LawyersUSA

The days of buying hundreds of dollars of computer software to run your office are coming to an end.

The lawyer of tomorrow will have a web browser on his computer, but the remainder of his tools will be on the Internet. We'll be computing in the Internet cloud.

Before you think I've gone off the deep end, let's consider what is available today for the web-based office via Software as a Service (SaaS).

The two biggest-name offerings are Microsoft Office Live (www.officelive.com) and Google Apps (www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html), which serves as the example for this article.

Another player in the SaaS field is Adobe. Take a few minutes to examine their new free service (www.acrobat.com). When coupled with Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional there's much of interest to the legal profession. Their web-based word processor is called Buzzword and is an alternative to Google Docs.

SasS offerings are either free or paid on a periodic basis. For the Google Premier level you'll shell out all of $50.00 per year per user. That's a lot less than properly licensed workstations running Microsoft Office or Corel WordPerfect Office.

The workhorse applications

Most lawyers can't survive without e-mail. Many are already using Google's Gmail. If you haven't tried it please set up a free account and take it for a test drive. Gmail stores everything nicely with about 6GB of free space. Searching is a breeze and sorting by threads or topics is automatic. It looks different from Outlook and Outlook Express so it takes some time to understand how to maximize the benefits of Gmail. However, the effort is well worth the results.

Next, every lawyer has to maintain a calendar. Google offers a calendar application that is rather robust and should meet the needs of most law offices. It allows you to share your calendar and synchronize it with most Personal Digital Assistant devices.

The third leg of this e-stool is Google Docs. Quite frankly, it is "almost" a replacement for your traditional office suite (MS Office or Corel WordPerfect.) Google's word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs perform all the tasks that confront the average attorney. If you need some really fancy stuff you might want to keep a copy of Word on one computer. However, I'm betting that as Google Apps matures more advanced features will be incorporated.

Reliability and security

At this point you're probably thinking, "I'm not going to trust my clients' documents to Google or any other on-line service."

This is a valid concern. However, you also need to ask yourself how secure your own internal office network is when compared to the behemoth Google? Do you really think that you have better security than Google? Do you really think that you have a better and more reliable backup system than Google?

You may be concerned that someone at Google could peek at your documents, but permit me to suggest that there may be a greater risk from the summer intern, the janitorial crew, a disgruntled associate or the people who service your equipment.

Lawyers have every right to be concerned about documents that are stored outside their offices – the point is not to be paranoid, just reasonably cautious. For those items deserving the highest level of security, simply use encryption. With the current crop of encryption tools it is quite easy.

A checklist of advantages

What are the advantages of computing in the Internet cloud? Consider this:

• There are no CDs to clutter up your desk and get lost when you need to reinstall an application.

• There are never any updates to install. The updates are automatically available through your web browser and you get an e-mail notice of what's new and different.

• You won't have the problem of the screwed up computer that just won't run correctly after you install new software.

• Your documents are accessible from any Internet connected computer.

• For those who have both Windows and Apple computers in the office, you won't have to worry about the differences because your documents are edited through the web interface.

• You won't have to spend several hundred dollars purchasing a suite of applications when you only need one or two from the package.

• SaaS also makes document collaboration much more efficient. Generally we'd send an e-mail with an attached document and ask for feedback. Some will send a responsive e-mail. Some will edit the document and return it to the originator, who will then use a "track changes" feature.

With the SaaS model, you won't have to e-mail the document. You'll simply provide a link and the client or fellow attorney will go directly to the document to read and edit – with only the privileges you grant. This should be far easier than e-mailing a document to several people and tracking changes in a round-robin. Everyone sees the most current version since it's stored in the on-line repository. Consider how this reduces the risk of multiple copies of a document residing on multiple computers. With SaaS, all versions of the document are in one location.

Some disadvantages

So what are the disadvantages of SaaS?

You won't control your upgrade cycle. When the new application is released, that's what you'll be using.

There may be a limitation on the storage capacity you can maintain for free, probably about 500MB. You can generally pay a few pennies per month per gigabyte for additional storage.

You need a high-speed Internet connection to be effective. Just about any DSL or cable connection should be fine.

Google Docs does not handle all file types. It's not going to "read" WordPerfect documents, but it will handle .doc, .rtf, .xls, .csv, .ppt, .pps and most of the common file types. I expect more file types will be added as the user base increases.

There is a risk that access to your documents might be impaired if the service provider goes out of business or if there is a major disruption of Internet traffic. But, let's consider the probability that Google or Microsoft will go out of business – pretty slim. I'd wager that it's more likely your office partnership will break up long before either of those giants go quietly into the e-night.

I recommend working with a recognized company of substance. Don't become an unwilling beta tester for a start-up company unless you fully appreciate the risk. If you're wondering whether Google Apps will be around for a while, a June 23rd article in InformationWeek magazine reports that, "More than half a million organizations have signed up for Google Apps – including General Electric and Proctor & Gamble – and there are now some 10 million Google Apps users."

Missing from the Google tools is a good legal time and billing system. There are other on-line vendors who will likely fill that slot. However, I'm betting that using another Google tool called "App Engine," someone will write a time and billing program to fill that void.

Importance of back-ups

Another worry is potential for the Internet to "go down." It is going to happen, just like local power outages. When it happens we have only so much battery backup and then we're all on a time-out until the electricity returns.

That's why we need portable computers and locally backed up documents. Absolutely back up all of your on-line materials locally so you have a fully redundant set of materials in the event something goes bump in the night. To work with your files off-line, Google Gears is the downloadable tool.