“A-B-C. A, always; B, be; C, closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!” Made popular by Alec Baldwin’s character in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” it’s a line that’s all too familiar to salespeople and rainmakers. With greater access to data, however, there’s a new mantra that should be leveraged by all those in business development: A, always; B, be; C, collecting; D, data. Always be collecting data!

Next week, legal technology providers from around the world will come together in Chicago for ABA TECHSHOW. It’s always an exciting time of year with big feature announcements being made in the days leading up to the event. At Zola Suite, we don’t just make product updates to get in the headlines before the conference. In fact, last year we made 983 updates to improve our platform. In our offices, we care less about the “splash” and more about the impact of our software on our clients’ efficiency and profitability.

Inspired by the latest Netflix binge craze, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” millions of Americans are decluttering. In the series, organizing expert Kondo travels to homes of stressed-out Americans to help them discard items that no longer spark joy and organize their living spaces in a meaningful way. Kondo contends that having little time or energy to organize can lead to anxiety and tension. As she explains in her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: “In essence, tidying ought to be the act of restoring balance among people, their possessions, and the house they live in.”

The practice of law is complicated. A single case can involve multiple attorneys, dozens of files and hundreds of interactions among a law firm, clients, opposing counsel and courts. Given the vast scope of moving parts and operations of a legal matter, it is ripe for business process optimization.

The New Year is the perfect time to reassess how you’ve been doing and make adjustments. Have you thought about cleaning house and moving to paperless? Running a paperless office has never been easier. With the advances in legal technology, the days of large scale cabinets filled with files in disarray are gone. Now, with law practice management software like Zola Suite, you can digitalize your entire office’s case files and communications. Going paperless will save you time, money, and add appeal for potential clients.

We can all clearly picture a lawyer that has been in practice for decades. They are trapped behind a desk piled high with client files, various documents, and correspondence long needed to be sorted and filed. They complain that they can’t ever find what they are looking for in the pile of papers they have amassed. Notes about important client meetings fall by the wayside. The dreaded end of the month comes and they have to enter their billable hours they have scrawled down on a piece of paper. These kind of lawyer problems are a thing of the past with advances in legal technology.

This year’s hurricane season has been disastrous for many people and their businesses. Those that were affected by the storm, and even those that weren’t directly in the storm’s path, experienced devastating encounters that made it difficult, if not impossible, to operate under normal conditions. “In times of need, the legal community is a crucial link in providing help to secure housing, file insurance claims, replace wills and emergency directives and other urgent legal services,” said our CEO Fred Cohen. However, in many cases, the storms made it challenging for lawyers to access files and communicate with their clients during a very vulnerable time.

Why are you emailing your clients weblinks to documents? They’re not supposed to click on unknown links. It’s making them nervous. Even if you’re using popular apps like dropbox to share files, you can’t be sure your client will trust the link. Nor should they. They might think it’s a phishing scheme. If you’re using a link retrieval system to “prove” that documents were received by your clients for compliance reasons, you may want to rethink this….

How can you prove what really happened behind closed doors? Can we ever know what happened in a meeting behind closed doors, with no recording devices and no third party witnesses? Probably not. Is email a clearer way to communicate a complex message? Not always….