When you think about the tools you use most in your day-to-day work, your document management system (DMS) and Outlook are probably at the top of the list. Working in both on your mobile device, though, has historically been a huge struggle, if not impossible. LINK brings them together in a single, secure, easy-to-use app.
LINK is designed to support the workflows attorneys use all day, every day. The app works with today’s most popular mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets – and supports the three leading document management systems, iManage Work®, NetDocuments, and eDocs by OpenText.
LINK for Smartphones and Tablets
LINK is solving the pervasive problem of lawyers being unable to adequately work on their mobile devices. With LINK, lawyers can fully access their documents, compare them, mark them up, edit them, email them, and more, as easily and securely as they can on a computer.
While we may be happy to wave au revoir to 2021, one midnight does not change world circumstances. I think that the following four trends that are not likely to go away in 2022.
Our most popular blog post in 2021, by a factor of 10, was this post by our CEO, Seth Hallem, on the REvil vulnerability and the ensuing ransomware. Many IT and security people were kept busy over the July 4th weekend with the Kaseya VSA exploit. More law firms and more businesses overall were hit with ransomware than the public is aware of. At the risk of stating the obvious, this will only grow going forward.
Unicorns, IPOs, M & A, and healthy funding rounds were undefeated by the pandemic. We covered the capital infusion in #legaltech here.
Early in 2021, we learned from Thomson Reuters that Big and Mid sized Law had been very profitable in pandemic burdened 2020. Work from home meant more billable hours. Legal IT departments got attorney up and running from home in quite literally a weekend. In early 2021 the question was, would work from home end as quickly as it had begun? The profits lead one to conclude that it would not. The Delta and Omicron variants in 2021 ensured no quick ending.
Finally, in the fall of 2021 companies such as Apple and Big Law firms were gearing up for early January or February 2022 “return to the office” dates. Then Omicron swept through the globe. Now all bets are off for when, and if, companies will return to the office.
Some good, some not so good. Overall, we can be grateful for the healthy demand for legal services and that so much of legal work can be done remotely.
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.
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:
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.
Attorneys made a positive adjustment to working from home and would like to retain some of that flexibility in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We talked to DocsCorp about our integration of their high fidelity Word document comparison in our LINK app. We used their compareDocs SDK. It was a success for us and for our legal clients. This post is from their blog site.
Picture this: you are a lawyer who relies heavily on your devices to work outside of office hours. Perhaps you use the morning commute to fire off emails from your smartphone, or maybe you use your tablet on the couch after everyone has gone to bed and the house is finally quiet. While working on these devices, you use a secure app made especially for legal professionals. It has everything you need – access to your document management system, advanced search, Word editing and annotation, and document comparison.
Can your lawyers work with iManage®, NetDocuments, SharePoint and the firm intranet from smartphones and tablets? Mobility for lawyers lives at the challenging crossroads of ease-of-use and security. We’ll look at top solutions used in legal today, covering topics including:
Can your lawyers work with iManage®, NetDocuments, SharePoint and the firm intranet from smartphones and tablets? Mobility for lawyers lives at the challenging crossroads of ease-of-use and security. We’ll look at top solutions used in legal today, covering topics including:
Trade-offs of mobile device management, secure container apps, virtual desktop infrastructure, virtual private network and browser access to SaaS applications
Top mobile workflows for lawyers (open an NRL file, check-in a doc to DMS, edit)
Demo of secure container mobile app designed for lawyers
Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Location
Gallagher, Evelius & Jones, LLP
218 N. Charles Street, Suite 400
Baltimore, MD 21201
Have you ever noticed that sometimes something very small can get in the way of completing something big and meaningful?
Like when you open a new Lego set and later discover that there are 1119 / 1120 pieces there, and of course the missing piece is the little tiny one that goes right in the middle, so you already spent two hours building half of the Star Wars set – but now you need to stop everything and drive 30 minutes each way to the Lego store to get that one tiny 2×2 block.
Toronto, Mobile Helix and MicroAgility are thrilled to be headed to your beautiful city for our ILTA Roadshow on April 28th at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP. Mobile Helix and Toronto company, MacroAgility, are sponsoring, “Make the Most of iManage – New Features in Work 9.3 and Secure Mobility.”
Join us to learn about Work 9.3 features from MacroAgility and about secure mobility for Work from Mobile Helix. We will show a demo of our LINK encrypted app for lawyers which integrates with Work, Outlook, SharePoint and the firm intranet. Enjoy lunch, education, and networking with peers. Registration is required. Details and registration here.
