Author Archives: Maureen

Clio 2021 Legal Trends Report

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Yesterday was the first day of the Clio Cloud Conference 2021. Clio does a fantastic job of wowing the attendees and creating a community of loyal followers.

Every year the don’t-miss speaker is CEO and Founder, Jack Newton. Jack has big visions. And his execution with Clio has been huge. In April of this year, Clio raised a $110M dollar Series E funding with a $1.6B valuation. When Jack speaks, people are eager to hear what Jack is planning next.

Of the many announcements from Clio today, three are:

  1. Clio Payments: Jack Newton says, “…the most frequent point of friction in attorney-client relationships is collections.” Clio Payments is integrated with the Clio cloud-based practice management platform and syncs with accounting platforms, such as Quicken and Xero.
  2. Clio Ventures: Clio will invest in “promising early stage companies and diverse founders” developing for the Clio platform. Clio has acquired a few companies, most recently Lawyaw, a YC-backed legal document automation company, which had been a Clio partner.
  3. Clio 2021 Legal Trends Report: I look forward to this annual report, full of timely data. The PDF is a free download with registration. I highly recommend that you take a look at it.

I’m highlighting a few points which interested me. There is much more in the report.

First Key Take-away: Client expectations have changed

As we saw in the 2020 Legal Trends Report, the pandemic understandably accelerated clients’ willingness to work with a lawyer remotely. With Clio’s annual data collection, they were able to illustrate the change from 2018 to 2021.

The report further digs into this data by stage of engagement and type of remote communication medium.

Second Key Take-away: Remote services are only part of the picture

I’ve yet to see any survey of criteria on choosing a lawyer in which responsiveness was not the top criteria. Here, “Responsiveness to questions” leads “Price transparency” by a hair. No technology, no remote or in-person meeting capability, is likely to surpass the importance of responsiveness.

Third Key Take-away: Growing firms are really growing.

This data mirrors the data which we saw in early 2021 with respect to the blockbuster year that Big Law had in 2020. See the report for a deeper dive, for example, that growing firms are more likely to be using on-line payments, client portals, and CRM.

And there is more fun stuff!

Vicariously, I like to study the hourly rates by state and by practice.

Also, the KPI data on utilization, realization, and collection rates is eye-opening.

You can download the report from Clio here.

I’d like to thank Clio for widely sharing this fascinating data about the legal market each year. They are committed to the legal community.

-Maureen

Get the Most from iManage Work® on Tablets and Smartphones with LINK

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Our “baby,” the LINK App, is a full-fledged teenager now, growing by leaps and bounds and taking the car out for a spin.

If you have not seen LINK in the past 12 months, you’ll find this demo video an eye-opener. Split-screen mode and multi-tabbed view are a fantastically productive way to work on tablets. You work in several lives screens.

This new demo video is a quick way to see some of LINK’s best workflows. Use the timeline to go directly to the feature which you want to see. Let us know what you think. To schedule a demo, write to us: [email protected].

0:00 – Authentication
0:34 – LINK Home Screen
1:42 – SharePoint / Portal / Web Resources
2:15 – My Files in LINK
3:11 – Navigate in iManage Work
3:22 – Split-screen Mode & Multi-tab View
5:57 – Search iManage
7:30 – Quick Lookup – Client/Matter & Doc ID
8:42 – List All Files
9:36 – PDF Viewer Features
11:02 – Annotation
12:25 – Check-in to iManage
13:20 – Email a File from iManage
15:15 – Edit with the Word App
17:15 – Check-in to iManage
18:20 – Compare Edited Version
19:00 – Inbox: Search, Sort, Filter
19:28 – Open an NRL, Annotate, & Email
20:13 – Predictive & Multiple Filing to Outlook and iManage Folders
22:25 – Compose an Email, Attach a File in iManage, Send & File

Our next ILTA webinar is: “Email Management Integrated with DMS in the LINK App” on October 20th. You’ll see LINK’s email usability features as well as predictive filing to Outlook and DMS folders. Learn more and register HERE.

