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 legal 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….

Most business owners don’t know how easy it is to send a fake email that appears to come from a colleague, vendor or even a public figure. This is one of many common misconceptions about email security and delivery. Here are some other common assumptions that are made every day...

The idea that legal technology could be better suited for the less tech-savvy lawyer sounds counterintuitive. The truth is that Zola Suite, next generation legal practice management software, provides lawyers who are less familiar with technology with a leg up. This is due in part to the fact that law practice management solutions streamline the use of many different legal tech tools such as accounting programs, document management systems, email, and interoffice communication systems. With legal practice management software, all of these different tech tools fall into one, more manageable program.

As lawyers, we have an ethical duty to ensure privacy for client communications. Technology hasn’t changed this, but there have been recent questions as to what steps lawyers should be expected to take to protect electronic communications. To address these issues, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility recently released Formal Opinion 477, an update to Formal Opinion 99-413, which discusses how changes in technology use coincide with Rule 1.6 concerning client confidences.

Here at Zola, we can understand why so many legal practice management programs make grand claims of being fully integrated, all-in-one solutions. Software with capabilities to meet all your law practice management needs in one user-friendly interface is appealing. The fact of the matter is that these claims are often misleading. You end up stuck with practice management software that relies on third-party applications and integrations to meet many of your key needs. The bottom line is - you can’t be an all-in-one practice management solution if you are relying on third party applications for important functions such as email, accounting, and document management.