As always SLAW come up with the goods when it comes to articles on how law firms will be operating in the future
Penned by Nicole Garton-Jones the managing partner of Heritage Law, which is regularly featured in the media about its use of technology and innovative approach to the practice of law.
Here’s her article:
Practicing Law on the Road: the Role of the Cloud and the Emergence of the Virtual Law Firm
ven as recently as the early 2000?s, the idea of achieving full in-office productivity while traveling on the road seemed difficult to imagine. The laptop, smartphone, cloud infrastructure, and internet access technologies of the day simply weren?t capable or ubiquitous enough to match in-office facilities and resources. But fast forward to 2010, and these ingredients have evolved and shifted significantly.
Firms like Heritage Law are predicated on the reality that any lawyer or staff member can work effectively from practically any remote office on a full time basis with nothing more than a Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephone, a broadband internet connection, a netbook grade PC, and combined printer/scanner. In this game changing model, each user is remotely served by the same set of highly integrated applications from their own personal Microsoft Windows desktop. These virtual desktops are hosted on servers in a centrally located, private and secure cloud. The private cloud is 100% firm owned and operated and is connected to the internet over a high speed dedicated line.
On the Road in the Virtual Firm
In a virtual firm, the requirements necessary to maximize productivity as a ?traveling lawyer? shrink dramatically when compared to the traditional IT deployment model, which requires the installation, periodic rebuilding and maintenance of every core application on both individual PCs and separate laptops for out-of-office travel. In the hosted or Desktop as a Service (Daas) model, the requirements for nomadic access from the road reduce to:
1. A sub $300 netbook PC running a basic installation of Windows from vendors such as Acer, Asus, Dell, or HP; depending on preference and budget, this ?thin client? PC could be more capable with a larger screen, or even an Apple Macbook running a Terminal Services client, the key point being that compute requirements on the client side are minimal and therefore the required hardware cost very low;
2. A smartphone such as an iPhone, Blackberry, or Google Nexus One with 3G broadband wireless data connectivity and an unlimited data plan:
– The phone tethers to the netbook to enable broadband data access from practically anywhere with 3G wireless coverage, and delivers sufficient downstream bandwidth for hosted desktop access even where only 2.5G (EDGE equivalent) data coverage is available;
– All calls from the VoIP telephone back in the office are set to simultaneously ring this phone to ensure a single number dialing; and
– This phone serves as the primary telephony device for outbound calls.
If physical paper document scanning is absolutely required, a portable scanner like the Pentax DS Mobile 600, or Xerox Travel Scanner 100 suffice to generate PDF files from relatively small multi-page paper documents collected in the field. Effective portable document printing is somewhat more difficult to realize, and is impractical if volumes are high. Depending on the resources at hand, the best option is probably to bulk together multiple print jobs and leverage the use of a nearby business center or shared guest office printer. Portable battery powered printers from vendors like Cannon are available when document length is small and total portability critical.
