As the legal community grapples with the exploding amount of information, attorneys will need to remove the artificial walls which hereto resulted in eDiscovery responsibilities being tossed over to the technocrats.  Moreover, the technical resources need to  invest the time to gain a deeper understanding of the attorney perspective.   Since increasingly relevant evidence is found in modern communication methods (think about SMS, twitter, facebook) attorneys are necessarily forced to embrace technology.  Since increasingly much of this information is in the cloud, attorneys will need to get comfortable with this rapidly expanding platform.

I am confident that this transition will occur at an increasingly faster pace.  Moreover, it will not just be limited to the newest generation of attorneys who can be said to be part of Prensky’s Digital Natives but also those who are Digital Immigrants (www.marcprenskey.com).  I anticipate that Software as a Service like aLawPractice.com will help you make the transition if you have not already.

We at Legal SaaS recognize that in this challenged economy the fledgling Solos are those in greatest need of assistance.  We see many JDs recently graduated and having successfully completed their bar exam, but still without a job offer.  We see seasoned attorneys launching new Solo Practices (and not all on their own volition) after many years at larger firms.  We see attorneys electing to have their own independent practice but banding together with like minded attorneys in loose coalitions.  There is a great need for Solos to be able to manage their matters with a minimum of overhead (e.g. IT support).

The design of aLawPractice.com incorporates components required for Solos, who often do not lease office space.  The ability to access matters, contacts, etc. whenever, wherever the attorney needs to practice law is fundamental to ALP.  Our solution allows the Solo to have a virtual law office without being tied down to the location of the server.  Recognizing that many Solos prefer iPhones we have focused our initial smartphone development on this device.  We think it is more important to deliver a core set of functionality on the iPhone than to develop a subset for multiple devices.

But you are not a Solo?  ALP may still be the best choice for you.  The minimum set of functionality to support a Solo Practice is also needed for attorneys in your firm.  We are scheduling our next release in Q2 2010 to include selective matter sharing across attorneys, conflict detection, attorney based backup and recovery (hopefully we will also be able to tackle the Blackberry).  Help us drive this development in our next release by subscribing now.

The majority of commercial LMPs are installed in one of two ways.  The LMP has either a centralized file system with a copy of the software residing on each of the attorneys’ and paralegals’ computers (desktops and laptops) or  the software resides on a central server and communicates over the local area network with each of the user’s computer.  The primary consequence of both of these implementations is that once you walk out of the office you lose access to the information you recorded for your matters.  If you need to be look up something, say the phone number of one of the contacts associated with the matter, you are often dependent on someone back in the office to provide support.  Now if your practice rarely has you out of the office and you are at the point in your career that you do not need to take work home this could be a great advantage.  Out of sight out of mind.  However, I have not found that is the case for attorneys I have spoken to.

One way attorneys have managed to extend their access to an on-premise LMP is to use remote control software (e.g. pcAnywhere™).  Remote control software allows the attorney to provide a connection into their computer and run it as if physically present at your desktop.  The software runs slower than if you are directly connected to your computer, but if you are connected to the internet, say at a home office, you are able to get to your data.

What about if you cannot sit down with a laptop and connect to a hotspot to remotely tele-connect to your matter data?  There are some apps available on various phones (e.g. BlackBerry®) that do provide rudimentary access to your LMP.  Currently, these are not very friendly and mostly are based on simple character based interfaces.  It is possible to get information but it often takes several minutes navigating to the right screen and pulling up what you need.

A modern SaaS application will enable you to access your information from any browser very quickly and, if designed with a Web 2.0 perspective, delivered in the intuitive manner we have all come to expect for our internet experiences.  When combined with well designed smartphone technology then it is possible to quickly obtain and record information vital to your matters.

So when we speak of the opportunity costs we are really asking, given your present on-premise LMP can you effectively practice law whenever, wherever?  If you bump into a client at lunch can you provide up to the minute information on the issues pending and are you able to instantaneously record the time for this valued exchange of information?   Do you need to rely on scribbling a note and hoping to remember to bill the activity.  If you need to meet with an important client at their office do you rely on lugging every relevant document over or can you just jump on the internet with an Air Card and your laptop to pull up those documents.

My point is that having general access whenever, wherever to your data with legal SaaS increases the opportunity for you to perform billable activities and to accurately record them quickly.  Another aspect of on-premise software is that you may find yourself engaging in a lot of non-billable activities, such as installation and integrating the software to other packages.  Most attorneys will in fact pay an IT expert to take care of this, but others have sufficient technical background to do it themselves.  Now, if spending your Saturday morning tweaking with your on-premise LMP is an enjoyable diversion from the day to day practice of law, more power to you.  However, most attorneys will find this a frustrating exercise that not only takes them from their chosen profession but often leaves them exasperated and drained to do their real job.  There is a significant opportunity cost of the DIYer approach which is largely mitigated by choosing a SaaS LMP.

I have addressed how SaaS obviates the attorney from performing or hiring for core IT tasks and how access out of the office to your matter data increases opportunities for you to bill more.  Perhaps an opportunity cost that is even more significant that SaaS can deliver on is the collaborative aspects of delivering information over the internet.  Would it be helpful for your practice to have a client securely review a lengthy document posted on your firm’s secure web presence?  Or do your clients prefer to use zip utilities and encryption software to review relevant material to the matter?  Or do you just trust that an unencrypted and uncompressed document will get through their email system without being bounced or subject to e-Discovery.

