Green Your Law Office With GoMatters
How many computers are you running in your office? Do you have an office server? How many sheets are paper are you wasting writing to-do notes? Storing your law office data on GoMatters will green your law office and reduce your carbon footprint.
The GoMatters servers are made to maximize the speed and efficiency at which your law office data can be stored, accessed and distributed. Storing your data on your local networks and maintaining those networks is an inefficient use of both your time and energy… and energy consumption! An inefficient data center or server like the one in your law office increases your office energy needs and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
GoMatters allows your law practice to cut down on physical data storage space in your office that can be used for other things besides housing clunky, loud servers. By centralizing computer processing power in our data centers, economies of scale are achieved and overall power consumption is reduced.
The “paperless law office” is as far from reality as a flying car, but GoMatters can help green your office by reducing paper consumption. Your case files may never be totally paperless, but you can certainly reduce the size of the files by storing your contacts, tasks and events in GoMatters. Creating an easily accessible digital case file with GoMatters is one easy step you can make towards making your law office green.
Backing Up Your Law Office Data – Your Firm’s Dirty Little Secret
Since you bought the first computer for your law office years ago, you’ve been told advised warned to backup your data regularly. How’s that going for you?
The truth is most law offices operate their computer networks like most home computer users – rarely if ever is a system backed up properly. And even rarer still is the chance that someone in your law office knows how to restore a backup.
There are basically two types of setups for your small to mid-size law office network – a peer to peer network where each computer shares resources and files with other computers on the network or a server based network where one centralized computer stores your law office data in one location that is accessed by users throughout your office. If you have a setup where you are sharing files from computer to computer, to backup your system safely, you need to be backing up every computer in your office. If you have 10 computers in your office with data on them, you need to backup all ten.
If everyone in your office is saving data to a server, your network setup costs and management may be more difficult, but your backup scenarios are less complicated. But having all of your data in one central location like your server creates a single point of failure for all of your data. If you server goes, your data goes with it. Not too much of a problem if you are backing up all of your data and keeping redundant copies offsite in a safe place and have another backup server on standby ready to be fired up at a moment’s notice… what? Your office doesn’t do that? You better. Your data is your practice.
No matter what your office network setup looks like, you need to make copies of your data backup and store the backup copies offsite. Offsite backups guard against loss of data by fires, flood, theft and other physical threats to your data.
GoMatters provides an easy solution to doing away with the hassle of backing up your law office data. All data stored in GoMatters is dispersed on our secure servers around the world. Multiple redundant copies of data stored with GoMatters means your data will never face the single point of failure problems an office server creates. Computer hardware failures in your office do nothing to your data stored with GoMatters. Data stored in GoMatters is always available no matter what computer you are using.
Costs of Owning Law Office Software
Believe it or not, many law office still embrace the old method of case management: paper, folders, and file cabinets. Lots of them.
Legal Software Cost Comparison
It’s not that law office software hasn’t been available for years, because it has. And while we admit that some office are simply afraid of converting, we think there are reasonable explanations for all the holdouts.
One of the barriers to converting a legal office from paper to bytes is that conventional matter management software has been cumbersome and expensive (among other things). In this post, we are going to focus on costs. We’ll talk about other things in future articles.
In the past, if a solo attorney or law office wanted to adopt some of the conventional matter management software, they were faced with a costly proposition. They had to buy a server, a business class router, licenses for the workstations, licenses for the server, purchase a backup system, pay for installation, buy an annual maintenance contract, pay extra for remote access, and on and on. For solos and small offices, this often equaled tens of thousands of dollars. In a large office, the costs were staggering.
We designed GoMatters from the ground up to eliminate the startup costs and barriers associated with conventional legal case management software. We don’t think you should spend thousands of dollars simply preparing to use your software. You probably don’t either.
See the chart for a comparison of conventional matter management software and GoMatters. You can use GoMatters for years for what you would pay just to get started with other law office management software.
Return Phone Call Time Block Tip
Nothing wastes time like a wasted phone call. Especially when that phone call lands you in a voice mailbox and the game of attorney-client phone tag is on.
Best practice for lawyers has always dictated that a missed call from a client be returned the same day. If not the same day, certainly within 24 hours of the call.
But how much time do you waste on missed return calls each day. How much time do you waste being interrupted with a call that has nothing to do with the case you’re working on? Calls like that force you to stop your train of thought, possibly go grab a file that was nowhere around and then get in the frame of mind to handle the call. All the while losing track of the last matter you were working on.
To save yourself at least 30 minutes in a day, set aside a time block in the afternoon when you can go down a list of gathered messages from the day and knock them out one after the other. To increase the efficiency of the return calls, make sure your secretary or paralegal explains to the initial caller that the call will be returned during the time you have set aside for your return calls and that the client needs to give a number where they will be at that time. Establishing the fact that the call will be returned within a time block is the key to increased efficiency.
Knowing the number where the client can be reached at a certain time of day can increase your chances of speaking with the client on the first go around and eliminate the horrible phone tag game that can go on for days. Never ask a client “At what number can you be reached?”. Always add the time factor like “At what number can you be reached between 4:00 and 4:30 PM today?”. Adding the time factor puts the burden on the client to be available at a time certain and actually makes for a happier client because the client knows when the call is coming and the client doesn’t waste time wondering when and if the call will be returned.
When viewing a matter in GoMatters, all contact numbers associated with contacts assigned to the matter are shown under the Matter Contacts tab. Seeing all known numbers for a contact assigned to a case allows you to bounce from number to number in seconds. If a call to one number is not successful, save yourself valuable time and bounce to the other number without fumbling through files.
Your staff members using GoMatters can add phone message return requests to matters as tasks throughout the day without disturbing you. You can pick off the messages as they appear in your task list or you can follow the time block rule outlined above and return all your calls in your time block reserved for that purpose. If your staff has recorded your message return requests as matter tasks, you can increase your efficiency by moving down the task list and viewing each task matter with all contact information in seconds.
SSL and Your Law Office
You are probably familiar with SSL as “https” used on e-commerce and banking sites. But what does SSL mean for your law office?
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a method for encrypting and securing data sent from one computer to another. Data sent without SSL can be seen by hackers using “sniffer” software. If a hacking eavesdropper intercepts data sent without SSL from one computer to another, the eavesdropper can read the information in plain text. E-commerce and banking sites use SSL to protect sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers. GoMatters uses SSL sessions to encrypt data transfers to and from your law office while using GoMatters.
Data transmissions to and from GoMatters are secure, but your law office data sent to other computers over the internet can be intercepted by eavesdroppers and read by a third party unless you are taking steps to properly encrypt your data.
Your law office email is one place where you can make an easy change to better secure your data by using SSL. If you are using Gmail for your law office email, make sure you force Gmail to use SSL by turning on the “Enable SSL” option under your”Domain settings” panel. Checking the Gmail SSL option will force all connections to Gmail from your office accounts to use SSL. If you don’t have access to your Gmail domain settings, you can simply type an “s” after the “http” in your browser and load the page. Placing the “s” after the “http” and reloading the page will shift you to Gmail’s SSL for that session.
If you have your own domain name for your law firm and use a hosted email service, contact the host about installing an SSL certificate for your domain. Some hosts offer an SSL option for your web email and you simply have to visit the “https” URL of your web mail address.