| SOLO/SMALL
FIRM PRACTITIONER |
BY
PAT YEVICS
|
|
Top 12 Reasons Why a PDA is Essential
to a Modern Law Practice Management System
By Bob McNeill
The purpose of a computerized
law practice management system (LPMS) is to get your work done “better,
faster and cheaper” (i.e., produce higher quality work-product
in less time and at lower cost by building expertise into the system, automating
routine documents and tasks, and putting most of the information used by
the practice at everyone’s fingertips). A personal digital assistant
(PDA) is a handheld device (such as a Palm or Palm phone) or PocketPC device
with an LCD display and some kind of data-entry device (such as a mini-keyboard
or stylus). The following attributes can enable your PDA to provide your
LPMS with additional leverage.
Portability. Lawyers do not work in the office all of the time.
We go to court, work at home and meet at clients’ offices or
nursing homes. Much of the information needed to be productive outside
the office, such as contacts, calendar, tasks and memos, can be stored
on a PDA. A PDA lets you take your practice information with you, without
lugging a laptop computer. Being able to work “anytime, anywhere” not
only means that you can be more productive, it also allows you to be
more responsive to your clients. (Time is saved by not having to call
the office to obtain information that could be stored on a PDA. How
many times have you called the office to find a telephone number that
was in your practice management system?)
Single point of entry. One of the principles of a well-designed
LPMS is to enter all information once and only once, and then use it
elsewhere as needed. Once a client’s name and address is entered
into an LPMS, it can be viewed like an index card on each person’s
computer so you can get rid of each staff person’s paper desktop
Rolodex®. The same name and address information can be used to create
a retainer agreement and other standard documents. It can also be sent
to the billing system to open up a new matter. Connecting your PDA to
your LPMS extends these efficiencies further; like a very long hose on
a vacuum cleaner, you can suck information in from places you could not
reach before. With your PDA, you can enter the name and e-mail address
of someone you meet at a social function so that you can automatically
add that person to your practice management system’s newsletter
mailing list.
Synchronization. How do you keep all the information in
the PDA current? Entering information directly into a PDA using the Palm’s
graffiti is not very efficient. Built-in or add-on keyboards are better,
but better still is the ability to automatically synchronize all the
information in your practice management system with the PDA. Placing
the PDA in its cradle and pushing a button is all it takes to synchronize.
This is much more efficient because the information is already in your
LPMS. Most legal-specific practice management systems have some type
of Palm synchronization, and some have Windows CE/Pocket PC synchronization,
but what exactly they synchronize varies. Some have the ability to define
the scope of the synchronization so that you see only your contacts or
calendar, rather than those of the entire firm.
Calendaring. Having an up-to-date calendar at your fingertips
on your PDA makes it easy to schedule and reschedule appointments, pick
a new trial date, plan a vacation, etc. Without a PDA, having your calendar
with you means that the office does not have an up-to-date copy of your
calendar, and that someone has to reconcile your personal calendar with
the main calendar at the office. With a PDA synchronized to the LPMS
in your office, everyone can access everyone else’s calendar at
the same time.
Task management. How many times have you been stuck in
court or in traffic and wished you had your “To Do” list
with you so that you could take care of simple tasks, such as dictating
a letter, making a phone call or delegating tasks? How do you remember
to add an item to your
“To Do” list when you are out of the office and a great idea pops
into your head? Jot it down on a piece of paper and hope it makes it back to
the office? Being able to review your “To Do” list on your PDA
(and to add new “To-Dos” and change existing ones) means being
able to make use of time that would otherwise be wasted. Adding, changing and
marking completed To Do’s on your PDA and synchronizing the changes to
your LPMS makes more efficient use of otherwise wasted time.
File notes. An LPMS is only as good as the information
in it. When you are not sitting at your desk, how do you record information
concerning a telephone call, meeting, or hearing? If your PDA synchronizes
notes with your law practice management system software, creating a memo
on the PDA gets the job done quickly and easily.
To create longer notes, dictating on a handheld recorder is probably best,
even though it requires time on the part of the staff to transcribe it and
your time to review it, which means it may not get to the electronic “file” for
a couple of days. Entering lots of text into a PDA is not its strong suit,
so if you plan on entering lots of notes, check out the size of the PDA display
and available methods of text entry (e.g., graffiti, mini-keyboard,
external keyboards and folding portable keyboards) to make sure that you will
be comfortable with the amount of text entry that you plan to do.
Capturing Caller ID information. If you use a combination
PDA/cell phone (such as the Treo), you can easily add a contact’s
name and telephone number to the PDA’s contact list. When you synchronize
the PDA with your LPMS, the new contact will also be added to the office’s
list of contacts.
Billing. One of the tenets of good billing practices is
to record the work as close as possible to the time that it is done because
it is more likely to be recorded (and recorded accurately). The more
time that elapses between the time the work is done and when it is recorded
the more likely to be recorded incorrectly (or not recorded at all).
If the time recorded is more than was actually spent, then the client
is overcharged; if less, the lawyer is being underpaid.
Many of the legal-specific time and billing applications have remote data-entry
programs that run on PDAs, with the ability to enter time and expenses on the
PDA and then transfer the information to the billing system during the synchronization
process. Recording work when it is fresh in your mind avoids having to recall
it hours or days later when trying to enter the information into the billing
system.
Expenses. How do you keep track of miscellaneous costs,
travel mileage and other out-of-pocket expenses? Most PDAs have an application
for tracking expenses as part of their standard array of programs that
can synchronize with a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. Even if you
do not synchronize your PDA with your billing system, tracking expenses
when they are incurred makes it more likely you will track them at all.
E-mail. E-mail is on its way to replacing regular (“snail”)
mail as the most common method of communication between lawyers and their
clients, other lawyers, etc. Therefore, your practice management system
has to be able to manage client/matter-related e-mail at the least. How
you should handle the barrage of e-mail you receive is beyond the scope
of this article. One tool, however, is to read and respond to e-mails
using your PDA, either with a live Internet connection on the PDA or
by synchronizing with the e-mail application on your desktop computer
that is connected to the Internet. Using your PDA to help process your
e-mail gives you the option of doing so at slack times when you are not
in the office and do not have regular e-mail access available.
Documents. If you need to be able to review and perhaps
create documents on the go (in addition to being able to view static
documents, such as statutes and rules of evidence), then you should investigate
whether synchronizing your word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF
files, etc., to your PDA is the answer. There are add-on programs that
will let you load a Word or WordPerfect file onto your PDA and make changes
to it before synchronizing it back to your desktop computer. The obvious
limitations are the size of the PDA display and its input capabilities.
Internet access. Being able to access the Internet is increasingly
important for lawyers. Some PDAs have the ability to access the Internet
over a wireless connection, and some websites can deliver content in
a format that is easier for the small display of a PDA to handle. With
this combination, you can perform online legal research
“anytime, anyplace,” giving you more flexibility in where and when
you do your work.
Deciding how you want to use a PDA to leverage your law practice management
system and choosing the right PDA for your purposes will make you more efficient
and productive, enabling you to provide better and more timely legal services
to your clients.
Bob McNeill has 15 years of
law practice experience. He is a past Chair of the MSBA Law Practice Management
Section.