-Maureen

Productivity Boost: Compare Word Files in the LINK App

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Did you know that in our LINK App you can compare Word files?

  • Compare two files
  • Compare two versions of a file
  • Compare an attachment in email to a file in DMS

Watch this 16 second video to view comparing two versions of a file in iManage Work in the LINK App.

LINK has the compareDocs engine from DocsCorp built-in for high fidelity comparison results within the LINK secure container.

LINK is integrated with iManage Work®, NetDocuments DMS, OpenText eDocs, and Outlook email. In a single app, compare your files, then email or check-in to DMS.

Watch this video to see full workflows using in-app comparison and using the Word app for editing.

If have any questions, write to us at: contact at mobilehelix dot com. We’d be happy to answer your questions.

-Maureen

Word App Editing Just Got Easier for Lawyers with LINK

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We have developed several editing workflows using the Word app over the years. Our newest one is the easiest one which we have seen anywhere. This is in part because our LINK app securely integrates your Document Management System and Email with the Word app. Therefore, you can choose to edit a file from DMS or an email attachment and it will open directly in Word.

Take a look at our 2 minute, 44 second video to see this workflow.

Here’s what you don’t have to do in our workflow:

  1. No need to copy the file in the Word app. LINK encrypts the file and moves it to Word.
  2. No need to save the file as .docx in the Word file. LINK converts .doc to .docx for you.
  3. No need to delete the file from the Word app after editing. LINK deletes it.

This video shows how straightforward it is to edit from LINK with the Word app.

LINK is integrated with iManage Work® 10, on-prem and in the Cloud; NetDocuments DMS; OneDrive; Network File Shares; and OpenText eDocs is in development. LINK is also integrated with Microsoft Exchange, therefore, you have your Outlook Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, and Notes within the LINK App.

If your attorneys are looking for a simple way to edit files in DMS or in Outlook email with the Word app, email me. We are happy to show you a demo of this workflow.

-Maureen

contact @ mobilehelix dot com

Annotation Just Got Easier – New LINK App Release

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Attorneys have always loved the annotation in LINK because anytime you open a file in LINK, annotation is immediately on the same screen. Whether the file is in DMS or another file share, or whether it’s an attachment to email, it just takes a tap to bring up the annotation menu. Annotate, then tap to email or upload to DMS or a file share.

You can even save your signature and initials in LINK so that you can sign a file with a couple of taps on the annotation menu.

In our new release you’ll see:

  1. Improved location of the annotation menu
  2. New features, including page display settings and grid view
  3. Enhanced layout of the annotation tools, for clearer discoverability
  4. A lighter interface.

We’ve gotten wonderful feedback on these improvements. Thank you!

You can get a quick look at the new UI in this 17 second video:

LINK App Annotation in 17 Seconds

To see LINK’s annotation in a full workflow, watch this video.

You will see how to use LINK’s split screen, then how to annotate a PDF, and email it.

If it looks simple, that’s because it really is. If you would like to see a demo via Zoom, write to me at: contact at mobilehelix dot com.

-Maureen

Productivity Leap with the LINK App: Multi-task with Split Screen Mode

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This is a fun week for us! With this new release LINK gives you the ability to multi-task on a tablet. We have also refreshed the LINK UI with a lighter look. The feedback has been fantastic. We appreciate the enthusiasm!

The key feature which enables multi-tasking is Split Screen Mode:

  • Two screens
  • Multiple live tabs in each screen
  • Tabs are files and apps like DMS, Email, Intranet
  • Drag and drop a file or app
  • Annotate or compare files in either screen
  • Keep email open while you work

Here is a 14 second preview of LINK’s new Multi-tasking capabilities.

Let us know if you would like to see a demo of LINK.

Email us at: contact at mobilehelix dot com

Next, more about the UI refresh!

-Maureen

Per the Data: Remote Work is Not a Phase in Legal

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Is remote work merely a short-term necessity or will it have legs when it is again safe to work in the law firm office? As we head into one full year of remote work, I set out to see if there were data which would substantiate the direction of remote work.

