Until recently, medium and large firms were the primary adopters of sophisticated practice management software, such as Time Matters produced by LexisNexis, and other “high” technology. This was due to the high cost of adopting cutting-edge technology, such as the need to have an in-house IT department. However, as the Google-Microsoft war heats up, smartphone apps proliferate, open-source projects continue to deliver competitve software, and hardware costs fall, it’s becoming increasingly possible for small firms and sole practitioners to run a high tech practice on little more than ingenuity and a tolerance to change.
Office Productivity
From reading law blogs, it appears that Google Apps is the backbone of choice for many such practices. At $50 per user per year, Google Apps provides your firm with custom domain email, chat, video, and voice communication applications; a time-management web application; and a structured wiki and basic website creation application. By comparison, Microsoft Office 2007  Small Business costs $280, and doesn’t provide all of these applications, such as simultaneous online document collaboration (Google Docs). Another popular and free productivity suite for those who do not want to compute in the cloud is OpenOffice.
Voice-to-Text
If you’re not a touch typist and/or are used to dictating, voice-to-text applications like Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking ($200 USD) can dramatically reduce the time it takes you to compose legal documents. According to Wikipedia,
An average professional typist reaches 50 to 70 words per minute (wpm), while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120.
Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as “hunt and peck” typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text, and 27 wpm when copying text but in bursts may be able to reach up to 60 to 70 wpm.
While the world’s fastest speaker, Steve Woodmore, who has achieved a rate of 595 wpm, may be disappointed, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can convert voice to text with 99% accuracy at an impressive 160 wpm. Dragon NaturallySpeaking even offers a legal edition which offers a “preconfigured legal vocabulary that includes over 30,000 legal specific terms and phrases, and [which] even formats legal citations”.
At the start of this school year, I started pitching this software to law students and professors as a great tool for the legal profession and education. I now know about a dozen or so people that are using it and are very pleased.
Smartphones
Smartphone users (and abusers) can now synchronize all of their Google contacts and calendar appointments to their smartphone with a free download of Google Sync.
Netbooks
Also called mini-laptops and sub-notebooks, these computer systems are small (typically with screens  under 11″) , cheap (<$400), light (<3 pounds), and low-power (typically a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU). If all you’re doing is word-processing, emailing, and browsing the net, these moveable electronic thinking machines will lighten your load without lightening your wallet. In addition, many benefit from supremely impressive battery life; for example, the Asus Eee PC 1005PE gets up to 14 hours!
“Say hello to my little friend!”
VOIP
Another way to bring the costs of calling down is voice over internet protocol (VOIP) technology, which allows you to place calls over the internet at extremely low rates. As well, in the US, Google now offers a free service called Google Voice, which offers free SMS and low cost international calls, along with many other impressive features. Perhaps most impressive of these is the ability to create a single phone number that rings all of your phones, wherever they are, at once or in a sequence.
Fax
To save some more money on the phone front, replace your fax line and use a service such as MyFax.com ($10 USD/month) to send and receive fascimiles by email; but you’ll need to invest in a scanner ($75+), or have incredibly steady hands, a digital camera, and no qualms about misappropriating technology.
Accounting
While PCLaw by LexisNexis provides “flexible financial tools that are fine-tuned for law professionals”, it also costs $1140 for a first new user (I wonder if that expense comes pre-entered). For those willing to adapt a generic small-business financial-accounting software to their law practice, open-source software like GnuCashcan be downloaded for free.
“Technology happens, it’s not good, it’s not bad. Is steel good or bad?”
– Andrew Grove, fourth employee and eventual CEO of Intel Corporation.
