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The phone has long been the most important tool in the law office. If your main office number is a Google Voice number, you can forward that number with the flip of a switch to your cell phone, home phone or even have calls routed directly to your desktop if you’re using Gmail. You can even schedule the time of day during which calls should be forwarded to various numbers based on where you will be. Driving home after 6pm? Have Google Voice automatically forward calls to your cell. At home after 7pm, forward the calls automatically to your home number. The ability to forward calls to multiple numbers means you will never miss a live call… unless you want to. That’s where Google Voice’s excellent voicemail system takes over.

Google Voice has the ability to transcribe voicemail message and deliver them to your email inbox or Google Messaging account. Voicemail transcription can increase your law office productivity and efficiency because it is easier to scan voicemail messages in your email inbox than it is to listen to every message by phone.

You can also set most cell phones to dial through Google Voice to show your office phone number on the caller ID of the phone you are calling. That means you can call from your cell phone, but your client will see your office number. That’s a great way to keep your cell phone number private and only present one number to the world.

Google Voice is great for small law firms or solo practitioners looking for a voicemail system or a call forwarding system and the best part is that it’s free. You will need to have phone service for the service to which you are forwarding from Google Voice. Learn more about Google Voice and how it can help your law practice.

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.