We will be following with a few tutorials in the next couple of days for some of the new features that have been added. We’ve packed some things into this version that are sure to streamline your office for you.

Enjoy!

So you’re going solo with a Mac, what now? Don’t worry too much, finding law practice management software for Mac is probably easier than putting in your notice at your current firm.

First things first, are you a Mac purist? We ask this question because you should start your Mac law office software quest off on the right foot and that does not mean jumping for the nearest copy of Boot Camp to install Windows on your Mac. If you’re a purist, you’ll hold out as long as you can and try to find as many alternatives as you can. Some law practice software specific to certain practice areas is only available for Windows so you many have no other option than to either install Windows on your Mac or maybe even pick up a cheap PC to run the practice specific software and use your Mac for everything else.

90% of your practice is likely to be word processing and you’d be hard pressed to find a better word processing program than Open Office. Good news is that it runs wonderfully on your Mac and the great news is that it’s free! Open Office is even a bit more flexible than Word when it comes to things like PDF’s and saving files in open formats.

After word processing, you’re going to need a Mac case management and billing system for your law office. GoMatters can help you with both the front office scheduling and back office billing and management to make your transition to solo practitioner as easy and as painless as possible. Emailing clients and viewing documents online with GoMatters can you save you the time, paper, postage and personnel overhead associated with traditional law practices.

• Completely redesigned UI to show all matters, contacts and tasks in each view
• Unlimited document upload and retrieval
• Matter notes
• Upload contact images
• Unlimited account storage capacity
• Full ledger based accounting

Our users on the US West Coast, Europe and the Asian Pacific region will also experience much faster data delivery with near network speeds.

Enjoy the new release! Don’t have an account? Signup for a free trial.

Many of our users are Mac happy lawyers and it will be interesting to see how many of those users begin to use Google Chrome. It seems most Mac users are content with Safari and our logs show the biggest browser variance among GoMatters PC users. Anecdotally, Mac user loyalty to Safari appears to be much greater than PC loyalty to Internet Explorer.

Platform and browser independence is one of the most enjoyable aspects of using GoMatters SaaS case management and billing system. Because GoMatters runs on any computer in any browser, law offices are no longer forced to have the same operating system or browser installations throughout the law office. GoMatters users can bounce from computer to computer in as many different locations as needed and secure access to office data is always available without software or hardware conflicts.

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.

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.