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Best
Practice #8
Provide Tech Support with that Technology
Making
balanced hours programs effective often involves encouraging attorneys
to use technology to work more efficiently. All too often, however,
technology can create frustration and major inefficiencies, as
demonstrated by the situation recounted below.
Useful
tools for balanced hours attorneys may include:
·
Cell phones and cell service.
· BlackBerries or similar hand-held email devices.
· Laptops, tablets or hand-held general-purpose computers.
· Fax machines.
· Second phone lines.
· Internet service.
· Virtual Private Networks for secure remote access.
Each
attorney's situation is likely to be unique, and some firms therefore
provide attorneys with a yearly stipend for purchasing technology
rather than a "standard issue" set of devices. While
laudable, this practice needs to be balanced against the IT costs
of providing technical support for many different devices and
brands. A middle-of-the-road approach is to offer attorneys a
stipend and a standard set of options for spending their stipends.
Spending
money on technical support services provides cost-effective benefits:
why have balanced-hours attorneys wasting valuable time on non-billable
activities when a trained IT person can solve problems more quickly
and free the attorneys up to do client work? An investment in
making technical support available can reduce stress and increase
productivity when attorneys and staff are working in non-traditional
ways.
Depending
on the firm's size, an in-house information technology support
department may be able to provide on-call services and technical
support. Alternatively, and especially if the firm does not provide
standardized equipment, it may be best to contract with an outside
vendor who may be more available to an off-site employee.
In
addition to IT support, proper training in technology, either
by in-house staff, contracted trainers, or in local classrooms
will increase the efficient use of technology and decrease technical
support costs.
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One
Balanced Hours Attorney's Story
The
challenge did not seem too daunting: take instructions from
the client at 5:25 p.m. and e-mail the revised document
to him by 9:00 the following morning, along with a comparison
showing the changes from the previous version. If I hadn't
had to leave the office by 5:30 p.m., I would probably have
marked up the document by hand and given it to word processing
to incorporate the changes. My preference would have been
to deal with it by the same method from home. However, at
that time I could not afford a fax machine and the firm
would not provide one. So I put the document on my laptop
and made the changes in the document myself later that evening.
My
problems started when I tried to connect to the firm's network.
It took me several attempts to make the connection. Every
time I instructed the computer to run a comparison of the
revised and original documents, it froze and I had to reboot
and start the connection process all over again. Eventually,
I managed to [get the document] to the client.
If
I had undertaken the same task in the office, I estimate
it would have taken me about 25 minutes to revise the document,
run the comparison and send the e-mail to the client. Working
from home, it took over two hours and a huge amount of frustration
to achieve the same result.
- Associate at a Washington, D.C. law firm.
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