Lawyer Collaboration Tools & Technologies : Dennis Kennedy & Tom Mighell : Wiki, Web 2.0, Sharepoint

In our collaboration tools wiki, we mention dozens of new and interesting sites and utilities that make it easy for people to work with each other online.  Although we don't use all of these tools, we've tried a lot of them, and Vyew is one of the tools I really wanted to like.  After all, it's one of the few online meeting services that offers free meetings for up to 20 participants. 

Two weeks ago, I wanted to use Vyew to give a presentation and demo to my co-workers, so I set up my Vyew meeting room -- it allowed me to personalize the room name, which was great.  It also had all the features I needed for my meeting.  The morning of the presentation, I tried to log in to Vyew to make sure everything was ready for the meeting -- only to find that I couldn't get in.  For some reason, Vyew had suddenly realized that I had a firewall, and wouldn't grant access to my meeting room.

No big deal -- when you're working with Web 2.0 tools issues like these happen from time to time.  Usually they are easily resolved.  So I emailed Vyew support and asked for some help with my problem.  Because my meeting was only a couple of hours away, I was not completely surprised that I did not hear from Vyew before the meeting started.  However, it has been nearly two weeks since the meeting, and I still haven't heard from Vyew.  Needless to say, I was forced to use another meeting service, which turned out to be much more reliable.  Now, I was using Vyew's free service, so at least I wasn't out any money -- but what if I had purchased a Plus or Professional plan?  Would I get the same level of support?

The lesson here:  Web 2.0 tools are being developed every day, and the infrastructure of each will vary depending on how much funding/staff they have.  Before you invest your time or money in one of these tools for your mission-critical work activities, make sure you can rely on the service to work as advertised.  In Vyew's case, the technology worked pretty well -- it was the support that was sorely absent.  Frankly, some of the Web 2.0 tools we mention in the wiki are not ready for prime time.  Make sure you know what you're getting into before using a tool for something really important.

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We've been singing the praises of screen-sharing program CrossLoop for some time now; I've been using it for well over a year now, and we included it as one of our favorite Web 2.0 technologies for screen sharing or simple online meetings.

And now Walt Street Journal technology guru Walt Mossberg agrees.  In With CrossLoop, Users Can Get Help From Techie Friend, Mossberg calls CrossLoop a simple, effective way to help a relative or friend with a PC problem.  In his podcast review, Mossberg describes CrossLoop as a "new" utility -- but we know better than that.

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There's no question that concerns about fuel prices and travel costs, whether motivated by "green" thoughts or not, are and will continue to be a driving factor in the growth of collaboration tools and technologies.

It's not very complicated. Webconferencing and online meetings can reduce travel and commuting costs.

John Jantsch's post "The Telephone Doesn't Use Any Gas" offers a good primer on how you can benefit from using online meeting tools. Jantsch also emphasizes how small business like small law firms should make use of these powerful tools to save money and, especially, time.

He lists a number of the popular tools, some of which we discuss in our book.

He also provides a good list of practical ways you can use these tools for marketing and communication in additional to standard meetings:

1. One to one seminar

2. Peer to peer seminar

3. Live with you

4. Interview an expert

5. Co-branded panel

6. Sponsored show

7. Q and A time

The money quote:

"As you utilize web and other tools such as web collaboration tools and teach your customers to use them as well, your effectiveness and efficiency will soar. Now, I’m not suggesting that you never venture out and grab some face time, I’m just suggesting you can be smart about employing technology to help you get more done with the same 24 hours everyone has in a day."

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What is your main word processing tool?  According to a poll taken over at ReadWriteWeb, 49% use Microsoft Word, which is not all that surprising.  But what is interesting is the number of respondents who primarily use an online word processor -- around 21 percent.  Google Docs accounts for most of that number, with around 15 percent of the total.  This is a six percent increase from ReadWriteWeb's poll last year.

