Technology—Property

Surviving the 24-7 Office

Technology—Property provides information on current technology and microcomputer software of interest in the real property area. The editors of Probate & Property welcome information and suggestions from readers.

It is 2022, and lawyers are returning to their offices en masse, leaving the comforts of home. Some are returning full-time; others have negotiated flexible schedules where they work selected days in the office. Over the past two years, lawyers armed with technology have been able to work from anywhere and at any time. With remote meeting technology, their client and colleague interactions have not been constrained by office hours. As a result, our clients and colleagues have been able to reach out to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and get a response. The resulting never-ending workday has caused disruptions in the work-life balance for many of us.

Most lawyers have successfully outfitted the home office with the resources of the work office, but they remain tethered to their desktop or laptop computer. With the right balance of technology, however, you can cut the umbilical cord to your computer and gain some level of freedom. Armed with a cell phone, you can leave the “office” to attend your child’s baseball game, go to a birthday party, visit your in-laws, or go on a vacation, so long as there is access to 4G or WiFi connections.

This article examines some of the technology that will allow you to cut the cord that binds you to your desk. It will be up to you to manage what level of provides information on current technology and microcomputer software of interest in the real property area. The editors of Probate & Property welcome information and suggestions from readers. work your clients and colleagues expect from you outside of traditional office hours. Certain legal tasks will always require a dedicated computer with a large screen, such as document drafting and review. But many legal tasks require informed decisions that can be delivered asynchronously. It is these tasks that can be handled via a cellphone or tablet outside of your work or home office that we discuss in this article.

Required Hardware

The cellphone is an essential piece of equipment. Start with a current model Android or iPhone cell phone; the larger the screen, the better. The screen display should be at least 6”. If you can get an Apple iPhone 13 Max or a Samsung Galaxy S21+, the extra screen display area is well worth the extra cost. It is also good to have extra storage capacity to handle downloaded documents and all the applications you will be installing. Look for a phone with long battery life. In addition, purchase a high-capacity portable battery to use whenever you travel. If you are working with a phone older than two years, consider getting the battery replaced or just trade it in.

Your cell phone provider is also important. You will want a generous data plan with 4G or 5G in the locations you will be working. You will also want to be aware of the WiFi hotspots in the places you go outside your office. WiFi connections are usually faster. With the proper precautions, they can be used safely. With 4G/5G you will also want the ability to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot. In this way, should you need the larger screen and keyboard of your laptop, you can connect to the internet through your phone.

Get a quality, noise-canceling headset. You will be making calls from locations where there is a lot of background noise. You will sound unprofessional shouting above the noise, and you will have difficulty hearing the other party on the call. The Apple AirPods Pro have acceptable noise canceling. However, you should also consider earbud offerings from Jabra, Samsung, Microsoft, Sennheiser, or Poly (previously Plantronics). If you expect to be in a noisy setting and have an iPhone, you might consider using an artificial intelligence-based noise cancellation application like Krisp.

Required Infrastructure

You must have a cloud-accessible Document Management System (DMS). Lawyers need to be informed when they talk to clients and colleagues. And this means having your documents at your fingertips to refer to in your conversation. VPN (Virtual Private Network) technology can work for a home office, but it will not work on your phone. And don’t ask me about using RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) on a cell phone; the screen is too tiny to get anything done.

Documents attached to emails can serve as a basis for discussion, but this approach is problematic. If a legal transaction is under intense negotiation, by the time you review the attachment, the draft version may have changed. By contrast, with a cloud-enabled DMS, you can be sent a secure link to the current version of the document. The document remains secure from hacking inside your DMS rather than as open attachments to an email. With a link to the document, you may even be able to edit the document on your phone and publish those changes back to the DMS.

As a NetDocuments consultant, I am partial to the NetDocuments offering. It is entirely cloud-based and meets all industry standards for security. It has a dedicated application for iPhone and Android that allows full-search, preview, and display, as well as editing of documents. Premise-based DMS vendors like iManage, Worldox, and OpenText offer a cloud option, which either leverages the premise-based document storage or a cloud-hosted database. Cloud-based file storage systems like Microsoft Office365, Dropbox, and Box have business-level offerings that give you anywhere access to your files. The benefit of these file storage systems is that storage space is relatively cheap. However, they currently lack the meta-data profiling, advanced search, workflow, and encryption at rest features available in dedicated DMS systems.

Asynchronous Communication Tools

When working in an office, communication happens with in-person meetings and calls. During the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual meetings occurred over the internet with platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and GoToMeeting. These platforms are great for one-onone meetings or small teams. If there are more than three people in attendance, these meetings are inherently unproductive; most attendees are listening with half an ear while checking their email or surfing the web until their names are mentioned.