What I learned paints a compelling rationale for remote work continuing. For some people, it might be for only one or two days a week. But the preference for a hybrid work model is clear.

There are two supporting dynamics:

  1. The economics of remote work were positive in 2020. Law firms will likely make changes, for instance in leases, to capitalize on this going forward.
  2. Attorneys made a positive adjustment to working from home and would like to retain some of that flexibility in the future.

In this post, I highlight a few of the interesting data points which I found. You can view and download (no registration) my full slide deck, “Remote Work is Not a Phase in Legal” here.

A key law firm financial metric is Profitability per Equity Partner. The results show that for Big Law and mid-sized law firms profitability grew significantly in the 12 months leading up to November of 2020. In part this was due to law firm rate increases established in December 2019 and to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), both on the income side.

Graph Profit per Equity Partner
Profit Per Equity Partner Growth 2019 and 2020

However, on the expense side, it is also due to law firms cutting overhead expenses in all but two categories, technology and Knowledge Management.

Graph Overhead Expense Growth
Overhead Expense Growth by Category 2109 and 2020

Both of the above charts are from a terrific resource, “2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market” by Thomson Reuters and Georgetown Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession. This report is chock full of data. I highly recommend reading it if you work in a law firm. And, as good attorneys say, “read the footnotes” for gems. You may also listen to the podcast, “Was the Pandemic a Tipping Point for Law Firms?” which is based on the report. Bob Ambrogi interviewed Jim Jones, Senior Fellow at Georgetown and Director of its Program on Trends in Law Practice. Mr. Jones is a contributor to the report. He adds interesting color to the report findings in this interview.

A funny thing happened while attorneys toiled from home. They appreciated the benefits. The greatest benefit to attorneys and staff is the time gained by not commuting. For time-keepers the extra hours per week can add up to several days per year of additional billable hours plus additional leisure time to boot.

Now 85% of attorneys want to work from home at least one day per week.

Image Remote Work
“Lawyers put in 20 extra work days when working from home,” Legal Cheek, Aishah Hussain, January 8, 2021

Finally, here is an infographic with a few of the more illustrative points regarding remote work in law firms. You may download the Remote Work infographic PDF here.

Remote Work is Not a Phase in Legal infographic

How does this compare to your experience of working from home this past year? What work model would you like to see going forward?

-Maureen

F5 Labs on Phishing in 2020

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Last week in my post on Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work report, I mentioned the F5 Labs 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report. It is cited in the Businesses at Work report for its warning on Office 365. In brief, that warning is that Office 365 is a rich target because if an attacker breaches Office 365, they have access to email and much more, including potentially to SharePoint and OneDrive. F5 Labs warns to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with Office 365.

The F5 Labs Phishing and Fraud report is full of useful information. It’s a tutorial on phishing, a source of exploit data, and a guide as to how to protect from phishing.

In this post, I share 3 of the many images in the report to tempt you to looking at the full report.

Phishing Incidents Dealt with by F5’s Security Operations Center – F5 Labs

We’ve known for years that phishing is the number one cause of data breaches. F5 Labs estimated, as shown above, that the number of phishing incidents in 2020 was projected to increase by 15% compared with 2019.

Sample Phishing Subject Lines – F5 Labs

As anyone who has an email inbox knows, phishing perpetrators are nothing if not topical. In addition, they prey on fear. These cyber-criminals were quick to capitalize on COVID-19. Starting in March 0f 2020, fear and false information about COVID-19 became a hot subject for phishing, as this list conveys.

Steps in a Phishing Attack – F5 Labs

The report explains financial fraud, deception techniques such as custom URLs, and the trajectory of phishing in the report. It concludes with pragmatic sections on “Protecting the Business” and “Protecting Users.”

F5 Labs also explains financial fraud, deception techniques such as custom URLs, and the trajectory of phishing in the report. Phishing is a challenging problem. It is social engineering. The attackers’ schemes mutate. We humans are the weak link. F5 Labs has useful research here, free tor the reading.

