Miscellaneous

New era

Posted on by Gareth

Note: this post was originally from 2014. The 2015 update is in blue below

A new era for Hatton James took hold in June 2014. We went from paper to the digital world of the Cloud.

New era 1Our staff have great deskspace and we have freed up room to take on more staff.

We like to think that we have always been ahead of the curve in terms of Solihull law firms. But this leap forward took us into a new era.

Following a carefully-choreographed plan, we took a number of steps that ensure we were up to date with modern technology could deliver a better service to our clients.

  • We threw away our filing cabinets and uploaded our documents, correspondence and employment tribunal paperwork into the Cloud.
  • Archived papers are being imaged and stored electronically.
  • Data is protected with 256-bit AES encryption (which would take longer than the age of the universe to crack by brute-force).
  • We don’t send faxes any more. We can receive them (via software) if we have to.
  • We use a secure download service to send hearing bundles.
  • Letters in are scanned and stored in our Cloud-based filing system immediately.
  • Our staff have access to work emails outside the office (naturally).
  • We are taking office telephone calls outside normal business hours and use a 24 hour virtual receptionist.
  • We’ve taken on an IT specialist to work further on all of this in the future.
  • We moved from POTS (plain old telephone system) to VOIP.

Update one year later:

Secure downloads

  • When choosing a secure download service, avoid sites that expire downloads after a short period – recipients don’t always access our bundles when we email the link, then ask for another one a few weeks later, causing extra uploading work.

VOIP

  • Our internet speed didn’t support VOIP. We shouldn’t have believed our provider’s assessment that it would. We moved to 8×8’s platform (through who2 – fantastic customer care). It routes incoming calls to our mobiles. Outgoing calls are made over our mobiles, which send our office number. We threw away our deskphones.
  • There will be LOTS of teething problems with a new phone system. One tiny, obscure setting on your mobile device can cause days of not being able to make calls. You’ll need notes of which settings to use, oodles of patience and possibly counselling.

Files

  • A small business (or a larger one, if people don’t work on the same files) can get up and running on the Cloud with just Dropbox for storage/backup and Boxcryptor for encryption. Because you’re not file-sharing over a traditional network, if two people work on the same file, a conflicted copy is created, which is a headache. Microsoft Office in conjunction with OneDrive cloud storage or Google Docs with Google Drive storage allows two or more people to access the same file – you’ll see everyone else who is in the file editing away at the same time.
  • …and therefore this solution is inappropriate for databases and outlook email .pst files. Keep these on a local network or your hard drive if you have to (we moved to other online solutions instead). 
  • Correspondence is best named in the yymmdd from xxx to yyy format. yymmdd keeps them in date order when sorted by name.
  • Follow a consistent naming convention. Eg with correspondence, “from xxx to yyy” generic (eg “from client to us” rather than “from Joanne to HJ”) lets you run the same search criteria each time.
  • No need for subfolders in the correspondence folder – the search will create virtual folders as you go (eg in Win7, “system.filename:from client to us”).
  • When drafting, append _01, _02 to each draft to keep successive versions of the same document together and sorted correctly.

Office software

  • Microsoft licensing is confusing. Office 365 is a pain to navigate. We reverted to disc technology after trying SaSS (software as a service).
  • The reasons we will always stick to paid Office software instead of free open source are 1. the reviewing feature; 2. ability to use vba trickery; 3. the cost saving is negligible. 4. the reviewing feature; we use it all the time.

Printing, pages and PDFs

  • We mostly use pdf bundles and our only substantial paperwork is hearing bundles at the end of a case. No need to pay for pdf creation software – free utilities are out there and Adobe has made Acrobat 7 available free, which still works great.
  • A-pdf number will put page numbers on your pdf bundles using software at the click of a button.
  • If you don’t outsource your shredding get a commercial shredder that takes 20+ pages at a time. All shredders are prone to jamming; smaller ones especially so.
  • Use Google Cloud print to create a printer network if you’re not on a physical network (print from any computer to any printer as long as it is connected to a computer and both are connected to the internet).

Working with others

  • Share screens when discussing a document, with both colleagues and with clients. We recommend Teamviewer.
  • Consider refusing to work for clients who don’t use email.

Efficiency

  • Two screens are better than one. Compare two documents at once. Or keep emails always visible on the second screen. Or research on one while you draft on another. 
  • When you have two screens, you may not be able to resist a third. 
  • If you acquire a fourth, you’ve probably gone too far.
  • On a modern laptop, the easiest way to get a third monitor is with a usb3 adapter, otherwise you’ll need an external graphics card. If you have a pc, installing up to four monitors is easily done with an internal quad graphics card and two twin adapters.
  • If you don’t already, learn to touch-type There are plenty of online courses.
  • Use a bluetooth headset to free your hands to type notes while you’re on the phone.

and most annoyingly of all…

  • GP surgeries will never email documents but insist on faxing them. I don’t foresee this changing in my lifetime!