Text Message New Tasks To Users

GoMatters has added SMS capability for sending tasks via text message to users. To use the new service, login and update your user information by clicking on the “Users” link in the main app sidebar. Add text messaging numbers for users in their “SMS” cell (double click cells to open). Make sure text messaging numbers are in the email format for the particular cell carrier. Some of the most popular US cell carrier text messaging by email address formats are:

  • ATT: [mobile-number]@txt.att.net
  • Verzion: [mobile-number]@vtxt.com
  • Sprint: [mobile-number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
  • T-Mobile: [mobile-number]@tmomail.net
  • AIM: 1+[mobile-number]

When adding a new task, check the “Send SMS” box to send a text message to the user’s mobile phone.

Sending tasks by text message works great when secretaries or paralegals need to get quick messages to you when you are out of the office or stuck in court. With GoMatters new task SMS service, “return call to client” messages can be entered once, sent via text, and acted upon that much quicker.

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Cloud Computing for Lawyers

“Cloud Computing” is the buzzword du jour for technophiles, but what does it mean to you as a lawyer and how will it help your law office in the future?

First things first… what is cloud computing? To understand cloud computing, you first need to know about “the Cloud”. Breaking it down as simply as possibly means “the Cloud” is the internet and the internet, as every two year old knows nowadays, is an endless array of computers linked together. Cloud computing takes advantage of that endless array of computer power and storage capacity and moves data storage and the applications to manipulate the data off of your local computer and onto remote computers that are part of “the Cloud”. By removing the data from your computer and storing it in a secure environment, you reduce the likelihood of drive failure or data loss while increasing data accessibility and convenience.

Think email.

Chances are your law firm is using a web based email service like Gmail. Gmail is cloud computing. The Gmail application to read your email is not stored on your local law office computer, but is accessed through the web browser on your computer. The data that comprises your email is not stored on your local hard drive, but is saved on Google’s Gmail servers. Storing the data in that secure setting allows you to access your data from wherever and whenever you want.

Cloud computing is not “remote computing” that some people are already familiar with. “Remote computing” is the process of logging into a computer at another location and accessing that computer alone. VPN’s and services like GoToMyPC are “remote computing” solutions. “Remote computing” does not share many of the advantages of cloud applications like GoMatters. “Remote computing” does not prevent against data loss through hardware failure. VPN’s can also be difficult to setup correctly.

GoMatters is cloud computing for lawyers. GoMatters stores your data on secure servers across the globe. Because your law firm data is stored in “the Cloud”, you can access your law firm data securely and conveniently anywhere, anytime.

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Email Event Notices to Matter Contacts

Have you ever wanted to shoot a quick email to a client or opposing counsel telling them about an upcoming court date? Would your clients like an automatic email notice of an upcoming event in their case?

We’ve added automatic event notice emails to GoMatters so you can email an event notice to any matter contact with the press of a button. Login into your GoMatters case mangement account and you will notice the “Email Notice” option on the “Add Event” dialog. Selecting the “Yes” option for emailing notices allows you to customize the email addresses to which GoMatters will send a short event notice. You can also pull up a quick list of all matter contact email addresses by selecting the “All Matter Contacts” option. Add any additional email addresses for the event notice separated by a comma.

Recipients of the event notice will receive a short email notice of the event details of date, time and place that they can easily add to their own calendars. The GoMatters event email also contains a Google Maps link to the event place.

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Storing Passwords In Your Office Computer Web Browsers – The Security Accident Waiting To Happen

All modern web browsers offer the option to remember passwords for you for websites regularly visited that require logins. Choosing to let a browser remember a password for a website sounds like a good idea at first, but you should take a close look at whether or not you want to allow members of your law firm to save passwords when prompted.

Storing passwords in a browser allows for longer, more secure passwords to be used with relative ease. Its just a simple fact, stronger passwords are more difficult to remember and they are also more difficult to type. But storing website passwords in a browser is a very bad security decision in an environment where people frequently have access to other computers and workstations like your law office setting.

Each password stored in a browser is a security accident waiting to happen. The more people that have physical access to the computer, the more the security threat is increased. If any computers in your law office with stored passwords are left unattended, an unauthorized user can check recent sites visited by viewing the browser history and login to the site with the stored password. Temporary employees, cleaning staff and even clients left in a conference room or roaming about the halls can easily login to any account on an unattended computer with stored web passwords.

Having computers that are protected with system logins is simply not enough because inevitably, some of your law office computers will be left on and unattended at some point even if only for a few minutes.

GoMatters recommends that you do not permit the storage of any web passwords in your office web browsers. GoMatters does not provide a “Remember” option for passwords at login.

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User Notes – Fast Access to Client Info

We recently received this email from one of users:

I just wanted to drop you a quick note because I was so happy with myself! Well, okay, myself and GoMatters. I needed to contact a client quickly to tell them that a court date was still on for tomorrow and that they needed to attend the court date.

I got off the phone with opposing counsel and was already looking at my “Events” tab in GoMatters with tomorrow’s date docketed. I selected the event and pressed the “View Matter” button which flipped me over to my “Matters” tab and pulled up all of my contacts for the matter in a split second with their phone numbers staring me in the face. I got my client on the line quickly and advised him of the court date.

My client asked me to email him the address for the court. I did one better by getting a Google Maps link for him and pulling his email from my GoMatters “Contacts” tab and firing out the email before we got off the phone.

Thanks for a great product. I love to look good in front of my clients.

So how do you use GoMatters? Send us a note and let us know your best tips and tricks.

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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.

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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.

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Costs of Owning Law Office Software

Let’s Talk About Costs
Believe it or not, many law office still embrace the old method of case management: paper, folders, and file cabinets.  Lots of them.
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 records to electronic records 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 all those 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 a 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.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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