Here is a scenario that never fails to amaze me:
A firm invested in practice management and billing software over 9 years ago, then never upgraded it. They run a mix of Windows 7 and Windows XP operating systems, and Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Office 2010. The old case management system does not work with the new Outlook and Word, so the firm can no longer save emails or documents to the practice management program.
The partners want to keep costs down, so they haven’t added disk space to the old (make that ancient) server, nor have they updated the old hub to a more modern – and much faster -Gigabit switch. Not surprisingly, performance, even on the newest workstations, is less than stellar. In fact, a fairly new Windows 7 computer could not complete a backup of the billing software. Supposedly someone else, sitting at a different workstation, would get around to making the backup of the firm’s billing data – eventually.
The partners also decided that scanners are an unnecessary and frivolous investment for their practice.
The day that I visited, a physical file was missing, containing papers brought in by a new client. As you would expect, without a scanner, pdf images of the documents were not available as a backup. Our training session was delayed while partners, associates and paralegals searched, unsuccessfully, for the missing folder.
The moral of this story is that, while you don’t want to fling money recklessly at technology, it costs money notto invest in technology for your practice. In some cases serious money, many times over the cost of an upgrade.
A good rule of thumb is to upgrade software at least every other year to maintain compatibility with the new Windows and Office suites, and to ensure that technical support will be available. Most vendors will not support more than the current version and two versions prior to the current one. This has become pretty much standard policy with the developers of virtually all of the products we support.
Most offices should have at least one scanner, and possibly two: a mega-scanner/copier that is the office workhorse, and a smaller Fujitsu ScanSnap or similar scanner that is a convenient arm’s length reach of an office administrator.
Don’t overextend the technology lifecycle. That five-year-old PC your receptionist is using probably won’t hurt your business when it dies. But if the 10-year-old server under her desk does, it can cripple your entire company.
All technology has a set lifecycle. Manufacturers call this life cycle MTBF, or “mean time between failures”. Any IT person worth their salt can see how many errors hardware is making from logs automatically generated, and can judge when it needs to be replaced. Servers and PC hardware, in general, have a lifespan of about 3-5 years. This lifespan depends on how much this equipment is used, but it is painful to have to recover from a failed server or hub in the middle of the business day.
Eastern Legal Systems offers a Technology Assessment Service for law firms, to assist you in evaluating your current technology environment, and in devising a phased project plan to put high-productivity software and hardware in place to get you operating efficiently again..
Give us a call at 877-357-0555 if you would like to learn more about this important service.
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.
Perfect example– just talked to a client who hired the Geek Squad to upgrade their Time Matters database when they bought new hardware. Somehow their current data got overwritten with 3 year old data, and the old PC is gone. But they didn’t spend much money!
Thanks, Karen, for that example. Technology requires thinking, planning and qualified execution, no doubt about it.
It frustrates me that providing legal staff with up-to-date, efficient tools is such a low priority at many (most?) law firms. That 5-year-old PC running Windows XP and MS Office 2003 works just fine, they’ll tell you.
But if there’s even a ten-minute lapse of email service to the Crackberries, there’s hell to pay!