We suspect that most lawyers are still using a desktop word processing program -- Microsoft Word, or perhaps that old standby WordPerfect?  We'd like to ask our readers the same question:  which word processor do you use most often?  Please answer below:

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Carolyn Elefant is one of our favorite bloggers and people. She's also the author of the excellent book, Solo by Choice.

We're thrilled to see Carolyn's review of our book.

Carolyn captures the heart of the book and how we wanted it to be a practical guide that gave lawyers practical information, practical steps and practical ideas to improve their practices and lives and also pointed out ways that lawyers can come up with their own creative ways to use these tools.

Carolyn gives some excellent ideas, with an emphasis of how these tools can help the solo lawyer. You'll benefit from Carolyn's perspectives and ideas.

The money quote:

But Tom and Dennis always tie the technology back to the purpose, recognizing that for lawyers, technology is a means to deliver legal services more efficiently and effectively and not an end in itself.

And were more than happy to take this compliment:

I'll just go ahead and rave:  The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies is a book that opens huge possibilities for solo and small firm lawyers and will change the way you market and run your law firm.

Thank you, Carolyn. We hope that solos and small firm lawyers who read your book and our book will find the tools they need to change the practice for the better.

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We presented twice on collaboration tools and technologies at the excellent ILTA 2008 conference last week - a must-attend-at-least-once event for anyone seriously interested in legal technology.

We learned that there were 14 sessions addressing collaboration topics, showing the growing interest in the subject matter of our book.

We were quite pleased with the feedback we got on the book and learned that one of the other speakers had quoted from our book.

We recorded a portion of one of our presentations (had a technical difficulty) and hope to turn that into some kind of podcast.

The great news was that our sessions were well-covered by live-bloggers, Doug Cornelius, LawyerKM and David Hobbie, which gives you a great way to see what we covered in the sessions. A very special thank you to them. As a fascinating observation about live blogging, LawyerKM's outlines of the sessions were actually better than the speaking notes I had in front of me. Doug provides a handy set of links to the posts on our sessions under the heading of Collaboration Tools on his post here.

We'll also make one or more versions of our slides available on this site. In due course.

West also produced a video of Tom talking about the book.

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Back when Dennis and I first started talking about sending large files to others, our favorite service was YouSendIt -- it's still a great service, but you're only limited to sending a 100MB file for free.  Nowadays, there are services that accept files in excess of 1GB -- even some that accept 50GB files or unlimited file size!  Robin Good's great blog features a guide on how to send files larger than a gigabyte, with a chart comparing eight services. We'll be adding these services to our Collaboration Tools Wiki as soon as we can.

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Microsoft's Sharepoint is am amazingly powerful technology -- I don't even understand everything Sharepoint can do.  I'm familiar with using Sharepoint as a project management tool, both within an organization and outside the firewall with members of the ABA TECHSHOW board.  But did you know, for instance, that you can build a website using Sharepoint?  I didn't.  It's not a topic for today's post, but I mention this to demonstrate the incredible power of this software tool.

But companies that want to work better with their customers or clients can also use Sharepoint to enhance the business relationship.  For example, the insurance company Allied North America  created a "mySocrates portal" based on Sharepoint for its insurance customers.  Insureds can check on the status of interactions with the insurance company, review data about injuries that occur on the insureds' worksites, and hopefully improve their risk management as a result.

This is a great example not only of using technology to work smarter with your customers, but also a great way to offer extra value to your clients beyond the main services offered.

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Our recent article in Law Practice Magazine focused on how collaboration can happen around the corner or around the world. It's surprising how often collaboration on projects these days has a global dimension.

It should not be a surprise that the first article we wrote about collaboration technologies after we finished the book was for a publication outside the United States.

The article is called simply "Get Smart" and appeared in the Law Society of Ireland's Law Society Gazette. I noticed that a PDF version of the article (page 40) and the issue in which it appeared is now available on the Internet. We hope that you'll now find it a little easier to collaborate with your favorite Irish lawyers, but lawyers all over the world will benefit from some of the ideas and tips in the article.

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