-Maureen

Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work Report

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Each year I look forward to Okta’s Businesses at Work report. Okta anonymizes data from its more than 9,400 customer entities. These are customers which use the Okta Identity Network (OIN) with its over 6,500 integrations with cloud, mobile, and web apps, and with IT infrastructure providers. The report is free, not even a registration is needed. To my knowledge no other public report provides this level of data on cloud application usage.

For data lovers it’s a treasure trove of facts about cloud usage. There are over 28 charts and tables. Download it here. I’ll share a few of my favorite insights from the report.

Most Popular Apps by Number of Customers

Microsoft 365 wins. I attended a legal technology conference in 2014. In a session on SharePoint, hosted by Microsoft, the roadmap showed that Outlook, Exchange, and, yes, SharePoint were all moving to the cloud in the form of Office 365. People exited the room in fury. At that time, most law firms were adamant – No Cloud. While there will always be law firms, especially “Big Law,” which will keep Outlook, SharePoint, and the Office Suite on-premises, the adoption of Office 365 or Microsoft 365 in the legal sector has been swift over the past two years. The Okta data reflects this.

This chart shows that the gap in usage between Microsoft 365 and all other applications, including AWS and Salesforce, has only widened in the past 5 years.

Most Popular Video Conferencing Apps

This graph highlights the steep curve in Zoom usage which we all lived through in 2020. At Mobile Helix, we started using Zoom heavily in 2017. We even perform our LINK system deployments remotely over Zoom in about two hours. When the pandemic hit, we were easily able to deploy LINK with IT staff who were themselves working from home. Customers favor our over-Zoom deployment over an on-site visit as it ends up taking less of their time.

Customers Authenticating With Each Factor

Phishing has been up 220% during the pandemic per F5’s 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report (an excellent report on phishing). The Okta report quotes, “F5 warns that the login page of our most popular app, Microsoft 365 (M365), is one of the most popular targets for generic phishing because attackers know that stealing Office 365 credentials can grant them access not only to email but also corporate documents, finance, HR, and many other critical business functions.”

Strong Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) should be used with M365. The chart above shows that of Okta customers authenticating with a factor in addition to, or instead of a password, 82% use Okta Verify. The good news here is that weaker factors such as SMS and security questions are on the decline.

One of the positive conclusions from Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work report has to be that as difficult as 2020 was, with 38M people applying for unemployment, if it had happened even 10 years earlier, how many people would have been unable to work from home? The growth of web-based applications, cloud-based services, and mobile apps resulted in most office jobs successfully transitioning to work-from-home in two or three weeks.

2020 was The Year of the Cloud.

-Maureen

Phishing Never Takes a Holiday

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No. I’m not referring to the now infamous GoDaddy employee $650 holiday bonus email. Employees who responded to the email with the requested information were later informed that they had failed the company phishing test. If you have not yet read that dispiriting story, it’s here.

I am referring to this charming email which I received this morning.

Phishing Email and Fish
Phishing Email from “[email protected]”

It is from: “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

Presumably, that would be warning enough for your employees to hit the “Delete” button posthaste.

If not that, then maybe those over-sized blue bands which overlap the line below would be a tip-off.

(I have obscured the recipient’s email address.)

This is a very good opportunity for me to show you a security feature in our LINK App. When you open an email in LINK you will always see the alias and below it the sender’s email address. You don’t have to tap or do anything else to display the email address. It’s there.

In this case the alias is the aforementioned, “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

And the email address is, “[email protected].”

If your employee were uncertain as to whether to hit that “Delete” button, I think that seeing that the email is from “[email protected]” would be the icing on the cake. This email is definitely not from the company IT department. Delete.

We are serious about security at Mobile Helix. Much of what we build into the LINK system, such as certificate-based device registration in the new user registration process, is behind the scenes. It’s invisible to your employee and works in the background.

But this security feature is a designed to help your employees to be watchdogs for senders with devious intentions. 90% of organizations experienced targeted phishing attacks in 2019. Humans are the weakest link. This is one simple tool to help all of us to be vigilant.

-Maureen

Originally published in LinkedIn on December 28, 2020