The managing partner of a small law firm walked into the office one morning to find his new associate struggling to turn his desk around ninety degrees. When he asked the associate why he was rearranging the furniture he was told that the associate was having trouble with the firm’s practice management software. The associate was quite certain he could fix this himself, without any outside assistance from the firm’s local IT support organization.
Placing a call to the practice management software’s tech support center, he “learned” that his desk was not set up correctly, so he was experimenting with alternative arrangements. Turns out the support person at the software manufacturer had suggested that his “DEP” (Data Execution Prevention) was not set up correctly. The associate ran with the problem on his own from there, based on what he heard.
So much for fixing software via feng shui. When you are not schooled in the technology or the language, you tend to hear what you want to hear to get the problem resolved quickly, based on your own comfort zone. Often with embarrassing – or disastrous – results.
Sometimes the most important service our firm provides, as technology consultants, is one of translation. Like any skilled translator, we need to be able to speak multiple “languages” to fully understand and effectively “translate” a recommended course of action into a workable solution for a technical problem. Or for a tricky business process issue. Or a complicated software integration.
I am happy to announce that we now have more “translators” than ever, with the addition of the staff from Software Analysis Corp. to our stable of consultants. We now total ten staff, collectively representing almost twenty unique software applications covering a wide range of professions and business types. Our resources are now national in scope, and we are equipped to take on much larger projects than we could have handled in the past. We hope that our name change, from Eastern Legal Systems, will adequately reflect that expanded capability. We aim to place ourselves at the “crosspoint” of software technology and business processes, and deliver the benefit of this perspective on all of our future engagements on behalf of our clients.
The distinct organizations that now comprise Crosspointe Consulting Group have each operated successful consulting practices for almost twenty five years, so none of us are newcomers to the technology arena. We have all come to appreciate the fact that today’s technology challenges are just too large, and too rapidly changing, to be addressed efficiently in a smaller or a solo firm. Virtualization, remote connectivity, and Cloud services make possible the kinds of collaborative efforts needed to solve today’s technology problems that was simply not financially or operational feasible as recently as five or six years ago.
So before you attempt to “feng shui” your office, give us a call at 877-357-0555, or email us at [email protected], to see if we can help you tackle your perplexing software issues, without having to rearrange the furniture by yourself. Let us do the “heavy lifting” for you!
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.