Asynchronous communication is the solution to unproductive meetings: all meetings should be preceded by an agenda that is distributed in advance of the meeting that also assigns the persons responsible for each item. The agenda can then be discussed asynchronously in a threaded conversation before the meeting. As a result, the meeting is shorter and focused on decisions.

Your firm should agree on a threaded discussion platform. If your firm has deployed Office365, you can use the included Teams technology. You create a team and, for each team, create discussion channels. In the channel, you can have an open period of discussion where everyone contributes before the meeting, with the options or decisions being presented for consideration at the formal meeting. If the discussion requires synchronous communication, you click on the audio call button and it brings everyone together for a zoom-style call with full screen-sharing. Teams can run on Mac-OS, IOS, and Android.

Slack is a popular alternative for these team discussions because of the ease of bringing in people outside the organization into the discussion and its freemium model. NetDocuments DMS has the ndPlan offering which includes ndThread. The nd Thread module allows you to have matter-centric discussions with discussion channels focused on particular documents or issues. With the SmartViewer, you can add an annotation layer to documents WhatsApp offers secure international messaging. If you use Salesforce.com or a practice management system like Litify or AdvologixPM that is hosted on the Salesforce.com platform, there is Salesforce Chatter. Be sure to consider how private and secure your messaging platform is. You will want to maintain a clear wall between business communications and personal communications. For this reason, I would never use Facebook messaging to communicate with clients and would likely avoid the usage of Google Hangouts unless the firm has standardized on an all-Google platform. Hangouts Chat is Google’s alternative to Teams and Slack. Facebook-owned WhatsApp offers secure international messaging. If you use Salesforce.com or a practice management system like Litify or AdvologixPM that is hosted on the Salesforce.com platform, there is Salesforce Chatter. Be sure to consider how private and secure your messaging platform is. You will want to maintain a clear wall between business communications and personal communications. For this reason, I would never use Facebook messaging to communicate with clients and would likely avoid the usage of Google Hangouts unless the firm has standardized on an all-Google platform.

Task Management and Workflow

If you are going to be working outside of normal office hours and away from your desk, you should be able to let your team know which tasks are in progress or completed, and you should be able to bill for your time. There are now many options when choosing a cloud-based or cloud-enabled legal practice management system. Strong offerings are available from Zola Suite, ZenCase, Clio, and Centerbase, to name a few. With a Galaxy S21+ or an iPhone13 Max, you can access and run many of these systems in the browser. The text size will be small, but they will function. Some programs have created dedicated apps that are available for download from the Apple App Store or Google Play. The dedicated applications are better integrated with phone functions like calling, email, and document review.

Some applications like ndPlan, MOT-R Workflow, DocMinder, Onit, BEC Legal Systems MatterLink, and AfterPattern allow you to flow documents through a task workflow. The workflow would include task assignments, as well as approvals. With these systems, you can get asynchronous approvals. Think of them as “votes.” A task that requires multiple approvals before it goes to the next stage can trigger an email or text message with a link back to the documents. Approval is a matter of clicking on a button in the emails. Votes are registered in the workflow application. Once the necessary vote threshold is attained, the assignee of the task is notified of the result and can proceed to the next step. The workflows can be initiated at any time of day and get brought full circle in minutes without lengthy meetings or time delays. All the information the approver needs is accessible online from their cellphone or tablet.

Task management is usually included in legal practice management systems as part of a billing workflow; completed tasks are turned in billable timeslips. They can be viewed in a list by the assignor and assignee for all tasks, or they can be viewed in a sublist under each matter. This approach works for small matters, but more is required for larger projects that involve multiple teams working together on different aspects of a single project. For these larger projects, you might consider dedicated project management tools like BaseCamp, Trello, Zoho Projects, Wrike, and Asana. Some of these have integration with document management systems. Another option would be to leverage your document management system. NetDocuments includes a Task management tool that allows you to create multiple KanBan task boards for each matter and then attach documents, checklists, notes, and discussion to each task assignment. Other products have integrations with Worldox, iManage, and NetDocuments.

Setting Your Ideal Work-Life Balance

These tools and techniques will free up the dead time in your day that is spent in meetings or making sure you are available when someone calls. It will free you up to go to your kid’s soccer game or go on a family outing—just bring your phone. If a client calls, you take a moment to review the file online and get them their answer. If a colleague wants you to review a draft, they can send a link, and you can reply with approval or suggested changes. Ultimately, you will need to manage the expectations of your clients and colleagues. They need to understand that you care about their needs, but you are also off the clock.

Technology—Property Editor: Seth Rowland, Esq. (www.linkedin.com/in/ sethrowland) has been building document workflow automation solutions since 1996 through Basha Systems (www.bashasys. com), the consultancy he founded. He also helps law firms implement document management and practice management systems as a member of the 3545 Consulting Group (www.3545consulting. com).

Published in Probate & Property, Volume 36, No 1 © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.