Migrating to better technology

Today and tomorrow will see me attending a conference on Legal Technology which will talk about how law business and technology can be put together and generate more income for legal firms. This is all thanks to my friend, Eddie Law of http://www.elawyer.com.my/ a local online portal specifically design with lawyers in mind.

I have always been an advocate of legal technology and in my legal firm, my department, which is the litigation department has been spearheading the drive as we manage to generate notice of demands and summonses at lightning speed. This is due to most legal document management system which had templates using Windows Words. It is easy for us litigators to just copy the standard notice of demand and summonses making them into templates. Furthermore, my department is one of the smallest in the firm serving just two banks.

Its not so easy for the conveyancing department with nearly five to six banks whith each having nearly 10 types of documents to migrate to the new system. We are currently training our conveyancing staff to do the migration but being bogged down with the current work, it has been a slow task.

This is the first time my firm embark in a systematic approach to doing things. Being medium sized and without having any advice from an outside consultant, which have been the norm since we started the firm, we have to rely on our own knowledge when we do a new thing. Some of the things that we managed to implement successfully over the year include the registration system of files, mapping of old files in our storage area, communication using the intranet system and sharing of files through the network. All this was done through our own knowledge and we had to do it through trial and error. Tedious but cheap. Up until now, we have done it our way.

We now realised that there are always a better way of doing things. Although we are small, people seems to see the potential in our firm. We use that as leverage to get better deals when we buy or rent something. We have been embarking on this new mentality ever since we moved our office from a small one where you wouldn't believe that there's a law firm there (although we are not the only one) to an office so big that we can double our staff without needing to move again. We even have an unused penthouse which have now been rented out to one of our associate.

Its not that we have suddenly hit an unknown jackpot (unknown as I'm the one managing account and know nothing of it), it is more due to realising the need for us to catch up with the bigger firm in town. Being small, technology can be a big advantage for you. They will help you reach out to your current clients and even the potential clients.

We still have no website of our own but we will in the near future. We were already being teased on not having a website by a government agency who wants to promote us. Maybe this forum will help me understand more on how to harness technology. This blog is my starting point.

I'll post about it properly after I have attended it.