Internet, and get down to business. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

The chains aren’t real. All you have to fight against are your own preconceived notions about where you work.

To be sure, there are things you’ll need to do in order to prepare for that walk outside. But once you have the mindset, the solutions to the other minor problems will soon come into sharper focus.

Photo credit: Giorgio Montersino (via Flickr).

Filed Under: Virtual Law Office Tagged With: Android, bankruptcy code, bankruptcy lawyers, cell phones, cloud storage, computing, data synchronization, dropbox, fax, file hosting, law firm, law office, lawyer, lawyers, mindset, online backup services, phone, technology, virtual, Virtual Law Office

Remaking The Bankruptcy Law Firm: Telephone Systems

January 28, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

When attempting to create a location-independent law firm, the first thing that’s important to handle is how telephones are used. Though we live in a digital world, for most the telephone is still the primary means of connecting. Courts need to get through to the office, clients call with a myriad of questions and issues, and we as attorneys are required to be available.

I thought initially of having a voice mail system that used the 4-Hour Workweek system of, “I’m not here, I’ll call you back at 2:00pm, leave a number and buzz off,” approach but quickly discarded it as unworkable for all but a few people in the office.

The old telephone system was unworkable, cumbersome and costly to maintain. 14 lines into the office just to be sure that callers never got a busy signal, proprietary handsets that could not be easily swapped out for replacements in the event of breakage, and lots of wires holding us to our desks.

If you’ve got a wired phone that lives on your hard-wired phone system, you’re hard-wired to your desk. Definitely NOT location-independent.

I tried RingCentral, a virtual phone system that lets you create multiple mailboxes and forward them to a variety of places, but ultimately ditched it. Though a great system and one that I think you should look into, RingCentral fell short in a variety of ways. For example:

RingCentral is a VOIP (Internet-based) phone system, which means that if their central servers go down then so does your phone system; and

RingCentral’s mailboxes don’t offer a huge degree of customization in the way phones are answered and calls handled.

So in the end I went back to Grasshopper, a phone system I’ve been using for my own virtual law firm for a number of years. The idea behind Grasshopper is simple – it takes what would otherwise be an expensive and full-featured phone system and turns it into a web-based service.

Here’s how it works: your caller dials your number and is met with an auto-attendant greeting (“Welcome to blah blah blah, if you know your party’s extension dial it at any time. For a dial-by-name directory dial 8, for the operator dial 0, etc.”) You choose your extension and dial it. The recipient’s extension dials and they pick up or send it to voice mail.

Simple, right?

There are a few things going on under the hood that make it spectacular:

The extension can ring to any phone – a cell phone, a desk phone, a Skype phone … any kind of phone you want. This means I can program Grasshopper to ring my extension (which happens to be 704) in my office, on my home phone line, my cell phone … anywhere I choose. So when someone calls me and connects with me, it doesn’t matter where I am physically.

You can choose when your extension rings to which phone. I can set it up that my extension rings to my office phone Mondays from 9:00am to 1:00pm, my cell phone on Tuesdays, my home phone on Thursdays, and on and on.

You can shut down your phone entirely. If my paralegal is out to lunch from 12:00pm-1:00pm each day, I can tell Grasshopper to stop sending calls to her during that time and send them instead directly to voice mail. If I know I like to get “real work” done each day from 3:00pm-5:00pm then I can tell Grasshopper to send all calls to voice mail during that time. My receptionist, who handles all new client calls, goes to lunch at 12:30pm-1:30pm each day; during that time, I tell Grasshopper to send her calls to a virtual assistant. No more lost calls for us!

Grasshopper sends all voice mail messages to the recipient’s email account in mp3 format. When I miss a call I don’t have to dial in and listen to messages – they come to me. But more important than that, I can save those mp3 files to the client’s folder in our computer system. Record-keeping becomes a breeze!

With Grasshopper, there’s never a busy signal. Though the system is POTS (plain old telephone system) lines rather than Internet-based, when someone calls my firm’s main phone line they never get a busy signal – period. So now instead of having to pay for 14 phone lines (at $50 per month, that adds up fast) for 6 people, I can just have 6 office phone lines going to their desks. That saves us $400 per month right there. Cha-ching!

Of course, we needed to keep our “main” phone line and set up call forwarding to the phone number provided by Grasshopper. But our new business cards will have the Grasshopper-provided phone number on them, so eventually that old number will be a relic. We will eventually decide whether to keep it or mothball it, but I suspect it will remain on the books for a number of years at least (it’s a good number).

Once I signed the firm up for Grasshopper we hired a voiceover artist on Elance for $125 to do a series of outgoing messages for us – the main one (“Thank you for calling Shaev & Fleischman …”), the transfer messages (what people hear when they’re on hold), and a few other main ones such as the one for directions and such.

Each month we’re looking at a significant cost savings over a “regular” phone system. More important, though, is the fact that the entire firm is now location-independent … at least, as far as the phone system is concerned.

Disclosure: The links to Grasshopper contained in this post are affiliate links. If you click on those links and ultimately become a customer of Grasshopper I will get a commission. That commission does not increase your cost for the Grasshopper service at all. Quite frankly, it’s not a ton of money in my pocket but it does help defray the overhead costs of this site. You can also find Grasshopper service online by doing a quick Google search.

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Filed Under: Virtual Law Office Tagged With: Grasshopper, location-independent lawyer, Virtual Law Office, virtual PBX, virtual phone system

How A Virtual Lawyer Sends Non-Virtual Mail

November 23, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

snailmailr

Everything’s online these days. My email’s here, my files are scanned and accessible here, even my faxes come to me by email. The circle, however, is incomplete.

Some days you need to send out a piece of paper through the old-fashioned US Postal Service.

Well, maybe not. There’s this cool service called SnailMailr.com. The premise is so gloriously simple I nearly broke out into cheers when I heard about it. You type in a return address, then type in your recipient’s address. Once done you can either type a message for inclusion or (glory glory!) upload a PDF for them to print in 4-color (that’s full color, folks). Pay $0.99 for up to two pages (including the postage stamp) via Amazon’s payment mechanism and you’re all set.

This isn’t a substitute for serving litigation-related documents (but you already use CertificateOfService.com, right? RIGHT?), nor is it a really good idea for mass mailing needs. But for the times when paper mail is the only option, this may be a winner.

For example, you’re on vacation and speak with a new client. You need to get out a retainer agreement but the client doesn’t have email – or doesn’t have a printer so he or she can sign the document. With SnailMailr you just upload the PDF and it gets mailed. You go back to drinks with umbrellas on the beach, client gets the retainer for signature, and the world is good.

Sure it’s $0.99 to send out two pages, but it includes all the grunt work involved with sending out mail (print it, fold it, lick the envelope, affix the stamp, get to the mailbox) and it’s full color. Not a bad price overall, I think.

Have you used it? What do you think about it? Sound off in the comments below!