What about the collaborative aspects of working with co-council or for that matter opposing council?  Does the modern internet experience with the so-called Web 2.0 user interfaces provide a new model for you to perform your job?   Is it time for you to consider how your LMP can improve the delivery of your work or should you continue to view it as a necessary evil and which your focus is to minimize the dollar spend on?

Perhaps it is time for you to factor in the Opportunity Costs when you compare a subscription service versus on-premise legal practice management.  Only you can say whether freedom from IT headaches, mobility and collaboration delivers value for your law practice.  Let us know your thoughts on when this could be of value or for that matter when these capabilities are not worth moving to a new delivery model of services.

aLawPractice.com is designed to deliver legal matter management whenever, wherever the attorney finds them self.  Our aim is to support many different types of technological devices which support attorneys in and out of the law office.  To deliver a highly collaborative application through the internet requires an understanding of many different technologies and the rapidly evolving landscape to support computing in the cloud.  Many decisions need to be made at several levels.  These decisions need to be reevaluated at various stages as the product evolves.

At ALP we are evaluating many simultaneous considerations such as platform, programming language, protocols.  Do we develop within LAMP or .Net?  Do we develop web services with a Service Oriented Architecture or simply JBOS?  Is it Java, Ruby on Rails or Objective-C?  Do we leverage Javascript, Ajax, Flash?  Are we working in the Cocoa or the Android API.   Are we focused on building strictly Restful services or do entertain a Registry/Repository?  Do we even care whether the app relies on state or not? Do we restrict the MVC pattern to the UI or is it ok for data services.  Do we build services only at the data layer or are there true business level services?  Are we developing in an Agile style or not?  Do we strive for a common platform or do target specific environments?  Do we seek open-source solutions for common tasks or should it be developed de novo.

I am not saying that as an attorney you should care much about our technical decisions, only that we stay informed and continue to make good choices.  Creating a modern application which runs on a browser over http or uses a smartphone and web services to populate your time entries mandates that we select and deploy many different technologies.   The reality is that the more user friendly an app becomes, in general, the more involved are the technologies.  Quickly developers find themselves with a problem in combinatorics and one which new components keep getting added.  You want a vendor which is capable of playing in this space as software can quickly become stale in this evolving landscape.  Having the technological knowledge and acumen to put the appropriate technologies together is one of the four pillars we at Legal SaaS believe is required to deliver in this world of Software as a Service.

So my take away message is that if you are entrusting your data and your client’s data to a software vendor then you want assurance that your vendor is thinking through the problems of delivering a collaborative app which is highly stable, very secure, has an architecture that will readily allow new extensions but that, collectively, is well constructed.  Moreover, the application you will be relying on needs to be built with technologies that will deliver for you whenever, wherever you may need to be to support your clients.   The technologies need to be current and supportive of many different types of devices.  It is not enough to have access to your matters when you are sitting in your office.  Moreover, a well constructed app needs for its technologies to hang together and you certainly should not be paying for the developers chasing some hot new platform that the blogerati is all jazzed about.   It is incumbent on you that one of the foundational pillars your vendor must be bringing to the market is significant developer engagement with modern software development and constant monitoring of the continuously evolving landscape so that your system is able to deliver consistently and effectively when you are.

The most significant hard dollar costs are licensing, installation, hardware, and support. Let’s talk about them one at a time.

Licensing of smaller law office software packages are generally not prohibitive per seat.  If you amortize it over say three years before you purchase the next upgrade it will be significantly less than a subscription service for SaaS.

But as you will discover licensing is the least of your expenses.  What is the cost to install the software?  Do you pay an IT professional their rate to set it up for you or do you work over the weekend to get it up and running?  If you do not like messing with this sort of thing you will probably spend a couple hundred dollars to get it installed.  (Alternatively if you are prepared to invest the time you should not discount your opportunity costs.  For example, assuming the IT professional is twice as fast as you are at these tasks, do you really want to discount your legal billing rate by that much?)

Hardware cost can be trivial if you select a system which runs on your desktops/laptops accessing a centralized file system.  In that case you may not even need to purchase a separate server computer dedicated to this purpose.   You just have to be sure that your computer can handle the LPM system in addition to your other work.   If your  legal software requires a dedicated server you may now be talking over a Thousand Dollars for the hardware including networking gear.

If you have on-premise software you will need some sort of recovery plan to ensure that in the event of a hard disk failure your important data records are not lost.  Either you need to spend the time creating and implementing a plan or once again you are calling your IT guy and spending real dollars with them.  In addition any inconsistencies that arise between your on-premise LPM system and the operating system or other software packages will require you to hire that IT Consultant, unless in addition to practicing law, this is in your skill set.

What about needing to access your LPM when you are out of the office.  This is difficult at best, but several attorneys will pay for software to “log into” their office LPM system.  These packages tend to run slow but can get the job done, at least from your home.  Hopefully, you don’t need to do this often and when you do it is just to check a quick detail.

I would advice putting together a total TCO budget for your LPM system and compare it to a subscription service SaaS offering.  Unlike some comparisons I have found out on the web, I tried to take a conservative view on the TCO for on-premise and not assume that your practice needed more expensive solutions than you actually might.

Even if you find that costs are comparable or in some instances for DIY’ers lower for on-premise versus SaaS, you still need to think about the Opportunity Costs.   Look for my Part 2 on this subject.